WPT University Place History Sandwiched In Ruth Ann Lee, "Maple Syrup Education"  February 2, 2011 UP547  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]