There are more than 400 registered maple-syrup producers in Ontario and countless others who enjoy sugaring as a hobby.
Simcoe County is full of maple trees and seeing the silver gleam of buckets hanging off them at this time of year is not uncommon.
Scott LaMantia’s hobby is a sweet way of unwinding from his sometimes stressful job.
As the City of Barrie’s senior communications advisor, LaMantia deals with several calls, emails and reporter inquiries every day, so over the last few years he has found a way to get away from it all on his Oro-Medonte property north of the city.
“I’ve been making my own maple syrup for about six years now, tapping the trees around me,” LaMantia tells BarrieToday. “It started off small with just a couple, but I’m up to about 60 trees now.”
Living just off Horseshoe Valley Road on the 6th Line in a small community fittingly called Sugar Bush, LaMantia says he’s surrounded by maple trees and, just as important, some helpful neighbours.
“The community is very tight knit. We all help each other out when we can and if I’m chasing the kids around the yard, a neighbour will keep the fire going while I’ve got the sap boiling,” LaMantia says.
While he originally just wanted to do something small for fun, LaMantia says he now sees the passion people have for sugaring.
After his first try of boiling what he retrieved from the buckets ended up with very little syrup, LaMantia stepped up his production from a local store-bought kit to now having a sugar shack and tree lines.
“It started with a kit from Home Hardware that had five buckets and five taps, but I realized that you need a lot of sap because after you boil the water out of it, there is little syrup left,” he says. “I did some research and found it was better to spread the sap out and boil it, so I use heating trays now and I made my own evaporator out of an old barrel.
"The year after I did that, I ended up buying an evaporator from a guy in Quebec and now I have a sugar shack to protect it all from the elements," LaMantia adds.
He also has half of the taps on lines that get tapped into the trees on the hill, so the sap runs into the line and right down into the barrel.
“It got tiring running up and down the hill every night with 40 to 45 buckets. This will make it a little bit easier,” LaMantia says.
LaMantia said he might even sell a few bottles of LaMantia’s Small Batch Maple Syrup (some bottles have a label) at the beginning of a season to help offset the cost of the productions, but adds he’d rather “give it a way to people just to see them enjoy it.”
“I just enjoy doing it and sharing it. Just to sit there with a book, in front of a fire and keeping an eye on the maple syrup is such a great way to spend some time,” he says. “It's pretty Canadian, too, right?”
