Memorial Day Plant Sale
We have hundreds of vegetable seedlings ready for planting in your home garden. Tomatoes, Eggplant, Peppers and Cucumbers $2.00 each, or $20/dozen. Mix and Match.

 

Apple of My Eye

When Linda and I first bought this old homestead three years ago, the old apple orchard immediately caught my attention. So covered was it with multiflora rose, bittersweet and poison ivy that we couldn't even count how many trees there were. They had grown to nearly 40 feet - far too high to harvest - and were filled with dead wood and broken branches. We called  Linda's childhood friends in western NY state for advice - people who run one of the largest orchards and cold storage facilities in the state - and they firmly advised us to cut everything down and start over. But when we unearthed the first air photos of Connecticut from 1934 and could clearly see the orchard in the image, we vowed to bring it back to life.

At first we simply removed the weeds, established a meadow understory where we grazed the sheep, and planted a handful of cherries to fill in the grid. Today we took next next major revitalization effort with the first hard pruning the orchard's had in perhaps 25 years. The trees look a bit like a scene from a horror movie but over the next several years we'll shape and sculpt them into a productive organic fruit orchard. For now, we're content to see that birds are already building nests in them and eating bugs, aiding in our pest control strategy. Our souls are also at peace with the realization that our children, and very likely their children, will walk into the back yard someday and pick fruit growing on trees planted by someone eighty years ago.

Easter Dinner

We have a great selection for your Easter dinner and are taking orders.
Smoked hams - 4 to 5 pounds each, $12/lb
Leg of lamb, about 4 lbs, $10/lb
Loin, Boston Butt and Shoulder pork roasts, $10 to $11/lb
as well as smoked bacon, chops, sausage etc.

Call or email to reserve yours.

CSA info

Sounds of Spring

The plink, plink of maple sap dripping into buckets and the bleating of baby lambs calling their mother are two unmistakable auditory clues that spring is around the corner. We hear both on the farm now, with our first two lambs born this week and our sap buckets slowly filling.

Soon we'll hear spring peepers and  smell the fresh scent of the earth as we cut our first furrows. For now, we'll rejoice in the miracle of birth, glad that our girls can experience the excitement of seeing a new life begin, as they drink chilled sap. These are the intangible rewards, which don't appear on a balance sheet, that remind us why we chose to live this life. We are all the richer for it.

Pig out

Fresh pork available next week. Call or email for a price list and cut sheet. Also fresh eggs daily.

Pickings, November 14th

The fields are silent now, resting for the winter, with a healthy cover crop growing to maintain and enrich the soil. We spent a bit of time this week cleaning up after the storm, burning some brush to add potash back into the soil, taking down a beautiful elm which fell victim to the damned Dutch Elm Disease, planting a handful of extra garlic, mulching here and there, and installing a new water line to the barn. Although the To-Do list is still endless, it  is much shorter now, coinciding with the shorter days of fall and the quieter pace is a welcome relief to the non-stop work of long summer days. Still, we spent several evenings reading by headlamp during the blackout  - seed catalogs, a great little book - The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball, a Harvard-educated, NY professional turned farmer (sound familiar?)  who writes about her life on a CSA in the Adirondacks, and Rachel Carson's first book, Under the Sea Wind which has nothing to do with farming, but is a great read anyway.

On the livestock front, we processed our fall batch of broilers last week. These free-range birds were here a bit longer than we hoped but they're exquisitely tender, utterly delicious and BIG. We have a few dozen still available, ranging from 4 to just about 7 pounds. We roasted  one of the largest on Saturday and it fed us for three nights (with a few chicken sandwich lunches to boot). They are USDA certified, processed right here in New Milford, and available for $5.00 per pound frozen; please email to reserve them as they are selling fast and we won't have more until spring.

Best,
Nick, Linda and the girls.