Difficulty Level Easy

Now that March is here, we are experiencing warm, sunny days and cold nights and in my neck of the woods that can mean only one thing: time for sugaring off. For the uninitiated, that means heading to the sugar bush and tapping maple trees for the sap, which is then reduced after many, many hours of boiling into the wonderful elixir we call maple syrup.

Well, now there is an organization in Toronto that is doing a pilot maple syrup project this spring using urban maple trees called We'd Tap That! Not Far From theTree is a volunteer organization that harvests fruits and nuts from neighbourhood trees. 1/3 of the produce goes to the tree owner, 1/3 to the volunteer pickers and the other 1/3 goes to local communty food programmes. In 2008 they harvested over 3000 pounds of fruit that would otherwise have gone to waste. Last summer they increased that number to a whopping 8135 pounds.

This spring they have turned their attention to harvesting sap.Toronto has a very large number of hearty Norway maples and they will be using those rather than sugar maples which have more trouble surviving in an urban environment. It takes a huge amount of sap to make a very small amount of syrup and you have to tap a lot of trees and the sap of the Norway isn't as sweet as that of a sugar maple, but they are keen to give it a try. To this end they have asked for people to volunteer their trees and their time. Initially, the City of Toronto wasn't so keen on this experiment, as a good number of the trees actually belong to the city, including the trees on most of our front yards, but the organization has demonstrated that they know what they are doing and have received the city's blessing.

I had already decided to do a series of posts celebrating maple syrup, but this really spurred me on. Of course, when they have their syrup ready, they will be holding a pancake breakfast and testing the results of their labours, because in Canada we know that the pancake is the perfect vehicle for delivering maple syrup to your mouth.

Don't be fooled by imitations. Table syrup is not maple syrup, so don't buy it. I admit that real maple syrup is expensive, but if you knew how much effort went into making that one bottle, you wouldn't bedgrudge the price. It is fantastic and nothing else in the world tastes like it, and little goes a long way. You can store it in the refrigerator for a really long time. If you get your syrup from a farmers' market they will usually have different grades on offer, the darker the syrup the stronger the maple flavour. Forbes Wild Foods has #1 light, #2 amber and #3 dark and you can order them online.

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