Learning To Tap A Bigleaf Maple Tree can provide you with an endless supply of sweet syrup. The chance to taste the unique flavour of West Coast maple syrup attracts people from all over Vancouver Island to the Maple Syrup Festival held in Duncan each spring. Last spring 2,000 islanders showed up and the coordinator, Aimee Greenaway, told me that they are expecting an even greater crowd for the next event to be held the 6th Feb at the BC Forest Discovery Centre. She said that almost half of the visitors to last years event were from outside of the Cowichan Valley and it has become a truly Vancouver Island wide attraction.We think of maple syrup as an eastern Canadian product but those who have sampled the island supply say it surpasses the taste of any imported product. The festival is more than a syrup tasting opportunity. Visitors can participate in tapping and syrup making demonstrations, taste testing, syrup finishing, hot maple tea samples and a maple cooking demo by a celebrity chef.
On a wild food foraging workshop I attended last spring we learned how to strip the young maple shoots of the thin outer bark in order to reveal the pale green inner core. The stems were crisp with a very subtle sweet maple taste. The flowers as well are quite sweet and can be used as a unique addition to a wild greens salad, in fact they could be used as an additional ingredient in a fruit salad and be an interesting talking point for your guests. I am so intrigued by this use of maple shoots that the next addition to my patio food garden will be a small maple stump. The maple outstrips any other hardwood tree in its ability to produce prolific numbers of young shoots and what a fun way to learn to value the much maligned Bigleaf Maple. You will never again think of it as a nuisance tree with enormous leafs that strain your patience and your back as you rake away at the autumn supply of unwanted ground cover.
Spring Comes Early To The Island and with it the opportunity to poke around in the woods for edible greens. There will be workshops available to those eager to learn about wild food harvesting in our bio-region and there are wonderful books available as well. My recent purchase is Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples but there are several other books available covering the harvesting of edible native plants in our specific area.
Harvesting Our Most Popular Native Fruit is a different matter. If you’ve ever flown over Vancouver Island in September you may be able to spot those gorgeous pools of flaming red cranberries. There is little chance of walking amongst the plants and munching a few berries although cranberries are a native North American food plant. Now under cultivation in 88 Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island farms, more than 80 millions lbs. of annually harvested cranberries make it the largest berry crop in the province. The next time you are sipping on a chilled glass of Ocean Spray cranberry juice the berries likely came from the province.
