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BENNINGTON â Just in time for Arbor Day, the Bennington Free Library is giving out free activities bags. Families can pick up a bag beginning Saturday during library take-out hours, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Each bag contains sugar maple seed packets (the sugar maple is Vermont s state tree), a tree scavenger hunt, tree craft ideas with materials for bark rubbings, Arbor Day bookmarks and a Vermont tree guide.
Acer saccharum At first, it might seem counterintuitive to plant red maple in a sugar maple forest. Red maples can be tapped, but the sap is a little less sweet, meaning it requires more boiling to make desirable syrup. Red maple doesn t live as long as sugar maple, but it has a few advantages: a broader range, more adaptability to different conditions, and characteristics unappealing to the forest tent caterpillar, a pest that munches sugar maple leaves with abandon. At UVM s Proctor Maple Research Center, researchers have tapped more and more red maples; the trees now account for some 25 percent of taps, according to Mark Isselhardt, UVM Extension s maple specialist.