Tapping into spring
May 7, 2020
In the second week of March, when a friend of Jan Dawe鈥檚 heard that OneTree Alaska wouldn鈥檛 be able to move ahead with its usual springtime birch sap collection program, she cried: 鈥淥h NO. Everyone needs birch sap.鈥
That feeling was reinforced by OneTree K-12 teachers, who reported they were struggling to transform classroom activities into distance-delivery lesson plans.
The OneTree Alaska spring program is more than just a syrup- and caramel-making event. The program includes a curriculum called 鈥淭apping into Spring鈥 taught in K-12 classrooms.
It also welcomes the 50-60 participants in the Fairbanks Birch Sap Cooperative to the Lola Tilly Commons kitchen at 性欲社 each day of the sap season. They deliver hundreds of gallons of icy, fresh birch sap.
Given how these personal interactions would be limited by COVID-19 social-distancing protocols, it became clear that OneTree Alaska needed to pivot. If people weren鈥檛 allowed to bring buckets of sap to the Tilly kitchen, OneTree needed to get buckets and gear to the people for processing sap at home.
Enter Gwen Holdmann and Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Through the program鈥檚 sponsorship, OneTree created and distributed 200 home birch-tapping kits.
The kits have gone to K-12 students and their families from Salcha to Nenana. Written instructions, included in the kit, cover choosing a good sap tree, best practices for setting a spile in a tree, storing sap and two methods for processing sap to syrup.
鈥淚t鈥檚 thanks to ACEP鈥檚 support that OneTree Alaska has been able to take a leap into the future,鈥 says Dawe.
The program scaled up from working in individual K-12 classrooms to crowdsourcing a popular citizen-science project. Over 230 K-12 families and community members are collecting daily birch sap data with the home tapping kits. After the sap season is over, these data will be entered onto a Google Earth map.
鈥淢any thanks to ACEP and Gwen for spearheading so much learning and fun 鈥 needed elements of hunkering down at home in an age of coronavirus,鈥 added Dawe.
Learn more about , or email Jan Dawe at jan.dawe@alaska.edu.