March 2013 | Section A
Bottles of maple syrup are ready to be sold during the upcoming Maple Syrup festival. BELOW: Tim Burton and his wife, Angie.
FAMILY FARMS
Tim Burton and his wife, Angie, celebrate Indiana’s oldest agricultural crop story By sherri dugger | photos by josh marshall
I
f you hear Tim Burton tell it, tapping trees to make maple syrup goes back in his wife’s family history almost 200 years. But it was coincidence that he and his wife, Angie, got into the syrup trade. Now the owners of Burton’s Maplewood Farm, Tim and Angie once operated a systems integration business called CCI. It was around February of 2003 that one of their technicians repeatedly asked to leave work early, Tim says, until — finally — one day Tim asked why. “‘I’m helping to collect maple sap,’” Tim says his technician reported. “He told me I should go with him.” And so Tim joined a group collecting sap one afternoon, and as he
was watching it boil, “I got it,” he says. “I got the whole excitement.” It was the lost social aspect of the sap collection process “that intrigued me the most,” he explains. “It was once common for friends and neighbors and families to come together to share in the bounty. They would all collectively get their maple syrup or sugar for the year.” Tim wanted to bring more of that communal spirit into his own life. Around the same time, “things were changing within the business world,” Tim says. “We started feeling the effects of the down economy.” So Tim and Angie decided to reinvent themselves. They already owned 28 acres in
Medora, and the couple decided to make their land work for them. They built a sugar house in 2006 and, for the first year, simply collected the sap from their trees, selling it to a local maple syrup producer. In 2007, they began making their own syrup. Thanks to Indiana’s climate and geographic location, maple syrup season begins in southern Indiana earlier than anywhere else in the world — as soon as the third or fourth week in January, Tim says. The perfect temperatures for “the sugar season,” as it’s also called, are below freezing at night and above freezing by day. Attaching taps to the 700-plus trees on their farm, the Burtons utilize the same methods Angie’s ancestors once used. The taps go about an inch and a half into each tree, in the cambium layer, between
the bark and the hardwood. The Burtons collect their syrup with hood-covered buckets — an antiquated undertaking considering the modern methods that now exist. The buckets are attached to the tap to allow the tree to deposit sap into them one drop at a time. Each bucket collects approximately 10 gallons of sap each season. As they pursued their new venture, Tim and Angie kept their systems integration business going until they were comfortable that the syrup business was a viable trade. Eventually, in 2010, they closed the doors to CCI for good. By then, they had begun selling their products at farmers markets, traveling as far as Chicago to spread the word about their syrup. “Angie and I were driving up to Chicago twice a week for about two months; it’s a five-hour trip each
See burton on A2
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