On the West Coast? Are you kidding?
Nope.
We've got bigleaf maples. They produce sap that actually has enough sugar in it to make it viable to produce syrup. And they've got a long harvesting season (from mid-November to mid-February most years; in the east, it's only a few short weeks). Of course, we have to collect more sap to make the equivalent amount of syrup, but what the heck!
Thanks to the Forest Discovery Centre's Maple Syrup Festival, Dave has now got a new hobby. So we got the book, picked up a kit from Bees 'n Glass, got some wine kit bags from Valley Vines to Wines for sap collecting and cleaned them out, and all we needed was Dave's drilling expertise, and a little patience.
We got started at the very end of the season, yet the weather cooperated to give us some hope for success. After a week's worth of collecting, we ended up with about 20 litres of sap which boiled down to 500 mLs (two cups) of syrup. YUMM!!!!! This is definitely something we'll be looking forward to doing next winter.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Maple Syrup Harvest
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Well la di dah you West coasties and your Big Leaf syrup. ;P
I want to visit out west sooooo badly! One of these days! As much as I adore New England I think I would love the Pacific Northwest too.
Hahaha!!
I think you'd get lots of inspiration Marissa - and Vancouver, Seattle & Portland have some great printmaking.
Post a Comment