WOODBURY — One of the units in Nonnewaug’s natural resources class is collecting sap from maple trees and boiling it down into maple syrup in the school’s evaporator. The five-gallon buckets hanging from sugar maple trees can be seen around campus along with a system of blue sap lines leading to a collection tank. 

As winter approaches, the class is preparing for sap collection season by putting up these lines, but this year they are doing it a little differently than in years past.

“We normally have lateral tubing lines with drop lines (from the tree) that will flow sap to the collection tank,” natural resources teacher Lee McMillan said. “This is normally used for sap tubing with less than 50 trees on a line. This year, we are adding a main line tubing in one section of our sugar bush. The main line tubing is larger and can accommodate more than 50 trees on one line.”

The natural resources class is hopeful that adding this main line tubing will make things a lot easier as it can stay up for around twenty years instead of having to be taken down every year like they have done in the past. This will hopefully increase the amount of sap collected. 

“My expectation by adding the mainline tubing is that we will be able to collect more sap to boil this season and therefore be able to tap more trees in our sugarbush,” McMillan said. “But with the drought this past fall, I am not sure how that is going to affect the quantity of sap this spring.”