NCOF syrup is very much a community effort.
We celebrate the product, and our process of making it in many ways, including Maple Magic (our community pancake breakfast & historical reenactment tours) our educational maple sugaring tours, and by selling syrup at our market stand for you to enjoy.

NCOF makes syrup the old-fashioned way, hanging silver-colored, lidded buckets from individually drilled tap holes fitted with special hollow metallic tubes with hooks on them, called spiles.

Tapping commences in late winter when temperature fluctuations (nights below freezing, days above freezing) trigger sap flow and  pull stored sugars out of tree roots.

Buckets are collected and emptied by hand, by farmers working with youth workers, and volunteers.

Sap is then transferred to the NCOF sugar shack where it is boiled down in a traditional wood-fired evaporator in our old-timey but recently renovated shack using wood donated by local arborists and split by teens on our teen work crew.

We do not grade our syrup, as larger commercial producers do, preferring to sell it “as is” and letting people choose for themselves whether they like the flavor of lighter or darker syrup.

Thousands of people of all ages attend our maple sugaring tours to learn the science, lore and traditions of maple sugaring!

Discover sugaring  history and artifacts beginning with Native Americans through modern times, learn the science of sugaring, visit our tapped maples and sample sap if it’s dripping, and explore our sugar shack where a wood-stocked evaporator boils sap into delicious syrup