People of all ages gathered at Hempstead Lake State Park’s Environmental Education and Resiliency Center on Saturday for the park’s third annual Maple Festival. The interactive educational experience gave visitors a chance to learn about the production of maple syrup and the history of the practice.
“When I moved to Long Island from upstate, I really wanted to showcase that you can get maple syrup from trees in your own backyard and trees at Hempstead Lake State Park,” the park’s director, Kate Gross said. “You can literally make maple syrup with one tree from your own backyard.
“I think one of the coolest things about this event for me,” Gross added, “is watching the kids taste our maple syrup, knowing it came from a tree here in the park.”
The festival featured five activity and educational stations. Families had the opportunity to make maple leaf crafts, including dot art and leaf embroidering, or enjoy a maple-themed book in the storybook corner.
They also got to sample syrup made at the park, and learn about the different grades of maple syrup. A grading system created by the International Maple Syrup Institute is used to determine whether a syrup is Golden, Amber, Dark or Very Dark. The grades have similar flavors, but serve different purposes.
Amber syrup is the most commonly used because of its versatility. Served on pancakes and waffles, it can also be added to salad dressings and sauces, hot cocoa and coffee. Golden syrup is used in maple cream, candy and sugar and drizzled on ice cream. Dark syrup pairs well with roasted and baked vegetables and meats, or with other smoky foods, while the Very Dark variety is used mostly for cooking or baking.
Lighter syrups are made with sap that was tapped from a tree earlier in the maple-sugaring season, while darker syrups are produced from saps extracted later in the season. The park offered attendees samples of Golden syrup.
Sap can be collected from late winter to early spring, when the temperature is below 32 degrees at night and around 40 during the day. “The freeze-thaw cycle is what allows the sap to flow in the tree,” Nicole Insolia, an environmental educator, explained. Given the necessary conditions, maple syrup is produced largely in southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States.
To harvest your own maple syrup, you need a spile, or tap, for the sap to flow through once it is inserted into the tree; an electric drill with a clean bit that is the same size as the spile, to drill an inch or two into the tree; a hammer to secure the spile in the tree; a collection bag or bucket to collect the sap, which is then boil down into syrup.
“The message we’re trying to get across to people is, you just need one tree and a few tools to be able to do this at home,” Insolia said. “But you do need 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.”
Pam Hunter, another environmental educator, described the history of maple sugaring and demonstrated the traditional methods of boiling sap into syrup. Before it was boiled in a kettle over a fire, sap was collected into hollowed-out log troughs and boiled by dropping fire-heated stones into the sap, which evaporated the water.
“They would boil the sap down until it was a block of maple sugar because they didn’t want to travel with syrup,” Hunter said of syrup pioneers. “So they would use the block of sugar and added water to it if they needed syrup.”
Native Americans have been harvesting sap and making maple sugar for at least 400 years, with records dating back to 1609. While syrup’s discovery is unknown, Haudenosaunee legend claims that a chief threw his ax into a maple tree, and when the sun came out the next day, sap flowed from the cut. The chief’s wife used the sap to cook and the meal was extra sweet, so they decided to collect more, and discover the sap’s properties.
“During colonial times, maple sugar actually was cheaper then white sugarcane, which came from the Andes region,” Hunter said. “But now it’s reversed, and maple sugar isn’t used as much.”
Sugaring eventually grew into an industry that has overcome economic, environmental and political challenges to create the product we enjoy to this day.
Beyond the Maple Festival, Hempstead Lake State Park offers public programs during the sugaring season where attendees have the chance to tap a tree themselves. “It’s cool to have this opportunity in a relatively urban area,” Insolia said.
For more information, the park can be contacted at HempsteadLakeEE@parks.ny.gov.
