Sweetest month of the year

Come each March, Evie Rathke and her six children and 20 grandchildren gather in rural Fredonia for another year’s observance of a nine-decade-old family ritual—collecting sap for maple syrup.

Evie’s mother started making maple syrup in the 1930s on the farm along the Milwaukee River that was purchased in 1855 from Yankee speculators. Evie, her two sisters and brother and relatives prepared the syrup at home. Her father Oliver Lied later went into business with his father-in-law to sell the product.

“He always referred to it as the first crop of the year,” Evie said of her father.

Today’s family get-togethers start in the afternoon, when the sap flows.

“It’s getting outside. It’s really a great thing for our family, the camaraderie,” Evie said.

Evie’s late cousin Ron Fellenz years ago said children would like working more if they had a place to stay, so he built a sugar shack. Evie later put in a wood stove and
made a big pot of soup for the family. Children have even held birthday parties in the shack.

The season usually starts in early March. Holes are drilled in about 250 trees, mostly maples, on the 79-acre farm. Two people can put in all the taps in one day using a hand drill.         

The taps, Evie said, are inserted on the south side of the trees so the sun gets the sap flowing early in the day. The taps remain in the trees for about a month until the end of the season.

The taps don’t injure the trees, she said. “By the next year, you have to look to see if you can find the hole.”

Freezing temperatures at night and a warm day will fill the sap sacks attached to the taps. Some of the larger trees can handle two taps.

Evie explained that the sap is in the roots of a tree. Warmer late-winter temperatures cause it to flow. “Once the weather gets too warm and it’s no longer freezing at night, once the buds are on the trees, we’re done,” she said. “It loses its flavor.”

The end of the season is usually in early April.

“We start out with snow and we go to mud. By the end we’ve got some wildflowers coming out,” Evie said.

Collecting the sap and making the syrup happens on more than Sundays. Relatives will come after work and school on weekdays, if conditions are suitable. Evie keeps them informed via a Facebook group.

They have plenty of work to do. About 42 gallons of sap are required to make a gallon of syrup.

“It’s a lot of gathering in the woods,” Evie said, adding that birch and box elder trees provide sap but require about double the amount a maple tree does per gallon of syrup.

An average day brings about 350 gallons of sap. A good day can reach 500 and a slow day yields about 160, she said.             

The sap is gathered in pails and poured through a flannel cloth quickly to keep bugs away. It is preheated using an evaporator and finished off in a flat pan.

Evie’s daughter-in-law, who lives a couple of miles away, puts her pan on a gas stove to control the heat.

 Syrups, Evie said, differ in how they’re processed. “We are very old-fashioned the way we do it. Just boil it in the pan,” she said. More modern methods use reverse osmosis and cook the syrup longer. Those syrups will almost be as light as honey.

“Ours is a little darker than that. The colorization creates taste and color,” Evie said.

On the scale of maple syrups, Grade A has light maple flavor while Grade B is darker with a stronger maple taste.

The Rathkes try to make one batch of syrup per day. The syrup is put up in bottles and jars of various sizes.

The Rathkes sell their syrup to only a few private customers. The rest is given to family members. Evie uses some of  the syrup to make trail mix she sells at the annual Jeri Boehlke Memorial Horse Show each year, held in honor of her granddaughter who died in an all-terrain vehicle accident in 2004.

The syrup is also good on ham, carrots and baked beans, or even in salad dressing, Evie said. Some of it gets boiled down to sugar, which can be used in tea and oatmeal.

Evie and her husband Rich used to run Hartmann Sand & Gravel Co., Inc., and now their son Steve manages it. They still raise a few head of beef cattle.

“We’re trying to be serious in retirement,” Evie said.

Just not in March.