sugar beets?

I've been using Stevia for a few years now. I find it great, and thought about growing it if i stayed in the warmer part of ontario.
It's expensive yes, but a compact dropper bottle lasts me at least a month, sometimes 2. Sure is easy to stock and pack...and i might venture, a good barter item.
Not toxic , as sugar is. 3-5 drops in a large coffee ...just right for me. o )
Try it, you'll like it !

I meant i was looking for a natural source availible in ontario

I think sugar beets are used to make lots of our commercial sugar by red path

Stevia is a natural source, and it is available in ontario. You can grow it yourself too in s.ontario and/or in greenhouse, and dry the leaves or make a tincture.

Maple sugar and honey are just about all you need, I think. Invest a couple hundred dollars, you can pick up the supplies to tap trees for cheap at home hardware, as for making honey... you could do some research and build your own shelves, contact a beekeeper, order some bees.

Beekeepers are actually enthusiastic since bees are on the general decline. It's too bad their ordering services weren't more user friendly, perhaps more people would do it. Anyways it's a lot of work to make maple syrup and I heard honey is also a lot of work... on the bees part. With adequate resources carefully executed and well thought out planning, you should be able to stock enough of each of these for a year. Perhaps the best part about utilizing both of them is one of them is primarily done in the summer, the other in the winter.

Hell... I think I'm gonna pick up some buckets and taps this year for sure. Don't know about bee colonies though, as I live almost two hours from my farm.

When you are thinking about tapping trees to make syrup, please remember you can also use birch sap.
This makes a lighter syrup not quite so sweet

When you are thinking about tapping trees to make syrup, please remember you can also use birch sap.
This makes a lighter syrup not quite so sweet

Well I had no idea, thanks man! Plenty of birch trees on my property. I'll look into it.

In our climate there are a surprising number of sources of sugar.

Maple Syrup and Apples are the 2 best. The base ingredients are available in abundance and the final product only requires moderate ingenuity and lots of work. However the best reason to rely on both is their incredibly low glycemic index! You get all the enjoyment of sugar, without any of the inherent health risks.

Other great sources of sugar that could be raised and refined our climate are:

Birch Syrup (roughly 1/5th the yield you get from tapping same number of maple trees)
Honey
Sugar Beets
Carrots
Grapes
Select corns
Xylitol (can be produced from some corn and hardwood trees)
Dates (I'm assuming you'd have to manufacture a micro-clim to enable this)
Brown rice syrup (likely the least viable option for our climate)

i just look for it on sale i just this week bought 10 5lb bags from no frills they were 2 for $1.88. sugar lasts forever i put mine in vacuum sealed bags so it won"t get hard.

I'm lucky enough to have my own maple sugar bush and sugar shack. This season we've set a target of 250L of syrup to split among our family and anything after that gets turned into maple sugar.

Difficult to do without burning it... but the payoff is a ridiculously "healthy" sugar that tastes 100x better than anything commercial and doesn't risk diabetes or other health issues.

I'm also going to try rendering some fruit down to sugar... but have no idea at this point how that process works. I just know we have 70 apple trees that provide very sweet, delicious apples and we can't eat that much pie and applesauce!

also remember that you can get sap from any maple tree...sugar maple gives the most sap(is that right?), but it's just as good from other maples.

apple sauce - I can up dozens of half pint jars annually. cooked apples are quite sweet depending on the variety, and it's less work, in my opinion, than powdering them for sugar.

any fruit, really, can be subbed for sugar(in baking - maybe not in coffee) dried/powdered, or canned.

Oddmott - have you tried making Applejack with them? 😀

Speaking from a diabetic point of view, a little sugar is OK but overall I believe the less dependence on sugary stuff you can cultivate the better off you and your family will be.