An illustrated guide to Vermont maple syrup harvest featuring a maple leaf, maple tree trunk, maple syrup jar, measuring spoons with dark amber, medium, and light amber syrup, and a small cup, all labeled with handwritten annotations.

Maple Syrup

Maple syrup comes from sugar maple trees, known as senômozi to the Abenaki. Sugar maple is native across New England, parts of the upper Midwest, and Quebec-- a unique bioregion known as Maple Nation. Many thousands of years ago, the Indigenous people of this region devised a way of tapping into that flow of sap, collecting it in buckets, then boiling it down to get senômozibagw [se-NOH-moh-ZEE- bahk], sweet maple syrup and maple sugar. Over the millennia, the tools and methods for sugaring have changed, however the basic practice has remained the same; collecting sap and concentrating its sugar content to something sweet and syrupy. The process requires patience, as it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, but the wait is well worth it!

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A metal bucket hanging on a tree, filled with murky water.

Harvest Videos

Harvest Photos

Two children standing near a large tree in a wooded area, with one touching the tree and the other looking on, dressed in jackets and hats.
Four children holding trays of freshly baked cookies in a kitchen.
A group of children watching a fire inside a wood-fired cooking stove in a wooden barn. One person is tending the fire, and a woman is standing nearby, explaining something to the children.
Plastic shot glasses filled with maple syrup placed on a red tray, with a bottle of Vermont pure maple syrup and a bottle of pancake and waffle syrup on a store shelf behind them.