Sunday, March 11, 2012

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



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!







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.




Saturday, March 3, 2012

March Madness

We're back!  And right to work in the greenhouse.  Being in the greenhouse is like being back on St. John...tropical. This week we planted onions and shallots, which will stay indoors for at least 2 months before being transplanted to the fields.  The plantings will come in waves over the next few months.  The seed tables are new, made with sturdy wire mesh stapled to wooden frames and mounted on cinder blocks.  They can be easily moved around if needed and completely broken down when not in use.

A new chore duty has been added: seed tray watering and ambient temperature monitoring.  Our growers are understandably nervous.  This is the beginning of the entire growing season, and we want our little seed friends to get a good, healthy start with ideal environmental conditions...soil, water, temperature, and air flow.  Each morning, noon, and evening, we'll record the greenhouse temp, and carefully check the seed trays for proper moisture content.