Backyard Sugaring

Announcing a backyard maple syrup making workshop hosted at the Paul Smith’s College VIC and offered by Mike Rechlin, aka West Virginia’s Maple Mike. This is a beginner maple tapping and syrup making workshop. If you have 10 maple trees you can make all the syrup your family can slather on pancakes for the year. If you have 20 trees, your next year’s Christmas shopping is done. Who wouldn’t like to get a nice bottle of your homemade maple syrup? Making maple syrup is fun, it’s educational and it’s delicious.

This day long workshop will include indoor and indoor activities. Dress for the season. We will learn what trees to tap, how to tap them, ways to collect sap in buckets or milk jugs, how to boil the sap on an outdoor fire or your barbeque grill, and how to safely package your product for storage. Along the way we will ponder what the tree thinks of all this. We’ll explore various aspects of maple biology, physiology and ecology that make tapping a maple a good idea but make tapping an oak or pine a not so good idea. You will leave the workshop with all you need to go home and start your own sugarbush. And there will be plenty of the maple sugaring season left this winter.