{"id":32755,"date":"2023-03-16T14:34:14","date_gmt":"2023-03-16T18:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=32755"},"modified":"2023-03-23T19:00:58","modified_gmt":"2023-03-23T23:00:58","slug":"sugaring-aurora-is-sweet-community-success-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/sugaring-aurora-is-sweet-community-success-story\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSugaring Aurora\u201d is sweet community success story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Spring is just around the corner, the sap is flowing, and families are flocking to sugar bushes to sample Canada\u2019s most iconic flavour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But some local maple syrup enthusiasts don\u2019t have very far to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Aurora\u2019s northeast, neighbours have banded together to tap their trees as a collective, building an unexpected community in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It all started when the father-in-law of resident Dave Hunt cast his expert eye across Hunt\u2019s yard and saw nothing but possibilities. A veteran tree-tapper going back 30 years, he determined Dave had five trees ready to go and, before the season was up, he collected 160 litres of sap, resulting in 3.5 litres of the sweet stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was totally psyched,\u201d says Dave, adding he initially thought he would be lending a hand to his father-in-law, before getting immersed in a small-scale side-hustle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before long, however, neighbourhood curiosity was piqued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Dave spotted similar trees in the backyard of Jim Stewart (The Auroran\u2019s sports writer).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne day in the Spring, Jim was out gardening, I introduced myself, and had barely finished the sentence before he said he was in,\u201d Dave recalls. \u201cHe called me the next day [and more neighbours were in], including Rob, and what started off as just expecting Jim, we had five of us in for the next year. Not many people say no to maple syrup!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, they\u2019ve nearly hit 20 households involved in what Dave describes as the \u201cSugaring Aurora\u201d project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these early days, it was a very hands-on process. Trees were initially tapped into traditional metal and plastic pails, which were then hauled to the Dave\u2019s wood-fired evaporator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe usually seem to have at least one Saturday a year where the temperature is perfect, the sun is out, people are walking in the neighbourhood, and there are usually many neighbours on speed dial who will rush out between 2 and 4 p.m., grab the pails, wheel them over in their grandkids\u2019 wagons. They know what to do \u2013 they pour it into the system and wheel back their empty pails. People in the neighbourhood just come by, pop their head in to see what\u2019s going on, and we were part of a community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe started with the buckets and now we have lines \u2013 almost 2,500 feet of tubing running through all the backyards now. Because we have had some seniors helping us in the past, we wanted to make [the process] as quick as possible. We had four collection sites and that made a big difference.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also making a big difference is science, with the latest addition of a reverse osmosis machine helping to increase syrup yields \u2013 a welcome development for the neighbours who share the costs of production and divvy the results up by labour and the number of their own trees involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along the way they received helpful expertise from friends spearheading similar projects in the Oro-Medonte area, as well as in Facebook groups dedicated to the \u201cbackyarder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I joined the Facebook group \u2018Ontario Backyarders I think there were about 800 of us and through COVID it\u2019s more than 9,000. The thing about it very simply is it just brought people together. Jim and Rob, for instance, their kids are very different ages but they\u2019ve been involved in community sport for all their kids\u2019 years and never really met each other. Now, they\u2019re good pals. It has brought us together. Those of us participating have gotten to know each other much better and are sharing the experience as much as possible. We call it the \u2018Sugaring Aurora Project\u2019 and it\u2019s totally a community thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s a community, he indicates, could continue to grow over a shared love for one of our favourite exports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis must have been a maple grove before they put a subdivision in because they\u2019re all through our backyards and these aren\u2019t even the best trees,\u201d he says. \u201cThe best ones are untouched and, wow, these things are spectacular.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spring is just around the corner, the sap is flowing, and families are flocking to sugar bushes to sample Canada\u2019s most iconic flavour. But some local maple syrup enthusiasts don\u2019t have very far to go. In Aurora\u2019s northeast, neighbours have banded together to tap their trees as a collective, building an unexpected community in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":32756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/2023-03-16-01.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-8wj","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-05 18:57:33","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}