It's time to harvest the maple sugar that drips with mouth-watering promises

DURING SCHOOL hours, Mary Lee Zechman of Millersville spent decades educating students in the Penn Manor, Hempfield and Manheim Central school districts. But once school let out, she was "selling ‘bootleg' cotton candy out of the trunk of my car in the parking lots."
Lest you think she was a pusher of the pink and blue stuff, Zechman, aka "The Maple Lady," dealt only in unadulterated sugar, straight from the trees surrounding her family's historic homestead in Tioga County.
An unabashed maple promoter, Zechman aims to win converts wherever she can find them.
And maple cotton candy is her instant hook.
"I got started handing out samples at the Pennsylvania State Farm Show," she said, recalling the herds of visitors that would mindlessly graze past the food vendors. "I loved watching them taste it as they were walking away, stop dead in their tracks, and turn around with a ‘wow,' wanting more."
From those instant converts, she branched out, with her daughter's help, to county fairs and festivals, perfecting the art of spinning maple sugar into fluffy clouds of sweetness and air. Their natural variety lacks the day-glo attention-grabbing appeal of the more traditional carnival confections, instead appearing as pale amber, and resembling dirty snow. But once customers taste this tree-harvested treat, they're hooked.
Then comes the cornucopia of other maple goodies, from maple-coated kettle corn to maple barbecue sauce, from maple walnut topping to maple dipping mustard. The family caters to serious hikers with maple sugar cakes to shave into cereal or eat for pure energy. For bakers, they sell 5-pound bags of maple sugar. And of course, the original maple syrup itself, from the fancy grades in decorative glass bottles to the B-grade popular in cleanse diets.
Now, as the snow melts and the maple trees turn tumescent, it's sugar-harvesting time and the family is gearing up for high season. Thankfully the means of collection is easier than when Zechman was a child.
"We were always cold and wet," she recalled. "My dad would build a fire in the woods for us to warm up with, and in the sugar shack, he would hard boil eggs in the sap for us to eat. Our greatest treat was to get to spend the night with him in the sugar shack, sleeping on cardboard atop the wood piles while he read Zane Grey novels to stay awake."
Her brother Richard Patterson became a maple syrup entrepreneur as a teen, creating his own candy cakes in muffin tins to sell at school. He later took over the farm in Sabinsville, growing the operation from the 600 buckets collected by horse-drawn sleigh of his childhood to the 80,000 taps carrying sap through hundreds of miles of tubing through the woods to the modern evaporator.
He expects to harvest 1.6 million gallons of sap this year, yielding 30,000 gallons of syrup during the intense six-week season, which still necessitates 24-hour vigils.
"If the sap's running, we're boiling," Zechman said.
The family's Patterson Farms is the largest single producer on the East Coast.

LOCALLY, Zechman's daughter Pam Guhl is spending this week spinning skeins of the cottony sweet in preparation for Lancaster County Central Park's 33rd annual series of sugaring demonstrations starting Sunday, from 1 to 4 p.m.
The seasonal alchemy of turning sap to syrup takes center stage in the park's sheltered sugar bush, on successive weekends, where naturalists tap trees and boil down the liquid in the Sugar Shack next to Pavilion 11.
According to Zechman: "Sap straight from the tree is 98 percent water, 2 percent sugar. To make syrup, it's boiled down to 66 percent sugar."
Naturalists will demonstrate all stages of the process, offering plenty of samples for visitors.
"This is my favorite program, only because I love maple syrup so much," naturalist Lisa J. Sanchez admitted. "It's a program that you can see, feel, touch and taste through all the stages of this amazing process. Plus, what's better for cabin fever than standing by a fire on a cold winter day inhaling as the sap boils down into syrup?"
In addition to this weekend, naturalists will also conduct sugaring demonstrations on Saturday, Feb. 27, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Sunday, Feb. 28, from 1 to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, March 7, from 1 to 4 p.m. Pre-registration is not required to attend the free public demonstrations, but private groups may schedule demonstrations for a nominal fee by contacting the parks department at 295-2055, or visit www.lancastercountyparks.org.
Sanchez, who further cooks down the syrup into crystallized candy for visitors to sample, said that Lancaster's sugar maple grove provides sweet incentive for visitors to make the switch to a local sweetener.
"I use it for everything, in jams and jellies, as coating for nuts, to make cordials, even in my own fruit leathers," Sanchez said.
With more cooking, maple syrup can turn to other maple confections. To make a creamy spread, cook maple syrup to 230 to 232 degrees Fahrenheit, then quickly cool to room temperature. Continually stir by hand until very creamy and light in color. To make maple sugar candy, cook the syrup to 238 to 240 degrees Fahrenheit, and then cool to 190 degrees. Stir until syrup becomes sugary, and then pour into molds to finish cooling. To make maple sugar, cook the syrup to 252 degrees Fahrenheit and stir while hot. First a creamy paste will form, followed by sugar crumbles. This will take continual hard stirring.

MAPLE SYRUP has as much calcium as milk and fewer calories than corn syrup and honey, according to www.nutritiondata.com. It also contains trace amounts of riboflavin, potassium, manganese, iron and folic acid.
• When cooking with maple syrup, use 3/4 cup maple syrup for 1 cup of granulated sugar. When baking with syrup, reduce the other liquid by 3 tablespoons for each cup of syrup substituted.
• Maple sugar is easily substituted in recipes as well; simply use 1/2 cup of maple sugar in place of 1 cup of granulated sugar.

Daina Savage is a Lancaster Newspapers correspondent.