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
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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!
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
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