Students 'sugar off' at Hart House Farm

Like a circulatory system, a tangle of interconnecting clear, plastic tubes carries maple sap from about 380 trees on a farm in the Caledon Hills. 

The sap collects in a tank, and is then transferred to 45-gallon barrels and pumped into a container in a shed. The sap is then boiled to approximately 219°F (104°C), filling the air with a sweet smell.

“It's like a hurricane,” said Steve Warn, Hart House Farm's caretaker, while looking at the swirl of steam in the evaporator. “A hurricane of flavour.”

Before it's finally ready for the breakfast table, the syrup is put through filters and bottled on site.

Each season produces a few hundred bottles, which travel far and wide. The syrup is sold at Hart House, used in the Gallery Grill's crème brûlée and given to foreign dignitaries who visit the University of Toronto, including a Japanese consul general and rectors of Belgian universities.

The old sugar shack at Hart House Farm (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Over the weekend, Warn gave U of T students a tour of the 150-acre farm and a sample of syrup still hot from the boiler. About two dozen people – and Warn’s basset hound Boots – crammed into the shack to try the syrup from dentists’ cups.

For many international students, the visit provided their first taste of the Canadian sugar shack tradition. Ofure Iribhogbe, a psychology and health studies student at U of T Scarborough, said the smell of boiling sap reminded her of the aroma of melting sugar, used to make glass candy back home in Nigeria. It was her first time eating maple syrup – but definitely not her last, she said.

She spent the rest of the day exploring the property, seeing old farm houses, the woods and a frozen spring, she said. The trip, organized by the student-run Hart House Farm Committee, was a breath of fresh air that helped her unwind before writing her final exams.

Generations of U of T students have gone to the farm, over an hour's drive northwest of Toronto, to find tranquility. Former Hart House warden Nicholas Ignatieff bought the property in 1949 to encourage students to experience life outside the city.

Audrey Hozack, who started as Hart House secretary and eventually became assistant warden, rides a tractor at the farm in a photo thought to have been taken in 1954 (photo courtesy of hhfarmcommittee via Flickr)

The Ignatieff farmhouse has rows of bunk beds upstairs, a piano on the ground floor and dishes for 40 people. For the sugaring-off weekend, an annual tradition, the Hart House Farm committee members prepared a lunch of 200 pancakes, baked beans and banana bread. 

Warn became the official caretaker, or farm resident, in 2006, but he's worked on the farm much longer.

He started working there as a teenager under a previous caretaker, Eric Anderson. Warn grew up in Terra Cotta, Ont., close to the farm. His parents became the caretakers in the mid-1980s, and then he took over.

He has U of T students in his backyard year-round, he said, and he enjoys showing them around. 

“The city is very hectic and chaotic, to me anyways,” he said. “Here students can come and unwind, they can sit outside and look at the stars, which you don’t see in Toronto.”

And of course, they can try the farm's famous maple syrup as soon as it’s ready – which is pretty much the only way that Warn likes it. 

He doesn't eat pancakes, so he has syrup only when he's making it – with one exception. 

“I do have one weakness: French vanilla ice cream with maple syrup. It's off the charts.”

Steve Warn has been the Hart House Farm caretaker since 2006 (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)