Sticky situation

Local tree tappers find joy in maple syrup making

Even though the price of a litre of maple syrup ranges from $20 at Costco to around $35 for the premium stuff from a local producer, it would be wrong to think that the spike in small, backyard syrup operations in Kawarthas Lakes is a financial decision. Syrup making is a labour of love that, for some, is a natural extension of other harvests.

Anna Maria and Greg Gungner of Fenelon Falls harvest hazelnuts, grow pears, and make apple cider and grape juice, at their residential property, so it wasn’t a big leap five years ago to add maple syrup to the list of products generated at home. They tapped two trees (both soft maples) and collected enough sap to make a few litres of syrup in a one-day boil. Anna Maria explains, “we use a turkey fryer (a propane-fuelled burner) and a wide, shallow pan to boil. We are lucky because the house is already heated with propane.” With their four kids out of the house, and not dipping into the supply, the syrup lasts until the next collection season.

Around the corner from the Gungners, Gerry Garvey didn’t let the fact there are no maples on his lot prevent him from getting in on the action. The retired Hydro One forester can identify more than 40 kinds of trees, so when he decided to give making syrup a try more than 10 years ago, he asked his neighbour if he could tap the eight or 10 maples he had identified on their residential property.

“Most are hard maple which produce more syrup, with a 40:1 sap to syrup ratio. The soft ones are more like 45 or 47:1,” he said, adding that birch and walnut can also be tapped.

Syrup production is not a new activity for him, having done it on a larger scale at another property he owned while he was still working. The demands of collecting the sap, carrying full pails, and boiling it after putting in a full day of climbing trees got to be a bit much after a few seasons.

Gerry Garvey also uses a propane turkey fryer and pot but adds a “Gerry-rigged” bucket and copper pipe with tap that gravity feeds sap at a controlled rate to the boiling pot. Last year he started collecting sap on Feb. 4 and stopped March 27 and made more than 10 litres of syrup.

Still others enjoy making liquid gold as a social activity involving friends. For Dar Kimble, who is a millennial, but doesn’t fit that stereotype says, “I find it to be a great reason to get outside after the winter and spend time with family and friends around the evaporator. I also think it’s important to be resourceful and take a larger role in the process of how food gets to your table.”

“This is my second season. We tap 20 trees, and if all goes well we will finish 12 litres of syrup this year. My longest boil would be about 10 hours.” Doubling down on the resourcefulness angle, he also built their evaporator found at the family acreage near Bobcaygeon.

He adds that for his partner, Jenna Hutchinson, baking is one of the main reasons they do it. “Jenna bakes with it a lot, substituting it for sugar in breads, muffins and cookies.”

Until the $23 million gold heist at Pearson International Airport in 2023, the most valuable robbery in this country involved maple syrup in a Quebecois version of the train tanker car heist of pre-cursor from the AMC series Breaking Bad.

About 3,000 tonnes of syrup worth almost $19 million dollars was liberated from a Quebec storage facility over a few months at the end of 2011 and into 2012. Thieves moved full barrels off-site and transferred the syrup into empty ones before refilling the originals with water and returning them to the facility. The theft went unnoticed since that warehouse was only inventoried once a year.

Ontario producers, some with operations involving thousands of trees, bring $28 million dollars’ worth of syrup to the shelves, but Quebec accounts for almost 90 per cent of Canada’s production. Germany, France, the UK, Australia and Japan are major importers, and despite having several states that make maple syrup, more than 60 per cent of our national production goes to the US.

As might be expected, the majority of equipment used in the US to produce maple syrup is made in Canada. It remains to be seen how US-imposed tariffs will affect the industry but there was a surge in equipment orders from south of the border prior to the first announced tariff deadline.

Despite the millions of dollars involved nationally, no one gets into backyard syrup production to get rich. Just like an angler that says he is saving money by catching fish instead of buying them, making maple syrup on a small scale is not a smart income generating strategy, but it is a rewarding pastime and a way to connect with people and nature.

And, as Garvey puts it, “When you finish a boil at 9:30 at night and you taste a tablespoon of fresh, warm syrup…it doesn’t get much better than that. Double dog delicious.”