Edible Traditions

Syruping Tradition Gets Sweeter With Time at Orchard School

By Shawndra Miller Photos courtesy of The Orchard School

Fred Lorenz captures the attention of young students while making pancakes, circa 1960’s.

It takes three ingredients to create maple syrup: sap, fire and time.

So says Vicky Prusinski, Orchard School’s elementary science teacher. A final critical ingredient, knowledge, undergirds the other three. Ask any student or alum of Orchard, where the first-graders are at the helm of a tradition almost as old as the school. Nearly every year for eight decades now, Orchard students have tapped maple trees and boiled the sap down to syrup.

As early as 1927, the school began tapping trees and boiling sap at its original location. The Indianapolis Star that spring boasted, “500 quarts taken from a maple sugar camp right in the City of Indianapolis!”

Today, the tradition continues in the two-acre maple grove flanking Orchard, a private school that serves preschool through eighthgrade students. Each year, roughly in late February, the first-graders follow the exact syruping process taken by earlier generations of Orchard students.

Meanwhile, teachers and faculty keep the custom alive. The late Fred Lorenz, an avid outdoorsman, came on board as the shop teacher in 1948. His daughter, Linda Lorenz Norton, says he loved to introduce children to the great outdoors, even opening Brown County’s Gnaw Bone Camp to continue his passion during summers. She was a first

Orchard students watch the flowing sap, circa 1960’s

Current day Orchard students watch the flowing sap

“When Dad discovered the woods were full of sugar maple trees, we just had to get out there and tap them,” Lorenz Norton says.

grader in the 1950s when Orchard moved to its current 50-acre campus on West 64th Street.

“When Dad discovered the woods were full of sugar maple trees, we just had to get out there and tap them,” Lorenz Norton says.

Lorenz’s commitment to the school continued past his retirement, says Diana Shellhaas, the school’s outdoor education coordinator, who now coordinates the tree tapping along with Prusinski. When Shellhaas started out 27 years ago, Lorenz returned to teach her how to tap the trees, using the same equipment he had repurposed from army surplus supplies.

“It truly is an ingrained tradition at our school,” she says.

Sourcing Sweetness

On a December afternoon, sunshine slants through the maple grove next to Orchard. It’s quiet now, but in a few months the excited shouts of first-graders will echo through the trees as they discover what every Orchard student knows: These trees are the source of a distinctively tasty sweetness. The first-grade class numbers about 60, and over the course of a couple days, the children will tap 50 trees.

Walking through the woods, it’s easy to picture children trundling buckets full of sap to the outdoor shelter—rechristened the “sugar shack” during maple syrup days—and then racing back to replace the empties.

Prusinski says that today’s 45° weather would be perfect if it occurred during syruping time’s three-week window, a late winter period around President’s Day in February. Sap typically fills the buckets with a slow drip, but on a day like this in late February? “You would have a true run,” Prusinski says.

But there’s more to making maple syrup than collecting sap. Prusinski starts the youngsters off by having them research where maple syrup comes from, sweetening the deal with taste tests. She then moves on to tree identification, tricky business when all the leaves have fallen. Once they master that, kids try their hands at measuring the circumference of a tree to make sure it’s large enough to withstand tapping.

There’s also a meteorological component to their preparations, since getting the timing just right is key. “Temperatures have to be above 32° during the day and below [that] at night, so the sap runs up and down the tree,” Prusinski explains.

“It’s sort of like ‘make hay while the sun shines’—you make maple syrup while the sun shines,” she says.

On the first day, the kids use a brace and bit to make a hole in the soft wood of each tree, then insert the metal spout, called a spile. Each student monitors one spile for the next few days. Hanging the buckets is followed by waiting for that telltale drip—an exercise in delayed grat-

ification. As the sap begins to flow, the kids measure the output. When enough sap has been collected, which might take several days depending on the weather, it’s time to boil it down over a big fire. This activity, in turn, lends itself to a discussion of evaporation. Every step is linked to active learning.

The lesson must stick, because Shellhaas reports that many parents end up asking where they can get spiles for home use. “Kids are so excited that they want to tap sugar maple trees in their yard.” She counts it as a victory that successive generations are learning “they don’t have to go to the grocery store to buy everything.”

Pancakes Put It to the Test

They’re also finding out that there’s little contest when the rich flavor of real maple syrup goes up against its store-bought cousin.

The final piece of the tradition allows everyone to experience that full-bodied sweetness of real maple syrup over pancakes. “Long ago,” says Shellhaas, “[when] the school was so much smaller … the kids would all bring in whatever they wanted to cook for breakfast and they’d set up the griddles and the big iron skillets over the fire and kids would cook their breakfast.”

Norton recalls those days with fondness. “The standard joke was, it was an extra challenge to eat your syrupy pancake while wearing your mittens.”

These days, it’s a little different, but the spirit of the custom remains. At the close of syruping time, children in each grade come outside for a pancake cooked to perfection on Lorenz’s original army surplus griddles over the outdoor fire. Breakfast consists of a “pancake taco”—a rolled up pancake filled with syrup, eaten without utensils or a plate.

That smoky-sweet taste can transport an Orchard grad straight back to childhood. Many alumni get that chance at the school’s annual Pancake Day, held in early March, where the fruits of the firstgraders’ labor are served up to some 500 Orchard community members. The syrup isn’t sold or made available elsewhere, keeping this tradition as close to the source as it can possibly get.

Each year, roughly in late February, the first-graders follow the exact syruping process taken by earlier generations of Orchard students.