Our new hoop house

I’ve been itching to build a hoop house for some time now. This spring I went to a permaculture demonstration on extending the season at David Homa’s impressive home and permaculture site. I based this small hoop house on his design and several of these small hoops that he had set up at his place. It’s not too complicated, cost around $100 in supplies, and took me exactly a day to construct, including digging out the sod to place the raised bed. We’re still sifting the compost to fill the bed, but hope to get some things planted and growing in the hoop in the next week or so, so we can plan on harvesting greens and some other hardy things well into the fall and winter.

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Agriculture, Garden Agriculture, extended garden season, Garden, hoop house

Our growing herd of dairy goats was definitely one of the main attractions for those stopping by on Saturday

It was an honor and a great pleasure to be included among the farms on this year’s Backyard Locavore tour, and Saturday was a perfect day to show folks around the homestead. After a week spent mowing and trimming and tidying up the place, Karl and I put out some chévre and, with the help of the Cooperative Extension Office’s excellent volunteers, took turns answering questions and leading people through our gardens, orchard, and root cellar/cheese cave/basement.

Eating locally, like so many of our major life changes, has snuck up on us: every year, the garden and poultry flocks expand, the goat herd multiplies, and I become a little more proficient at food preservation. And each year, as we weed and milk and can, we come a little closer to self-sufficiency. Showing visitors around gave us a chance to focus on what we’re doing right–instead of seeing all the projects we haven’t finished (raised asparagus beds, anyone?), we saw tomato vines leaning with heavy clusters of fruit, 100 heads of garlic curing in the root cellar, and pumpkins so big that our girls can’t lift them. The hens are laying, the broilers are fattening, and the ducks have added fallen apples and acorns to their diet. The homestead chugs along, and we are so so lucky to be along for the ride.

Master Gardener and Master Preserver Rae Belanger (and master-in-the-making Charlotte) answered everyone’s questions about jams and jellies.

Ten Apple Farm herb and smoked paprika chévre

Agriculture Backyard Locavore tour, cooperative extension office, Garden, locavore

Our duck house, waiting for repairs, and ducks.

A lot of people ask how we make a living as farmers. The answer is, we don’t. We farm or homestead as a lifestyle choice, to live closer to the source of our food supply, to live as sustainably as possible, to reduce our impact on the environment, to provide our girls with an educational and life experience that will teach them to appreciate the important things, at least as we see them.

We make our living in other ways, off the farm. Margaret writes, and I am the Director of the Aurora Photos photo agency. It’s a full-time-and-then-some job. Five days a week, I carpool into Portland from the farm, leaving usually a little before 8am and getting home around 6pm. Farming, for me takes place between the hours of 5am and 7:30am, and sometimes a little bit between 6-7pm. It’s not a lot of time, and in the spring, when there are projects galore, it is difficult to get anything beyond daily chores done until the weekend.

And so, the duck house (formerly our neighbor “Dumpster” Bill’s generator shed), which needs a new front door and ramp, has been sitting derelict and duckless (as the ducks outgrew their brooding box, and duck stink grew in the house, and now grows in the barn). Hopefully this weekend – a 3 day weekend! – will give me the time to get that door fixed, and get the ducks in. It’s the top priority this weekend – I don’t think the ducks, or our noses, can take another week of confinement and stink.

Agriculture, Farming duck house, Farming, part-time farming, work

Sorrel is one of the foods traditionally eaten at Shavuot.

Last night marked the beginning of the two day festival of Shavuot. Like so many Jewish holidays, Shavuot combines Biblical injunction with agricultural celebration: it is both the commemoration of the Revelation at Sinai, during which the Torah was given to the Jewish people, and it is the Festival of the First Fruits, during which the blessings of the first harvest of spring are celebrated. Traditionally, it is a time to rejoice in the many gifts of God–towards our spiritual and our physical sustenance. Homes and synagogues are decorated with branches and flowers; devout Jews stay up all night studying Torah; we eat foods made with milk and honey, both because of the abundance of dairy at this time of year, and because of a passage in the Song of Song: “Knowledge of the Torah is like milk and honey under the tongue.”

On our farm, the house is bedecked with fragrant lilacs and green branches we’ve cleared from the woods. Tonight, we’re making chévre blintzes drizzled with rhubarb sauce for a sweet supper (we’ll post photos and recipes tomorrow!). We’ve just planted sorrel in the garden, and if it looks leafy enough, we’ll harvest some to make schav borscht, a sour, vivid green soup enriched with eggs and sour cream and eaten cold. In our delight at every new leaf that emerges from our soil, we remember that we are blessed.

While looking for Shavuot craft ideas for our girls, I stumbled upon this passage, from Israel Kasovich’s out-of-print 1929 memoir, The Days of Our Years: Personal and General Reminiscence (1859-1929). His words inspire us at the holiday, connecting our homestead to millennia of Jewish farmers who’ve come before us. With them, Karl and I are proud to have our heads in the Torah and our hands in the earth.

Our first holiday on the farm was Shavuot. All around us was a sea of verdure and everything was in bloom. I told my children that this holiday commemorates the giving of the Torah to the children of Israel at Sinai–a Torah which teaches us to live in fair and brotherly terms with our fellowmen; and who could do this so well as the farmer with his unique mode of life? I described to them how our ancestors, the Jewish farmers of Palestine, used to go to Jerusalem for Shavuot, bearing the fairest fruits as offerings to the Temple; how the hills of Judea would resound with the sweet Hebrew songs of the brave, proud Jewish farmers; and how the priests and leading men of Jerusalem would come out to meet their brothers, whose labor fed the whole nation, and escort them with great pomp to the Temple. And I related to them how, when I was a little boy and went on the eve of Shavuot to other men’s fields to pluck some blades of grass and twigs with which to decorate our house for the holiday, gentile peasant boys threw stones and set their dogs at me. And now we were living in a free country among our own green fields and woods, and I was proud to hold our Torah in one hand and a plow in the other.

-Israel Kasovich

Agriculture, Family, Judaism Holiday, Israel Kasovich, Jewish, shavuot

Chansonetta and Joshua explore the dewy morn

In honor of the season and the wakening farm, I’ve been reading Janet Lembke’s beautiful translation of the Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. Written between 37 and 30 BC, the poem is both a celebration of the natural world and a treatise on farming. It’s lovely and lyrical, and has been bringing a thoughtful quiet to the end of my day. Surprisingly, much of its practical advice is also relevant (though I have no idea what arbutus leaves are…).

Some instructions on goat keeping from Book Three:

Agriculture, Goats, Poems Agriculture, Farming, Goats, poetry, Virgil

Our crop mob at work: Trusty farm sitters (and weeders) Matt and Kelsey, and Harry Johnson in the background attacking dandelions.

It was a beautiful weekend — almost all of which we spent in the garden, planting the majority of things that we were hoping to get in. We couldn’t have done it without the amazing help we got from a handful of volunteers, who, in exchange for a lunch of fresh bread and fresh chevre (and the promise of potatoes in the fall), lent us their backs, their muscle and their sweat. The highlight of Saturday was Harry and Matt pulling a huge boulder from the garden… I just hope they don’t require that rock’s weight in potatoes as payment. It would take our entire crop.

In any case, it’s days like this that remind you of the blessings that farming brings into our lives, in friendship, community, good hard labor, and the promise of its reward.

Bea, just in from the sprinkler, inspects the boulder

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Agriculture, Farming, Garden

Charlotte does her patriotic duty and plants peas on (the day before) Patriots’ Day

After a couple days of rain (and snow!), the weather cleared enough for us to finally spend a little time in the garden yesterday. Margaret had already cleared a couple rows for onions and shallots, but today’s purpose was peas. Today is Patriots’ Day in New England, and as described in this article by MOFGA Executive Director, Russell Libby it is traditionally the day that many Maine farmers and gardeners use to plant their peas. In doing so, they’re sure to have peas by the Fourth of July. (Of course, depending on the variety, you could have them even sooner.)

We planted 3 short rows to start, with plans to stagger plantings later to ensure peas all through the summer and hopefully fall, as well. We had some shell peas and snow peas leftover from last year that we finished off (about a row and a half’s worth), and for the rest we planted Sugar Ann Snap Peas that we ordered from John Scheeper’s Kitchen Garden Seeds. Before the skies opened up again in the late afternoon, we also got our shallots in, including an experiment, trying to replant a handful of last year’s harvest that were still hanging around in the kitchen. Stay tuned to find out if they come up.

Agriculture, Farming, Garden

The remainder of last year's seeds, organized and evaluated

In between trips out to the barn to check on Toka, we’ve been trying to get organized for spring. One big task is planning the garden and what we will be planting this spring. We try to grow as much as possible from seed, as opposed to seedlings, although we always end up grabbing a seedling or two at the farmer’s market or farm store if there’s something that just didn’t start off well, or something we didn’t think of earlier that looks particularly good or interesting.

This year we’re ordering our seeds from two sources: Fedco and John Scheeper’s Kitchen Garden Seeds. Below is the list of what we’ll be planting. This list doesn’t include the seeds we’ve still got from last year (mostly squashes and greens) or our potato selection. We like to visit the Fedco tree sale in person in the spring to collect our saplings and pick out our seed potatoes, and that’s the plan this year. Last year we planted several rows of potatoes with the last wrinkled potatoes remaining in our root cellar, and had very good results, but because of last year’s blight, we want to start this year with a clean batch of seed potatoes.

This year we’re trying to experiment with companion planting, and we’ve added an abundance of flowers to the vegetable patch. We’d love to hear from you, what you’ll be growing this year, and any thoughts (or tips) you have about what’s in our garden.

FEDCO

Multicolored Pole Bean Mix
Beer Friend Soybean
Spring Treat Yellow Sweet Corn
Halona Muskmelon
de Bourbonne Pickling Cucumber
Amsterdam #2 Carrot
Scarlet Nantes Carrot
Red Cored Chantenay Carrot
Danvers Carrot
Purple Haze Carrot
Harris Model Parsnip
Lincoln Leek
Arugula
Shuko Pac Choi
Broccoli Blend
Pingtung Long Eggplant
New Ace Sweet Pepper
Flavorburst Sweet Pepper
Heirloom Tomato Mix OG
Jewel Mix Nasturtium

JOHN SCHEEPERS KITCHEN GARDEN SEEDS

Hero French-Crested Marigold Mixture
Royal Russell Lupine Mixture
The Irresistible Cutting Flower Garden
Gourmet Rainbow Radish Mixture
Sugar Ann Snap Peas
Touchstone Golden Beets
One Kilo Chinese Cabbage
Totem Belgian Endive

Agriculture, Garden Garden, planning, potatoes, seeds

When we moved into our homestead, there were ten ancient apple trees scattered around the property: one near the barn, one near the garden, two at a gap in the stone wall that marks the entrance to the orchard, and six farther down, neatly arranged in parallel rows. Most of the apples are relatively pedestrian varieties like Red and Golden Delicious, but we do have a couple that are more interesting, like a Tolman Sweet, and some baking apples that we haven’t yet identified. Since moving in, we’ve pruned the trees, cleared the orchard, and added two hives of bees. The bees didn’t last the winter and heavy rains knocked off most of the blossoms this spring, but even so, each fall we bring up baskets of fruit for sauce and pie and the trees provide a ready snack on our way to hikes in the woods.

For Valentine’s Day this year, Karl and I bought each other one Reliance peach and one Montmorency cherry sapling, which we planted in the front yard. Ever since, I’ve been lobbying for some pears and a couple more apples. We’ve been held back by two things: the deer that come up from the woods and nibble the branches all winter, and our farm name, Ten Apple. Imagine my surprise and delight when we found, dangling like ornaments in a half-cleared thicket behind the paddock, the apples of an eleventh tree! Its trunk was gnarled, and many branches were dead, but there it was, peeking out from between the blackberries and sumac. The spell is broken! (Though I still don’t know how we’ll keep the deer at bay.) It’s another Red Delicious, but never fear, the Fedco tree catalog is open on my desk and I’ve started my wish list.

Agriculture, Events, Food, Workshops apples, trees, workshop

Victory! After an agonizing month of turkey pen electrification and nightly duck confinement, we spent today processing the summer poultry. We raised six Broad Breasted Bronze turkeys and thirteen heritage Rouen ducks this year–they’re all in the freezer and the fox got none. Since spotting the fox, we’ve been on constant vigil, worried each night that some carelessness would leave him an opening. But we won! The roasts are ours!

Agriculture, poultry