After a nice breakfast my brother, Debbie and I headed about an hour north to Westfield Heritage Village were they were celebrating Maple Sugar Day. It was a beautiful sunshiny day and we enjoyed a pancake brunch before exploring the site. It’s a lovely place, nicely laid out, and right beside it is a maple sugar producer who had buckets for collecting sap hanging off the maple sugar trees and a sugar shack for boiling it down. A very simple process but hugely labour intensive. The photos I’ve posted show the traditional equipment but he also had modern collection bags that were heavy plastic and tubes from a group of trees that dripped directly into a covered 5 gallon pail. There must be thousands of sugar maples in Quebec and Ontario to produce the amount of maple sugar that Canada sends to market.
We were done there by mid-afternoon and headed back, after a stop to walk the beach on Lake Ontario at Hamilton, along the Niagara escarpment
. From there it was back to Vineland for a Shepherds Pie (very tasty) supper and then we all four got back in the car and drove west to Port Colborne and Lake Erie. Spent a bit of time on a beach there than turned back to have a look at the Welland Canal. Two huge ships had spent the winter there. The canal wasn’t operating yet as the lakes had been frozen over until just a few weeks ago. From there it was back to Vineland and getting organized for an early get-up to catch the train the next day to Ottawa.
Maple Sugar and Two Great Lakes
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Westfield Heritage Village, Ontario, Canada
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2025-02-10