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.

North Branch Farm Stand, Thanksgiving Edition

I'm here with a shameless marketing ploy, so I hope those of you far away can see it as news of the farm, and those of you close by can spread the word!  Here goes...

Why go to the supermarket when you could come to North Branch Farm?  Our farm stand is open now through Wednesday, November 21, so come on over for a turkey and everything to keep it company on the Thanksgiving table!

Find us at 122 Stream Road in Monroe for winter squash, onions, garlic, cabbage, carrots, leeks, herbs, Fuzzy Udder Creamery cheeses made with our milk, locally grown and freshly milled oats, and dry beans in six varieties!  Turkeys grown organically by Lucretia and Oai on Stovepipe Alley are available by pre-order, as are apple, pumpkin and blueberry pies (fresh, or frozen for travel!) baked by Elsie.  Also available by pre-order or by luck: licensed raw milk and cream from our heritage Devon cows, 10 lb boxes of frozen organic wild blueberries from Montville and 14 oz bags of frozen organic cranberries from Ellsworth.

Open daily on the honor system from 6:30am-8pm.  Call Five-two-five-3323 or email northbranchfarm(dot)monroe(at)gmail(dot)com with questions or to pre-order.  Pre-orders should be in by noon on Tuesday.  Thanks, and enjoy!

Piglets on their second day, born three weeks ago

The Yentes-Quinn house, only a day or so away from being fully shingled!

Over 2000 trees and fruiting plants were dug and sent to the Fedco Trees warehouse last week!

The Shapley-Quinn/Gilbert/Apprentice Cabin on its way to livability

First Frost, Etc.

We've had some blazingly brilliant days and cool nights here on the farm, with our first light, patchy frost just a week ago.  Fall is a time I am both excited and relieved by every year, and I'm glad to see it's here again.  Just in time to save us from our ridiculously prolific tomatoes!  Late blight and frost pulled the old one-two on those solanums, and now all that's left are some fat brandywines slowly going soft on the windowsill.

North Branch Farm is in a bit of a frost pocket, so when the weather forecast for Monroe says the night will be clear and 42 degrees or lower, we assume we'll get a touch of frost.  And if there's anything winter squash doesn't like, it's just that.  Last Sunday, we harvested our entire squash crop--about two-thirds of an acre--in a day.

Crates of Red Kuri in the field

The last of three wagonloads of squash

Half of our harvest crew: Seth, Kirsten, Willie, Clayton, Timmy, and Katya

Last week we also opened our North Branch Farm stand, right in front of the farm, where we sell all our standard fall crops along with some leafy greens and fresh herbs and any other home garden items we have in surplus.  In a month from now, we'll be selling at two farmers' markets--the Bangor European Market, Saturday 9:30-1 on Buck St; and the Ellsworth Woodlawn Market, from 11-2 on Sundays, so we've been gearing up for that as well.  We hope to see some of you there!

August's Closing Shop

Time flies when you're working hard...sometimes you forget to eat lunch, or pee, or even (astonishingly) write a blog entry.  But the farm is still here, and thriving on the whole.  We are deeply grateful to Kerstin and Katya, our apprentices this season, for the many hours of hard labor they have put in on the farm.

Before I go farther, I want to formally invite all blog readers to our annual pig roast, co-hosted at our place by North Branch, Artisan Builders, and First Light Community Midwives.  It is on Saturday, September 8th at 3 pm and it is a potluck (don't bring pork) family-friendly event, with hay rides, music, and fun.  We hope many of you can make it, and feel free to contact us here or on our facebook page if you need more details.

We are actually coming to the end of an interesting time in the vegetables and fruits right now, when we mainly watch, wait, weed, and water.  This slight grace period in the cultivated crops coincides beautifully with hay-making, and when that’s not going on we have endless lists to fill the time between morning and evening milkings.  We’ve moved firewood, worked on building a small cabin, frozen green beans, made sauerkraut, canned salsa, bud-grafted 4000 fruit trees, fenced in tens of acres of new pasture, treated mastitis infections, hosted an ultimate frisbee game and cook-out, planned a field trip to the Blue Hill peninsula, broken and repaired my camera (one excuse for the dearth of activity here), had our weekly meetings, and even gotten the veggies and fruits certified organic by MOFGA!

Now for the photos:
 

A view of our farm, looking south from the new cabin.

The milking parlor

Tyler, a blissful milker

Our new Massey 80 hp tractor

Frida the Brown Swiss, on loan to us for three months.

Elsie filtering milk.

Additional feline news:

We are the new adopted family of a burly gray cat named Scottie who has come to help us with our rodent problems.  Mere days after Scottie came to live at the farm, we found a scrawny, loud little kitten scrunched under the edge of our outhouse.  What shall we do with the little lass?  She's crawling with fleas, and seems to need a home!  We're feeding and housing her for now, and waiting to see how she and Scottie get on.

Fence-Building etc.

It's July 15th, and the crops are in!  We just have some late successions of lettuce, pac choi and the like to get in over the next couple months.  Potato planting this year was a speedy group effort: dig a shallow trench with a wheel hoe, band in fish meal and sul-po-mag, plant whole sprouty potatoes, and then cover them up with the same wheel hoe.

Gib cleaning up during potato planting.

Elsie and Ada cleaning up on stunning-ness during potato planting.

Anna (that's me) seeding pelleted carrot seed with a double gang Earthway seeder.  Didn't work so well.

Anna on the double gang seeder and Chris on the single to complete the 3-row bed.

Crops and barnyard around the summer solstice.

Tyler walking through the orchard.

On June 23rd we had a fence-building party to really get things kicked off, and get those deer moving out of the orchard and away from their young apple trees snacking.  To prepare, Seth dug many of the post holes with a borrowed post hole auger that hooked on to our Kioti tractor, and Seth and Tyler hauled and put into position many of the cedar posts they had cut from the woods surrounding the orchard.

Touching up a hole by hand.

Setting the posts

The first run of posts, heading north along the east side of the orchard

Setting up for the gate, the last posts to go in.

Trusty post hole digger

The last run of posts, heading east along the south side of the orchard

 

 

Ta-daaaah!

A few days after the fence started going up, our two apprentices for the season arrived: Kerstin and Katya.  They are amazing, hard-working, and great company.  Thanks to them, we have caught up on a lot of farm work that had been neglected and things are looking beautiful.  Now, for a little more rain!?!?

In the news...

Hey Everyone-
Check out the Bangor Daily News feature that came out yesterday, June 12, 2012,  about North Branch Farm:
http://bangordailynews.com/slideshow/young-farmers-working-together-on-the-midcoast/?ref=maineframe

Things are going blazingly well here on the farm, with the usual setbacks to keep us humble and in check.  Deer have discovered the young apple trees in the new orchard and are making tasty snacks out of them while we race to cut cedar fence posts for an eight-foot deer fence around the whole six-acre block.  In the shuffle of farm priorities, we neglected to cover our delicate home garden crops--zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, melons, and eggplant--with row cover, and they have been decimated by squash beetles and flea beetles in a matter of a few days.  We sprayed them and will cover them today, and hopefully they'll be able to recover to give our apprentices and us some food this summer.  The only other bad news of note is that one of our calves was very sick--we figured out it was a selenium deficiency (our soils, like most in this area, have no selenium at all) and got him an injection of selenium, and he seems to be recovering well though he will probably be at least partially blind for life.

We got our 30 laying hen chicks and 40 meat bird chicks out into chicken tractors this week, and they are happily chomping grass, clover, and bugs along with their organic chicken grain pellets.  Ada's not the only one who likes to eat chicken feed!

Meat chicks on pasture

People started stopping by the farm yesterday after seeing the BDN article, to tell us about it and to chat, and we thought, "Okay, now we need a sign, even a temporary one..."  This has been in the works for the last month or so, but one thing led to another and before long we had a massive, eleven foot high cedar structure (not so temporary), and a sign that will hopefully be replaced within the year with something more permanent and artful.

North Branch Farm goes public

The vegetable crops are doing great so far this year--brassicas (cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts) are looking healthy, alliums (onions, garlic, shallots, and leeks) are sturdy, solanums (tomatoes and peppers) are loving the sunshine, and one of our new and exciting crops, sweet potatoes, is settling in nicely.  We have yet to plant the root crops, and the winter squash is seeded but not sprouted yet.  The annual crop of quackgrass is not as bad as in previous years, but we still have our fair share.

Ada and Seth killing quackgrass.

We're in the thick of preparing the milkroom so that we can be state-licensed to sell milk.  We basically emptied the existing milkroom and started fresh: painted the walls a sunny yellow, rewired and plumbed the whole things, installed an electric hot water heater, and bought and installed new stainless steel hand-washing and milk-equipment-washing sinks.  The vacuum system is also functioning, and Tyler's gradually training the cows, starting with the Jerseys, to be milked with a Surge belly-milker (photo from http://surgemilker.com/):

In fact, I just heard the vacuum pump turn off; morning chores must be moving along!  The cows themselves are a little ahead of schedule, and Tyler and Crew are milking six cows right now, mostly by hand.  Elsie has taken on the noble, labor-intensive work of milk processing.  She has put up many pounds of fresh, yellow, I-can't-believe-I-can't-stop-eating-it butter, hand-churned in her vintage Dazey churn.  She also bought a wine cooler to function as a mini cheese cave, and has already begun to fill it with wheels of cheese: Parmesan, cheddar, Caerphilly, and more.

It's raining today, but it will be busy nonetheless.  The list of rainy day options is endless.  We could repair a tractor, spread beneficial nematodes to control wireworms, kill and butcher a sheep whose time has come, work on the milkroom, clean, clean, clean, and more...

Thank you all for your continued support, near and far, and we hope we get to see you or hear from you soon.