Sap season

By Burton Cole

BUTLER — Andrew Darnell hoisted his young son James above and away from the clouds of steam. The vantage point allowed the boy to look down on the pans of boiling sap in Jeff Pettit’s sugar shack at Faith Acres Farm.

Darnell and family gathered around the wood-fired evaporator — but not too close — to study the process of boiling the nearly clear maple tree sap into sweet, amber-colored pancake syrup.

“I have very fond memories. My family used to do this when we were kids,” the Falmouth man said visiting sugar shacks.

“I think it’s important for kids to know where their food comes from.”

Another visitor to Faith Acres’ annual Sugar Day on Saturday, Norma from Grants Lick, said she came because, “I just wanted to see the process of it. I can’t believe this comes out of a tree. This is amazing.”

February and March generally are the months for producing maple syrup, but very little of it is done in Kentucky. The weather in the northern states is more conducive for sap flows.

The ideal weather is below freezing at night and temperatures in the 40s during the day to encourage the best sap runs.

“It’s hard to get that fluctuation in Kentucky,” Pettit said.

“He’s wanting it to freeze and we want it to warm up,” Norma said.

Once the buds start showing on the trees, the season is over.

Up north, where conditions are better suited for syrup, it takes about 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup. In Kentucky, Pettit said a good year is 50 to one.

“One year, I had 700 gallons of sap and got seven gallons of syrup — 100 to one.”

This year started out about 68 gallons of sap for a gallon of syrup, but that had improved to 60 to one by Saturday.

“I was hoping it would be better,” Pettit said. “It seems to be all right.”

So if Kentucky is less than ideal to produce maple syrup, why even bother?

Education. Family tradition. Just because.

BEGINNINGS

“The maple syrup production on Faith Acres Farm was born from a Pettit family tradition, where Jeff’s dad, Jim Pettit, would produce it for the family’s use,” Jeff’s wife, Sara, said.

“Jim would use gallon jugs and taps of ten-penny nails and tubes and cook the sap over an open fire in an old milk tank. Jeff would help his dad and learned the craft directly from him.”

Outside the sugar shack on Saturday, Jeff Pettit had his dad’s system fired up as well. His dad kept a wood fire going under the tub of the old milk cooler unit from the dairy farm. It holds 45 gallons of sap, which boils down to a little less than a gallon of syrup in about five hours.

Photos inside the Faith Acres Farm Store show Jim Pettit and his system of plastic milk jugs nailed to trees and Jim and young Jeff boiling the sap in the milk tank.

About 15 years ago, Sara found an old full-page article from the Kentucky Post featuring Jim and Jeff in the process of the annual syrup harvest and “was immediately excited to know more about it. Jeff set to harvesting that first year to satisfy his wife’s curiosity,” she said.

With the plastic milk jugs to catch the sap, hung on a ten-penny nail with a tube for a tap worked well enough that first time to get enough sap for Jeff to cook down on the kitchen stove. Sara said it was some of the best syrup she ever had.

“From that occurrence the annual harvest began, and the community was introduced to its sugary goodness,” she said.

Jeff purchased an evaporator in 2015. A wood-fed fire in the chamber below heats the stainless steel pans of sap above to boiling. The sap eventually works its way through several tiers of pans, boiling away the water as steam until syrup remains.

It’s an all-day process. Pettit said he can boil 100 gallons of sap in a day to get about one and three-quarters gallons of syrup, which is sold at the Faith Acres store and at the Farmers’ Market in Falmouth.

Over the years, Pettit has upgraded from milk jugs to five-gallon buckets to now connecting his sugar and silver maple trees with 2,200 feet of plastic tubing.

He said he’s running 152 taps this year. Each tree can have two to three taps depending on the size. Most of the trees are tapped as high as he can stretch to allow gravity to let the sap drip through the network of tubes and flow down into blue, plastic collection barrels.

He placed the first 69 taps the second week of February and boiled down three gallons of syrup.

SUGAR DAY

“Faith Acres mission is to educate the public about where their food comes from and to provide fresh products direct to the consumer,” Sara said.

“In 2016, the very first Faith Acres Farm Sugar Day was held to invite people to the farm to see just what the harvest is about. It has now become an annual event.”

Visitors come from Pendleton County, other counties and even out of state to “enjoy the day of celebration filled with demonstrations, touring the sugar shack, sugar bush and farm store and enjoy a complimentary pancake and pork sausage breakfast topped with some of that beautiful maple goodness,” she said.

The turnout on Saturday was about 175 visitors, including from northern Ohio, Indiana and southern Kentucky.

“It was a fabulous day and encourages our desire to continue to do what we do and provide healthy local foods to the community and knowledge of how their food is produced and where good food comes from,” Sara said.

“Rain or shine, the event continues and offers up an experience unique to this area. This is what those that came before us relied on for their resources, and now Faith Acres is sharing their tradition with the public to get a glimpse of what makes agriculture in Pendleton County so interesting.”

Among those attending on Saturday were Shanna Rizzo of Grants Lick and her daughter Khylee, 7. Shanna said she read about the event on a Facebook post and decided to take Khylee, partly for education but mainly to get out of the house and do something.

Khylee gave a thumbs up to the sugar shack, but it was another aspect of the farm that had her off and running.

“She’s more interested in the cat right now,” Shanna said.