MapleFest Pancake Breakfast

Celebrate maple syrup season with an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast in the MacMillan Auditorium. Make reservations for communal seating, available on the half hour from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

The menu includes pancakes and maple syrup, served with sausage, a selection of pancake toppings, coffee and orange juice.

Did you know the Arboretum taps more than 350 maple trees every winter? Learn more about our trees and the maple tapping process and see how we cook down the sap to make pure maple syrup.

MapleFest is a fundraising event and all proceeds go towards our general operating budget.

Learn about syrup at MapleFest!

Maple syrup experts, Randy Gage and Richard DeVries, will be doing educational programming from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Maple Sugar House and Frog Hollow. See the activities below for details.

Tap a sugar maple tree.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to tap a maple tree? Arboretum Youth Education Manager Randy Gage and his volunteers will lead these demonstrations at the top of the hill above Frog Hollow. After you try out tree tapping head down the hill to the Sugar House for more activities and taste testing.

See which trees have sweet saps.

Learn how to identify a sugar maple in winter without its leaves, and learn which trees can be tapped to make syrup. It’s not just sugar maples!

Learn how weather affects sap.

Take a lesson from Citizen Science Sap Flow to discover which conditions are predictive of sap flow, including monitoring temperatures throughout the day.

Boil it down.

Visit the Sweet Sap Room at Frog Hollow. Use scientific tools to measure sugar content in different sap samples and explore the many tools and equipment used over the years to collect sap and concentrate its sweetness.

Make a spile.

A spile is a small peg or spigot for tapping into maple trees. Try your hand at making an elderberry spile as a souvenir of MapleFest 2023.

Watch the process in action.

Natural Resources Horticulturist Richard DeVries and his volunteers will be working in the Sugar House to show how the process of syrup making happens at the Arboretum today.