Show and Tell with Tony: Oregon Maple Project
Video by KPTV FOX 12 Oregon, Good Day Oregon Watch on YouTube
Oregon’s morning show visits the Sugar Shack in Colton and tastes bigleaf syrup for the first time.
In 2018 an elementary school teacher named Eliza Nelson tapped a dozen bigleaf maples to get her students interested in nature. That grew into the Oregon Maple Project, a nonprofit in Colton that runs school field trips, teaches backyard sugaring workshops, and boils the community’s sap in a shared evaporator every spring.
FOX 12’s Tony went out for a taste. The reaction on the anchor desk afterward (“it almost has a savory feel to it”) is the same thing we hear at the farmers market: bigleaf is sweet, but it is not East Coast sweet.
Why we’re sharing it
- It is a six-minute answer to “you can make maple syrup in Oregon?”
- It explains sugaring in plain terms: tap, collect, boil. About a hundred small bottles of sap for one gallon of syrup.
- Eliza calls bigleaf “the espresso of maple syrup,” which is as good a description of the flavor as we have heard.
- The Oregon Maple Project and the OSU research program are why a small farm like ours could get started at all.
We are not in this segment; the Oregon Maple Project is the story. If you want to try sugaring in your own backyard, their workshops are the place to start. If you would rather just taste the finished thing, ours is here.
