0:13 It's that time of year again, and Toronto is as festive as ever. The annual Christmas market and the Distillery District encourages families to come together and enjoy this special time of year. The Christmas market is a valued tradition for residents in the city. Guests can enjoy a variety of food and drinks, go shopping, or listen to carolers like Nicole Daly. 0:37 [Music: live caroling Santa Claus is Coming to Town] 0:48 The people love it. Like the people love it, especially when they're walking in the street and we're just in a corner and they see us and we start singing. They just go crazy. Oh, carolers. 1:00 Vendors are a huge part of the Toronto Christmas market. Some booths have been here for the last several years. Ashley Greenville is working at the gingerbread booth at the market. 1:11 This is the seventh year that this booth has been here. It's got a bit of a renovation with this new look. This is the first time it looks this nice. 1:19 This booth has both treats for kids and pets. The booth features miniature gingerbread houses that attached to mugs. 1:26 So these are edible postcards for dogs. They're made out of raw hide. And I would say the best sellers are mostly the cookies. And and the they call these Mug Mates. 1:40 As many vendors have been coming to the market for several years. This is john Tamori's first year. John owns and runs Pefferlaw Creek farms for three years with his brothers, Ben and Tony Tamori making organic maple syrup. 1:55 We've been making maple syrup since we were kids at my parents place. And that's been we've been doing that for about 25 years now and the farm we have quite a few more trees on that property. So we started, we started tapping those trees three years ago and we've sort of grown into a commercial scale and now we produce it for large events like this. And for other customers who want local maple syrup that's sourced in Ontario and 100% pure. 2:25 From engineers to maple farmers, the Tomori brothers are working to make themselves a well known name. John Tamori quit his job two years ago to pursue the maple farm full time, being the first brother to run the farm. 2:39 I grew up in my parents place where there is about 20 acres. I love working in the forest working with my hands and and also just agriculture generally. Not to mention, I am able to apply my I'm a chemical engineer by profession, so I'm able to apply a lot of the skills and the education that I've received to what we do. Because the design and implementation of our collection systems is it's a pretty, it's an industrial process at that level, I guess you could call it. And it takes a fair bit of design and just strategy to properly lay out everything. 3:14 The Pefferlaw Creek farm has been owned by the Tamori family for six years now. However, neither of them imagined the amount it would grow to be. 3:22 Three years ago, my brothers and I just went for, we didn't spend a whole lot of time at the farm before there was no house on it, there's nothing like that. So we would occasionally go there maybe once every two or three months. But there's one time where we went to the farm and we did a really nice walk through the forest and we just were blown away by the maple trees there. And we said, Wow, this is our opportunity to make maple syrup. You know, a full time profession and that day on we started just started making plans we we pulled a lot of really long days where we would be working in the evenings and on weekends to get the the installation started. And then it just got to a point where we added another forest that was you know, adjacent to us and we added a whole bunch of attach so it justified me quitting as the first one. And that's that's how it started and we're just kind of progressing and adding things like this. This market to just increase the viability so one of my brothers can join me, hopefully next year so. 4:16 Although he pursued a career in engineering, he found his passion in maple farming. However, his engineering background hasn't been forgotten. 4:24 There's a well, it's it's suddenly when you go from a I would say engineering can be a little bit more one dimensional, so I have a set skill set and I have a set sort of repertoire of duties, right. And I would say that when I went into this full time, I had to do everything. I was doing business administration, sales, marketing, you know, operations, I'm installing pipes and doing all this stuff, right? So for me it was a big learning curve and also just forcing myself to do things that perhaps I wasn't used to doing in the past. Like just sales and marketing is something I never touched as an engineer and I had to jump into stuff like that so. 5:04 But Maple farming is no easy task. 5:07 To we'll collect all the sap will bring into one spot and we'll put it through a couple of filtration units to clean it and concentrate it and then we'll put it through a wood fired evaporator. So we'll we'll boil it for a lengthy amount of time and then we'll produce final syrup. Starts the sap comes out of the trees at about 2% sugar and we finish it at 66%, so there's a lot of boiling and water removal but nothing is added along the way. It's just a question of removing the water. 5:37 While other farmers usually harvest in the fall, maple syrup is produced in the spring, 5:42 Usually the majority of the syrup is produced in two months. So sap in the trees will flow in the spring, so that'll start with the first thaws of the spring. And then the sap will start moving up and down the trees and then we tap the trees and we start bringing that out. And that season goes till the trees will actually bud so when the leaves start growing on the trees, basically. And that usually will last about two months. 6:08 75% of the world's maple syrup is made in Quebec. Oh, it makes Pefferlaw Creek Farms, maple syrup different is how it's produced. 6:16 So there are a couple of things producers will use different agents for cleaning their tubings tubing systems and lines that we don't use anything. There's also things like the cleaning of your pen, some producers may use synthetic phosphoric acid, whereas we'll use food grade vinegar, things like that. So there are a couple there are a number of things and there's also tapping practices. We make sure that we we never tap trees that are too small and never put more than two taps into a tree. So that's the sort of a sustainable tapping procedure that gets you into the organic grown. 6:49 John's booth will be at the Toronto Christmas market until December 22. The Pefferlaw Creek farm is located in Oxford, Ontario is open all year round. For News Night, this is Natasha Herman.