The break room of the Wesselman Woods Nature Center building has been a makeshift maple syrup production room. Needless to say, it smells great.
The sap has already been boiled down twice and as a final step, the product is being filtered by a large white fabric cone into a metal pot.
“It helps to filter out heavy metals, other kinds of large particles that we didn't skim out,” said Derek Walsh, director of Natural Resources and Research. “And then what we have underneath that is the final product, our syrup.”
But that final product after weeks of collecting sap from 22 trees and boiling it all down will only be about a quart of syrup, total. This is the second year in a row Wesselman has had low syrup yields.
Last year, the syrup spoiled before they could boil it.
So this weekend they’ll again be selling syrup from another part of Indiana for their festival.
A good sap yield requires a specific rhythm of day and night temperature changes. Walsh said they were able to tap their sugar maple trees about a month ago.
“And weather has not cooperated — we had that long, cold spell, and then we had several weeks where days were just barely getting below freezing, but not for an extended period of time … you want nights below freezing, and then days above freezing.”
He said they collected between 35 and 40 gallons of sap compared to two years ago where they got around 400 gallons of sap.
He added that they are at the very southern range of where syrup can be produced.
“So places like Vermont that are big producers of syrup, nights are below freezing much earlier in the fall. But down here, it takes a while.”
Cindy Cifuentes is a Master of Forestry Candidate at the School for the Environment and former director of Natural Resources and research at Wesselman woods.
Her school’s maple syrup facility has a much larger crop, collecting more than 30 gallons of sap per day. “It's 412 trees that are being tapped,” she said.
She says regarding location — topography and distance from the coast also matters. She’s not ready to definitively blame climate change.
“Wesselman Woods is in an urban area, it's an urban forest. And so it's gonna get more of the urban heat island effect compared to other forests … especially in rural areas,” she said. “The local aspect of it has a huge implication as well.”
Derek Walsh hopes it’s just a few bad years. “Because you know, two years is too soon to determine whether or not it's going to be like this for the next several decades. So I would say it's not a trend but it could be.”
They’ll be selling syrup from Greencastle at the Maple Sugarbush Festival all weekend. You can buy real genuine Wesselman woods maple syrup — but just don’t expect a large bottle.
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