Well the bulk of the maple syrup has been sold for the year thanks to The Whole Earth Center in Princeton, New Jersey and an outfit in Virginia called Arganinica, both of whom took a chance on us and were satisfied with the outcome according to their sales of the syrup. I am eyeing what’s left with that cautious “if I ration this I can make it last until next March” look I get around things I really enjoy, but the fact is that we are moving forward, into a new season with new possibilities.
The onions went in yesterday, red onions, shallots, whites and yellows, and the garlic is looking great. The lambs arrived about a week after the piglets farrowed, there twelve of each now, the sow having unceremoniously crushed a few of her offspring to death- the remainder having learned to move with caution around their quarter-ton mother. We also brought in a pair of whiteface steers to fatten up on grass for the summer and we turned the billy goat loose in the pasture with them to show them through the hoops. And the Australian Shepherd puppy, Honey, I almost forgot to mention her arrival with all the rest that’s been going on, but it’s a welcome one and she’s already hard at work keeping anything that moves moving in the right direction.
We spent the past several days harvesting some exceedingly large pines and with the help of a young man with a portable mill, turning it into 7,500 board feet of building materials for the projects lined up for the year, like an equipment shed and our portable chicken coops. Mark from Ragged View Farm came over with his two Percherons, Virgil and Woodrow and helped us to extract some of the timber we couldn’t get at with the tractor. They did a great job and I learned how well they worked in a tight space so that later this year, probably sometime in early Winter, we can use them again up in the maple orchard to thin out the beech that have proliferated through fifty years of benign neglect.
There’s a great photo below of Mark and I logging with his team, but you’ll have to right click on it and open in a new window to see it as it is a rather large, scrollable file-
The cold frames are packed now with the flats of our seedlings, the heirloom tomatoes and peppers, the brocollini and eggplants and in short order, if this weather keeps up, we’ll be sowing directly into the rototilled gardens in front and out back. This morning we woke up to a half inch of light snow, what folks around here call “poor man’s fertilizer” so most of what we’ll concentrate on will be focused around the tilapia tanks. We’ve got approximately 2,000 of them right now and their growth has been staggering to say the least. We’ll need to get them into the stocking tanks sooner rather than later and by tomorrow we’ll have another delivery of rainbow and brook trout to stock the lower pond with, most in the 6″-12″ category. Hopefully, should everything go as planned we’ll be hosting one hell of a fish fry by the end of Summer.
April 17th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Hi Marc, I love reading about your progress. I can attest, the maple syrup is delicious!
Deb