Sunday was Maine Maple Sunday, a day when all the maple farms open up their sugar shacks for visitors to come see the steamy maple-syrup-making process. They use taps and hoses to gather sap from lots of trees, and pour it all into a giant vat, then build a fire underneath and boil and boil and boil and boil until the watery sap cooks down into a concentrated, sticky, tasty syrup. It takes around 30 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup, and 1 cord of firewood to make 25 gallons of syrup! We went to visit a few neighborhood farms, Merrifield Farm in Gorham and Morin’s Maple Farm in Limerick, which is close to our new house in Limington. Our friend Paz came with us to visit Merrifield’s. Over the course of the day, we tasted pure shaved maple sugar, warm maple syrup on vanilla ice cream, maple cream on crackers, leaf-shaped maple sugar candies, and chocolate cupcakes with maple cream icing.
