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Tonight's featured vendor? Sugar Grove Maple Products!!
If Braden Fisher is cooking down his sap to produce maple syrup when you step out of your car at Sugar Grove Maple Products, your senses are sure in for a treat. I thought I’d walked into a candy kitchen – the cooking maple syrup smells so rich, and so sweet, you can almost taste it. I was instantly sorry we didn’t have more maple trees on our own farm, or a fresh batch of pancakes!
And I was shocked by his infrastructure… the romanticized picture in my mind was of old-fashioned buckets on the trees collecting sap, and a simple pan heated with woodfire, not the super-efficient tubing collection system through the trees and sleek, ultra-modern, diesel-powered evaporator and reverse osmosis (What word do I need here? It’s not a filter or extractor, right?!) he could adjust with the touch of a button. With reverse osmosis, he can remove 80% of the water from the sap before he ever begins to cook it into syrup… the essence of efficiency!
When he said this had been a hobby for ten years, I wanted to laugh – other people call collecting stamps, reading, or knitting a hobby, not this kind of massive annual undertaking. Collecting and processing 20,000 gallons of sap from 1,000 trees? I think we’re all glad Braden is so committed to his “hobby”!
At the family farm on State Route 41 just west of Troy, it all began when Braden, then in high school, learned the art of maple sugaring from his cousin in Indiana. With a convenient location on a high-traffic road, and more than a little determination, his first year saw him collecting sap with buckets, stoking his fire with wood, and cooking down the sap in a 2 foot by 5 foot pan… and one year the old-fashioned way was enough! Enter a new evaporator, the tubing pipeline to collect the sap from the trees, and Braden was on his way to becoming the area’s go-to maple syrup producer!
When I visited recently to see his process in action, he was constantly and capably working, fine-tuning this, adjusting that, moving here and there… it was all I could do to be relatively quiet (believe me, a herculean feat), so floored I was by the art unfolding before my eyes that I asked only one million questions. It cracked me up that he was so calm and nonchalant about what to me was the neatest thing I’d see in some time.
Like so many agricultural productions, the maple syrup process is severely affected by the weather – changes in barometric pressure can fluctuate daily or hourly, and hinder production. So much thought, planning and care goes into Braden’s syrup, and you can taste not only the quality but the effort it’s production demands.
You couldn’t find a lovelier personality than his mother, Marilyn, who is a familiar face at the Cherry Street farmer’s market with Braden’s syrup and sugar along with her scrumptious confections, of course made with maple!
In addition to the virtual market, Cherry Street, and their farm store, you can also find his syrup and sugar at the Covered Wagon farm market, Dorothy Lane market, Bodega in Tipp, and Whole Health for the Whole Family in Troy.
We are undoubtedly lucky to be in an area able to support such a plethora of delicious, quality products… Home Grown Great, indeed!
And a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Joan Buehler, the lovely wife of Phil, who many of you know to be the amiable jokester with the wonderful freezer van, bringing down the family’s beef and pork products to you each week. A hearty THANK YOU for letting us borrow Phil not only each Tuesday, but especially on your birthday :-)
All our available products can be found at www.miamicounty.locallygrown.net