Maple Tapping

Nathan, Logan, and I took a little excursion to the Indiana National Lakeshore a week ago to learn about maple syrup.  The Chellberg farm is a part of the parks department and they have annual maple tapping that visitors can watch and learn about.

It was a bit of a cold day, but Logan was excited to get started on the tour.

He was very interested in going for walks in the woods and kept trying to escape and go on his own, private, adventure.

The Native Americans used wood bowls to hold the syrup and heated rocks to place in the bowls to boil the water out of the mixture.

Cast iron was used later to reduce the water content in the syrup.  It would take hours to get the syrup reduced in one pot in the poured into a smaller pot to reduce.

They had a few posts set up to practice maple tapping on.  Logan became a professional and was very excited about drilling the hole for the tap.  He was able to put the tap into his drilled hole.

They had real Maple Syrup samples and fake syrup samples to taste the difference.  Logan did not want to relinquish his sample.

The tour ended with Logan sitting on my car, for some reason.  He seemed to like that part too.