Blog
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
From Pangaea - with love
December 30, 2023
On the very last day of 2020 I found a quartz geode laying on top of a stone wall in our pig pasture. It's small – the exposed quartz is only about two square inches, but still, I'm not sure how I never noticed it before. I thought the pigs must have uncovered it, but there is lichen on it, so it's been exposed for a while.
It was likely formed 200 million years ago, when our farm (along with the rest of North America) was connected to the northwest coast of Africa as part of the
Guilty As Charged
December 22, 2023
“Mast” is defined as “the fruit of forest trees and shrubs” - in other words, nuts, pinecones, and seeds. “Masting” is the synchronized overproduction of that fruit. Every 3-5 years all the oak trees in a region will produce an overabundance of acorns. Pine trees have mast years every 7-10 years and 2023 is clearly one of those years! Masting is beneficial to trees as the intermittent over abundance means there are many more nuts or pinecones than the local squirrel population can possibly eat a
The Civility of Swine
December 15, 2023
For everything that is annoying about pigs (and the list is indeed very long) – they are surprisingly civilized with one another. They are rarely aggressive, and bullying has yet to ever be a problem for us. Introducing new pigs to an established group, like we did this week, can be as easy as just opening the trailer door. Of course, having plenty of food helps keep the peace with all our animals! Not exactly angels, the bigger pigs will always assert their right to eat the best food at the be
