March 2026
By Kat Resanovich, Volunteer Coordinator & Educator
Maple sugaring season is one of the most magical, but also temperamental times of year in New York! We had an amazing crew of volunteers that helped us make maple syrup this year in sunny weather, snow, rain, and everything in between.
At Baltimore Woods, it’s an annual tradition to make maple syrup. We don’t sell syrup, but we use it for education programs. This year, our homeschool groups learned about the sugaring process when they helped to tap our trees, but then the rest of the sugaring process was done by volunteers this year! After the sugar maples are tapped, we routinely check the sugarbush to see if the sap is flowing. A great group of on-call volunteers were ready at the drop of sap to come over to collect and boil gallons of sap. It can be hard to predict when the sap will flow, so we needed a group of volunteers ready to jump in to help based on the weather. Once we have cool nights and warm days and the sap starts to flow, volunteers collect gallons and gallons of sap to get it ready for boiling. Once we have the sap, boiling volunteers make and tend to a fire to keep the evaporator going for hours. While the sap is boiling. Volunteers also skim foam that forms and continuously add more sap. The volunteers helped process over 80 gallons of sap this year. That will end up as about 2 gallons of syrup. Our A-Team volunteers were also a huge help in keeping our fire supplies well stocked. On Wednesdays when the group meets, many volunteers took the time to haul and split more wood to make sure we never ran out while they were boiling.
After the sap is boiled down in the evaporator, it is still not completely finished. The syrup has to be finished on a stovetop. One volunteer, George Thomas who has been making syrup at home for years helped us finish the syrup this year. George volunteered to complete the process and get our syrup ready for field trips and programs. This included hours of more boiling, filtering, and jarring the syrup. It can be tricky to finish syrup by hand, to make sure it doesn’t burn, but George did a fantastic job. By the time George left, we had jars and jars of delicious, golden maple syrup.
This year, we also had some volunteers help students learn and understand the maple sugaring process a little better. Some volunteers assisted with our “Maple Magic: field trips by boiling sap during the program. This lets students explore the entire maple sugaring process, and really help them understand how sap transforms into syrup, by seeing it happen in front of them. This is a fantastic experience for the students to see, because many of them didn’t know that maple syrup came from trees until they came on the trip. Thanks to volunteer help, the students get to see the process up close. The volunteers also helped us prepare materials for the classes, by making and handing out maple syrup samples for the students to try, this is usually their favorite part of the trip! We also had volunteers help out with our Sweet 60th anniversary celebration by boiling sap to show the public the maple sugaring process.
From start to finish, our volunteers made maple sugaring at Baltimore Woods possible this year. It is a time intensive process to make maple syrup and it would not be possible without our volunteers. Thank you to all of our volunteers that helped with maple sugaring this year! We look forward to next year’s sugaring season.
To get involved in volunteering, fill out our volunteer interest form: https://baltimorewoods.org/volunteer-request-for-information/ or email us at [email protected]
