Cape Breton Places & Foods

Nova Scotia Nova Scotia stretches 500 kilometres on a southwest-northeast axis from Cape Sable to Cape North, the shape of the province is often compared to that native delicacy, the lobster, with Cape Breton Island representing the outstretched claws, preparing to nip unsuspecting Newfoundland across the Cabot Strait.

The outstanding geographical fact about Nova Scotia is not the land, but the sea. The province is virtually an island connected to the rest of Canada by the narrow Isthmus of Chignecto. No point of land is more than 55 kilometres from the coastline. Cape Breton is an island joined to the mainland by the Canso Causeway. It is the sea that has carved the wild and ragged shoreline of the Atlantic coast and the sea that creates the wondrous tides of the Bay of Fundy. It is the sea upon which the first European settlers arrived and the sea from which they pulled their livelihood in once bursting nets. It is the sea for which they built ships to sail to other seas, bringing back goods rare and precious and tales even stranger. Not surprisingly, it is to the sea that Nova Scotians today are looking for new sources of wealth from offshore oil and gas.

The province can be divided into three distinct physiographic regions - the lowlands, the uplands and the highlands, which in tum may be subdivided into distinct sub-regions. The lowlands include the fertile Annapolis Valley, the low-lying areas around the Northumberland Strait and large parts of Cape Breton Island. The geology is primarily sedimentary and it is in these areas that most of Nova Scotia's rich coal seams are located. These coasts tend to be low and flat, and there are few good harbours. The shoreline is characterized by sandbars and occasional dunes. Bathers can often wade many hundreds of metres on these sandbars when the tide is out.

The Atlantic uplands comprise an area equal to half the province, running from Cape Canso, Guysborough County, to the extreme southern tip, including all of Yarmouth, Shelburne, Queens and Lunenburg counties, and most of Digby, Halifax and Guysborough counties. The uplands are a mass of Pre-Cambrian hard granite and quartzite, interspersed with belts of weaker slate. l'he area has been heavily glaciated with the result that much of the soil has been scraped away and redeposited in numerous glacial formations, the most famous of which is the drumlin that forms Halifax's Citadel Hill.

Nova Scotia The coastline of the uplands region is deeply indented, forming many good harbours, some of which are considered outstanding. Hundreds of islands dot the landscape along the entire Atlantic coast, most notably at St. Margarets Bay and Mahone Bay. Reefs and shoals abound, accounting for the many lighthouses erected along this coast. In many ways the Atlantic uplands coast epitomizes the North Atlantic coastline with its bare granite sheets plunging headlong into the raging surf to produce an awesome cataclysm between land and sea. When people think of Nova Scotia, they usually envisage the rocky granite shores of the uplands.

The highlands are those parts of the province where metamorphosed igneous and sedimentary rocks have either intruded through the preexisting lowland sediments or resisted erosion to a better degree than the surrounding softer rock. The Cape Breton Highlands are the most notable example. The Cobequid Mountains of Cumberland and Colchester counties, the Antigonish highlands, and the North Mountain, which runs parallel with the Fundy shore from Cape Blomidon to Digby Neck, are the other Nova Scotia highlands. Appearing as sharp ridges when viewed from below, the highlands are actually flat tablelands. This may be observed first hand in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. At Ingonish, and at Cheticamp, the Cabot Trail rises to the tablelands, several hundred metres above the sea level.

The outstanding feature of the highlands is rectilinear coastlines. In contrast with the hundreds of bays and peninsulas of the Atlantic coast, the shoreline of the Bay of Fundy and western Cape Breton are virtually straight. Here, uplifted highland cliffs that soar up hundreds of metres directly from the ocean create stretches of spectacular landscapes. Less well known, but no less spectacular, are the cliffs of the Bay of Fundy coast, which are interspersed with fossils and unusual minerals.


Maple

Filed under: Cape Breton — admin @ 9:48 pm

The Cape Breton Maple Forest Cooperative includes the two largest maple production facilities on the Island, foresters with masters degrees, local community trainees, qualified teachers, researchers, scientists, and specialists in international eMarketing all adjoined together in Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Each member has a strong desire to bring back a thousand year old tradition of the Mi’kmaq people - the making of maple syrup from the magnificent sugar maple tree.

Melody Mountain Maple Creations
Port Hawkesbury, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia 

Melody Mountain Maple syrup products are procured from a 600-acres maplebush of prime sugar maple trees, 15-thousand taps located in the Denys Mountain Range in Glendale, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Owned and operated by Melody Rooyakkers, the Glendale maple production facility is a state-of-the-art sap collection, evaporation and syrup processing centre. All equipment and installation of the equipment was by CDL Incorporated.

Melody Mountain Maple co-ordinates with maple research facilities in New York, Vermont and Quebec, developing its own research and training facilities to assist educating and bringing Atlantic Canadian maple syrup to the world with on-staff market developers for both domestic and international sales.

For more information, contact Melody Rooyakkers

Main Office: Port Hawkesbury, Cape Breton
Production Office: Glendale, Cape Breton
TEL: (902) 227-5283

Highland Gold

Highland Gold maple syrup products are procured from a stand of 6-thousand maple taps nestled in the hills of Boisdale in central Cape Breton. Owned and operated by Paul MacKenzie, a veteran of experimental bush development and forestry-training programs specifically for maple production in Cape Breton Island.

Highland Gold maple products are privately labeled and bottled in both original style and ornamental bottles, and also include packaged maple sugar and maple fudge.

All are 100 percent natural. Our customer base includes tourists, cruise ship visitors and many loyal Cape Bretoners.

For more information, contact Paul MacKenzie

64 Leonard Street,
Sydney, Nova Scotia, B1S 2T5
TEL: (902) 539-1927

The cooperative based in Glendale/Eskasoni with founding members will include producers, Melody Rooyakkers (Melody Mountain) and Paul MacKenzie, (Highland Gold) as well as identified community leaders and participants from the following areas Eskasoni, Waycobah, Wagmatcook, Membertou, Chapel Island, Baddeck, Mabou, Margaree, Glendale, Boisdale and Cheticamp.

Operations will include maple harvesting and processing at sites currently owned by Melody Rooyakkers and Paul MacKenzie, and packaging at a bottling facility that will be constructed and operated by the First Nation Communities of the Cape Breton Island region.

As the co-op develops, membership will be offered to all workers employed by the cooperative. Ultimately the workers will comprise the majority of the membership, and will have commensurate representation on the board of directors. Operations of the co-op will span harvesting sap, processing, packaging, and marketing certified organic maple syrup and maple syrup value added products (sugar, candies and specialty products.)

With the installation of its remaining taps, Melody Mountain will have roughly 30,000 taps, with capacity to produce 6-7,000 gallons of syrup annually. Highland Gold currently has 6,000 taps, with a further 2,000 taps dedicated to experimental product development.

All told, then, there is short term potential to produce 7-9,000 gallons of syrup. At this stage, the syrup has a potential International market value of $200 per gallon. Production will provide employment for 14 workers initially; expanding per community as tap installation is planned and implemented.

The bottling/processing facility will add value to the product. Bottling and processing will employ a further 7 workers, and based on expansion to critical mass (1.5 million Cape Breton Island maple tap potential) a further 2 workers may be employed (1 in sap collection/1 in bottling) per each additional 2,000 maple taps processed. Additional activity will be investigated and, if feasible, initiate a facility for candy production and development of other value added products as markets are developed.

6 Comments »

  1. hi, my daugther is doing a project on maple syrup. i was just woundering if a person would be able to see the production of making maple syrup. thank you for your time.

    Comment by patricia cormier — March 31, 2008 @ 9:35 pm

  2. It is possible but that would require a 7 hour drive from Halifax to Boisdale, Cape Breton. The Glendale facility is a couple hours closer but isn’t in production this year.

    Comment by admin — March 31, 2008 @ 10:28 pm

  3. Hello,

    Do you purchase fresh, raw sap.
    I have a maple stand that I am trying to develop.
    This is going to be my first season.
    I have approximately 175 taps in and could potentially put in 350. The stand could probably be developed into several thousand taps.
    About 1/2 of these are on gravity tubing, the rest are buckets.
    If we can ever get some decent weather, I could potentially collect way more syrup than I could process with my homemade evaporator.

    I’m in the Bras d’or area, give me a shout if you are interested.

    Cheers
    Donnie

    Comment by Donald Mac Neil — April 1, 2008 @ 8:45 am

  4. Ya the weather really kills this - and it has been getting worse each year for the past 3 or 4 years now.

    Purchase “sap” or “syrup”? …I’ll assume since you have a evap you meant syrup and the answer would rely on what grade?

    Comment by admin — April 1, 2008 @ 10:19 am

  5. Actually I meant “sap”. The evaporator that I built can really only handle 50 taps or so. I’d like to develop this stand, but can’t really justify a commercial evaporator yet. I’ve read that some large producers in Quebec and Ontario purchase bulk sap from neighboring smaller producers. Priced based on the sugar %.
    Depending on the weather, I could have as much as 300-400 gallons a day.(more if I have a reason to tap the whole stand).
    I know it’s small by your standards, but it’s a starting point.

    Cheers
    Donnie

    Comment by Donald Mac Neil — April 1, 2008 @ 3:57 pm

  6. It’s a backward industry if you ask me… sucking sap to get the sugar content… considering the maple tree is a natural water filter, 97% of the sap is waste water, and the water (since you have the equipment to boiling it off anyway) could be recycled as an ingredient in maple wine, maple beer, or maple mead or just sold as ‘bottled water’.

    Wouldn’t that be a “green business”! :-)

    Comment by admin — April 1, 2008 @ 5:07 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Copyright 2007 © Cape Breton Foods. All Rights Reserved.