The winter thaw means only one thing if you've got a giant sugar maple in your yard: Time to tap it and make maple syrup. In part one of this latest installment of "Cooking with Gretchen," videographer Steve Mellon heads to the PG Test Front Yard, where Jeff Cieslak of Ben Avon demonstrates the fine art of back/front yard sugaring. Steps include drilling a hole in the sunny side of a maple, tapping a "spile" into the hole and attaching tubing for collection of the water-like sap into a 5-gallon bucket.

Mr. Cieslak is tapping 10 neighborhood trees for a communal batch of maple syrup. The peak flow, he explains, occurs early in the sugaring season when it freezes at night and is bright, sunny and warm the next day, with the temperatures in the 40s. The process can take several weeks, and you can only collect sap until the tree starts budding; after that, it gets bitter. In part two next week, Mr. Cieslak will show how to boil the collected sap into syrup.

See Gretchen at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Pittsburgh Home & Garden Show Dream Home kitchen at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown.

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