Felzke Farms

The Felskie family, the farm started back in 1902. It was just your general 80 acre farm that my great-grandpa Herman Felskie would have come from Germany. Kind of from there it grew to what it is today through I would be the fourth generation, consisting of the biggest, With that said, back in 1978, my parents, Paul and Sandra Felskie, introduced strawberries to the family farm. This will make our 46th season growing strawberries. With that said, we have a variety of specialty crop, which now, with the month of March, is our maple syrup. Dad, when he was 15 years old, introduced maple syrup, collecting sap from the trees. Were heading a lot of hardwoods in the woods that was on the family farm. So dad would collect that, and my grandma Felskie, she would boil it down. So basically, it's fair to say that we've then produced the maple syrup. It's more of a family tradition for over 70 years. You have the freezing and thawing, but when we do all hard maple, basically, it's You have a tap, you put it into the tree, you collect the sap out of the tree, and an average tree should run 10 gallons of sap, which would produce roughly a quart of syrup. But the ratio is 40 to 1. They always figured 40 gallons of sap to 1 gallons of syrup. That's just the sugar content. When you collect it from the tree, what we've been collecting here this year started out at 2, 2. 5. As the season goes later, it falls to 1. 7 percent sugar. So you got to figure, 7 percent of that sugar, boil that, basically evaporate the waterway until you get down to the sugar, the byproduct, and what you're looking for. 80 percent of our sales is done at our farm market here. We do have a few farm markets that we wholesale to, limited. We do, It's not the cheapest source of sugar, but it's a natural product. Having family in operation is great. It can good and bad, but then raised on, I've always said if I couldn't do it with a family, I don'think I'do it, because it's just,