A Walk Through “Maple Town.” May, 2016

As is well known, most of the world’s maple syrup is produced in Canada. Every spring, when the first buds begin to appear on the trees and the temperature drops slightly below freezing at night and rises slightly above it during the day, sugar maple trees begin to produce maple sap... 

On one of those sunny but still cool spring days, we headed to a conservation area where you can see how maple syrup is collected and produced. And since there was another interesting conservation area nearby, we decided to visit that one as well.

Let me start from the beginning. Crawford Conservation Area. An hour’s drive from Toronto, and we found ourselves in the forest, beside the incredibly beautiful Crawford Lake. I’ll show you the lake another time, but what makes this conservation area interesting is that there is an Iroquoian village on its grounds — or rather, a reconstruction of a 15th-century village.

We stepped inside the settlers’ “longhouses.” The houses were built with wooden frames covered with elm bark. Each longhouse was home to an entire Iroquoian clan, led by its chief

We walked around the village and watched corn bread — the staple food of the people who lived here at that time — being prepared with maple syrup 

We tried the bread, listened to a talk about how maple syrup is made, and sampled several different varieties of syrup, which varied in thickness and clarity 

We also tried maple taffy — a homemade candy made by pouring hot maple syrup over cold snow. The snow used for the taffy was artificially made, but the ice covering the tree branches was very real. It was one of those spring days when winter suddenly decided to remind us it wasn’t quite gone yet. After rain during the day, the temperature dropped sharply overnight, and everything was covered in ice. In just a few hours, the entire forest would be crackling as the ice melted and fell from the branches under the bright sunshine. But for now, the branches looked like this 

Then we headed to the neighboring conservation area — Mountsberg Conservation Area. This is where the “Maple Town” is located

But first, we stopped by the centre that cares for birds of prey

And here we are at our destination 

The maple forest. There is a small hole drilled into each tree trunk with a tube through which the sap flows into a bucket. One tree produces enough sap in a season to make just one liter of maple syrup. It takes as many as 40 buckets of sap to make one bucket of maple syrup after it has been boiled down. Throughout the forest, there are signs with interesting facts about maple syrup 

The first settlers boiled the sap in large kettles. Today, maple syrup production has become a whole industry. By the way, no sugar is added to maple syrup. Maple sap is about 97% water and 3% sugar. During the boiling process, the sap is reduced to syrup containing about 33% water and 67% sugar 

We also took a horse-drawn wagon ride through the forest. The horses live on a small farm right on the grounds of the conservation area 

We stopped by a few little shops selling maple syrup and various souvenirs. And, of course, there were plenty of maple syrup-based sweets. These candies had just been poured into molds. They still needed about an hour to harden before they would be ready to enjoy 

And that was our little maple adventure...