March 19, 2026 • Volume 39, No. 22
Next edition April 2
The Navan maple syrup society By Fred Sherwin The Orléans Star
Navan tapper Luc Picknell holds up a jar from last year’s maple syrup harvest. He and some of his friends are hoping to have another bountiful year this maple syrup season. FRED SHERWIN PHOTO
They have become the first sign that spring is just around the corner. Long before the first crocuses start appearing on Parliament Hill and the first pallets of annuals start popping up in the box store garden centres, blue buckets suddenly begin to sprout on the trunks of maple trees in the village of Navan. This year, they began appearing on March 1. First in front of a house on Delson Drive. Then in front of several more houses on Delson, Villeroy Crescent, Tyburn Court, Forest Lea Drive and Loeper Street. A majority of the trees are owned by a group of friends who call themselves the Navan
Tappers. Their clubhouse is called the “Navan Tappin’ Shack”, which doubles as their sugar shack where they boil down the maple sap into delicious maple syrup. Last year, the six friends collected over 400 litres of maple sap from the more than 100 trees they collectively tap on their properties. They then turned the 400 litres of sap into 100 litres of syrup. “We had perfect conditions last year,” says the group’s founder and the man who built the Tappin’ Shack, Luc Picknell. “We had so much syrup we were using it to make BBQ sauce, pickled onions...we even used it to flavour vodka.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 2