The Sugar Moon

Cold nights and warm days are perfect sugaring weather, and the Codman Community Farms’ Sugar Shack is now busy boiling down sweet maple sap. The sap is gathered from the sugar maple (Acer saccharum) trees along Baker Bridge Road off Route 126 in Lincoln. Henry David Thoreau walked down this road many times when he traveled from Walden to Flint’s Pond years ago.

In the fall, maple trees store starch in their roots. This starch becomes sugar when the sap rises in the spring. It takes about forty gallons of boiled-down sap to make one gallon of syrup!

American Indians taught the European immigrants how to gather and make maple syrup. Sugaring was so important to the Indians that they named the first full moon of spring the Sugar Moon. This year the Sugar Moon is on March 27th.

The maple syrup is available from the Codman Community Farms store, 58 Codman Road, Lincoln. For more information, phone 781-259-0456 or go to www.CodmanCommunityFarms.org This maple syrup is great! I have been using it as a sweetener in coffee and on breakfast pancakes.