The trip we actually took to Nova Scotia was not the first trip to Nova Scotia I planned. I’ve had Nova Scotia in my sights for a long time. And on one of those past aborted planning sprees, I came across Sugar Moon Farm’s website, immediately knew I wanted to visit, and filed it away in my brain for the next couple of years.
And so one of the last places we went in Nova Scotia was the place we’d been planning to visit for the longest. And it was well worth the wait.
Sugar Moon Farm is in Earltown, in the much less visited interior of Nova Scotia, although you’re never very far from the ocean in Nova Scotia. It’s about 40 minutes from Pictou, where we were staying, but it’s only about 25 minutes from Truro or 20 minutes from Tatamagouche. We were only staying in Pictou because we thought we’d be taking the ferry to PEI. We ended up driving across the bridge instead, and, had we known that beforehand, we could have found somewhere much closer to stay.
Sugar Moon Farm is a working maple farm; you can go there to stock up on maple syrup, and you can also take a tour to see how the syrup makes it from the trees to the pancakes, and you can eat at the excellent restaurant. When we first got there, it was still a little while until the next tour, so we hiked a short way on the Rogart Mountain Trail, right across the parking lot, while we waited.
Quita Gray gave us our tour. She and her husband have owned the farm since 1996, so, of course, she knows everything there is to know about how to make maple syrup. First we watched a video about the process and saw some fabulous maple syrup art:
Then we got to see the room where the magic happens and all that sap from the trees gets boiled down into syrup during the short maple season.
Then the syrup tasting! We got to try early and late season syrup, which taste surprisingly different even though they have the same sugar content.
And then the official tour ended, but Quita pointed us up the hill to go see the maple trees themselves and the sap lines that, with help from gravity, bring the sap down to the room where it all gets turned into syrup over the wood fire.
All that was left was buying a bunch of maple syrup to bring home for ourselves and for gifts for assorted friends and relatives and eating at the excellent restaurant. Which serves many things with maple syrup: pancakes, of course, but also maple baked beans, biscuits with maple butter, maple hot chocolate, and even maple crafted cocktails.
And there ends my last Nova Scotia post; onward to PEI!
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