Kraus Farms is please to offer our very own Maple Syrup. We harvest the sap from our maple trees. We boil and strain it to get a wonderfully sweet all natural syrup.
 
Maple sap is available when the day time temps are about freezing and night time temps are below. What this does is expand all the veins of the tree and when it warms up it releases the sap. The sap is harvested by “tapping the tree” which means drilling a small hole and inserting a spigot into the drill hole.  The spigot can hold a bucket used to collect the free flowing sap. It takes about 18 gallons to collect 1 gallon of syrup. Gathering the sap is the easy part kind of. We tap a few dozen trees to collect from. The sap flows quick and can fill a 5 gallon bucket rather quick on the right day.  The goal is to collect 30+ gallons before we move onto the next phase.
 
For our boil we use a 30 gallon aluminum pot. Typically we can get 40 or 50 gallons to boil over the course of a week Once we start to boil the fun can lasts for several days. There is a constant effort to strain, stir, and add new sap, but, the final product is a sweet and delicious.