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Record Maple Syrup from Pendle Hill's Trees
When hungry Pendle Hill residents showed up for breakfast on March 15, they got a real treat. Ready to pour over Bobbi Kelly's delicious apple walnut pancakes was maple syrup from Pendle Hill's own trees - and lots of it.

Groundskeeper Lloyd Guindon reports that 24 quarts of syrup were produced this year. "This is the most we've gotten since I started tapping our trees in the late 1980s." In February of 2006, Lloyd and student Bob Denison put 14 taps in six sugar maple trees on the Pendle Hill campus. While it's possible to tap trees other than sugar maples, Lloyd prefers the sugar maples because of the sap's greater sugar content. According to Lloyd, "it takes 40 gallons of maple sap to produce a single gallon of syrup," meaning that Pendle Hill's six trees produced an astonishing 240 gallons of sap over a four week collection period.

How did all that sap get turned into syrup? Pendle Hill's cooks boiled down the sap in huge pots over the large gas stove in Main House. It takes patience and caring to do this work - hours and hours of stirring and checking to be sure the syrup doesn't burn.

Pendle Hill has been producing maple syrup for decades. Naturalist Ewell Gibbon, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, worked at Pendle Hill in the late 1950s. The story has it that he blackened the kitchen walls during his maple syrup boil-downs!

As Lloyd points out, "Homemade maple syrup is a special treat for late winter residents at Pendle Hill." To get the sap from the trees, you need nights when the temperature is below freezing and days which are well above the freezing mark. And syrup this good doesn't last long!