Tis the season of maple sugaring in the Hudson Valley! It's a tradition dating back hundreds of years and is a sweet idea for a Road Trip: Close to Home.

Book a reservation at Muscoot Farm, and you'll get the chance to learn about the process on a private tour. "For sugaring what we do is, we'll take people they'll come out to our sugar house, and I go through the history of maple sugaring and then not only that, but they get to see the process live right in front of them," says Muscoot Farm curator Jonathon Benjamin.

Benjamin explains the process, “The first thing we want to do is locate a sugar maple or a maple tree. There's a lot of different ways you can tell, one of the ways is the bark. Once you find your tree, you'll drill a hole and get the sap out. We only go into the tree about 1 to 2 inches.”

Once a hole is drilled into the tree, Benjamin hammers in a spout, hangs a bucket on it, and watchs the sap drip out. "Sugar maples — the reason why it's so good is because it already has the highest sugar content in the sap. And because we're doing it at a safe way, we're making sure that we're not taking too much sap out of the tree."

Once the bucket has enough sap, it’s brought to the sugar house to be boiled. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of maple syrup. We need to get this up to 219 degrees, and at 219 degrees it officially turns from sap into maple syrup."

It may seem like a lot of work, but in the end, you get to enjoy the final product and that's fresh Hudson Valley maple syrup!