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Backyard becomes a maple sugar farm

In News on March 15, 2010 at 1:45 pm

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Last month Erdenheim resident Joe Slapinsky decided he would tap into the natural sugar in his backyard for the first time rather than buying his sweetener at the supermarket.
He passed on modern power drills in favor of an old brace drill, which he got for a dollar at an antique shop, and bought a set of metal drill bits for $10 on eBay.
“I thought, if you’re going to do it, do it the way your great-grandparents did,” he said.
His grandmother, who is 90 and grew up canning preserves and working in her garden, asked why he was voluntarily doing such labor-intensive projects when he could buy sugar at the store, or at least use a modern drill.
“Knowing how to do it is fulfilling as well,” Slapinsky said. “It’s those old skills that nobody is doing anymore.”
He also likes to show his children, Karina, 9, and J.T., 5.
Three weeks ago, with his new-old tools, a red maple tree and a silver maple tree in his backyard, and the help of the book “Backyard Sugarin’” by Rink Mann, Slapinsky invited over some neighbors and fellow members of the groups Sustainable Springfield and Wissahickon Growing Greener, drilled two-inch holes in the trees and hung stainless steel bucket sprouts to capture the clear sap drip by drip.
“Here’s the cool thing about this — you can drill it and just forget about it,” Slapinsky said.
Then they went inside and enjoyed some Tommy Knockers Maple Nut Brown Ale.
The “backyard sugarin’ project,” as Slapinsky calls it, partially began because Slapinsky wanted to make beer with the sap just as he did in his college days at Temple University.
“I’m a DIY [do it yourself] kind of person. I’m a tinkerer,” he said, adding that people who live around him on Harston Lane have also shown an interest in projects like this one.
Slapinsky was also inspired by the book “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers,” by Stephen Harrod Buhner, where he read about the medicinal uses of maple beer, which requires boiling the sap, adding yeast and fermenting, he said.
The sap he draws from the trees is mostly sucrose, basically table sugar with extra vitamins and minerals, he said.
He boils it down halfway to three-quarters, a concentration American Indians called “maple water.” He uses this as a sugar substitute in his green tea and in his bread recipes.
He has made some quantities of syrup for pancakes and waffles.
The boiling point of sap is slightly above that of water, around 218 to 219 degrees, he said.
He likened the process of sugaring to tending to a fireplace, which is not necessarily a labor-intensive.
Slapinsky got a little bit of help from Lehmans.com, an Amish business that sold him his spouts, to determine when sugaring season had begun.
The best time for sugaring is about a two- to three-month window in which the atmosphere is below freezing at night and above freezing during the day, he said.
During the warmer months, the tree gets its sugar from its leaves and sends it down to the roots. When temperatures drop below freezing, the tree draws the sugar up again.
Slapinsky inserted his taps on the side of the trees closest to the sun because the warmth makes the sap thaw and flow more quickly through the tap.
When the sun is shining, he gets about a quart of sap per day.
Slapinsky, a multimedia consultant for pharmaceutical companies, works from home and can check his taps or boil sap during the day.
For those interesting in tapping into their own trees, Slapinsky recommends reading “Backyard Sugarin’” and looking into the instructional Wissahickon Valley Watershed seminars.
“The best part about it for me was sitting in front of the fire and drinking herbal green tea with my own sugar sweetener,” he said.
Next year he will probably make his own taps, he added.

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Council backs off gun vote

In News on March 15, 2010 at 1:38 pm

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Hatboro Council took no further action to pursue a local lost or stolen handgun reporting ordinance last month, but may adopt a resolution at a later date in support of statewide adoption of the ordinance.
Council announced at its Feb. 8 meeting it would vote Feb. 22 to advertise a future vote on a lost or stolen handgun reporting ordinance, which would require citizens to report their lost or stolen handguns to the police up to 72 hours after discovery or face a fine or imprisonment.
Before the meeting, Hatboro Mayor Norm Hawkes suggested the ordinance be removed from the agenda because a vote to send a resolution to the Pennsylvania General Assembly and Gov. Ed Rendell would have had a better chance of passing, he said.
“I don’t know whose support it would have gotten or not gotten,” Hawkes said of the ordinance. “I thought it was a compromise.”
“The ultimate goal is to get it [the state] to adopt it on a state level. The local ordinances are trying to push the state in that direction.”
In the future, maybe two years down the road, he thinks the ordinance will come up for a vote again, he added.
“My personal opinion is he [Hawkes] realized that the ordinance was not going to be passed and he didn’t want to have the negative impact of it not passing so he had it withdrawn instead,” Aleta Ostrander, chairwoman of the borough’s public safety committee, said.
Council had decided it would also consider sending a resolution to support the ordinance on a state level, an idea suggested by council President Marianne Reymer.
Upon reviewing the proposed resolution, Solicitor Christen Pionzio advised against a vote for Feb. 22, and is preparing a more simple resolution that she thinks would be appropriate for officials to consider.
“The resolution was full of facts and statistics that I had no independent knowledge if they were true or not,” Pionzio said. “I couldn’t recommend they adopt something without knowing that the facts and data contained in the resolution were accurate.”
Hawkes received the resolution under consideration from Mayors Against Illegal Guns, of which he is a member, he said.
“Everything in there is fact,” he said. “I think you have a difficult time telling the families of police officers that were killed in Pennsylvania that it was propaganda.”
The resolution states that Hatboro requests the Legislature and governor “take rapid action to address the epidemic of illegal handgun trafficking in our commonwealth by passing a statewide lost or stolen handgun reporting requirement law.”
Ostrander had received at least 40 calls from Hatboro residents asking her not to support the ordinance, she said.
“I’ve had, I believe, four people tell me they were in support of it,” she said.
Hawkes said everyone he has spoken to is in favor of the ordinance.
“The only negative comments I got were from the people who came to the [council] meeting,” he said. “Everyone has told me it’s a good ordinance and it should be passed in Hatboro.”
Last week a missing handgun was reported in the borough and recovered, said police Chief James Gardner. “It’s not something that comes up all the time,” he said.
Nearby, Ambler Borough Council on Feb. 16 chose to support the ordinance on a state level instead of enacting a local ordinance due to concerns it would pre-empt state law.
A lost or stolen gun bill, House Bill 29, was considered in the House Judiciary Committee in January 2007, but did not get enough votes to move forward.

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Tea party groups speak out at President’s visit to Arcadia

In News on March 15, 2010 at 1:33 pm

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After listening to President Barack Obama speak Monday [March 8], Pat Stanton still didn’t have the answers he wanted about health care reform.
“Who’s going to pay? He didn’t answer that question,” he said after the president left Arcadia University’s Kuch Center.
The small-businessman in Jenkintown spends a lot of money on health care and just saw a 24 percent increase on his premiums, he said.
For Stanton, high costs are the crux of the problem. His mother was recently in the hospital and incurred a $20,000 bill for three days, he said.
While he supports reforming the system —“Everyone in this building’s for reform,” he said — he was concerned how the government will pay for the legislation.
He was also concerned that tax dollars would fund abortions under the bill.
“[That] our citizens will now be forced to pay for abortion is unconstitutional,” he said.
While President Obama’s speech brought in its fair share of supporters, those skeptical of and opposed to the plan, from event ticket-holders to Tea Partiers, were also present Monday.
During Obama’s remarks, Jack O’Brien shouted a question asking how the government would pay for the bill, but the president continued speaking.
“The government can’t supply us with health care. They can’t afford it,” the Coatesville resident said after the speech. “We have a trillion-and-a-half dollar a year deficit. They raised the debt ceiling $1.8 trillion in December. This is going to cost another trillion dollars.”
Earlier in the day, at about 9 a.m., at least 30 people with signs reading “Obamacare — vote no!” and “Free health care is not free” rallied on the Easton Road border of campus.
Russ Murphy, founder and chairman of the 9-12 Delaware Patriots, traveled to Philadelphia to show his opposition to the president’s health care reform bill, legislation he fears will incur costs that could drive some doctors out of business and hike the price of Medicare, he said.
“They ought to just take the whole thing, tear it up and start over again,” he said, adding the bill would also give the government more control over the people.
“There’s over 2,700 pages and to go through the list of all the things that are in there that are hidden, and most of these people are aware of, you might just as well take the whole thing, trash it, start over, write it so people can understand it,” he said.
Kurt Gasper of Southampton also called for legislators to tear up the bill.
“We got a good turnout here and just want everyone to know, we got to stop Obama and his health care takeover — his socialism,” he said.
If the bill is passed, it will significantly change more than health care, said Joseph Panas, a member of the Valley Forge Patriots.
“I suspect that he may be willing to be a one-term president to try to ram this through,” he said. “So in my own small way, I’m just out here trying to send a message and say, ‘Please don’t do this, it’s ruining the country.’”

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