Star Tribune
Tapping into neighborhood power to make maple syrup in a Minneapolis sugarbush
The sap erupted at the end of January, two months earlier than normal. There had been no rain, so the rivulets of ice coursing between the furrows of King Park’s maple trees could only be frozen sap. It came apart in the hand with a slightly glutinous texture, and tasted distinctly sweet.
The sudden start of syruping season launched the members of the Urban Sap Tap project into action. Holes were drilled in trunks, spiles hammered 2½ inches deep, plastic receptacles hung with the group’s new logo, including a QR code with information about their new Park Board pilot program.
For the past six winters, an ad hoc collective of people who live in the King Field neighborhood of south Minneapolis have harvested sap from the maple trees in their own yards, getting together in the park to boil their spoils down into syrup. This winter they got the Park Board’s permission to tap the park’s maples, too, after convincing the forestry department they could do it without damaging the trees.
At the peak of sap production, Sarah Linnes-Robinson, a longtime neighborhood association leader, would empty the bags in the park at least once a day into 5-gallon buckets. She compared sap tapping to ice dipping on the lakes, another niche and quintessentially Minnesotan activity that wasn’t sanctioned by the Park Board until residents pushed for it.
“I think the Park Board is maybe trying to listen more to citizens and how they want to use the urban environment,” Linnes-Robinson said.
By bringing the rustic tradition of maple tapping out of backyards and into a major city park, the group hopes to share their hobby more widely — including with neighbors who don’t have maples and those who don’t own land.
The whole exercise is bit like making stone soup. Maple sap contains 98% water and just 2% sugar, meaning 40 gallons of sap cooks down into about 1 gallon of syrup. A single maple tree isn’t going to produce much, and no one household in the city has enough space for a sugar bush, or maple orchard. It quite literally takes a village to make enough syrup to serve the neighborhood a proper pancake breakfast, which the Urban Sap Tap group puts on in March to celebrate spring’s arrival after the trees bud and the sap dries. They raise just enough money to finance the following year’s tap.
But is there a conservation angle? Just a subtle one derived from the oft-quoted logic of Senegalese forester Baba Dioum: “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
Urban Sap Tap member Steve Brandt and Aaron Flanders, King Park’s recreation supervisor, pondered the connection between caring for a tree and collecting food from it as they tapped six more maples in the park in early February. Brandt used a hand drill to make the hole and a turkey baster to flush it with diluted bleach.
“It gets you outside at the time of year when most people aren’t doing recreation outdoors, when the snow’s starting to go, the ice skating rinks have turned to mush and it’s not bicycling weather unless you’re hard-core,” he said. “It does put you in touch with trees. You learn to read a tree and see how the tree heals itself.”
Maple tree tapping was invented by Indigenous groups, who associated it with the nascent spring, when it’s still freezing at night but the days are starting to get warmer. These conditions cause the tree’s cells to expand and contract, sucking water up from the roots overnight and building pressure in the trunk when temperatures rise during the day. Some trees practically gush sap when that pressure gets overwhelming, like a cow badly needing to be milked.
“It’s hard to ask a tree to get a firsthand opinion, but it’s nature’s way of releasing pressure,” said Gary Wyatt, agroforestry educator with the University of Minnesota Extension. “I would say it’s somewhat healthy for the tree.”
Whether the trees are resilient enough for tapping following several years of drought and an unseasonably warm winter was a question posted on many a maple syruping forum this year. When urban residents asked friends on the reservation whether they’re tapping, the answers ran from abstention out of an abundance of caution to snapshots of pots full of sap boiling on the stove. There’s no absolute right answer — every tree owner has to make the decision for themselves, said Wyatt.
South High School’s All Nations program, which has a long-running tradition of tapping the boulevard trees next to the school, had a bye year. District spokeswoman M.A. Rosko said it was a weather-related decision.
Native kids who grow up in the city may never have gotten the chance tap a tree and collect their own sap for syruping, said Gloria Iacono of the Native American Community Development Institute. She’s the food sovereignty manager of Four Sisters Farm at 2839 17th Av. S., which has a plot dedicated to sugar maple saplings that will one day contribute to the farm’s mission of rebuilding Indigenous food systems in the urban environment.
That’ll be many years in the future, when the saplings reach the 10 inches in girth required for tapping. In the meantime, the NACDI and foraging instructor Haleigh Ziebol are trying to recreate in East Phillips the network of privately owned maple trees that the Urban Sap Tap group started in King Field. They hope that grassroots organizing will one day unlock park trees for tapping in the Phillips community as well.
“I don’t know of any other operations that are doing this in an urban environment,” said Iacono. “I think maybe part of that is, again, access to trees … You need to be able to tap a significant amount of trees, which is kind of why doing it in a community setting is so cool. If everyone pools their resources, you can find enough maple trees in your area, and people can bring the sap that they have and make something together.”
The Urban Sap Tap project hosted their annual pancake breakfast on March 16 and served 250 people, or roughly 100 more than last year, according to an informal utensil poll. As clouds of water vapor billowed from a new evaporator paid for by a park innovation grant, families sampled the product of last year’s tap. It was a dark, viscous syrup, its complex sweetness the result of sap taken from different types of maples growing in the neighborhood.
“Hopefully we can replicate this for other areas,” said Peter Jaeger, a citywide nature programmer for the Park Board who has long advocated for tapping the trees in King Park. “It’s been received pretty well, so as we continue, hopefully there’ll be more and more interest.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
