Halifax Urban Maple Sugaring Project

(Apologies for the less than stellar cover scan.)

By Mike and Juele

I'm pretty much guaranteed to give this zine a good review because I got to try some of the maple syrup that they made! Mmmmmmmm. Delicious!

The zine is made by some people who are all about bringing food production to people, through guerrilla gardening, urban farming, and similar projects. In this case they decided to tap a number of maple trees, collect the sap, and make maple syrup out of it! I guess I knew that maple syrup was made from tree sap (or maybe I didn't...), but it's kind of strange to think about it.

It turns out that making maple syrup is considerably easier than I would have expected. You can get up to four litres of sap from one tree in a single day! Of course, once you've gathered enough you have to build a fire and boil it down for hours on end, and the day these guys choose to do that on was pretty horrible weather wise. I guess if you have to be outside when it's raining, snowing, and windy, being gathered around a fire is probably one of the best places to be.

The zine was generally easy to read and follow, with illustrations showing the various tools and objects that they used at each step. I think it could have been a little better organized, but it's not a particularly long zine, so you can easily read it all before you start making maple syrup yourself.