Making Maple Syrup
What things might trees provide to make the lives of other plants and animals better?
Maple Syrup comes from trees. Let's learn how its taken from the tree and prepared for bottling.
Transcript
Abby Brown:
When you're walking outside, whether in your neighborhood or in a nature area like this, have you ever noticed how some trees are sticky? This is a maple tree. Some species of maple trees were around when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Pretty amazing, right? You know what helps keep maple trees strong, and healthy, and sticky? Sap! Just like blood runs through us to carry nutrients to different parts of our bodies, sap runs through trees to carry water, sugar, and nutrients to the branches and all throughout the tree. Temperature and daylight affect the flow of the sap too. And just like humans can donate blood without any harm, trees can give sap without any damage. That sap can be turned into food! That's right! This delicious gooey stuff you put on your pancakes, maple syrup!
Katie Klus:
We, here at Hartman, tap sugar maples. Sugar maples have the highest ratio of sugar content in their sap, so it kind of makes it worth your labor to do it. When we go to tap we take a drill and we drill in the tree at an angle and get all that sawdust extra sawdust out of there. And then we take a metal what's called a spile, or sometimes it's called a spout, and that gets hammered into the tree and it makes a tapping noise; hence why it's called tapping maple trees. And then we either hook some sort of container onto it. So here we have two different versions: we have the old school metal buckets and then we also have what's called a bag holder so it's it holds a plastic bag that gets hooked on the bottom.
Abby:
After the sap is collected it's taken to the sugar shack. It needs to be processed to turn into the syrup that we love to eat on our pancakes. This involves boiling the sap to evaporate the water. This makes a golden, or darker, color syrup; looks delicious. Whether you live in a city or a more rural area, you're bound to see a maple tree somewhere close by. You can recognize most types of maple trees by their hand-shaped leaves, and many of them turn beautiful colors in the fall. But what makes maple trees really amazing is that they can provide sap for a delicious treat, maple syrup!
Can you think of other things maple trees, and all trees, can provide to make plants animals and human lives better? Thanks for having fun investigating new discoveries with me!
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