SACO — This weekend, farms across the state will showcase their maple sugaring operations during Maine Maple Sunday. Visitors at River Bend farm in Saco last weekend got a taste of maple syrup production on a much smaller scale.

River Bend Farm, located on the Saco River on Simpson Road, was purchased by the Ecology School in 2017. The Ecology School, which provides residential and day ecological educational programs, plans to break ground on a dormitory and dining hall this year on the 105-acre property. The school has moved its offices into a 1794 farm house on the property. While residential programs are being held at Poland Spring Resort in Poland until next year, when construction on the proposed buildings is expected to be complete, activity has already begun on the farm.

On Saturday, the farm hosted a tour of their maple sugaring set-up, a small-scale operation that is run through a collaboration with The New School, a private high school in Kennebunk.

Nine students in a Sustainable Agriculture class at The New School have been going to River Bend farm twice a week to do some “hands on learning” about maple sugaring, said teacher Ally Muir.

“They’ve learned a lot and they’ve had fun,” she said.

Each student tapped a sugar maple tree, and not only collected sap, but data on factors such as whether tapping the north side of a tree gets a different result than tapping the south side of the tree, said Muir. The students also learned about sugar degradation, the breakdown of sugars when heated.

Muir said the students started tapping trees in mid-February, and ideally the sap flows best when there are cold nights and warm days.

Students will be boiling sap later this week to make syrup, but in the mean time, Jack Wagner a former employee of The Ecology School, came up from Massachusetts and was on hand on Saturday to help out with the sugaring process, which takes many hours.

The sweet smell of boiling sap mixed with wood smoke wafted in the air as Wagner tended to two trays of sap boiling over a barrel wood stove and another pot that was finishing off on a fire pit.

It was by no means a commercial-scale operation, but it was a system that a hobbyist could set up in their back yard.

“This gets the job done just fine,” he said.

Sugar maples, found in areas that include the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, are ideal for tapping, said Wagner. While it takes 40 gallons of sap from a sugar maple to make a gallon of syrup, it takes more sap per gallon of syrup from other types of maple trees, he said.

— Staff Writer Liz Gotthelf can be reached at 780-9015 or by email at [email protected].