Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
If there’s one thing that there is no shortage of in Pocahontas County, it’s trees – especially maple trees. For centuries, it’s been a tradition to tap maple trees in the spring to make delicious maple syrup.
Maple syrup has become such a large part of the farming industry in West Virginia that, in 2017, Mountain State Maple Days was founded and during one weekend in February and one in March, the state becomes a haven for maple lovers. Sugar shacks open up for tours and local restaurants have special maple inspired menus.
This year, the Future Generations Appalachian Program got into the maple game with Maple in the Schools. Hillsboro Elementary School was selected as one of the schools to participate in the pilot program.
Future Generations community education associate Casey Withers has worked with HES to implement the program and provide hands-on learning to the students.
“I was able to go to the school February 7,” he said. “We had ten taps and ten buckets. We identified some maple trees on the property and each class was able to come out and put some taps in. They were able to drill their tap hole and put in the tap.”
All students – kindergarten through fifth grade – participated in collecting sap and closely monitored the buckets.
The sap flowed swiftly and it wasn’t long before the school needed help with containers for the sweet water. Luckily, Hillsboro Maple Works is near by and was happy to help.
“Whenever we tapped, it was really good sap flow weather and they were collecting it so fast that they were scurrying a little bit, trying to figure out what to do with everything,” Withers said. “I had given them some white five gallon buckets to collect it in, but they had already filled those up within the first few days, so Trevor [Swan] from Hillsboro Maple Works, was able to get them a big barrel for their sap.”
As Swan made his rounds to collect sap from his own trees, he would swing by the school to do the same there.
On March 5, the students got to experience the next step in maple syrup production with a tour of the Hillsboro Maple Works facility. Swan led the students on the tour and at the end, gifted them and their teachers with mini bottles of a special batch of syrup.
“He used their sap to make maple syrup and on the field trip, he had little mini bottles and each student and teacher got to take one of those home,” Wither said. “We’re under the assumption that it definitely contained some of their sap, so that was pretty cool.”
In addition to the hands-on activities, Withers said the maple in schools program has a six week curriculum that ties into the school standards for grades pre-K through 12, so HES was able to tie the maple syrup program into several different lessons.
Now that maple syrup season is essentially over, the taps and buckets will be put aside until it’s time to tap the trees again for the sweet nectar.
“The school wants to keep doing this every year, so that’s pretty exciting,” Withers said.
