Working in high gear

In the small, everyday conversations of life at this time of year, lots of people ask each other, "How's your spring going?" and this year more so than ever before I find myself honestly responding with "Really busy.  And really good."  This is our third year growing for our winter CSA members, and the first year that, when it has come time to plant onions, that I've been excited to do it and then excited while doing, and not pestering myself over the questions like:  How did we do this last year?  Was it right or wrong then?  What should I change?  What should I do the same? Am I forgetting anything?

We grew over fifteen thousand onion, leek and shallot seedlings in the greenhouse and, over the course of last Thursday and Friday, planted all of them.  The weather was perfect: cloudy, with occasional precipitation and a nice little downpour at the end, and the planting operation was essentially seamless.  Seth and I dunked each flat of seedlings in fish emulsion water before loading them into the truck; Seth shuttled them out to the field as needed, one or two people stayed busy pulling the seedlings out of their tray and separating them, and most of us spent hours on end digging small holes with one hand (right, for me), tucking in an onion with the other (left), and patting the soil back around it with the first (right).  Fifteen thousand onions in one and a half days of work is not bad, and just as good was doing such satisfying work in such above-average company.  The usual suspects (the farm owners) all participated, Tyler only occasionally when he wasn't busy spreading two semi-truck loads of chicken manure over the back hayfields before the wet weather came, and we got to experience the stamina and conversation of our two apprentices, Miriam and Mark, and our good friend Graham.  Nonnie-Chris spent time making life interesting for little Ada, and that made it all possible.  Thank you, all of you.

 

On the dairy side of the operation, we have calves coming out our ears.  Five calves have been born in the last three weeks, two girls and three boys, and all are doing well--I think the only definitively named ones are the first two, Daisy and Carlos, who are both half Canadian Jersey and half Devon.  Tyler delivered his first breech calf out of Regan, and the momma is currently being treated with antibiotics for what we believe to be a uterine infection.  Elsie has made the first two milk deliveries of the year over to Jessie at Fuzzy Udder Creamery AND we have recently started eating the gouda that Elsie and Tyler made last fall when Jessie was done cheese-ing but we still had more milk than we knew what to do with.  It is amazing, delicious, creamy, dense...I am imagining cutting a thick wedge for each of you.  We are off and running again in cow world!

Another major part of this time of year, working backwards, are those little baby fruit trees we talked about last time.  Those grafted trees are now planted in long straight rows just a few feet away from the onion patch.  That was an epic project as well, in true Seth fashion--after thinking about how long it would take to plant the eight thousand fruit trees we needed to this spring, Seth decided we'd need a tractor drawn tree-planter.   After thinking about how long it would take to design, build and tweak one from scratch, we decided to import one from Damcon, in the Netherlands.  After it arrived (in the nick of time) we discovered our tractor couldn't drive slow enough for a person to pop the trees in at the desired spacing AND the part that opens a furrow in the soil was unnecessarily wide to the point that it was bogging the tractor down and digging in too deep.  So, naturally, Seth up and welded a new shoe and sweet talked the neighbor into lending us his 20-hp hydrostatic transmission (aka really really slow) Kubota lawn tractor.  And in a few short days, those little trees were out of the sawdust and into the soil.

 Over the last week or two, thinking about an upcoming blog post, I have been realizing that the nature of farming could lead to a rather boring blog for the same reason that I love farming as work and life: the same things happen every year.  Over and over again.  The weather changes, and sometimes the field or the people or the exact varieties of plants and trees and cows, but the more we refine what we do, I think the more repetitive this blog will become.  Sure, the tree planter is a new development and hopefully by next year I'll be able to show you pictures of a barn with new windows and siding, but the reality of the natural world reigns over all.  I basically give you the farmer's picture of the seasons.  Enjoy!

 

Grafting tutorial and more

Someday, when I create a farm calendar, the months will be: January, February, March, Apple, May, etc...and happily, as of today, bench grafting of apples (and some minor amounts of other fruit trees) is complete.  Below you will find Elsie's photo tutorial of how to make a whip-and-tongue graft.  First, you practice by making hundreds of slices to hundreds of scrap twigs until you can produce the perfectly angled, oriented, and flattened cut with a single-bevel grafting knife.

Then you make these cuts on two identical thickness pieces of wood: one side is the rootstock, which is a baby tree that you've lopped off about eight inches tall, and the other is the scion wood, a two-inch section of a young branch from a desirable variety.  That's the "whip" part.

Then you cut matching slits into each piece of wood, slits that go parallel to length of the scion and rootstock.  You push them together, with their "tongues" interlocked.  I guess you could say they're French-kissing.

Then you bind them together with parafilm grafting tape, and hope for the best!

Our greenhouse is rocking out, and getting ready to have another similar-sized one constructed right next door.  The spinach I was hoping to would supply our needs turned out to be a little too copious, and we've been selling it off the farm to much acclaim.  You may have seen it if you've been shopping or eating at the Belfast Co-op, Fresh off the Farm, the Natural Living Center, or Shepherd's Pie.

Yum

Newly seeded alliums

Alliums are up!

Fresh new wood on the barn, now covered up with typar, awaiting new windows, trim, and cedar shingling.

April showers, check.

The fury of spring, days longer than nights, warmer weather, and awakening earth are all upon us.  Right now you can assume that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of new blogging about the farm and the amount of new projects on the farm.

Our new apprentices, Miriam and Mark, are also journeypeople through MOFGA's journeyperson program, which basically means they are serious farmers-in-training and have spent many years working on farms already.  It has been an absolute pleasure and boost to the workforce to have their strong arms and minds join our crew.

Currently, Seth is heading up the bench-grafting of 200-300 apple trees a day towards a goal of 4000 bench-grafted trees in by April 12, 2013.  The mudroom/CSA room has been transformed into grafting central and our utility-pantry room has become the "healing in" room where baby trees stay warm and protected while the graft union callouses over and begins to grow.

The barn is being given a serious examination and every bit of rot is being amended in some way.  The windows and doors have all been removed and will be replaced with brand new ones, and the day is not far off when cedar shingle siding will start going on those barn walls.

In the world of livestock, the pigs staged a mutiny after living in their freezing mud-filled quonset hut one cold rainstorm too long and Elsie showed up to evening chores a couple weeks ago to find them burrowed under and around a round bale of hay inside the barn.  Coincidentally, we had been wondering how we would move them into the barn, so it was kind of a relief they moved themselves.  But soon they'll have to go back outside since a barn can't have pigs while cows are being milked in it, and the cows are due this month to start calving out, starting first with two Anguses and followed up by the Devons and Jerseys.  All cows except the yearlings are back on the home front as of yesterday in a paddock outside the barn, eating hay and tapping their hooves while they wait for the grass to grow again.

Here are the week's photos:

Filling the soil-blocker...

Stamping out blocks,

Filling blocks with seeds.

Early summer squash experiment.

Moving pigs from temporary to long-term barn enclosures using the well-known "wheelbarrow method."

March-ing on

It looks like winter may be going out with a bang (or plop) this year, with Winter Storm Ukko predicted to bring us 8-12 inches of snow over the next couple of days.  We have just a few residual patches of snow at this point, but they haven't shrunk over the last week since temps have stayed pretty solidly below freezing.  Now they'll get some moral support from the big drifts coming in...

Elsie and Tyler got a new camera and can now contribute to farm photography.  Here are some from Elsie's first set:

May and April

These girls are waiting patiently for work and fresh pasture, chomping on hay and looking plush in their furry coats.

de-luscious spinach feeding us in the greenhouse

 One of our projects for this year will be to put up a second greenhouse so that we can grow more winter greens.  Right now, the spinach plantings we had harvested from for the winter CSA have grown back and we are eating mountains of it.  I've found it's especially good wilted in hot bacon grease with the bacon crumbled on top, along with a drizzle of really good balsamic and some toasted pecans.  Mmmmm.

Tyler demo-ing on the barn

 Another project for this year will be finishing the barn--it needs replacements for some sills and studs that have started rotting, then new windows, then cedar shingle siding.  Tyler's gotten started by ripping off the boards to expose the rotten spots.

Allium babies

 I think I've made it through my annual week-long held breath between when we plant the first seeds and when they start to emerge, when my background train of thought is going "(am I really a farmer?  what if those seeds don't grow?  what if we fail?  I don't think they're going to come up!  are they too wet or too dry?  was the seed good?  what will we do?  aaaaaaah...)" Strangely enough, those seeds sprout up every year without fail.  But that's no reason not to stress out about it!

Bulk grain!  Yes!

Grain Bin, Up!

The four-ton silo went up on a snowy day last week with help from family and friends.  Luckily, it doesn't actually weigh four tons, but it does hold that much grain.  We're due to get our first delivery of grain in the next couple of weeks.

Graham-Ada-Elsie-Tyler-Gilbert-Jonathan-Seth

Seth with the wrench on the inside...

...and Tyler with another wrench on the outside, tightening bolts.

Our clan has had a bit of a temporary out-migration; at the moment, about half of us are away on trips to Nicaragua, Alabama, the Snow Row, and a spinner's retreat.  Lucretia and Oai are holding down the fort on Stovepipe Alley and making phở while Tyler and Elsie keep critters fed on the Stream Rd.  And I'm keeping my little one fed, snug and warm at home but with many adventures planned for the next couple days.

Also in the news for the week:
Fauna update:  We've sold our lovely, hungry, escapist flock of sheep off to some farmers on Isleboro.  The sheep have been on the market for a while now, but with spring and green grass in the foreseeable future we finally had some takers.  We may get into sheep again at some point, but focusing on the dairy and relieving the pressures of almost daily fence-moving duties seemed like a good move for the time being.

Flora update: We set up the seedling greenhouse and planted our first seeds this week; one thousand shallot seeds and 1500 leek seeds are now waiting on some sun and light to get them up out of the soil.  We're also enjoying spinach and cilantro out of the greenhouse, along with the ability to dig in real brown thawed ground.

And coming up next! Tomorrow we'll be at the Belfast Community Supported Agriculture and Fisheries Fair at the Belfast Boathouse, from 1pm-3pm.  Come see us and buy our eggs and salami!  

Februa(g)r(a)y

Uploading photos from my camera today, I noticed the color theme was overwhelmingly gray, which seems to be oftentimes what February is like in these years of climate change.  I hear tell that this part of Maine used to be white clear into April, but not so in the few short years since I landed here.   We go on trying to check things off our lists and look forward to forecasts of snow (a meager 1-3 inches are due here in the next 24 hours).

With March just around the corner, we are getting our seedling greenhouse set up in order to start thousands of leeks, onions and shallots.  Ada's here with me as I type, and has been an amazing young person to be around--she turned two and a half yesterday and I could brag on her endlessly.  But really, you should just come visit us and see for yourself.  I think that, all in all, we're gearing up for an exciting, productive, and thoughtful year of growing both in our farm enterprise and in our whole-farm picture.  We're hiring someone to help us plan a layout for many of the possible future infrastructure components on the farm, and we're dedicating more of our resources towards soil and forest improvement.

Here are a few photos from around the farm:

Seth next to the 4-ton capacity grain bin

Aged Brussels sprouts standing strong, but not that palatable, in the field

The nursery trees, dormant and waiting for another summer of grafting and growing.

Farm equipment also lies dormant at all scales

A glimpse of spring arrived from North Carolina by post!

New Lunar Year

Yesterday we had a farm meeting with the four of us farmers--Tyler, Elsie, Seth and I--where it was brought up once again that the North Branch Farm blog has been neglected.  We're going to try to get back on track.  One picture for each month since the last post:

Lettuce, mache, pac choi and spinach in our unheated winter greenhouse (November)

Pork sausages hung in the smokehouse: andouille, bratwurst, hot italian, chorizo, and Seth's "liver perfection medley"

Yukon and Ada in a snow cave after last weekend's nor'easter (Nemo?)

We've had all kinds of adventures in the last few months.   In the bovine realm, Tyler and Elsie started drying off the dairy herd in mid-December, which took a couple of weeks, but the humans and cows have had a break from lactational work for the last month and a half.  The cows aren't due to calf out until late May or June, but at that point we'll have 6 or more little calves running about and we'll be swimming in milk once again.

Our herd of Coopworth and Romney sheep are wintering over in the barn and are due for their little ones in April.  We had a hard lambing season last time around, so we're hoping for more and healthier lambs this year out of our eleven ewes.

The seven piglets that were born last fall are four months old now and doing great, living off of a lot of rotten squash and other culled vegetables in addition to their daily grain rations.  They do eat a lot of grain though, and--forseeing their appetite and all the other hungry animals on the farm--we are in the midst of assembling and installing a 4.2 ton-capacity grain silo so that we can get regular deliveries of bulk pelleted organic grain from Maine Organic Milling Cooperative in Auburn, ME.  We're quite excited about supporting this relatively new cooperative business, reducing the amount of packaging coming onto the farm, and getting a better price for high quality feed for our critters.  We're also hoping we can resell grain to folks in our neighborhood who want to buy organic grain without all that packaging but who don't have their own grain bin.

The vegetable operation seems to have been a rollicking success, and it feels like we've just passed a natural "new year" in that area.  Our winter vegetable CSA had its last pick-up on February 7th, and I ordered seeds for this years' vegetables the very next day.  We still have a fair amount of vegetables lingering in the basement--especially rutabaga and celeriac--which we could sell, but most of it we'll eat ourselves until we can start harvesting fresh food out of the greenhouse and the garden again.  We ended up our CSA season with 51 members (our goal was 50), and my most heartfelt thanks go out to all of them.  We also sold to numerous other venues, including Crown o' Maine Organic Cooperative, the Natural Living Center in Bangor, the Ampersand Store in Orono, the Belfast Co-op, Fresh off the Farm in Rockport, and to restaurants including The Lost Kitchen, Francine Bistro, Shepherd's Pie, Natalie's, Waterfront, and Fresh.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, for purchasing and eating seasonal, organic, delicious produce!  Your body thanks you too.

Coming right around the corner is the beginning of the fruit tree season.  After sending a few thousand trees off to the Fedco Trees warehouse last November, things have pretty much been on hiatus in tree world.  But!  Pruning time is now, and not long after that is bench grafting season (late March-early April) and not long after that is tree planting time!  One goal for this year is to have a tractor-drawn tree-planter to save our backs and our time.  Nothing like a little metal fabrication project with a fast-approaching deadline to really make you feel crazy.

I think that's the news.  Enjoy, and stay warm.