cc >> Paul Rogovitch: Good
afternoon and welcome to History Sandwiched In.
And although it's mid-winter right now, it's not going to be
long before at least the days will be getting warmer and that
means maple sugar time. Today's speaker has come from
the MacKenzie Center up near Poynette.
It's a Department of Natural Resources education center.
It's huge and has so many things.
If you haven't visited it, you really should, you really
should. Especially around maple sugar
time, and she'll tell you when that is.
Our speaker is Ruth Ann Lee. Please, Ruth Ann,
let's all welcome her to History Sandwiched In.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Ruth Ann Lee: Thank you. Today I'm honored to be here,
and all of you want to learn a little bit more about maple
sugar. At the MacKenzie Center,
we take our maple syrup pretty seriously, and it's one of
our biggest education programs. But let me tell you a little bit
about the MacKenzie Center if you're not familiar with it.
How many of you have ever been there before?
Beautiful. We're only about 25 miles north
of Madison. Take highway 51 straight up, and
you'll run right into Poynette. Most people associate us with
the state game farm and the pheasants.
That's because that property is our neighbor.
But the MacKenzie Center is an environmental education center,
and we host lots and lots of students every year for outdoor
field trips and hands-on field trips.
We're 250 acres. We have live animals.
You might often hear us in the news with our bobcats or our
wolves or our mountain lions. We have a nice live wildlife
exhibit. We have themed museums, hiking
trails, different habitats on property for people to explore
and the students to explore. A pond.
An arboretum. We have a hundred different
species of trees that are all GPS located that you can go out
and learn to identify. Our sugar bush, very important,
picnic areas, a nice big lodge and dormitories.
We actually can sleep 82 people on any given night.
In 2010 we reached just over 7600 kids, through a variety of
programming. They come for day field trips
with their teachers. We may not see them.
Sometimes they're self-guided, other times they have a lot of
staff or volunteer help. They come for our maple program
just in the month of March. We have day camp programs.
We have overnight programs, those are those 82 beds where
they spend the night with us, and the kids spend the night
with their teachers and chaperones and then they kind of
wiggle in those traditional campfire and night hikes into
their field trips. And then we do have a variety of
summer camp programming as well. But today I'm going to focus on
maple syrup. Out of that 7600 kids, about
1500 of them were just for maple, in the month of March.
So it's a pretty intense program for us.
This is a picture of our sugar bush.
Harley MacKenzie, for whom the center is named after, loved
trees, particularly the sugar maple.
And so we're blessed with his love all these years later with
many sugar maple trees to tap. The students arrive.
They're greeted by volunteers. They get into their small
groups, and we really do like them in small groups because
it's hands-on for these kids. This is not lecture for them.
This is hands-on, outside. They're learning all about, a
little bit about MacKenzie but they're also learning about why
trees are important, why the forest is important, products
like fire wood and lumber and that trees give us oxygen, that
trees can actually give us food, and usually they'll catch on to
nuts and berries and things like that and apples and oranges.
And we try to get them to think about the sap that's also
flowing in those trees. What's neat about this is we
talk about the signs of spring. And Paul mentioned earlier in
the introduction that we're waiting for our days to get
warmer. But for maple syrup to be
successful we need warm days and very cold nights.
So we need to get the kids to think about that.
Springtime, what does that mean? Puddles are melting but they
freeze again over night. We get them to think about, I'll
go back just a second, about tree identification.
They're at the MacKenzie Center and we're going to tap sugar
maple trees, well most often they'll know the difference
between a maple and an oak, but in March the leaves aren't on
the trees. So we need to go a step further
and do a little winter identification with them.
And we'll talk about the branches on the trees.
Whether they have alternate or opposite branching.
And a sugar maple tree in particular, does anybody know
what kind of branching they might have?
Nobody? Okay.
Opposite. So if you think my body is the
trunk and my arms as branches, the branches are opposite from
each other. Versus alternate where you might
be like this. So we get the kids to do a
little dance out in the sugar bush.
This is a food factory. We like to stress that trees are
food. They make their own food.
And we'll get them to experience and kind of investigate what
that means. What the structure of the tree
is. There's a wood cookie here at
the bottom of the tree. It's simply a cross section of a
tree. So we'll talk about the xylem
and the phloem, those veins in the trees that are carrying the
sap from the roots all the way up to the buds much like the
veins in your body carrying your blood.
We talk about how the bark protects the tree.
And then they'll usually get to the fact that there's going to
be leaves on that tree. And leaves are usually green.
And green leaves make food because of the chlorophyll and
the process of photosynthesis. And so the students will
investigate that a little bit. And this is really important to
us because we not only want them to learn about maple sugar and
maple sap but we also need them to know how it was created.
So they're experiencing it. We've got these little pieces
that fit inside the food factory that represent the sunlight and
the chlorophyll needs. The water, carbon dioxide, all
those things that the tree needs.
Oops, I'm going a little fast here.
The kids will experience then that through that process of
photosynthesis the tree is making sugar and water and
oxygen. And it's that sugar that they're
going to learn about how to collect.
So you collect it. You can't just cut the tree
down. We need to create some sort of
method to harvest the sap in that tree.
In this case the students here are making what's called a
spile. And they're made from small
elderberry branches that have a very soft pith or center core.
And they'll actually clean them out and make their own little
wooden spile, much like people may have done a hundred years
ago. So hands-on again.
Real successful. They love doing this.
We'll share with them a story or a legend, how maple sap may or
may not have been discovered. And there's a story about a
Native American chief who, at the end of his day of hunting
and gathering, came home and put his hatchet, just kind of hit it
right in the tree. Went about his business.
Rested for the evening. When he got up in the morning,
he took his hatchet and we went back out and he was hunting and
gathering for his family. While it was a nice warm march
day where it was above freezing during the day, and his wife had
left all her vessels in her basket at the base of that tree
and that tree gave them water and filled the baskets.
Well she thought it was a really nice option to use the water in
those baskets instead of traveling all the way down to
the crick to gather water to make her meal.
And so she cooked their venison and their meat in that water
that the tree gave them that day.
And they realized how sweet and how delicious it was.
And so they continued to try to collect it from the trees, the
water from the trees. Had they known it was sugar?
I don't know. Is the story true?
I don't know either. We call it a legend.
But it's one idea of how to do it.
But again, no hatchets for the children.
They're making spiles to collect it.
They're cleaning out. Then we've got to find a tree.
We've already told them about opposite branching.
We told them about how maple trees have brown bark and brown
buds this time of year. And they're up in our sugar
bush. And they're not allowed, if
you'll notice to the left there's a tree that's already
wrapped with a ribbon, sometimes we put ribbons around a pine
tree just to throw them off, but they've got to find their tree
because we're going to actually let the kids tap the tree.
So no hatchets. We do use a brace and a bit, and
we let the children all take turns with the drill.
No wooden spiles today but we would do a metal spile with a
hook. And so our teacher here is
actually gently tapping it in. We talk to the kids about where
to tap it on the tree, whether it's way down low or way up high
or usually about three or four feet off the ground is
appropriate. Makes it easy to collect.
Will the tree give us sap way up high?
Probably. But when that bucket is super
full it's going to be really hard to lift it off without
spilling. On a really nice warm day, the
tree will start dripping before we even have the bucket hung.
And it's always interesting to get a sample.
Get it on your finger and taste what it's like.
And most kids are expecting syrup.
It's quite interesting. You ask them what does it taste
like and they'll say water. Well, what's interesting about
maple sap is on a good tree only about 3% to 5% of that sap is
going to be sugar, the rest is all water.
By the time you put it on your pancakes it's usually about 66%
sugar. So there's a big deference
between what comes out of the tree as sap and what you put on
your pancakes for syrup. Here's some girls checking out
how much is in the buckets. On any given season we will
probably tap well over a hundred trees, and 90% of those trees
were tapped in small groups by students.
There's only a few that the volunteers are tapping without a
group of students. So what we also do with our
maple program once they've had all this hands-on, they go visit
our Che-po-ta-kay. And the Che-po-ta-kay is a home,
a Native American home. And in this case we have a
replica. And it's covered in a tarp but
inside is something special. This is where our maple program
reaches a different level. These students are learning
about a little bit of history. How Native Americans would
travel from their winter home to their springtime home and why
they would do that. Now Native Americans weren't
making syrup. They had no way to gauge
percentages in their sap and in their syrup, they were making
sugar. Inside the house we decorate it
with hides and pelts and different artifacts.
There's an interpreter in here. This particular educator is
sharing his knowledge with the students about how grandmother
ran the house. It wasn't mom or dad, it would
have been grandma. And the jobs you may or may not
have had as a young child at this particular time in history.
They'll move on to a different station.
We call this our hollow log station.
How did Native Americans get their sap from 3% from the tree
into sugar which is beyond 66%? Well, they got very creative and
they'd hollow out logs and they would have different vessels
such as these. They'd take hot rocks that
they'd heat up in a campfire, and this hollow log in our
demonstration purposes is filled with water.
History would tell us it would be filled with sap.
You drop those hot rocks into that sap and you're evaporating.
What is all that steam? Well it's water.
So it's concentrating the sap through evaporation.
Another station we take the students to is early pioneers.
How did the pioneers, they learned a lot from the Native
Americans. They could barter and trade for
syrup and for sap and for sugar. But they brought tools with
them, tools the Native Americans didn't have.
They had iron. So we have our iron kettles.
We talk about tapping the trees and bringing different tools
with you. They may have modified the spile
a little bit. In this case the spile is quite
long, it's probably a good 12 to 18 inches compared to that
little metal one we tapped in the tree.
While they didn't necessarily have a method to hang a bucket
from the spile, they'd set it at the base of the tree so you
needed a longer spile so you that you didn't waste any of
those drops, that it landed right in the bucket that you
placed there. So we're talking about
concentrating that sap, again through evaporation.
A hot fire is cooking that sap. You constantly needed to use
that paddle to stir it up so that it wouldn't scorch on the
bottom of those iron kettles. It would get a little darker,
you'd move it to the next kettle, next kettle until you
got a little bit less and a little bit less.
Kids want to do this at home. So sometimes we'll show them an
outdoor cooker. I don't know if any of you know
people that produce maple syrup at home but traditionally you
don't do the whole process from beginning to end in your
kitchen. You think about boiling water
for noodles and things like that and all the condensation and the
steam that's in your kitchen. Now can you imagine for doing
that for 10-12 hours straight. It produces a lot of humidity in
your home, and if you have wallpaper and things like that
it's not usually a good idea. You can start the process
outside. This is a simple little brick
outdoor cooker with a flat pan on the fireplace.
We're very fortunate at MacKenzie because we have
buildings dedicated just for our maple syrup program.
These are students that are near our cook shack.
And here they're looking at the a demonstration of all the many
different kinds of spiles. Some of it is technology
improving from wooden to metal to plastic.
Sometimes it's simply just your preference.
All the Wisconsin maple products.
We have lots of local maple products here in Wisconsin.
A weather station just reaffirming to the students that
you can't do this any other time of year.
You need to remind them you need springtime.
You need warm spring days but you also need those cold spring
nights. And a thermograph that measures
the temperatures helps us monitor some of those things.
In our cook shack we have a special back room that holds our
sap tank. There's a hundred gallon tank in
there. So all the sap that's collected
from the trees that the students just tapped.
Some of it gets refrigerated, some of it goes directly into
that silver sap tank. Here they're looking at a
demonstration of milk jugs. To put it into perspective on
how much time it takes in perspective, if our maple tree
has 5% sugar, it would take us 17 gallons of sap to make one
gallon of syrup. So we would have to collect that
many milk jugs full of sap just to get on milk jug of pancake
syrup. At 4% it's 21 and at 3% it's 28.
And trees on average are closer to three than they are to five
so we are collecting a lot of sap to make just a little bit of
syrup, and that's often why pure maple syrup is more expensive.
It's very time consuming to produce.
So this displays on the outside of our cook shack for our
students. Then they get to enter the
shack. Here we have a volunteer
educator explaining what's going on in this building in this part
of the process. Our technology is from the Civil
War era. Here we have an arch stove with
a flat pan. And the pan is actually the top
of the stove. If you were to remove that pan,
you'd see the flames. Very hot fire.
In this case that sap tank I showed you in a previous slide
has a little tube that goes through the wall because it is
constantly draining into this flat pan so that there's always
about an inch to an inch and a half in that pan.
And if you were to look at, it's at a little roaring boil.
All these little bubbles. And they stir it up, they just
don't want it to scorch. It takes them probably 10 to 12
hours to cook down that hundred gallon tank full of sap.
So we have volunteers that arrive quite early in the
morning. On a cold day this is a favorite
spot for the kids. We have some very interesting
engineers in our volunteer crew. That contraption that's on the
top of the flat pan evaporator you'll see that this is the tube
that comes out, the sap tank is on the opposite side of the
wall. What they're trying to do is
preheat the sap a little bit through those coils before it
enters right in. And I think it took off an hour
or two of production time at the end of the day.
Some students in the sugar house.
Inside our finishing house we like to share with them all the
different maple products. We'll quiz them.
We'll pick up this bottle of Aunt Jemima, and we'll ask one
of the students to read the back and read the ingredients.
What do you think is in this particular pancake syrup?
Corn syrup. >> Corn syrup.
Nowhere in the ingredients list will it say maple.
And for a product to have pure maple syrup in it, it has to say
it on the front of the label. We use a refractometer and this
is a diagram of it. It's a small tool that you put a
drop of sap on, and you measure how the light reflects through
that sap and it will tell you how much sugar is in it.
So that flat pan, they're cooking and they're cooking and
they're cooking all day, they take it off that hot fire at
about 64%. Sometimes it moves really quick
on them. Then they'll take it inside our
finishing house where on a stove, on a gas stove, they'll
get it just to the very end. And their goal is 66% bricks or
66% sugar. If you go past it, you're going
to get like a maple candy or maple actually crumb sugar.
It almost looks like brown sugar.
So the volunteers are constantly measuring where it is in the
process. It gets filtered several
different times, and then it gets jarred and bundled up.
Cooled and labeled. And the students then do enjoy a
campfire outside where they kind of have a review.
They get to sample some pure maple syrup, see what they've
learned on their field trip. We've got some neat props.
This particular wood cookie that the volunteer has here has been
a tree that's been tapped before.
So they're showing some scars on that particular tree and
stressing to them that the tree had healed much like a scab on
your body, the tree healed and continued to grow.
We challenge them a little bit, talking again about pioneer life
and collecting and the tools you may have had to do that and how
much work and how time consuming and labor intensive this process
can be. But it got you outside and
everybody loved it. And then, of course, the sample.
And I have samples to share with you today as well.
Now what make this is program successful at MacKenzie is last
year we had over 68 volunteers that served over 3,000 hours in
the month of March. So it reached 1500 students,
they collected just over 1200 gallons of sap and produced
just over 40 gallons of syrup. It's a lot of time and a lot of
effort on them, but our volunteers often tell us that
it's addicting. That once they get settled, once
they find their niche in the program, they wait for it every
year. So we're pretty excited about
it. We're already in the midst of
planning for this spring. Our teachers are gearing up.
They plan all their field trips next week.
So hopefully we'll have our spring field trip calendar
filled. And we do quite well.
We have a lot of fun with it. It does mean that spring is
coming. All right.
Samples, would you like to enjoy some samples or take some
questions? [APPLAUSE]