A recent drive around the Meadowood campus yielded a curious sight: dozens of trees throughout the grounds fitted with strange tubes and buckets. If you’ve ever traveled to the U.S.’s northern states in late winter, you may have recognized these oddities as spiles, or the spouts used to collect the sap of sugar trees. 

While last year just two maple trees were tapped on the Meadowood property, under the guidance of J.C. Wanck of the grounds department, the crew went full steam this spring, tapping more than 20 trees over the course of seven weeks.

“We hatched a plan to make Meadowood maple syrup last summer as we looked at the marvelous Sugar Maple trees on Meadowood’s property,” says Wanck. “We purchased the supplies and tapped the trees in late January when Mother Nature decided the season had started.”

“It’s a pretty labor-intensive process,” says Meadowood’s horticulturist Dawn Keller. And Mother Nature has got to be in on the deal, assuring the right conditions for tapping the trees.

How does this seemingly magical process work? It begins when the daytime temperatures rise above freezing. At night, as the temperature drops, negative pressure pulls the sap up through large pores that connect the roots with the body of the tree. During the day, the warmer temperatures push the sap back down toward the roots and into the tap system. The sap then flows through the spout and tubing into a food-grade collection bucket. This process repeats as long as the temperature falls below freezing at night and warms above freezing during the day and lasts for just a few weeks. As soon as buds appear on the trees, the sap turns bitter and won’t make good syrup.

A maple tree can produce sap for syrup for up to 100 years, which is a good thing, because it can take up to 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup. In fact, just seven gallons were produced from the nearly 300 gallons of sap collected this season here.

It’s a continual process, since the sap must be boiled almost as soon as it is tapped so it doesn’t spoil. Wanck says they collected sap daily and boiled it at least every two days. Although the end product is typically referred to as “maple” syrup, it can also include the sap of certain walnut trees, box elder, sycamore, hickory, birch and alder trees as well.

The project had the whole campus buzzing.

“During our collecting, we had loads of interested folks stop to talk to us about the process. Their interest was amazing!” Wanck says. “When the season wound down, we collected the last of the sap, pulled the taps and buckets and boiled the last of it to make syrup. Once all done, we combined the syrup into one big pot and filled the bottles.”

Those precious bottles contained home-brewed sweet stuff that was smelled, sipped, studied and enjoyed by residents at an informational event held on March 3. As anyone who attended the event can tell you, sipping the different types of syrup conjured from Meadowood’s own trees is heavenly. No tinge of plastic, no hint of mass production, just pure, smooth sweetness on the tongue. We enjoyed the delicious treat right out of sampling cups, over shaved ice, and in the café poured over stacks of pancakes. Afterward, the amber liquid was distributed campus-wide for all to sample.

The bottles proudly bear the “Meadowood Maple Syrup” name and will be available to buy while supplies last at a plant (and syrup!) sale at the end of March.

There were murmurs of selling the stuff on the black market…it could seriously rival anything you find in Vermont. But in the end, it was decided it should stay right here, to be enjoyed by residents and staff who treasure our trees all year round–just as much as we treasure the members of our grounds crew for caring for them so well.