The Turning of the Season

This afternoon Brad and I went to Flanders Nature Center and Land Trust in Woodbury to learn how maple syrup is made.  (Tis the season.)

This is the Sugar House at Flanders.  Inside, maple sap is being boiled down to syrup.  We got a tour inside and out and learned a lot about the syrup making process. 

From our tour, here's a map showing the only part of the world where the sugar maple trees produce the sap with the right sugar content to be boiled down to syrup.  The sap can be tapped when the nighttime temperatures are freezing and the daytime temperatures are above freezing.  In Connecticut, that roughly translates to February/March.  Not surprisingly, the Native Americans are the ones who first figured this out. 

This is the sap boiling inside the (fragrant) Sugar House.  It takes about eight hours to boil down from sap (4% sugar) to syrup (66% sugar).  And it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.  Flanders (an educational center staffed by volunteers) has about 200 taps on trees in the area.  Last year the weather was such that they only got enough sap to produce 40 gallons of syrup.  With this year's weather, they are expecting to get enough to make about 100 gallons of syrup. 

We brought home some maple syrup with us.  It is delicious!  If you want to get a quick explanation of the syrup making process, click on the Flanders link at the beginning of the post.  It will take you to the Flanders website and on the top right corner is the same guy in these photos (the one with the hat) explaining the syrup making process.

Afterwards, we went on a walk around the Flanders preserve.  It was muddy, snowy, leafy, windy, brisk, and the birds were out chirping.  The season is clearly turning from winter to spring.  There was also some beautiful moss.  I will call this one Moss 1.

Moss 2

Moss 3