April 7th – April 14th

The laying hens are enjoying the compost piles behind the dairy barn.

We loaded up the laying hens Monday night and moved them into their summer egg-mobile. After setting up a poultry netting fence as well as we could in the compost yard behind the dairy barn, we pulled the egg-mobile over to the only flat spot in that yard and released the chickens. They have been doing great work scratching and digging through the top layer of those piles, but some hens have jumped the fence and tried to return to their winter house. Grace has spent several hours in the past week tracking down the escapees and returning them to the flock, and I expect that this game might end when the egg-mobile moves a bit further away from the hen’s winter quarters. Once the chickens were moved out of their winter house, Grace and visiting students were able to immediately begin the annual dig-out and clean of that building, and the deep wood-shavings bedding is already moving out the front door to be piled up for some composting. The laying flock will be on the move until freezing weather returns in the fall, and they’ll be all over the farm’s fields and farm-roads between now and then. We got everyone into one egg-mobile, but we have plans to receive our next batch of layer chicks in the mail soon, and those birds will go out on pasture in another egg-mobile once they seem big enough to handle the wilds of pasture life. Both houses will move once or twice a week through the growing season, and we’ll try to spread their strong manure over pastures that needs the help. 

These onion starts are just about ready to plant.

The veggie team put together quite a bit of seeding and weeding and harvesting in our greenhouse and hoop-houses this week, and although the fields beds are still under cover and not ready for bed-prep and seeding, there was plenty to accomplish to set up the season. The veggie team started laying out the irrigation system, though the super wet spring we’re enduring right now makes that system seem a little ridiculous at this point in the year, weeded the strawberries, harvested spinach and arugula, trimmed the onion starts one more time, seeded peppers in the greenhouse, and mixed up more potting soil. The greenhouse is getting pretty full here by the middle of April, but with a few more weeks until we can start moving crops from there to the fields, I think we’re going to have to find more space to hold the growing starts and newly seeded trays. 

Hopefully this new Sugar Maple will grow up big and shady.

We hosted wonderful sixth graders from Milton Academy this week, and as has been their custom over the many years that they have been coming out to the farm, they brought a new Sugar Maple sapling to plant on the farm. We picked out a really nice spot in the north east corner of the games field out behind the Bunkhouse, and the hope is that, in a few years, we might have a nice shade tree out there standing up tall above those new cabins we built a few years ago. Milton also brought a few blue-berry bushes this year as well, and those were planted down in the lower orchard where we hope they’ll grow well, produce some nice berries, and help establish some more structure in the wet soil down there. These long-term investments in the farm landscape are wonderful, and I always admire the forethought that goes into planting perennials and trees that we hope will be a benefit for generations to come. 

Our four winter pigs are just about big enough.

Taylor has most of the dairy grazing rotation paddock fences setup by now, and the fields up behind the bunkhouse are starting to take shape again for the coming season. The forage plants are growing well despite the over abundance of rain and the lack of much sun, and we seem to be on our typical timing with grazing starting the first week of May. There is grass out there, but this time of year we always have to exercise a good deal of patience to let those forage plants get big, strong and well established before we start challenging them with grazing cows. I did some work on the fences around the Old Sheep Pasture on the other side of the farm this week too, and that acreage looks to be growing nicely as well. The fences have been cleared and renewed, and hopefully that system is ready to host cows when the pasture is ready to feed them. We typically get the dairy herd into that pasture first to start the grazing season, so it feels good to know that the herd’s first pasture is set up and will be ready when the time comes. I’ve also just started doing similar work on the beef herds fence system, and similarly, I like to start with the fences and pastures that will host the herd first and to work onwards from there. I think that the first beef pasture fence is ready, but that pasture really needs the next few weeks of growth before it will be ready to feed those cows. This has been a cool wet spring, and our more poorly drained acreage would really benefit from some warm dry weather here at the back half of April to get growing. 

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April 1st – April 7th

Just a little bit of snow remains

Our new walk-way down to the goats

Looking back over the past few weeks, I notice a pattern in the weather that has continued this week as well. Again, we had a few nice days to start the week, but on Wednesday a big mixed up winter storm drifted over the farm and scrambled everything up. Strong winds whipped the treetops, every kind of rain and frozen precipitation fell, and the phone and internet went out for most of the day on Thursday. Thursday morning was remarkably unpleasant, and we kept the visiting students in the bunkhouse and barn for a few hours while the peak of the storm moved over us. Our driveway and yards are a true mess now, and we are doing our best to make sure that all of the animals have a dry covered place to get out of the mud. We ended up with a few inches of frozen crusty snow on the ground by Friday morning, but most of that has melted by this weekend. The weather forecast seems to show a really nice warm up through the first half of next week, but then another storm arriving at the middle of the week. The weather this spring has been wet and messy enough that we have actually built a new bridge/walk-way down to the big goat’s pen that we hope will carry farmers over the ponds that have formed in the road down that way.  We were all looking for inside work while the storm worked its way over the farm this week, and I spent a few hours on Wednesday doing a quick repair to another cracked floor joist that we found in the dairy barn tool shop. Similar to these repairs that we’ve made in the milking parlor this winter, we pushed the cracked joist up with a big post and sistered a pair of new 2×8 joists around the original one. 

Three new bottle lambs enjoying their heat lamp

Unfortunately, one of our purchased goat kids died at the start of this week, and the symptoms indicate that he was undone by overeating grain. However, his brother, fed the same ration, is doing great, so we aren’t too sure that we have made the correct diagnosis. We bought in three bottle lambs to keep baby Chocolate company, so now have four bottle babies in the barn calling for their three-times-a-day feedings and snuggling under their heat lamps. I think that Chocolate will have to be mixed in with our three goat does and spend his summer with them out on the hedgerows eating brush, and we’ll run the lambs as a group in the grazing corners around the FlatField. Chocolate is just about ready to start reducing his bottle ration, and we’ll slowly start shifting his feed from milk to hay and grain over the next few weeks until he can go join the big goats.

The forestry team collected some birch sap this week, and they got through the rough weather boiling that down into birch syrup and sitting around the fire whittling. I haven’t had a chance to try any of the birch syrup yet, and I’m not sure that enough was made for much sharing, but I’ll try to find some and let y’all know how it turned out. The spring of forestry work is just about finished, and that part of the farm is looking pretty neat and tidy as the foresters work to button everything up before they move on to other work. 

We’re trying to generate fertilized eggs

Grace collected a few Rhode Island Red hens and our Barred Rock rooster this week, and put them all in the brooder in the hopes that they will collaborate to produce some fertilized eggs. Grace has plans to fill our new incubator and try to hatch some of our own eggs this summer, so the brooder adaptations and chicken move were the first steps in this plan. A few changes were needed in the brooder to comfortably accommodate full grown egg laying hens, and we also put a cover on the yard and installed an automatic door to let the ladies out there. There seems to be some doubt about whether the rooster has been successful in mounting the hens yet, and Grace has been researching the structure of the ‘harem’ that roosters seem to develop and whether this structure could interfere with our project. If the hens that we selected were committed to a different rooster, they may not be receptive to the advances of the rooster that we’ve put them with. 

Our newest dairy calf Rianna is out with the herd full time now, and we’re trying to keep a close eye on her as she navigates the muddy mess of the cow’s winter yard. She was our last calf for a few months, and with a barn full of bottle-babies, I think we’re all happy to get a break in calving for a bit. We also started weaning Elektra’s heifer calf Eden this week, so there is plenty of noise in the milking barn these days. 

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March 24th – March 31st

Baby Pharaoh is growing up nicely.

This week started out pretty warm and sunny, but another nasty mixed up storm moved over the farm through the middle of the week, and the landscape has continued wet, muddy and pretty gross. I tried to do some work in the dairy herd’s winter yard out behind the barn, and while I was able to remove some of the muck from right around where the cows walk out of the barn, their yard is still pretty rough. We have a new calf out in the yard with the group, so I have some concerns about his ability to navigate the difficult and ever changing conditions out there on his new long spindly legs. This weekend is nice and sunny, and it looks like these dry conditions might stretch into the middle of next week, so maybe we’ll be able to dry out a bit before the next storm blows in Wednesday or Thursday. 

Ruby’s calf Rianna

Our second first-calf-heifer Ruby delivered a heifer calf this week, right on schedule and looking great. Ruby was not nearly as attentive as Phlox was with her first calf last week, and without the proper attention from her mother, baby Rianna did not flourish. A new-born calf needs the rough licking and attention from the cow to wake up and to get motivated for standing up and trying to nurse, and Ruby seemed more interested in her hay feeder than her new calf. We toweled off Rianna and tried to get her fired up, but we ended up having to tube feed her a few bottles of colostrum to keep her going until she and her mother had developed a stronger connection. Taylor kept after the project, and it sounds like Rianna is now up and nursing on her own and that Ruby seems to have taken full responsibility for her. These two calves will be our only spring calves, so now we’ll have a long break until calving gets going again in July. 

We took delivery of five more wrapped round bales of hay for the dairy this week, hoping to supplement our square bale supply and to keep some variety in front of the cows through the remainder of the hay feeding season. Taylor did start building dairy fences out on the pastures behind the bunkhouse this week, so while grazing is coming soon, we do have about a month more of hay feeding between here and there. We have been feeding mostly square bales this spring, with a fresh round bale fed out every Friday to get the herd through the weekend. We’d like to keep this pattern going, so we needed a few more round bales to reach May. 

Work started on the dairy grazing fences this week.

This was another busy week in the greenhouse and in the hoop-houses, and the list of work started and completed is pretty long. There was some seeding, some tending to crops already seeded, some work on the compost and some work on the irrigation system. There is a ton of seeding, bed prep and planting coming in the next few weeks out in the veggie fields, but for now the work is focussed on some of the smaller spaces and systems that will support the coming season. 

Brad and the forestry team ignited our burn pile this week, but it was so large and old that they had to use the tractor to break it up, separate out smaller parts to burn, and slowly work their way through all of the material in there. There was a pretty good collection of the large old butts of logs, and those big wet things have taken a long time to burn. I expect that they’ll stay hot and smoky for quite a while yet, so we’ll keep a close eye on that scene to make sure that nothing gets burning too much again. Once the burn pile is going, we’re all motivated to collect any of the old wood junk and brush around the farm and to toss it on, so there was some nice farm clean-up this week once everyone saw the smoke coming off the burn pile.

The egg-mobile is almost ready for chickens.

Grace has been working this week to get the egg-mobile prepared to move the laying hens into, and I think that we’re going to try to park them at the compost yard as their first spot after moving out of their winter house. We put them on the compost piles last spring too, and the weather and conditions proved to be a little too wet and muddy for that to last very long, but we’ll give it another try again this year. I really like the idea of those hens scratching through the compost piles and catching all of the flies that will be emerging when the weather really warms up, so it feels like it’s worth giving the idea another shot. 

March 17th – March 24th

Baby Pharaoh resting

Our first-calf-heifer Phlox, daughter of the wonderful Phoenix, delivered a bull-calf on Wednesday afternoon, and both Phlox and her boy Pharaoh are doing great. Pharaoh did a bit of the classic Jersey bull-calf ‘I’m not sure I want to live‘ thing, but with a bit of coaching and support, we’ve got him nursing on his own and I think he’s headed in the right direction now. We had been going through a remarkably mild March up until the middle of this week, but things changed right around the time when the little fellow was born, and he has had to endure some pretty chilly wet weather. I’ve heard farmers claim that cold weather will actually drive a new baby to nurse more and to grow better since it gives them some added motivation to fend off the cold temperatures, but I am certainly more comfortable when new babies show up under a bit warmer conditions than what we’ve had this week. Our other heifer Ruby is due to calve in a few days, but for now, Phlox and Pharaoh are in the calving pen, staying out of the weather, and building the strong connection that will serve them well through the coming months. Phlox delivered her calf on her actual due-date, according to our calculations, and I’m not sure that I have ever seen that in fifteen years of dairy farming at The Farm School. 

Some of the rain froze on the trees.

After a real change in the weather and some terribly cold and windy conditions that blew over the farm Thursday and Friday, an enormous rain and snow producer moved across New England this weekend and soaked the farm. A bit of snow came first Friday night, but then we spent all day Saturday watching every kind of rain and frozen mess fall on the farm before the system moved out Saturday night and temperatures fell into the twenties. This storm produced almost two feet of snow at elevation a few hours north of here, but we have been left with an icy mess and saturated soil. The forecast leads me to some hope that things will melt away pretty swiftly in the coming days, and that maybe this was our last bit of winter before spring really sets in. I think that we get a bit of snow every April however, so I bet we’re not fully out of the woods yet. 

This might explain why the greenhouse vent isn’t working properly.

The windy conditions here this week were a real challenge in the veggie fields, and several of the heavy silage tarps that we use to prep planting beds were torn up and damaged by the gusty conditions. The veggie team spent a good part of the week trying to keep the tarps from blowing away entirely, and the difficult conditions have prompted an effort to rehab our sand-bag supply. We use these little sandbags to weigh the tarps down, so the veggie team has been going through the bags, topping off those that have gotten a little light, and putting together more. We fill our own sandbags, so this is a lot of shoveling, zip-tying and moving heavy things around. The wind was also a challenge with our malfunctioning greenhouse vent, and Kristen continued to search for a service provider who will come out and set the thing to rights. The vent, at the peak of the greenhouse roof, is designed to open and close in communication with a thermostat inside measuring the temperature of the greenhouse. Our vent has not been functioning properly, and the windy conditions have meant that the vent has had to stay closed to avoid damage. Inside the greenhouse, we continue spring seeding work, and onions went first this week, as usual. 

The brooder yard has a new top.

These challenging weather conditions have also meant the end of the maple sugaring season, and the forestry team has started pulling the sap buckets from the trees along our road. Though the season wasn’t a banger, we did make some syrup, and certainly more than I expected when it started so warm and mixed up. Most of our forestry work is concentrated in the winter and spring, so the forestry team has also started cleaning up their processing yard, finishing up their cord-wood stacks, and generally getting that space ready to be left for the summer. We’ll keep going out in the woods for sure, and the sugar-shack is often a nice place for summer whittling projects or for kids who just need to split some wood, but the work of the fields and pastures will take up just about all of our time once the growing season gets going. 

The dairy herd’s dry-hay feeder has been improved.

Farmer Grace did a couple of great carpentry projects this week, and we now have a deeper tray for the hay in the dairy herd’s dry-hay feeder, and a netting top on the brooder’s outside yard. Grace wants to try to hatch our own eggs this summer, so she’s been retrofitting the brooder to hold a few hens and a rooster who we hope will collaborate to generate some fertilized eggs. She’s covered the brooder yard so that the chickens can’t just hop out, and this will make the space safer for chicks and pullets too when they’re in there after our breeding program is done. The dry-hay feeder, completed a few weeks ago, has been working well, but we decided to make the sides at the bottom a little higher in the hopes of keeping a little more hay inside instead of outside the feeder. 

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March 10th – March 17th

Chocolate and Chip, under their heat lamp

Dr. Locitzer came out to the farm on Friday to take a look at our goat who is suffering with damaged skin on her ankles, and it sounds like we’ll be following the usual treatment course for this ailment. We seem to face this challenge in our goat herd over the winter every year, and despite trying to remedy the conditions and cull out the most susceptible animals, the issue seems to be persisting. Just one goat is showing signs of this skin irritation this spring, so maybe we will have the opportunity to cull her from the herd and finally eliminate the issue. The goats are not bred right now, so once the medications administered have taken their course and cleared from her body, we could move her along. Once the goat is bred, we would want to keep her on the farm until she’s delivered and raised her kids, and there would be a good chance that they would inherit her predilection for this weaker skin condition. 

The pasture below the barn is greening

The maple sap continued to flow this week, despite the mixed up spring weather and warm conditions. Every maple season confirms for me that I don’t really know what weather combination actually makes the sap flow, and I’m not sure that anyone else really does either. We’ve had several stretches of warm weather this spring that I would have expected to turn the sap, but it keeps going pretty well, and the shelves in the sugar-shack are gradually filling with golden half-gallon jars of finished syrup. The run did really slow at the end of this week, but conditions next week look favorable, so maybe it will get going again. 

We made pizza in the outdoor wood oven on Thursday

Several of the floor joists above the cow’s heads in our dairy barn, the long 2x8s that hold up the floor under the stack of dry bales in the loft, have been slowly sagging and cracking under the weight of years and years of holding up thousands of square-bales through the winter. I worked with a group of visiting students this week to sister new joists onto the sagging ones before the movement went any further. We cut ourselves a nice big beam, just the right length, and pounded that into place between the cement floor at the bottom and the cracked joist above. This beam had to be centered and handled just right since it was enduring so much pressure, but it worked well to push the sagging joist back up to its proper place. Then we jammed the new joist in alongside the one we’d forced up, and sank in five or six pairs of big screws, one above the other, to hold the two joists together. When we pounded our beam back out from under the joist, it looked to me like everything stayed up high and tight the way we wanted it, so I believe that our fix has worked. The dairy barn got a similar treatment on its end walls over the summer when we added strong vertical boards to the studs on both ends of the barn to make those walls a bit more rigid and straight, so hopefully these additions will help the barn stand up to the weight of the solar panels going on the roof soon, and to another century of service. 

The dairy herd enjoyed their weekend round bale

I worked this week to get our two barn trucks ready for the growing season, and the red truck has an updated state inspection sticker to keep it legal for another year, its sagging exhaust pipe has been wired up a bit, and two tires have gone into the shop for repair. The green Toyota has a roaring exhaust leak, but it will have to go into the shop some time soon for a more professional repair that I can accomplish here on the farm. We’ll be zipping all over the fields soon, and we’ll need both trucks to move farmers, supplies and equipment where they’re  needed to get all of the work accomplished. 

Taylor is almost done digging out the calving pen in the back of the dairy barn, and our two bred heifers due in the last week of March, are beginning to show signs that we don’t have too much more time to get their space ready. Both cows are walking slowly, doing plenty of sighing and wheezing, and both seem to prefer to be left at rest rather than coming into the barn for AM and PM chores. This will be the first calf for both of these ladies, and I am excited to see how they do. Ruby is Rio’s daughter and Phlox came from Phoenix, two fantastic dams who’ve been strong milkers and mild personalities in the barn. I have high hopes for their daughters, and I am excited to see their grand-kids too. 

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March 3rd – March 10th

Years of horses feeding have made for smooth surfaces

There are a few half-gallon jars of syrup on the shelf in the sugar-shack, so despite the tough sugaring weather, we have been able to make some finished product. The ten-day forecast has some hopeful moments with cold nights and warm days, but also plenty of weather that looks too warm, so I’m not sure how the season will unfold. This was a messy and mixed up week of weather on the farm with a significant rain storm passing over us Wednesday afternoon and Thursday and dropping about two inches of rain on our already wet land. The dairy herd’s bale yard is an absolute mess, and we have been keeping the cows in the barn a bit more to give them time to rest and dry off a bit out of the mud and muck. These difficult conditions have renewed the urgency around our project to build an indoor loafing and feeding facility for the dairy herd, and I am working to pursue grant funding to help pay for a renovation of the back of our dairy barn. The heavy rain this week has soaked the farm and made mud all around, and with an inch and a half of rain forecasted for fall over the weekend, I am not looking forward to conditions on the farm next week. We might get a break in the rain next week though, so maybe we can dry out a bit then. 

We bought in two bottle-baby goats this week, both wethers that the visiting students have named Chocolate and Chip. We have successfully gotten them to start drinking the rich Jersey milk coming out of our cow herd, and I expect that they will grow well with this diet. They are in a small pen in the dairy barn where we can keep a close eye on them, and where they are handy for their three-times-a-day bottle feeding. We successfully raised three bottle-lambs last year, and when I could not find any lambs this spring, I bought these little goats to fill the same position for now. We’ll keep looking for lambs, but I hope that these goats will be able to graze many of the same edge locations that the lambs did so well on last year, and that the visiting students will love these little goats as much as they enjoyed the lambs. Goats are a bit more personable than sheep, and Chocolate and Chip have been a bit hit so far. 

We’ve had plenty of rain in the past two weeks

Veggie work continued in the greenhouse and hoop-houses this week, and those were great places to work during the cold rainy weather. We had enough rain Thursday that the paths between raised beds in one hoop-houses flooded, but luckily those raised beds remained up above the flood. The greenhouse seeding work continued this week, along with some harvest, direct seeding, cultivation, trellis building, and table set up. The veggie growers are feeling the pressure mount as they see all of the work ahead of them, but our fields are not warm and dry enough for any of it to start yet. Luckily the greenhouse is warm and dry, and there is a lot of work to accomplish starting seeds and tending to starts. 

Our new dairy herd dry hay feeder project advanced through the week, and other than tweaks and repairs that I’m sure will be required once we start actually using the thing, I believe that it is complete and ready to be deployed. We got a big group of farmers together Thursday to lift the salvaged green metal roof that we planned to put on top, and we were able to get that up on top of our feeder and screwed into place. We also got pressure-treated runners bolted onto the bottom of the feeder, and prepped a spot for it against the fence in the dairy herd’s feeding yard. The whole thing has come out much taller than I expected or feels necessary, but I’m sure that farmers and cows alike will appreciate there being no danger of banging heads into rafters when filling the feeder or eating out of it. I always enjoy the moment when a carefully measured and planned out drawing becomes a thing in the real world and the calculations that went into the plan become manifest. There is always some space between the vision and the reality, for better or for worse. 

The new dairy herd dry hay feeder is in place

Taylor continued work in the calf pen in the back of the dairy barn this week, and she is working with visiting students to get that space dug out and re-bedded in preparation for the calves that we expect at the end of March. This is a big project without a straight path to completion, and Taylor has been parking the tractor just outside the back of the barn, putting old bedding into the bucket, and driving that around the cow’s yard to dump it on the compost pile. It is certainly a circuitous path to follow, but the best we could come up with in our current late winter configuration. We’ve got a couple more weeks until calves are due to Phlox and Ruby, and progress has been steady on getting that space prepared. 

February 25th – March 3rd

Things are happening in the green-house.

The heat was turned on in the greenhouse this week, and the tables in there are starting to gradually fill up with the first real seed starts of the season. We did a little watering and seedling care refresher with the PVS staff in that space on Friday afternoon, so it seems like the seeding season is really getting started. A regular schedule of seeding, development and planting will start to take hold of that work as we use that warm enclosure to advance the season and give plants a well supported start to life before they move out to the fields. The warm greenhouse was a nice place to be this week as some classic strong and wild late winter weather passed over the farm. A big storm and weather front passed over the farm Wednesday afternoon, and Thursday was a bitter cold and windy day. The power was knocked out for a few hours overnight Wednesday into Thursday, and we were all looking for indoor heated spaces to work Thursday as the wind blew everything around the farm. Wood-stoves around the farm burned hot as the powerful wind created some amazing draw at every smoke-stack. Conditions moderated by Friday, and the ten-day forecast looks pretty wet and mild.

Labelled and growing

The wild weather, and the warm conditions that dominate most of our ten-day forecast, have not been great for sugaring and sap flow, but we did collect 175 gallons of sap this week and boil down a bit of syrup. It was wonderful to see the steam coming out of the sugar-shack vents, and the kids on the farm really enjoyed tasting the syrup as it moved from sap to the finished product. The sugar-shack is a wonderful place to spend a nasty early spring day, and with just the right bit of work to attend to, a warm cozy fire, a wonderful smell and a delicious product to sample, it is always a popular place to be when the arch and the pan are going. The forecast does not look great for the future of our season, but if the trees and the sap can hold on through what appears to be six or seven days of pretty warm conditions, I expect that temperatures should come back down to a more conducive range before true spring arrives. 

The start of our new dairy herd dry hay feeder

Construction began this week on a new wooden dry bale feeder for the dairy herd, modeled on the very successful one that we use for the beef herd. This will be a smaller unit to reflect the smaller cows and smaller herd at the dairy, but it will reflect the same design. Above will be a pitched metal roof, and below is a wooden tray with ten inch sides to hold the hay. Between the roof and tray are vertical wood posts, spaced and oriented so that cows can reach their head between them to access the hay but not climb in. This should allow us to put quite a few bales of hay inside the feeder, and the cows will surround it to eat with their heads inside. This design has been great for the beef herd, with some adaptations and changes depending on calves climbing through the bars and resting on the hay. We made some great progress on the new feeder this week, and I would like to get it done soon since our hay supply is pretty square bale heavy at this point. 

Gray New England, February into March

We separated and moved the two dairy steers that had been with the herd this winter, and they have been installed in the calf pen down at the beef barn. They’ll get a couple of weeks to get used to eating hay and forgetting about nursing before we release them to join the beef herd. Once released, these steers will face a period of trial when they have to try to find their way to accessing the hay feeders and avoiding the big beef cows, and we’ll do what we can to support them, sneak them their own hay supplies, and encourage them until we’re confident that they can survive and thrive. For now, they have their own space, their own hay and water, and a twice daily grain ration to keep them well fed. #11 has been jumping the panels of his enclosure to join the beef herd, but we have put him back in every time and tried to remind him that life on the inside will be much easier for now than the rough and tumble of the main herd. Dr. Ledoux came out to the farm this week to check dairy cow pregnancies, and he found that every cow we wanted bred, with the exception of Penelope, is carrying a baby. This was great news for the next round of calving and milk production, and Penelope was even obliging enough to come into heat Sunday morning too. An early March breeding will mean a December baby, and while this isn’t our favorite, it seems like we’ll probably go ahead and try to get her bred. We are looking forward to two calves due at the end of March.

February 17th – February 25th

We have been keeping some hay in the back of the barn for filling the dairy herd’s feeder.

This has been a school vacation week here in Massachusetts, so we did not host any visiting school groups on the farm this week. Many farmers took the week as vacation as well, so the farm was pretty quiet. This is just about the last chance to take some time off before the wild dash of spring gets going, and the work of the farm is still pretty slow and wintery right now. We kept milking cows and feeding the animals, and a few little things happened around the farm too. The extended run of mostly dry weather continued this week as well, and with temperatures getting up above freezing most days, it seems like Maple sugaring season is really here. Bradley and the forestry crew have spent the past few days getting most of our buckets up on the Sugar maples up and down the road that runs past the farm, and it sounds like there have already been a few pretty nice sap runs. The sugar-shack is getting set up as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a boil in the evaporator in the next couple of days. The bucking, splitting and stacking of soft-wood sugaring fuel continued this week, and the collection over there behind the sugar-shack is starting to look pretty good to me. The end of February is a pretty regular point on the calendar for the sugaring season to get going, and while I suspect that we have missed an early run or two, I am excited for this marker of the turning of the seasons. The pastures are still blank, brown and barren, and the trees are totally bare, but if the driveway is muddy and steam is coming out of the sugar-shack, grazing season can’t be too far off. I am keeping a close eye on our hay supply these days, and I am still feeling pretty good about what remains in the dairy barn hay loft and in the round bale stacks at both the beef and dairy barns. We have shifted our beef hay feeding program a bit to rely a little more on their round bales so that we can preserve as many square bales as we can for the dairy. The beef herd looks to have more than enough round bales, and with the quickly dwindling stack of round bales at the dairy, I know that we’re going to be feeding them only square bales before grazing season resumes in May. We also are working on plans to build a bigger better square bale feeder for the dairy herd, so keep an eye out for updates about that exciting spring project. 

The plum tree has been really cut back.

It turns out that there was a little more pruning to do in the orchard at the dairy farm, and vegetable farmers worked in the nice weather this week to address some significant fungal infections and blight in our plum tree and one apple tree. Our single plum tree has been struggling with Black Knot Disease for many years, and this year we cut back quite heavily in the hopes of giving that tree a fighting chance to beat this challenging issue. One of our apple trees appears to have Fire Blight, so that tree also got some heavy pruning this spring as well. Pruning work also commenced with the grapes, and that will continue next week. 

Work continued in the greenhouse this week as we fine tune that space for the heavy seeding season that is about to get started. Supplies were inventoried and restocked, and replacement items were ordered, plans were finalized, hoses hung, trays cleaned and soil mixed. The weather was warm enough this week to run a hose over to the hoop-houses and to do some watering of newly seeded beds of winter greens like arugula. 

The pigs enjoy sunny weather.

Our ten-day forecast includes a bit of wet weather in the middle of next week, but other than that, things look like they will continue pretty warm and dry. Sap runs best in the Maple trees when nights are cold and days are warm, sunny and still. There look to be a few good days like that in the next week, but maybe even a few days when night-time temperatures don’t go down low enough to drive the sap back down into the tree’s roots. Too many warm nights will spell the end of sugaring season, so I think we’re all hoping for a return of a little winter weather to give us a solid sugaring season. 

February 11th – February 17th

Eclipse has made a lot of milk this winter.

Weather forecasters in our area were worked into a state of real excitement by the potential for a real old-timey Nor’Easter moving up the coast early Tuesday, and we had forecasts ranging from fifteen inches of snow to one inch of snow, and everything in between. All of that uncertainty made me doubt that we’d see much snow around here, and we ended up not really getting any snow at all. I was excited about seeing another round of solid winter weather, but missing out on a big snowfall certainly makes getting school groups up to the farm easier. The ten day forecast looks to include some pretty nice sugaring weather in the coming week, but I think that we are going to hold off on tapping until the week after next. Next week is February vacation week here in Massachusetts, so we do not have any visiting school groups scheduled to be on the farm over that stretch. We’ll tap trees and fire up the evaporator with kids the following week, and hopefully we’ll have a good stretch of appropriate weather and a strong sap run. The forestry team cut, split and stacked quite a bit of soft-wood sugaring wood this week, and it is beginning to look like we’ll have the fuel needed to keep the arch hot and the sap boiling when the time comes. The forestry team was also out in the woods with the horses this week, and they moved a few cordwood logs to their log landing. These are busy days in forestry as we prep for sugaring while still deep in the midst of wood-stove season.

We have made some changes to the ‘handy steers’ feeding area.

Brad and Grace spent the first part of this week using our larger tractor to remove the accumulated bedding in the handy-steers area beneath the horse-barn, and piling it all down at the bottom of the barn pasture. That nice mix of manure and straw will compost down there through the spring and summer, and should be ready to be spread on our grazing acreage this coming fall. There isn’t a ton of head-room in the steers bedded space, and their horns get awfully close to the rafters by late winter when the bedding material has piled up down there. We have been accustomed to bedding that area with straw, but Grace is going to try using wood shavings for the next few weeks to see if this change might allow us to keep the bedding a bit shallower and give us more time before we have to dig everything out again. I think that the steers sank about two feet lower after their area was dug out, and we had to make some renovations to their feeder to give them easier access to the hay inside. We also added a few vertical beams to the leading edge of the hay feeder to limit the amount that the steers can swing their heads in that space, and hopefully filling the hay feeder will feel a bit easier at chore time. Those handy-steers were out on the farm a bit this week, though they did not get out into the forest for any log moving work. They benefit from a regular routine and regular work, so just getting in the yoke and walking around under command is enough to keep them focussed and attentive. 

The hoop-house is coming to life.

Pre-spring seeding in the hoop-houses continued this week, with all kinds of early season crops getting a head-start on the growing season. Greens, peas, turnips, radishes and scallions were all started, and a birch sapling pea trellis was started in the smaller hoop-house. This week also saw the conclusion of apple tree pruning for the year, and work has now begun on the peach trees. The stakes are pretty high doing this work on those long lived apple trees, but the peaches, which only survive 5-10 years here in New England, seem like a bit less of a commitment. We don’t have too many peach trees, so I expect that they will all be pruned up and ready for some spring buds and flowering in the next week or two. Crop plans for the coming growing season are getting finished up, and packages of seeds have started showing up in the mailbox, so the true start of seeding season must be right around the corner. 

February 4th – 11th

Pruning work in the apple trees started this week.

This week brought our first stretch of dry sunny weather it what feels like months and months, and it was a real treat to sit out in front of the bunkhouse to soak up some of the sun’s warmth between projects. This was also our first full week of youth programming for the spring season, and we hosted some truly wonderful kids on the farm through the week. The kids on the farm loved the dry sunny weather, and it made working outside much more enjoyable than what has been the norm around the farm for most of the winter. The extended dry weather did wonders for our cow yards, but it has also kicked off a bit of a mud season in our barn yard too. I expect that this could be just a mid-winter thaw, or ‘false spring’ as they call it up north in Vermont, but maple syrup producers around the area have started tapping their trees, so I guess they believe that the season is truly turning. There is nearly no snow around the farm now, but the sad remnants of a few large balls, rolled up by visiting youth and parked at the end of their trails, linger decaying and reminding us of some crazy free-times over the past week. February programming always seems to get going in fits and starts, and the pattern will continue this year too. The group scheduled to come out to the farm next week has had to cancel the first half of their visit, so we won’t have kids on the farm until Wednesday around lunch time. We’ll use the first half of the week to make any changes and updates to our schedules and facilities that are needed so that we are set up well for the rest of the spring. We have another break in February the week after that when schools are on vacation and we won’t be able to get a school group out to the farm. 

The dairy cows can come inside for some TLC when their yard gets too bad.

I used our large tractor to scrape the top six inches of hay and manure off the top of our dairy loafing yard this week, taking advantage of the warm dry weather to get into the space and hopefully to improve it a bit. I was able to move off quite a bit of material, and to expose the wood-chips underneath in some portion of the yard. The chips still seem to be in pretty good shape, though the cows will bury them again in no time as they pull apart their round bales and drop manure all around. This warm wet winter has really got me fired up about our hay-feeding season dairy accommodations, and I am still working to design a new feeding and loafing setup that could keep those cows cleaner, drier and more comfortable through the winter. Scraping the yard, a stretch of dry weather, and a hearty group of kids in the barn brushing the cows every day, worked together to get the girls looking much better and to ease my panic a bit.  

The driveway and yards got a little messy this week.

This is also hay moving season, and we spent most of our work sessions in the barn moving hay out of the hay loft and to various animals around the farm. The goats, down by the sawmill, have a little hay stack in one of their barns, the ‘handy-steers’ down under the HorseBarn have a pile of bales for use at chore time, we keep a supply in the back of the barn to use for refilling the dry hay feeder in the dairy yard, the livestock wagon is parked next to the beef herd’s dry hay feeder and holds bales, and we keep the hay box inside the milking parlor full too. All of this requires moving bales out of the loft and distributing them to these various locations, and this work ends up taking up a good deal of our time. We don’t have a ton of good kid’s work on the farm this time of year, other than brushing cows and moving hay, and luckily most kids really enjoy going up into the hay-loft and pushing bales out of the window. Our stack up in the loft is still looking pretty good, but this is definitely the time of year when I start counting days until grazing resumes and considering the state of our square bale collection in the loft. With about two and a half months until we can count on having enough grass to graze, I am not too worried yet. We don’t want to retain hay from last year into next year, so getting and using the right number of bales each year is always a real balancing act. 

The egg-mobiles are waiting for another round.

Brad brought in two large bundles of sawmill slab this week, and those will be bucked up and split for use in the sugaring arch. The smaller and drier we can get the fuel for the evaporator, the hotter we can boil and the finer we can control things, so dry soft-wood sawmill slab fits the bill nicely. We produce quite a bit of our own, but with the mill down for repair this winter, we’ve had to source some from off of the farm. Brad also started cleaning up thorn bushes from around the sugar maples along the road in front of the farm to make the work of tapping trees and collecting sap a bit easier when that work gets going here on the farm in a couple of weeks. 

The veggie farmers kept working in the hoop houses, and those warm covered spaces really showed their strength here in the middle of February. Snow peas were seeded, irrigation ran, starts were planted, and crops were watered, all in the middle of winter. We’ve been eating delicious spinach all winter because the crop, started last fall, can endure the cold of winter under cover inside the hoop house. They are really remarkable additions to the farm.