(Radio Iowa) – The maple syrup season is underway in Iowa and warmer temperatures have not helped. Eric Hart at the Indian Creek Nature Center in eastern Iowa says sap production is down. “It’s going to be less than most years because just the weather’s been unusually warm this year. And so that we haven’t had, we didn’t have a lot of days where the sap was flowing,” he says.

He says they need the normal cool spring temperatures for the best sap production. “It’s when the weather gets above freezing during the day, usually around 40 degrees. And then at night below freezing, somewhere in the 20s usually, makes it so that sap flows really well up and down the tree and it keeps the conditions prime so that the tree doesn’t switch over into growing leaves quite yet and it can let the sap flow for a while,” Hart says. Hart says you can visit the Nature Center and see how the whole process works.

“So we have public programs where people can come and try out different tools that people have used for maple syruping throughout the years,” he says, “from how the Native Americans did it to how colonial settlers did it, to kind of more modern tools today. And then they can even get inside a sugar house to see how that sap that’s been collected this year, how that’s getting boiled down into real maple syrup.” He says they’ve collected around 600 gallons of sap so far this year, and a good year is around one-thousand gallons.

Hart says it takes about 40 gallons of sap from Iowa trees to boil down into one gallon of maple syrup.  “Other regions, like in the northeast of the United States, the sap is just naturally sweeter there, so it can be 20 or 30 gallons for them, but around in Iowa, it’s about 40,” he says. You can find the full schedule for the public programs on the maple syrup process on the Center’ website at: indiancreeknaturecenter.org.

The maple syrup season will culminate with the annual Maple Syrup Festival on March 28th and 29th.