Groundwork Somerville holds Maple Syrup Boil-Down
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By Jack Adams

Somerville residents and people from as far as Connecticut gathered to witness Groundwork Somerville’s Maple Syrup Project Boil-Down at The Growing Center in Somerville this past Saturday. Groundwork Somerville’s “Green Team” demonstrated the syrup-making process, from tapping the sugar maple for sap to boiling the raw sap into syrup.

In the several weeks leading up to the event, Groundwork Somerville staff members, along with volunteers, tapped sugar maples on the Tufts University campus. Most of the sap they gathered was boiled beforehand at the Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville, a partner of Groundwork Somerville. At the boil-down itself, the remaining sap was poured into a large metal boiler, where about 85 percent of the water in the sap evaporated. The boiling-down process is finished later on a stovetop, where the sap is boiled down into pure syrup.

Green Team Coordinator Kristin Delviscio said it takes 43 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. While they typically gather about 260 gallons of sap, they only collected about half of that this year. The sap yield was so much lower this year because it has been too cold.

“When it’s freezing at night and not freezing during the day is when the sap is flowing up from the roots and into the leaves to feed the foliage that’s on its way. It’s really like pulling out the tree’s blood,” Lead Gardens Educator Sadie Richards said.

To take the sap from sugar maples, the Green Team uses a hand drill to make a small hole, into which they put a spigot that allows the sap to flow out. They tap between eight and 10 trees to get enough sap.

Groundwork Somerville Executive Director Chris Mancini has been participating in the annual boil down event long before he started working for Groundwork.

“I have an even longer history with it than Groundwork because I went to graduate school at Tufts, and there were some undergrads there who were doing this project,” he said. “They had taken it over from a community member who had been doing it at a very casual level, where he would tap one or two trees. I had met them and joined up because I wanted to be a part of them. It sounded like a very interesting project. They all graduated, but I lived here, so I ran the project as a lone volunteer, although not alone; I had a lot of other volunteers. We did a lot of organizing through Tufts, and then I had gotten a full-time job somewhere else and I knew Groundwork, so I kind of turned it over to them and they took it on. Then four years later I applied for the job as the executive director, so I have a great fondness for this project.”

The purpose of the event is to educate, and Mancini said they target the event towards families with kids. Groundwork used to take the boiling demonstration to second-grade classrooms but was unable to this year due to lack of funding.

Mancini said he hoped for a good turnout this year, saying that the previous year about 750 people came to the boil-down over the course of a day.

At the boil-down, high school kids employed by the Green Jobs Program, a program for low-income youth, sold pancakes with cups of syrup (from the supermarket). Three of the volunteers had cooked 200 pancakes that morning over the course of three hours at a kitchen donated by Cuisine en Locale.

Groundwork Somerville will sell the syrup made during the boil-down, which Mancini claims is the “most delicious syrup.”

The boil-down is the only event of its kind in Greater Boston, Mancini said, before correcting himself.

“Someone told me there might be another one in Larz Anderson Park,” he said, “but we’re the main one. We’re the best one.”