ANTRIM COUNTY, Mich,. (WPBN/WGTU) – – After a long and cold winter, a thaw has arrived across Michigan and that means the sap is following in sugar maple trees.
There is a sugar shack nestled in the woods in Antrim County as they prepare to welcome guests for Michigan Maple Syrup Association’s Maple Days.
“Yes, we like maple syrup. It’s a great sweetener and it’s so just good,” said Joe Woods, Out Of The Woods Farm.
Joe and Bobbi Woods may have always liked maple syrup but they kind of fell into running their own Antrim County maple farm.
“Well, actually it all comes back to my son coming home from, I do believe it was middle school and asking about can we produce maple syrup with these maple trees. So we went out, made sure they were sugar maples and made up some taps and got some buckets and made our first batch of maple syrup,” said Woods.
That was 1993, since then, with a lot of hard work and sweet success, they’ve gotten pretty solid at syrup.
“It just got bigger and bigger and as we always say, it was just a habit that just got out of hand,” said Woods.
Every spring when winter starts to fade, the sap starts flowing.
“Typically, in Northern Michigan, North, like I said, North of US 10, we look at about the first of March would be the starting of the season and ending usually around the April 10th,” said Woods.
It’s a short season to boil down an awful lot of sap to make a lot less syrup.
“40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup. Now that is on a good day. A lot of days it’s probably closer to 50 to one,” said Woods.
And that syrup, sweet enough for pancakes and more isn’t always the finished product.
“We also, because we are in cherry country, we do produce a maple cherry syrup. My wife also makes maple candy, maple cream, maple sugar, and for the open house, we will be doing maple cotton candy,” said Woods.
That open house is coming up here at Out of the Woods Farm and across the state over the next 3 weeks they are called Michigan Maple Weekends….where sugar shacks and farms statewide welcome the public in to see how they do what they do.
“You just get a lot of people who are totally unaware of how this is done and they’re fascinated by it, that this is where one of their food products that they enjoy, how it’s made and they can actually see it from a basically a start to finish aspect,” said Woods.
Folks like Joe and Bobbi love walking visitors through the process from the trees to the tanks, to the finished product, it’s as much about showcasing the sweet taste of their efforts as it is educating everyone about where their food comes from.
“I think part of the problem we’re experiencing right now is we’ve got groups of people who think that maybe the way to make food is in a factory using chemicals, doing this, doing that to it and I think that that is not good for our health. I mean, it comes really right down to what do we put on our bodies?” said Woods.
But a visit here, and you can see firsthand the entire process and walk away not only a little smarter but also, with something a little sweeter.
“First of all, you’re getting an idea of, some of the people might be in your community that you’re not aware of, some of the farms, things like that and you’re gonna be hopefully learning about a lot of these places and what they produce,” said Woods.
Michigan Maple Weekend is a statewide event, but the dates vary by region, with the southern lower peninsula being March 15-16 and the in the upper peninsula, April 5-6.
Out of the Woods in Antrim County will be having their weekend March 29 and 30.
You can check with your local maple producers to see when you can stop by for a tour and a visit.