Can our enjoyment of morning pancakes really be linked to our fireplaces?
Yep. It’s about the maple syrup. Today, the health of both our lakes and our sugar bushes is limited by widespread calcium decline – a legacy of decades of acid rain. Sugar maples have a particularly high demand for calcium. Friends of the Muskoka Watershed has launched a project, called AshMuskoka, to collect fireplace, wood stove and wood boiler ashes, which are 30% calcium, from hundreds of people in Muskoka and return these ashes to local sugar bushes to help solve the calcium decline problem.
In this talk, Dr. Norman Yan will lay out the reasons for and the approach to this citizen-based forest restoration project – the first of its kind in Canada – and provide initial results proving that ash additions work.
Enjoy those pancakes.
