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afternoon and welcome to History Sandwiched In.
And although it's mid-winter
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
It's a Department of Natural Poynette.
It's huge and has so many Resources things.on center.
If you haven't visited it,
should. Especially around maple sugar
time, and she'll tell you when
Our speaker is Ruth Ann Lee. that is.
let's all welcome her to History Sandwiched In.
Thank you.
Ruth Ann Lee: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
and all of you want to learn Today I'm honored to be here,
sugar. a little bit more about maple
we take our maple syrup pretty At the MacKenzie Center,
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
Beautiful. there before?
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
and we host lots and lots of environmental education center,
field trips and hands-on field students every year for outdoor
We're 250 acres. trips.
You might often hear us in the We have live animals.
wolves or our mountain lions. We have a nice live wildlife
exhibit.
trails, different habitats on property for people to explore
and the students to explore.
An arboretum. We have a hundred different
species of trees that are all GPS located that you can go out
and learn to identify.
picnic areas, a nice big lodge Our sugar bush, very important,
We actually can sleep 82 people on any given night.
In 2010 we reached just over
programming. 7600 kids, through a variety of
with their teachers. They come for day field trips
Sometimes they're self-guided, We may not see them.
staff or volunteer help. other times they have a lot of
just in the month of March. TheWe have day camp programs.am
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.
summer camp programming as well. And then we do have a variety of
maple syrup. But today I'm going to focus on
1500 of them were just for Out of that 7600 kids, about
So it's a pretty intense program maple, in the month of March.
This is a picture of our sugar for us.
Harley MacKenzie, for whom the bush.
trees, particularly the sugar center is nmaple.fter, loved
And so we're blessed with his love all these years later with
many sugar maple trees to tap.
They're greeted by volunteers. The students arrive.
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.
little bit about MacKenzie but They're learning all about, a
trees are important, why the they're also learning about why
like fire wood and lumber and that trees give us oxygen, that
trees can actually give us food,
nuts and berries and things like and usually they'll catch on to
And we try to get them to think tabout the sap that's alsos.
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
So we need to get the kids to think about that.
Springtime, what does that mean?
freeze again over night. Puddles are melting but they
go back just a second, about We get them to think about, I'll
They're at the MacKenzie Center and we're going to tap sugar
maple trees, well most often
between a maple and an oak, but in March the leaves aren't on
the trees.
and do a little winter So we need to go a step further
And we'll talk about the identification with them.
Whether they have alternate or branches on the trees.
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,
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
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
sap from the roots all the way the trees that are carrying the
veins in your body carrying your up to the buds much like the
We talk about how the bark blood.
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
the process of photosynthesis. because of the chlorophyll and
investigate that a little bit. And so the students will
us because we not only want them And this is really important to
maple sap but we also need them tto know how it was created.nd
So they're experiencing it. We've got these little pieces
that fit inside the food factory
the chlorophyll needs. that represent the sunlight and
those things that the tree The water, carbon dioxide, all
Oops, I'm going a little fast here..
The kids will experience then that through that process of
photosynthesis the tree is
oxygen. And it's that sugar that they're
going to learn about how to collect.
So you collect it.
down. We need to create some sort of
method to harvest the sap in
In this case the students here that tree.
spile. are making what's called a
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
ago. may have done a hundred years
Real successful. So hands-on again.
We'll share with them a story or They love doing this.
may not have been discovered. aAnd there's a story about aor
Native American chief who, at the end of his day of hunting
and gathering, came home and put
right in the tree. his hatchet, just kind of hit it
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
those baskets instead of nice option to use the water in
the crick to gather water to traveling all the way down to
And so she cooked their venison and their meat in that water
that the tree gave them that
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.
But it's one idea of how to do We call it a legend.
But again, no hatchets for the it.
They're making spiles to collect children.
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
buds this time of year. trAnd they're up in our sugarwn
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
tree just to throw them off, but we put ribbons around a pine
because we're going to actually thlet the kids tap the tree.ee
So no hatchets. We do use a brace and a bit, and
we let the children all take
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.
to tap it on the tree, whether We talk to the kids about where
or usually about three or four it's way down low or way up high
appropriate. feet off the ground is
Will the tree give us sap way up Makes it easy to collect.
Probably. But when that bucket is super
full it's going to be really
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 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
going to be sugar, the rest is about 3% to 5% of that sap is
By the time you put it on your all water.
sugar. pancakes it's usually about 66%
between what comes out of the tree as sap and what you put on
your pancakes for syrup.
how much is in the buckets. HOn any given season we willut
probably tap well over a hundred
were tapped in small groups by trees, and 90% of those trees
There's only a few that the volunteers are tapping without a
group of students.
maple program once they've had So what we also do with our
our Che-po-ta-kay. all this hands-on, they go visit
a Native American home. AndAnd in this case we have ame,
replica.
inside is something special. And it's covered in a tarp but
reaches a different level. This is where our maple program
about a little bit of history. These students are learning
travel from their winter home to How Native Americans would
they would do that. tNow Native Americans weren't
making syrup. They had no way to gauge
percentages in their sap and in their syrup, they were making
sugar.
with hides and pelts and Inside the house we decorate it
There's an interpreter in here. This particular educator is
sharing his knowledge with the
ran the house. students about how grandmother
have been grandma. It wasn't mom or dad, it would
have had as a young child at And the jobs you may or may not
They'll move on to a different this particular time in history.
We call this our hollow log station.
How did Native Americans get
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 heat up in a campfire, and this hollow log in our
demonstration purposes is filled
History would tell us it would with water.
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
Americans. learned a lot from the Native
syrup and for sap and for sugar. They could barter and trade for
them, tools the Native Americans But they brought tools with
They had iron. didn't have.
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
little metal one we tapped in 18 inchethe tree.d to that
While they didn't necessarily have a method to hang a bucket
from the spile, they'd set it at
needed a longer spile so you the base of the tree so you
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
bottom of those iron kettles. It would get a little darker,e
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.
for noodles and things like that You think about boiling water
steam that's in your kitchen. aNow can you imagine for doinghe
that for 10-12 hours straight.
your home, and if you have It produces a lot of humidity in
it's not usually a good idea. waYou can start the processhat
outside.
outdoor cooker with a flat pan This is a simple little brick
We're very fortunate at MacKenzie because we have
buildings dedicated just for our
These are students that are near maple syrup program.
And here they're looking at the a demonstration of all the many
different kinds of spiles.
improving from wooden to metal Some of it is technology
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
you can't do this any other time reaffirming to the students that
You need to remind them you need of year.
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.
from the trees that the students So all the sap that's collected
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
gallon of syrup. 17 gallons of sap to make one
many milk jugs full of sap just Sto get on milk jug of pancakeat
syrup.
And trees on average are closer Ato 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
It's very time consuming to maple syrupproduce. expensive.
So this displays on the outside of our cook shack for our
students. Then they get to enter the
shack.
educator explaining what's going Here we have a volunteer
of the process. Our technology is from the Civil
War era.
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
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
And if you were to look at, it's half in that pan.
All these little bubbles. And they stir it up, they just
don't want it to scorch.
hours to cook down that hundred It tgallon tank full of sap. 12
So we have volunteers that
morning. arrive quite early in the
spot for the kids. On a cold day this is a favorite
engineers in our volunteer crew. We have some very interesting
top of the flat pan evaporator That contraption that's on the
that comes out, the sap tank is yoon the opposite side of theube
wall. What they're trying to do is
preheat the sap a little bit
enters right in. through those coils before it
or two of production time at the And I think it took off an hour
Some students in the sugar end of the day.
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
of the students to read the back Aunt Jemima, and we'll ask one
What do you think is in this and read the ingredients.
Corn syrup. partic>> Corn syrup.yrup?
Nowhere in the ingredients list will it say maple.
And for a product to have pure
it on the front of the label. We use a refractometer and thisy
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%.
on them. Sometimes it moves really quick
finishing house where on a Then they'll take it inside our
get it just to the very end. stove, on a gas stove, they'll
66% sugar. And their goal is 66% bricks or
to get like a maple candy or If you go past it, you're going
It almost looks like brown maple actually crumb sugar.
So the volunteers are constantly sugar.
process. measuring where it is in the
different times, and then it It gets filtered several
Cooled and labeled. And the students then do enjoy a
campfire outside where they kind
They get to sample some pure of have a review.
learned on their field trip. maple syrup, see what they've
This particular wood cookie that We've got some neat props.
a tree that's been tapped the volunteebefore.ere has been
So they're showing some scars on
stressing to them that the tree had healed much like a scab on
your body, the tree healed and
We challenge them a little bit, talking again about pioneer life
and collecting and the tools you
much work and how time consuming may have had to do that and how
can be. andBut it got you outside andess
everybody loved it. And then, of course, the sample.
And I have samples to share with
Now what make this is program successful at MacKenzie is last
year we had over 68 volunteers
the month of March. thSo it reached 1500 students,n
they collected just over 1200 gallons of sap and produced
just over 40 gallons of syrup.
effort on them, but our Ivolunteers often tell us thatf
it's addicting. That once they get settled, once
they find their niche in the
year. pSo we're pretty excited abouty
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
questions? some samples or take some
[APPLAUSE]