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Today Carey and I took the kiddo to a local maple sugar farm to check things out, buy some sweet stuff, and learn a little bit.

We learned very little, bought $18 in products, and came home fairly disappointed. Carey and I learned more using our iPhones than we did in the half-hour presentation we left just past halfway through - after a ten-minute speech on the Asian Longhorn Beetle. The presentation was downright terrible. Three times as long as it needed to be, three times too crowded, and five times short on actual information.

Someone knew that "snow and mud" make for good syrup, but we were never told why. We were shown five grades (colors, tint) of syrup but not told what makes each. We were shown an evaporating table, but it wasn't explained how the sap moves along the channels - and why an evaporating table isn't round (it would probably be more efficient).

Did you know that it takes 40-50 gallons of sap - which is a lot more like water than syrup, of course - to get a gallon of syrup? Carey and I do now… because we looked that up on our iPhones while waiting for the first presentation to end.