HAWLEY, PA — Maple syrup production was the subject of the meeting of The Country Gardeners (TCG) club at the group’s April  meeting.

The guest speaker was Kristin Curtis, owner of Journey’s End Farm (maple@journeysendfarm.org, www.journeysendfarm.org) located in Sterling. The farm has been in her family for four generations. Starting with a few maple trees for maple syrup production, they now have 1,600 taps on a large number of sugar and red maple trees. To tap a tree, they drill a small hole in the trunk of the tree, and a small spout or spile is inserted to catch the sap that collects in the hole. The spile is attached to plastic tubing lines connected to other maple trees on the farm, and the sap moves from the top to the bottom of a hill into a sap house. It goes into a storage tank and then into a wood-fired evaporator where a lot of the water is boiled away. Raw maple tree sap has a sugar content of 1.8 percent, but after boiling and evaporation, it changes to pure maple syrup and contains 67 percent sugar. It is then filtered and put into a container for sale or made into items like maple cookies, candy and maple cream. 

There are four grades of maple syrup: golden delicate, amber, dark robust and very dark strong. The darker grades have a more intense flavor and are preferred for cooking and baking.

The next TCG meeting will be Thursday, May 1 at 1 p.m. at the Wallenpaupack Environmental Learning Center in Hawley. There will be a presentation on mushroom cultivation by Hunter Varga, owner of Mountain View Mushrooms.

Contributed by The Country Gardeners.