New Haven Independent

“No, it’s not ‘nasty,’” a chaperone corrected her. “It’s just ‘different.’”

The sap was flowing from Common Ground High School’s seven stately sugar maples on Sunday afternoon, at the ecology high school’s fourth annual winter festival. Flowing as swiftly, if not as eloquently, were the kids’ and parents’ attempts to describe it.

“It’s more like coffee without caffeine,” said another kid. “No way. You never drank coffee. It’s water with dirt in it.”

Renotica was among some hundred children and their families from throughout Greater New Haven ambling the rural campus at the base of West Rock, eyeing the fast-stepping chickens, and taking in the beautiful near-spring morning air on a day when the sap, activated by the cool nights and warm days, is running best.

The sap is combination of water drawn up the roots, which mixes with the tree’s starch and circulates upwards through the xylem, the maple’s circulation system, to feed the leaves on the branches.

Ben Gardner, a board member of the New Haven Ecology Project, Common Ground’s umbrella organization, explained to the kids that a bucket, hung on the tap, fills completely up in about 24 hours, and that it takes 40 gallons of sap to create a single gallon of syrup.

For Renotica and at least 15 other kids, who were part of the Guarding Angels Pathfinder group, a Scouts-like club organization at the Mt. Zion Seventh Day Adventist Church in Hamden, the sugar mapling was not just fun but fulfilling their responsibilities.

Janet McCray, the youth group’s leader (holding the document) said that promoting health and outdoor awareness is part of the group’s formal curriculum. The group is like the Boys and Girl Scouts, she said. “The kids are earning merits and badges for their work here today, but as it comes from the church, it’s part of the children’s religious education too.”

Twelve-year-old Adina McCray, her daughter and one of the Pathfinders, asked Common Ground’s director, Oliver Barton, how deep the tap goes into the tree (answer: about five-eighths of an inch). She dutifully took down the answer on her work sheet.

Another Pathfinder, Caysie Morgan, age ten, was concerned the tap might harm the tree.

“Not to worry,” Barton demonstrated. “The sap comes up and then circles all around the tree; we’re taking out just a little bit. It’s like giving blood. If we put in 50 taps, that would weaken the tree, of course, but we put in one or two. And the tap hole eventually heals.”

Caysie and Adina made their notes. Adina’s been here before, and she’s working on an advanced badge. Janet McCray is particularly proud of this aspect of the curriculum, she said, because her father wrote it.

And Barton said he was delighted with the Seventh Day Adventist Group’s participation. Common Ground through the winter festival reaches out, he said, to people way beyond the school’s immediate population’s circle. The aim is to keep alive the local practice and tradition and also to teach science. “I really didn’t know until they started coming that this kind of stewardship of the earth is a part of the kids’ religious education. I think it’s great.”

Adina McCray and her crew then went on to various other stations of maple syruping activity. They passed a pot of steaming sap dogs, miniature hot dogs that had been simmering in the newly extracted sap for about twelve hours (editorial note: delicious!). Then they visited the evaporator, where the sap is boiled down to syrup.

Manning that wood-fired device was Dante Lepore (not visible), a University of New Haven chemistry and microbiology major.

He was volunteering with a UNH group called SMILE (Students Making an Impact in their Living Environment.)

He definitely was. Nearby also were the bottles of “Common Ground Maple Syrup,” but in a way this was not the final product.

That would be breakfast. Along with the $5 admission fee — all proceeds support the school’s community environmental programming — came a pancake breakfast. No one had to ask Mike Wurm and his son Tyler, part of another group of scouting enthusiasts from North Haven, where the syrup was coming from.

The maple syruping, said Rebecca Holcombe, director of Common Ground’s community programs, is illustrative of the kinds of activities being offered through farm and nature based summer camps the school is operating for kids ages 4 to 12. For more information, click here.

After breakfast, and seeing how the syrup has traveled from tree to table, Adina McCray was intending to pick up a kit for her own backyard maple syruping. In order to complete her work for her advanced badge, she needs to create some syrup herself, from scratch.

Karaine Holness, the parent chaperone who earlier had tried to inspire Renotica to use other syrup-describing adjectives, told Adina she knew just the backyard, and just the tree.