We tagged along as Havenwood residents learned to make maple syrup

By Keith Testa - Apr 29, 2014 | 0 comments

A Mickey Mouse pancake.

Maple candies.

Syrup at Mapletree Farm.

Pancakes smothered in Havenwood-made maple syrup. We may or may not have eaten them in about 30 seconds.

The finished product, one official gallon of homemade maple syrup.

Wilber checks the sugar content of the sap at his sugar shack.

Some of the taps produced a steady drip.

Bill Morrill and Sue Pollock collect sap using a special pump system created by Wilber.

Barb Scammon drills a hole for a tap.

Dean Wilber of Mapletree Farm shows Don Vandenburgh the proper tap placement.

The first official collecting bucket.

There’s a strong probability that Tuesday morning’s meal wasn’t the first pancake breakfast ever to be held at Havenwood Heritage Heights. But it was more than likely the first one starring maple syrup harvested from trees on the Havenwood campus – by residents.

By the time residents chowed down – full disclosure: the Insider might have tasted a small sample, if you consider four pancakes small – they had learned how to tap trees and collect sap, and several had visited Dean Wilber at Mapletree Farm in East Concord to view the process of boiling sap and creating syrup.

The Maple Sugar Brigade, as the team of participants became known, wound up facing the same difficulties most local maple producers did during a dreadful season, collecting less sap than they’d hoped to, but in the end they wound up with one gallon of the sweet stuff collected from maple trees outside of most of their homes, more than enough to serve everyone that came through the line Tuesday.

In fact, there was almost a half-gallon left when the plates were cleared from the tables.

“I never knew about it, and I’m a New Englander,” said resident and project participant Norm Van Beaver. “I never knew there was so much involved in going from the tree to your plate, and it’s been very informative in that respect. I have a new respect for maple sugarers.”

The project was coordinated by Sue Pollock, director of programs at Havenwood Heritage Heights, who contacted Wilber and asked if he’d be willing to guide a group of seniors through the process (spoiler alert: he said yes).

Wilber turned out to be the star of the show, in fact, going above and beyond in walking residents through the process of tapping trees, designing a special pump to help them collect sap and inviting them to the shack while he boiled it into syrup.

“He was amazing,” Pollock said. “I don’t know that another man would have been that accomodating. He went above and beyond. I kept saying, the goodness of this man doesn’t stop.”

There was certainly an educational benefit to the entire project, as residents – and the Insider, as we followed along – learned a ton about maple sugaring. For instance, did you know that freshly-made maple syrup is delicious?

In the real facts departement, though, we learned that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, a ratio that can grow to as much as 60-to-1 as the season wears on, Wilber said.

Most of the valuable learning came because residents got to be hand-on through the whole process, though. Wilber visited the campus March 7 to help tap about 15 trees around the property, offering insight as to where taps should go and letting residents do the honors of hammering them – gently – into place.

As the weeks wore on, groups of two residents at a time from the brigade teamed up with Pollock to collect sap from the buckets, finding that some were tremendous performers while others remained bone dry. In all, they collected a total of just about 40 gallons, which produced the gallon of syrup used during the pancake breakfast.

The project more than fulfilled Pollock’s hopes, she said, as the end result was precisely what everyone wanted.

“It was very cool to just sit back and look at what they produced,” Pollock said. “It really came together just perfectly. I don’t know that I would really change anything. I sort of had a vision of how it would flow, but it worked out great.”

Residents shared Pollock’s enthusiasm. Many members of the brigade said one of the best benefits of the project was the camaraderie that developed throughout the group.

“It was fabulous, a journey from the very beginning,” resident Barb Scammon said. “It was great fun, and we had a great group.”

Said Van Beaver: “One of the great things is we had a group of about 12 or 14 residents, and it was just wonderful working with them.”

That spirit wasn’t lost on Wilber, who thrived on the enjoyment the seniors were experiencing.

“Rewarding is probably the best word I can use,” Wilber said. “The enthusiasm the group has had is just fantastic. I got a lot out of it, too.”

And the residents got exactly what they wanted – syrup. So, given all the manpower and work put into it, the question on everyone’s mind was this: was it any good?

“Are you kidding me?” Van Beaver said. “It was just terrific. And I was told by Dean that ours has the proper sugar content, whatever that is.”