Maple syrup

 

On Their Way to Camp 

Eastman Johnson

Mrs. Butterworth's syrup just can't compare to the taste of real maple on your pancakes. I can buy a big jug of organic maple syrup at Costco for  $14 and it lasts us about 6 months in the fridge. What a bargain. In the specialty food catalogs (or fancy Metropolitan Market) little bottles of maple syrup are really expensive.

 

Sometimes I use it instead of honey to make delicious granola.  Being a huge fan of the product, I wondered what effect climate change is having on sugar maple tree production.  I always thought that cold winters were crucial, but turns out they found a new metric for predicting syrup production: How many seed helicopters rained down from the tree the year before.

What really matters to syrup producers is the amount of sugar in the sap, and sugar maple sap is 2 to 3 percent sugar.  The rest is just water to boil off, so if you start with sap that's 3 percent sugar, it takes a third less sap to make a gallon of syrup. Both seeds and sugar are made from carbohydrates stored in trees and when a tree produces a lot of seeds one summer, the next spring the carbohydrate "bank account" is low for making sugar.

So weather alone is a bad predictor for how much sugar comes out of the taps. For several years, they have been studying mast seeding events -- years when trees produce far more seeds than usual. In sugar maples, big masts tend to occur every 2 to 5 years.  Looking ahead to next year's harvest throughout the northeast, the seed mast crop was small this year, suggesting the 2015 maple syrup harvest should be a good one. Yea.

There is another type of forest mast. Tree species like oak, hickory and beech product a hard mast of nuts, traditionally used to fatten pigs in the fall.  The November Book of Hours calendar page, one of my favorites, shows a peasant throwing sticks into the branches to knock down mast for the hogs while his dog watches.