By Charla Wurm-Adams
cwurm@wbcowqel.com
Making maple syrup the old-fashioned way is sticky business, but it is a business that has kept a Crawford County family working together for six generations. The Patton-Carlisle Sugar Camp on Stetzer Road was the site of a Crawford Park District outing on Saturday.
Lora Stuckert said the camp is an annual family affair.
“We make maple syrup here,”Stuckert said. “We do it as a family with six generations. It takes like 60 gallons to make one (gallon of syrup), just depending on the weather is how many we produce.”
Water is boiled off using wood fires and the entire process is very labor intensive from collecting the syrup to cutting the firewood. The family tapped the trees about a month ago. In order for the sap to move up and down the tree, the weather needs to cooperate with temperatures in the 40s during the day an in the 20s at night. The Carlisle-Patton Sugar Camp can produce from 80 to 300 gallons of fresh maple syrup every year.
“Making the sap itself, we take it off when it’s 180 degrees, we have to keep it at that,” Stuckert said. “ We have lots of people that come to us to buy the maple syrup and we also do it for anybody out in the public that is interested, we’ll always let them see what we are doing here.”
Fresh homemade maple syrup from the Patton-Carlisle Sugar Camp sells for $16 a quart, $25 for one-half gallon and $40 for one gallon.