Upcoming Maple Events

Working from long-range calendar planning to close-range events, we are excited about the upcoming slew of maple events.  There is literally something for everybody!

Join us for the 2023 Ohio Maple Days in Ashland, Ohio, December 8th and 9th for 2 days of instructional workshops, food and fellowship, and a Saturday full of technical talks for both advanced sugarmakers and beginners.  We kick things off at 1 PM on Friday with a value-added workshop that will teach participants how to make maple sugar, maple cream, maple candy, maple cotton candy, and even some maple-infused breakfast sausage links.  The Ohio Maple Producers Association is hosting a maple contest with banquet blowout Friday night with the full conference agenda on Saturday.  During Saturday afternoon, we are excited to offer a beginner’s track to explore the basics of maple and an advanced track that will focus on sugarhouse design, marking your woods for a crop tree release timber harvest, and more.  And by popular demand, we are bringing back hydrometer testing – so please mark your calendars for December 8th and 9th.  We will post the registration details as soon as they go live.

Lake Erie Maple Expo is slated for November 10-11 in Albion, PA.  This popular event has an excellent list of sessions and speakers on tap for participants.  I for one have never been in attendance but will be changing that this year.  I hope to see a few familiar faces there!

The week prior to LEME on November 3rd and 4th, the Ohio Maple Producers will be hosting their annual meeting – stay tuned or check their website for details!

Sturbridge, Massachusetts, will be the hosting location for this year’s North American Maple Conference from October 25-28.  This is the BIG show with an absolutely packed slate of tours, meetings, technical workshops, and great meals.  You can find registration details here.  If that’s not enough for you, the International Maple Grading School will be offered October 29th and 30th just down the road in Grafton, MA.

A bit more local, we are excited to be offering a tandem webinar/workshop in collaboration with the University of Kentucky.  The webinar – evening of September 11th –  will be a basic introduction to all things maple in order to whet new producers’ appetites and lure them out to the in-person event in Boone County, KY, on Monday, October 16th.

Sandwiched in between those 2 events, please consider joining us down in southwestern Ohio Saturday, September 16th for a workshop in partnership with the Cincinnati Zoo.  Registration details are live on the Ohio Woodland Stewards Program website.  In conjunction with the workshop, participants will have a chance to shop and browse at the Zoo’s Native Plant Nursery there on site at Bowyer Farm.

And last but not least, Pennsylvania is hosting Maple Boot Camp on September 6th-8 prefaced by a Maple Grading Workshop the morning of that Wednesday.  Boot Camp is the brain child of the 3-state OH/PA/WV, and it is the Keystone State’s turn to host.  We are excited about this in-depth, deep dive into maple sugaring and hope to repeat the success of last year’s Boot Camp in Ohio.

I’ll be sprinkling reminders here and there as different registration deadlines loom, but I hope to cross paths with you at least once, if not multiple times, throughout the fall maple programming season.  Lots of options to choose from!!

March Maple Programming Recap

Because the weather put us out of the syrup-making business by March 1st this year, we delivered a crowded schedule of March maple programming at a variety of events instead.

Kicking off the month, Kathy Smith and I tag-teamed a talk at the Woodland, Water, and Wildlife (WWW) Conference.  We spoke to a roomful of attendees about the maple toolbox that has emerged from our tri-state USDA ACER grant.  The maple toolbox is designed for foresters and natural resource professionals to bring maple sugaring to landowners as a management option.  From site and tree evaluation to a crash course in regulatory requirements for maple producers, the toolbox is gaining traction as an excellent resource across its intended Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania reach.  The 1-hour presentation at WWW teed up a full-day workshop dedicated to just the maple toolbox for middle of the month.

2 weeks later, I spoke to a group of 30 undergraduate students from the Buckeye Learning Community at OSU-Mansfield.  While students filled up their plates with pancakes covered in Ohio State maple syrup, we discussed the concepts of stewardship and sustainability in balancing the need for natural resources while protecting our environment.  Maple is absolutely a perfect candidate topic to explore these themes.  Once bellies were full, we went outside to get students some experience identifying maple trees in the woods.  With a handful of maples identified just outside the building, everyone got some tapping practice while we collected some sap to check Brix with our digital refractometers.  The sap sugar content exercise worked beautifully as a suppressed maple struggling to get out of the midstory posted a 1.4 Brix and was blown out of the water by the most dominant sugar maple in the stand – the maple monarch put up a stellar 3.4% sugar content.  It was eye-opening for many students to see the connection between a healthy forest and production potential as measured by Brix.

March 15th was a full day in-service workshop for 20 professionals.  The deep dive into the maple toolbox coupled an indoor morning session with an outdoor afternoon session.  Consulting foresters, extension educators, agents from local Soil and Water Conservation Districts, and more participated.  A big thanks to Les Ober and Carri Jagger for helping us teach that workshop.  While we talked about the in’s and out’s of how to make maple syrup, the workshop focused mostly on evaluating sites for feasibility and production potential and focusing on tree/forest health through the lens of sugarbush management.

Finally, a tandem of Saturday presentations at the Ohio River Valley Woodland & Wildlife Workshop focused on introducing landowners to sugarbush planning and maple economics.  I shared a presentation entitled “Maybe Maple? A Beginner’s Guide to Planning a Sugarbush” that was followed by a remote presentation from Dr. Sayeed Mehmood dedicated to the dollars and cents side of maple operations.  It is exciting to the southern tier excitement of maple spread, and engaging with an audience that welcomed attendees from Kentucky and Indiana to Loveland, Ohio, was a great opportunity to spread the good word of maple.

 

Registration OPEN for Maple Boot Camp

Maple Bootcamp: Ohio is for woodland owners looking for an annual income from their woodland or current producers looking to sharpen their skills.  This multi-day workshop will cover everything from tree identification and tree health through tapping and marketing an end product (syrup, candy etc).  There will be tours of a sugarbush that has been in operation for more than 50 years and one that takes advantage of today’s technology.  We will also tour the sugarbush that was installed on the Ohio State University Mansfield campus in 2019 and is a hub for maple research.  Join us June 22-24 for this exciting event.

Registration is $150 total for the 3-day camp.  Sign up here and check out the agenda for more details. 

Maple Bootcamp Announced: June 22-24

We are thrilled to announce Maple Bootcamp: Ohio, hosted at The Ohio State University-Mansfield campus from June 22-24 this summer.  Spots are limited and this opportunity will be shared across our tri-state collaborative (OH, WV, PA) and beyond.  You can register here and check out the 2022 Maple Camp Brochure that contains a full agenda.