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Romancing the Roo

March 22, 2024

Our Shetlands are a breed of sheep known for being healthy, hardy, self-reliant and notoriously independent. They are considered one of the few “unimproved” breeds of sheep. This slightly insulting term refers to the fact that they still have many qualities that were bred out of other sheep.
Unlike the “improved” sheep breeds, our Shetlands still retain the original shades of black, brown and grey fleeces along with some very distinctive markings. Over the centuries, as the processing and

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Instant Joy

March 15, 2024

This morning, the sun came out, the wind paused, and a healthy lamb greeted us in the pasture. It was pure unadulterated joy. The first lamb of the season always brings a sweetness to life, and this year it was especially so with the stress of endless wind, rain, soggy pastures, and sick sheep. Indeed, lambing brings on a whole new set of stresses and heartache, but it feels balanced and natural, unlike what felt like the impending doom of climate change. The magic of lambing will never get

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Drifting

March 8, 2024

Our life is always busy but once maple sugaring starts, it speeds up exponentially. Right now, I feel a bit like a piece of driftwood floating downstream. I can’t see around the corner or hear the approaching rapids, but the pace is picking up and I know that lambing season is coming quickly.
We are still a few weeks away from having “lambs on the ground,” but in essence they are already with us. They might still be in utero but they’re here just the same. The last few weeks of a ewe’s

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Long Logs

March 1, 2024

We’ve been busy in the mushroom yard, rearranging to make room for and inoculating our new “long logs.” It always takes a bit of searching to find all the trees we want to use. They need to be accessible, retrievable, and just the right species. Like a houseful of kids at dinner time, each type of mushroom prefers a different kind of tree (of course). Given what trees make up our woods, the menu is indeed somewhat limited. Oyster mushrooms like maple trees. Chestnut mushrooms prefer birch. Shii

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Marcescence (and a blanket of snow)

February 16, 2024

There are few things on this planet as peaceful as walking in a New England forest after a snow storm. The sound deadening blanket covering the earth creates a blissful silence and is the perfect tonic for an overly noisy world. The welcomed hush is broken only by the gentle rustle of leaves stubbornly clinging to a few outlying trees.
Most deciduous trees drop their leaves as soon as the color fades in Autumn. But a few, like white oak and beech trees, are “marcescent” and hold on to their

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The First Few Weeks of Spring

February 9, 2024


We tapped our sugar maple trees this week and that to me is the moment that Spring officially begins. The sap will run for as long as the temperatures continue to freeze at night, and warm up during the day. It takes the tree about 6 weeks to close off the tap holes we drill. If the sap is still running at that point, we could redrill the holes but that seems a bit unfair. We’ll get what we can in the next six weeks and when the tree shuts us off, we’ll call it a season.

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Romancing Spring

February 2, 2024

The days are definitely getting longer, my friend, just as surely as the nights are that much shorter. The change might seem incremental, but it’ll soon pick up speed - it always does, have some faith.
In a few short weeks even our hens will know Spring is on the way, and they’ll start to lay again. The “pineal gland” in their brain monitors the amount of daylight and in the Fall, as the days get shorter, the gland triggers an uptick in melatonin which allows the hens to “rest and rejuvenate.

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Crossing Paths

January 26, 2024

Just as the sun came up, the snow stopped, and the wind moved on. It was so bitterly cold, though, the only hope of staying warm was to just keep moving - quickly. I wanted to check the fence line for any trees that might have come down in the storm, and I was indeed making great time. When I crossed the stream, though, a series of tracks caught my eye. Pleased to see that I wasn’t the only one out doing chores in the freezing cold, I paused for a while to look at the storyboard recorded in the

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Forty Days and Forty Nights

January 12, 2024

During the summer when the grass is growing, we move our sheep from one pasture to the next before they graze the grass too short. The sheep are constantly moving, and the grass is constantly growing. When the first pasture has fully recovered, we let them back in to graze it again. The process is called rotational grazing, and it works pretty well. During extended droughts and wintertime, we keep the sheep in one pasture until the grass begins to grow again. That pasture is traditionally calle

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Counting Peas

January 4, 2024

Our friends with culinary ties to the South made their annual pilgrimage to buy smoked pork jowl from our farm last week. The jowl is traditionally cooked with collard greens, black-eyed-peas and served with cornbread. All of which are believed to bring good luck and prosperity in the New Year. The meal served either at midnight, or on New Year’s Day, has many iterations across the South and very specific ingredients and traditions surrounding each variation. I can’t keep track of them all but t

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