Recently, I joined friends on a trip out to Natick Community Organic Farm to check out Maple Magic Day.  We missed the pancake breakfast (so sad!), but we did enjoy a tour of the grounds and stood inside a real sugar shack, bathing in the steam and sugary air.  I was particularly pleased because, last fall, I read a book on maple sugaring, and so felt impressed to experience the workings in person.

An added bonus was running into two friends at the farm, both of whom, unbeknownst to me, work there!

Headed in for the tour with my companions for the afternoon, Megna and Heather (my third companion Alice is off-screen.)

Welcome sign out front the sugar shack.

Rabbit watches the crowd.

A young worker tends the fire.

My friend Donelle re-tells an indigenous-people’s story of maple syrup.

Sap captured.  Later it will be combined with the sap of other trees and boiled, boiled, boiled.  The wisdom goes that it take forty gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup.