Graduation

On Saturday, September 15, a small group of student farmers, their families, friends, faculty, and the larger Farm School community gathered to celebrate the end of an amazing, fabulous, life-changing year and the beginning of the Rest of Our Lives!  Here's the retrospective slide show I put together for the graduation ceremony from the photos that everyone contributed.

I think it'll take some time to fully process what this year has meant to me.  It most certainly has been transformative and will likely influence many of the personal and professional decisions I make from now on.

Are you wondering where I go from here?  A most excellent question.  I'm going to get my hair cut.  Sleep in. Celebrate my niece's birthday.

Wait...were you wondering about my life plans?  Oh.  That's a bit more fuzzy.  I've fantasized about a green education center (see Looking Ahead 12/30/11).  It says something to me that this continues to be ever-present in my brain.  The next few months will be about gaining clarity on the direction I'd like to take.  How do I best combine the skills and interests that I have: medicine, farming, nutrition, public health, working with the underserved, and environmental stewardship?  The answer is out there somewhere.  So, there is a conference, a workshop, and a retreat directly ahead so I can explore the possibilities.  And I will most likely take short-term assignments in family practice to determine if clinical medicine will be a part of my life.

My mantra continues: trust the process.

August

This is embarrassing.  I haven't posted since April?  Really?  Where has the time gone?  In my own defense, it's been pretty busy.  As a matter of fact, I reached a point in June when I didn't think I was going to make it.  The harvest season has proven to be pretty intense, and I found myself feeling physically exhausted and beat up every day.  But, I made the decision to take better care of myself with good sleep, yoga, meditation, and nutritious food; between that and generally getting accustomed to the work, I feel much better and have been handling the workload just fine.  You're in luck...I've been seized with a sudden burst of blogging energy, and I will now attempt to make up for a four month absence in one fell swoop.

The last of the lambs was born in early May.  They're now out on pasture, munching away on fresh grass and almost full-grown.  We had three sets of twins!

The cows are also out on pasture, and we have nine very cute calves.

We road-tripped to Vermont to pick up our piglets, sixty in all.

Transplanting into the fields began in earnest in the spring.  Harvest days are Mondays and Wednesdays, and market days are Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Each one of us has gotten the chance to work both the CSA drop-off in Cambridge and the Belmont market.  New this year: Athol started a farmers' market, and we were invited to be the flagship vendor.  The growers let us fly solo for that market on Saturdays...it's a great chance to get more experience.

Although the drought didn't affect us nearly as much as other parts of the country, we had to buy some irrigation equipment in July. The soils up here hold their moisture extremely well;  this is the first time that the school has had to irrigate.  The dry weather has definitely affected crop yields.

Strawberries were harvested in June.  Next came blueberries in July.  Watermelons went to market this week.  Raspberries and peaches are making an appearance, and the apples look like they'll be ready in a few weeks.  Tomato season is starting to wind down; we had an excellent year in spite of some issues with blight.

Stephen and Tyson have been thrilled with the quality of the onions and garlic this year.  They've been harvested and are curing in the barn.

We've been canning our hearts out.  Strawberry jam.  Frozen blueberries. Eighteen gallons of tomato sauce.  Twenty-eight dozen ears of corn reduced to forty pounds of frozen corn.  Dill pickles and sour kraut out the wazoo.

And this week we picked squash and pumpkins!  Carlen says that she's never seen such an early harvest.  We'll dry them in the sun for two weeks, which makes them store much better.

The timber frame, which we worked so hard on this winter, is slowly going up.  Maybe it'll be complete by the time we graduate?  Which, by the way, is in two weeks.  That's right, you heard me - two weeks.  Unbelievable.

 

                                 

 

Lil Lamb

Lambing season has officially ended.  We now have eleven lambs: three sets of twins and five singletons.  There is so much cuteness I'm having trouble breathing.  Everyone (the ewes) did a wonderful job...the births were normal, and the lambs are healthy and robust.  It's been a little touch-and-go with the last lamb, who was born to a first-time mom, barely a year old herself.  We've been calling her Teen Mom.  Babies having babies!  She rejected the lamb initially, but with some coaxing and TLC, she's making progress.

April Updates

Where do I even start?

Okay...how about the weather?  Two weeks ago, I applied sunscreen, a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses and shorts for the 80 degree summer day in mid-March.  A small group of people went swimming after chores. We had a barbecue. The daffodils bloomed. Sheesh.  Last week it became more seasonable with temps in the 40's and 50's.  We covered the new garlic shoots with Remay to protect them from freezing cold temps. And finally, on March 31, it snowed!  Next week I expect frogs and locusts to fall from the sky.

We have been very involved in the task of pruning fruit trees and bushes.  Who would have thought that pruning blueberry bushes could be so meditative and deeply satisfying?

 Blue Ox Farm

              

Expert pruner Brad Maloney gave us a day-long workshop on the art of apple tree pruning.  We worked on some of the trees at Maggie's, and in the afternoon he took us to New Salem Preserves to practice in their orchards.  I felt like a kid again climbing these trees.  Some of them are up to 100 years old, and each tree has such a unique character.

       Yoo hoo!                   

           Brad smiles as he works       

Sonia, our awesome Extension Agent, took us grapevine pruning at Cold Spring Orchard, which is the U. Mass research center.

                                   

                           

The ewes are about to lamb.  We're officially on "lamb watch" for the next six weeks...each day (and night), two students check the sheep every two hours for signs of labor & delivery.  And I thought I had seen the last of OB call!  We're eagerly anticipating all the cuteness.

On Friday we all piled in The Farm School van and took a field trip to visit four different farms in New York and western Mass.  We visited Roxbury Farm in Kinderhook, Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, and Camphill Village in Copake, NY.  For me, the highlight was the healing plant garden at Camphill...I'll definitely return there to learn more about it.  We spent the night at gorgeous Blueberry Hill Farm in Mt. Washington, Mass, where I felt like I was staying at a B&B.  The Austin family has owned this farm for generations and runs a pick-your-own operation in the summer.  There, we enjoyed a fantastic home-cooked meal and a bonfire;  in the morning, we woke up to snow on the ground!  But that didn't stop us from pruning their blueberry bushes before heading back home.

    Roxbury Farm         

Hawthorne Valley Farm     

   The healing plant garden at Camphill Village

Stirring the biodynamic preparations  

   Josh takes a break from blueberry pruning

           Snow on Blueberry Hill Farm  

The greenhouse is looking greener and greener all the time.  The alliums are tall and lush, and the lettuces already seem ready to eat.  Brassicas, including cabbage and kohlrabi, were seeded last week and are amazingly robust-appearing.  Happy April!

Early Spring Week-at-a-Glance

Monday

Let the sugaring begin!  One of our newest chore duties is collecting sap from the sugar maples on Maggie's Farm.  The sugar shack is located at Sentinel Elm, and between the two farms, about 100 trees have been tapped.  It takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, and so far we've made 15 gallons of deliciousness.


   Cheryl, Nathaniel and Reid at the evaporator

Full moon over Sentinel Elm   

Tuesday

Sonia, from the U. Mass Extension Service, gave us a most excellent lecture on small fruits - strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, grapes, and currants.  In the afternoon we finished planting onions and shallots in the greenhouse.  Our little friends are coming along...it now looks like a green mist has descended over the seed trays.

                              

Wednesday

                                   

The final push is on to finish clearing the fields in North Orange.  We spent the day felling trees, bucking, limbing, and splitting.  I tended the burn pile all day.  Warm and toasty.

Thursday

Sheep shearing day.  Sheep shearer Fred DePaul from Vermont led us through the task of shearing a sheep.  He's been doing this for 40 years, and certainly makes it look easy.  He can shear 90 sheep in 5 hours. At $7 a head, it seemed like a pretty sweet gig, until I nearly killed myself and my back shearing a single sheep.  It took each one of us 30-40 minutes to finish one sheep, just a little better than minimum wage.  Fred was a very, very, very patient teacher.

We used three different tools: an electric shearer, hand shearers, and a hand-cranked shearer.

 




Here's Fred shearing Junior, our ram.  It took him about 2 minutes!

                                       

Junior's beautiful fleece     

   Nothing like a good haircut!

Friday

We have been busy clearing a new field for the arrival of sixty pigs in April.  The name of this field?  Sixty Pigs, of course!  Today we began construction of little A-frame houses for them.  They're made of slab from the sawmill, and cut to size using a chainsaw.  I would live here, wouldn't you?

In the afternoon we visited Blue Ox Farm to prune their blueberry bushes.  This is a cool story.  The owners, Greg and Michael, bought this farm about ten years ago.  They looked at the property in the middle of winter when there was lots of snow on the ground.  In the spring, when the snow melted...voila!  Fifteen hundred blueberry bushes magically appeared.  They now have a pick-your-own operation; for every quart you take for yourself, you pick a quart for the farm, and no money exchanges hands.  The blueberries are sold by us as part of the CSA and farm market.  Michael also made us cookies.  They have to be the nicest people in the world.

     Sunset over the sugar shack