The Urban Sugaring Project

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Greetings. Welcome to our urban sugaring page. March and April are a time of renewal here in Wisconsin. One of the sure signs of this renewal is the maple sugar season! In early spring people throughout this region gather their buckets and spiles (spouts) and take to the woods.

We wanted to share with you a project that we started last year (2008). We live in Sheboygan, WI, a city of approximately 50,000 people. After assisting our local environmental center, Maywood or officially known as the Ellwood H. May Environmental Park www.gomaywood.org , in their maple grove for several years we decided to branch out on our own. We were inspired by a fellow we met from the Twin Cities (St. Paul/Minneapolis) who was tapping Maple trees in his urban environment.

To begin the project we distributed flyers in our community asking neighbors, city officials and a local veterinarian if we could tap their trees. We had several people who were excited and readily gave us permission. So we set out to collect the equipment we would need.

We are tapping trees as a way to obtain food for ourselves and our community. We are also offering this as an educational project to teach students and the community about the abundance of wild foods that are right in our back yard. Whether you live in the country, city or suburbs you can tap maple trees and have this sweet treat all year long!

This year (2008) was an abundant year for collecting sap. We collected approximately 263 gallons of sap from 25 taps. We worked with our local nature center who evaporated the sap for us in exchange for a percentage of the resulting syrup. We took 160 gallons of sap to them to be reduced. Our yield was 3 gallons of finished syrup, which we shared with some of the property owners and kept the rest for our own consumption.

We also kept some of the sap to cook with and to use as a base for tea and infusions. We made maple beans, cooking the beans for hours in our crockpot, this was inspired by our friend, herbalist Rose Barlow and you can find her recipe at http://www.prodigalgardens.info/maplesap%20recipes.htm.(*I added a can of homemade tomato sauce to the recipe). If you do not have sap you can dilute maple syrup in water and have a similar effect. I also made venison stew using the sap as the liquid and the meat was super tender! Any venison or other stew recipe will work. Interestingly enough as pointed out in Scott and Helen Neerings book titled The Maple Sugar Book, there is little evidence that indigenous people evaporated sap into syrup. As a matter of fact the process is way more labor intensive than the energy that is returned in nutrients. So cooking food in the sap is a more traditional and efficient way of using the sap.

One of my favorite things about collecting wild food is the connection to life, to the cycles that it brings as well as the nutrient density that is made available to our bodies. Early March is the time that Jessica Prentice has so aptly identified in her wonderful book Full Moon Feast, as the New Sap Moon. Jessica points out that in the Old Farmers Almanac-this name is based on the traditional calendars used by the indigenous peoples of the northern woodlands. Tapping trees in this region is a reconnection to the traditions of this land. To know the earth is to participate in this process and to ingest the resulting sweet offering of sap and syrup. Here is a link to nutritional information about Maple Syrup. www.massmaple.org/nutrition.html

Below you will find pictures of our project. We will keep you posted on the results of the 2009 harvest! Enjoy!

Drilling a hole Tapping the spile into the hole

The spile is set Many ways to collect sap, a milk jug, a bucket

or bags, you can see the clear sap

collecting the abundance Wood fired evaporator

Maple lacto fermented Soda Maple Beans Breakfast, oatmeal and tea with sap