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

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. 

Stephen, Tyson, and the students work diligently

 

                         

                 Happiness is a warm greenhouse!    

Chicken Love, Virgin Islands-style

Many farmers in the US order baby chicks through the mail, and they're picked up at the local post office when they're a day old.  In the Virgin Islands, their chicks arrive the old-fashioned way.

February Break

We are officially on a three-week break until the end of February.  Some of my fellow classmates have headed to Italy to work on an organic farm in Tuscany (http://www.spannocchia.com/index.cfm).  Others are doing mini-internships or using the time for reading and studying.  I'm doing a combination, and not ashamed to admit that I'm sleeping in a little, too.

I've really wanted to work on basic carpentry skills, so for a few days, I rebuilt a set of rickety stairs in the upper barn with Josh Pincus.  Stairs are pretty straightforward to make, but can include some tricky math calculations involving rise and run.  These stairs will also have to be detachable so that the wagon can fit in the barn for loading and unloading hay.  We sat down, and with the help of Josh's expertise, some instructions I found online and a cool YouTube video on using stair gauges, designed our stairs.  Josh kept an eye on me for awhile, then set me loose to work on my own.  I cut all the stringers and treads, sanded, and put it all together.  Never in a million years did I think that I could do something like this.  Where did I get that idea, anyway?

         Before

After     

I've discovered that using a circular saw definitely appeals to my meticulous nature.  Now I'm on a roll!  Here's the plan for the next stair project, which I'll build sometime in March:

I also helped out with chores for a few days.  Caring for the cows, sheep and chickens on your own is a lesson in what it's like to look after livestock on your own farm.  We've been feeding a mixture of beet pulp, apple cider vinegar, aloe, and garlic to the pregnant ewes to provide them with vitamins, probiotics, and anti-microbials, and it's a little like sheep crack cocaine.  They go nuts for it.  I experienced a sheep stampede, which isn't dangerous, but must be seriously hilarious to watch.

This weekend I headed to Burlington for the Northeast Organic Farmers Association conference, which was excellent.  And tomorrow, for no purpose other than good, clean fun, I travel to the Virgin Islands for ten days.  I'm trading my Carhartts for a bathing suit, if just for a short time!  See you in March, when the serious business of the growing season begins.

Chicken Love

In the spirit of learning or doing something new just about every day, I decided to enter a cake decorating contest.  Up to this point in my life, cake decorating has meant popping open a can of Betty Crocker Ready-To-Spread Frosting and applying it to the cake made with Betty Crocker Cake Mix.  No kidding.  But the new Liz bakes from scratch and makes her own frosting.  At least for this little affair.

My friend Ken Johnston was the creator and organizer of the first annual Holyoke Winter Carnival, which took place last week and featured a schedule full of really fun events like a dog show, chili cook-off, spaghetti dinner, a hockey game between the fire and the sheriff's departments, Zydeco music, a pancake breakfast, and, you guessed it, a cake decorating contest.  By the way, if you ever want to organize a wildly successful community event on a shoestring budget against all odds, Ken is your man.

Here's a little background which will help explain the idea I came up with for the cake.  Several years ago, two Holyoke city councilors introduced an ordinance to allow backyard chickens.  Unfortunately, it was controversial and failed miserably.  Fast forward to this year's mayoral election, when Holyoke's new mayor, Alex Morse, ran on a platform promoting unity and all-inclusiveness.  One of his campaign slogans was "I Am Holyoke."  Thus was born the City-Hall-Backyard-Chicken-All-Inclusive Cake.  After all, chickens are people too, right?

   Amateur night at the cake contest

My friend Stephen, Farm School faculty member and vegetable grower extraordinaire, was my co-creator.  Here's the crazy thing: we won!  Best Holyoke-inspired cake and best overall!  The competition was an amazing array of fondant-covered, gorgeous, professionally done works of culinary art, but were no match for the chickens of downtown Holyoke.  We even got our picture taken and were interviewed by the Springfield newspaper.  Oh Hallelujah fifteen minutes of fame!

Article: Bakers Take the Cake at Holyoke Winter Carnival

The Starrett Company

Eons ago, or what seems like it, I mentioned that the L.S. Starrett Company was one of the few remaining factories in the greater metropolitan Athol area.  This week, we were lucky enough to get to tour this facility.  Starrett makes precision tools for machinists and tool and die makers...things like micrometers, calipers, gages, squares, and bandsaw blades.  Laroy Sunderland Starrett, the company's founder, was originally a farmer (!) in Newburyport, Massachusetts.  He is the inventor of the combination square, and if you've done any carpentry work, you know how very, very handy it is.  We weren't allowed to take photos inside...apparently some top secret stuff happens here.  I took a few pics in the factory museum (no worries...all on the up-and-up) which give you a sense of the products they make.

Every day, I drive past these buildings on my way to the farm.  I had no idea how extensive it was!  Here's a cool old drawing I found on Wikipedia:

 

Seems like we walked for miles and miles on our tour.  It's hard to give you an idea of how enormous this factory is; it spans both sides of the Millers River and must be in the tens of thousands of square feet.  Each area contains pieces of machinery that perform very specific tasks, with an operator sitting at each station. It's loud and smells like machine oil.  There's an old-fashioned-sounding bell that goes off for break time.

It's interesting that this company has survived and thrived when many others have not, and there are some good reasons for this.  They're diversified and have factories in other US cities, Brazil and China.  They have a specialized niche and a reputation for quality and innovation.  All the same, they've kept their world headquarters in Athol.

The museum was fascinating.  The system of belts ran the factory machines back in 1800's.

                                        

  

 It was nice to get back outside.  But I think all that machine oil went to our heads.

Slow Down Your Travels

The days are getting noticeably longer.  I don't really pay attention for a few days, then miracle of miracles: we're doing chores at 5 pm and don't have to wear headlamps to see the cows.  I can't recall having enjoyed the winter quite so much in the past.  I'm finding that if I dress warmly enough and keep active, the cold doesn't bother me too much.  Sunshine, fresh air, and physical exertion in January are most definitely the antidotes to the winter blues.  I admit that it's also been unseasonably, weirdly warm (45 degrees and sunny today), which also helps even though I'm not a big fan of climate change.

In addition to business and crop planning classes, this week we visited Ron Mott, of Mott Iron Works, for welding lessons.  Welding is a good skill to have if you decide that you want to repair your own farm equipment, or even if you're just interested in using an incredibly hot torch to melt pieces of metal together wearing a cool helmet.  Ron is a second-generation fabricator and does mostly custom ornamental work throughout New England.  Check out his portfolio - he's amazing: http://www.mottironworks.com/index.html  He lives with his family in North Orange, not even 2 miles from the school!  What a great resource for us to have.  Oh, and he's also a really nice guy and a good teacher.

Here you can see what "laying down a welding bead" looks like when newbies practice.  Ron assured us that we did a good job.  See...nice guy. 

                                          

His best advice?  When laying down a bead, take your time and go slow to make sure you get a good weld. He would frequently tell us, "Slow down your travels."  Excellent advice, Ron Mott.  Excellent advice.

Here's a photo of Ron's studio.  The wood structures are molds for iron railings.

From left, in disguise: Theo, Grace, Keith, Jason, Liz.  May the force be with you.

Readying for Spring

The North Orange fields are getting a makeover.  Trees and brush have been slowly encroaching on the open spaces, limiting the sun exposure and good airflow that are so important for the healthy growth of vegetable crops.  Our growers, Stephen and Tyson, are ecstatic about this project.  We've spent many a January day felling trees, cutting and burning brush, and bucking and splitting firewood.  The beautiful stone walls that line the fields, ubiquitous in New England, are starting to reveal themselves in a big way.

This type of maintenance work is constant; in a few more years the process will have to be repeated.  Good news for future student farmers...lots of chainsaw and wood splitting practice!

                

I'm happy to report that I've successfully learned how to split firewood.  Nothing beats the right axe and a few good teachers.