Addison: Welcome to another USU Extension Education highlight. My name is Addison Stoddard, and joining me today is Kate Hunter, the director of education at Stokes Nature Center. Thanks so much for joining me today, Kate.
Kate: Thank you for having me.
Addison: Maple syrup production is not traditionally associated with western states. Most maple syrup in the United States comes from New England, with Vermont being the top producing state. However, Utah State University and the Stokes Nature Center is showing people otherwise.
Kate, would you be able to tell me a little bit about the community involvement on this project, and what you're doing at the stokes Nature Center to grow the awareness?
Kate: Yeah, absolutely. So part of the grant that us and others at Utah State got was making sure that we're also investigating maple syrup production out here in the West as part of a community science project, or rather, citizen science data gathering.
So a lot of the work that I'm doing, requires me to go out and do workshops where I teach people about how to tap their trees. A lot of people are surprised that they can even tap their Box Elders, which are in the maple genus. And at the end of the presentation, I make sure that they all know that if they do tap their trees that we really want to hear how it went. That might be how much that they got, the latitude and longitude of the tree, the size of the tree. So all of that really helping us to better understand more about maple syrup production out here in the West.
Addison: That's great. Could you tell me a little bit about what that process looks like, the collecting of sap and then turning it into syrup?
Kate: "Yeah. It's pretty fun. Actually, usually when I'm telling people about it, I think it sounds really hard, but it is pretty fun to connect with the trees in your backyard.
So essentially, you need a drill, and we usually say a 516, inch drill bit, or seven would work too. You need a bucket. There are some special maple sap collecting buckets that have a nice hole in them, which is so that they can sit on the maple tap, or a spile, which is essentially the tube that you're kind of drilling that hole in. So you can put it in the tree and collect that sap as it comes out into the bucket, and then ideally, you're going out and checking fat production. It can really depend on the weather how much you're getting.
So for good sap production, you need temperatures below freezing at night and above freezing during the day. But I will say this is kind of hot news in some way. Someone was telling me recently that you really need a five degree difference between the night and daytime temperature. The above and below freezing doesn't matter if they're just a degree apart, but that's beside the point. It's just kind of interesting. So then you collect lots of sap and you boil it down. Depending on your scale of production, you might even boil it down every day so that you're getting kind of half the amount of liquid that you're trying to store. You're trying to boil off about 60% of the water in however much you're collecting.
So it's a lot. If you're collecting sap, you're collecting a large volume. If you're evaporating, you're evaporating large volume water. And then you essentially do a lot of evaporating once it starts turning that kind of brown or more cloudy color, you can bring it inside, or maybe start focusing on it more. I'll say, unfortunately, I burned some tap the other day because I thought I had more time to go. So it is a process. You need to be kind of in it for the long haul, but it is a nice project to have at home. And then, yeah, I say you bring it inside, you boil it a little more. You can use things called a refractometer or hydrometer to check the doneness of your syrup. And then, ideally, you maybe freeze it. Once you're done, you can can it. There's not USDA certified measures for canning syrup, but if you're a canner at home, you can use similar methods. It has a fairly long shelf life. If you can it well, or if you freeze it has a really want chill and then you have some syrup.
Addison: Very interesting. How many people in the state of Utah do you have involved in this process? Are you constantly going out and finding new people that are interested in collecting sap in their backyard? Or is it kind of been a process to develop that?
Kate: "Yeah, so we at Stokes Nature Center have been doing maple syrup in workshops for quite a while, I'd say like four-ish years, if not more. And this project with uping, I believe, started two or three years ago.
So with that, we have been doing workshops, and we get we usually sell out at our workshops, and by sell out, they're free, but usually run out of space. So last year we did 250 person workshops. So about 100 people here in Logan came last year and this year, and people are pretty excited. So fortunately, we don't really have to go out too much to people to educate them about it. They tend to be excited about it. They'll come to us. And same thing down in Weber and Salt Lake City, we get we get a lot of excitement and interest in it.
Addison: That's great. Thank you so much for all this information, and thank you so much for joining me today.
Kate: Yeah, absolutely.
