September 18th – September 25th

The Dairy herd out on the PollBarn pasture, enjoying some late season grazing.

I think that summer has given way to fall this week, and the switch seemed to happen all at once Wednesday and Thursday when a strong weather front passed over the farm. Thunder and lightning, heavy rain and strong wind moved over the farm as the cold air of fall collided with the warm wet weather of summer, and pushed it out of the way. Friday dawned cold and bright with the classic feeling of fall in the air, and everyone’s wardrobe seemed to shift overnight to accommodate the new season. It is not too often that we experience such a clear demarcation between the seasons, and for a weather lover like me, it was a really cool moment as the seasons churned above us and the change occurred by the hour. We have had some solid rain over the past few weeks with a handful of storms stacked up one after another, so the soil is nice and damp for what I hope can be a strong fall pasture grazing season. Most of our grasses would be classified as cool season perennials, so they really like moderate soil moisture and temperatures below eighty degrees. Grasses like Orchard-grass, Rye-grass, Fescue, Timothy and Blue-grass all grow well in the spring, suffer a bit in the heat and dry of the summer, and usually bounce back a bit in September and October, before shutting down for the winter some time in November. These species should be pretty happy in our pastures right now with damp soil and the thermometer in the low sixties, so I am looking for some strong growth ahead of us. Most of our pastures are still in a noticeable deficit coming out of the deep summer drought that gripped the region over the past two months or so, and that is still visible around the farm. The beef herd has been moving pretty quickly as they exhaust the available forage in each pasture, and the dairy herd’s daily paddocks are pretty thin. We supplement the milk cow’s diets with grain and plenty of hay in the barn, so they are usually able to maintain a pretty consistent nutrient intake year round, if we’re doing our jobs. 

Pumpkins in the hoop-house

More grapes were harvested from the vines in the home garden this week, adding to last week’s impressive haul. JD and Piper processed and produced more grape jelly, and I think that we are all looking forward to seeing that farm product showing up on the breakfast table some time soon. It’s great to see the grapes being put to use this fall, and there have been many years when we just haven’t been able to take full advantage of this amazing crop. Our grapes have tart skins and pretty substantial seeds at their centers, so both eating and processing can take some real commitment. The rewards are worth it, but sometimes we just don’t get it done. 

Cord wood, ready for delivery.

Fall firewood deliveries started this week, and the forestry crew was able to hitch up the draft-horses for pulling the wood wagon around the farm roads to make deliveries to the cabins out in the woods. With a strong crew of visiting students to pitch wood into wagon, horses to pull the wagon around, and the same crew to unload and stack, this process was fast and efficient. We are always looking for more ways to use the horses, to keep the tractors and trucks idle in the garage, and to reduce our use of fuel, so delivering firewood that was cut, split and cured here on the farm for use in wood-stoves in houses also here on the farm, is a very satisfying project. This was our first week of full school visit programing since the spring of 2020, so we had a solid team of eager wood movers ready to get the job done and to have fun doing it. Though the farmers here can find joy in almost every part of the work of the farm through the year, the enthusiasm brought to bear by visiting youth, stepping onto the farm maybe for the first or second time, is powerful, remarkable to witness and feel, and infectious. 

September 11th – September 18th

The garden team harvested the grapes and peaches this week, collecting all of that beautiful fruit for eating and processing. The peaches had been under quite a bit of pressure from wasps and birds looking for sugar and moisture at the end of this hot dry summer, so the decision was made to get what we could off the peach trees now before every peach was damaged. The grapes were processed into grape juice, and I think there are plans to make some of that into jelly. With the dry conditions that baked the farm this summer, all of the fruit is pretty small, but the sugars are concentrated nicely and they all have some wonderful flavor. We do have some fall bearing raspberries coming on down at the bottom of the home garden, and the flowers are still going strong in quite a few beds, so there is still some good picking and some beautiful sights for farmers and visiting youth on a wander through the garden. 

Corn curing in the greenhouse

Dave and gg finished up the dig out of the laying hens winter house, and we will now go through the building with brooms and a shop-vac to complete a final deeper clean. We have not found any clear entry point for the rats that took up residence in the house last winter, so we’ll now have to think some more about how to make that house a more comfortable place to house hens this winter. Last winter’s rats definitely had burrows in the deep bedding on the floor of the winter house, and I had hoped to find a hole that they were using to get up into the house. We planned to block up the hole in hopes of keeping the rats out, but without that opportunity, we’re looking for new solutions. My concern is that the rats were able to just walk in the front door that the chickens use, dig holes in the bedding pack and make themselves at home, and I am not sure how we can stop that from happening again this winter. I don’t think that we’ll have a feeder inside the winter house this year, and that should help reduce the incentive for the rats, but the deep warm bedding that keeps the chickens comfortable is always going to be a temptation for rats looking to keep warm through the winter. 

The fall brassicas are looking good.

The beef herd has grazed their way over most of our large hay fields that surround their winter barn down on Brooks rd. The drought of late summer stunted those fields enough that we were not able to get a second cutting of hay off of them, so the cows enjoyed some pretty nice grazing instead. The grass itself was actually relatively dry and crispy after the extended period without rain, so the fields were a bit more like standing hay than actual green grass, but the herd did a nice job cleaning everything up. I am actually pleased to have run the cows over these hay fields where they were able to add a bit of manure to the system. We will spread a good deal of composted bedding and manure on these fields this fall, trying to keep them in productive health and ready to grow a strong crop of hay next year, but the cows added a bit more to the mix as they worked their way over the pastures. Conditions in the pastures have improved with the cooler weather of September and a few nice rain events, but I am not sure how deep into October we are going to be able to graze this fall. I think that the pasture plants are growing right now, but I will be really interested to see how well paddocks bounce back after this latest round of grazing. There is some nice grass out ahead of both cow herds, and if there is nice regrowth this time around we could go around again, but remains to be seen. 

Magnolia, out on pasture

Our newly purchased heifer calf Magnolia moved from her pen in the barn into the larger calf pen in the back of the barn this week so that she had some company at night when the calves are closed up. She was also caught nursing off of a couple different cows this week when she was let into the barn for the morning and afternoon bottles, so we decided to let her out with the herd onto pasture starting Saturday morning and to stop her mid-day feeding. The hope is that one cow will allow Magnolia to nurse from her regularly, and will adopt her a bit, and that her care can shift from us to a cow, who can do a much better job. We don’t want Magnolia nursing off of a few cows, so we’ll try to keep an eye on the situation and intervene as needed. 

We cleared out a melon bed in the hoophouse called Junior this week, prepped the bed with fertilizer and compost, and planted fall Bok Choy into the prepped bed. These were our last greenhouse starts of the season, so that space can be fully shifted to curing storage crops. Other fall field work continued with work on the fall crops like cabbage, kale and spinach, cleanup of tarps and sand-bags, more potato harvest, and mowing and weed-whacking. Harvest also continued this week, as well as a bit more onion and garlic processing. 

September 4th – September 11th

The dairy herd is enjoying some nice pasture below the greenhouses.

The week started with a significant two day rain event that passed over almost all of New England Monday and Tuesday. The farm’s rain gauge showed that more than two and a half inches of rain fell in that period, most of it in a steady soaking way that did not wash out our roads, driveway or paths. Though we had certainly been more than two and half inches short of our typical yearly rainfall by September, this was just the type of soaking storm we needed to restore the landscape parched over this hot dry summer. Ponds and streams have been refilled, the brown pastures are beginning to green up again, and I am hopeful that we might have a nice fall grazing season after all. The deep soil is still pretty dry, and I think it will take the slower freezing and thawing cycles of winter and spring to undo some of that, but the roots of our forage plants and fruit trees are getting their first solid drink in quite a while. Leaves have started turning brown and falling on some of the trees around the farm, and I still think that we might experience an early fall this year. 

The wood-shaving bedding pile so far.

We started digging out last year’s pine shavings bedding from the winter chicken house this week, working our way through the deep pack of dusty material and moving it out the front door, where it can be scooped up with the tractor and dumped on the compost pile. This is dusty unpleasant work, so we are not going to ask visiting kids to work in the house while we dig everything out, and we have been working to get effective dust masks and eye protection to try to keep out the dust as well as we can. Despite hours of searching and patching holes, we had rats in the winter layer house last winter, so we are hoping to find holes in the floor under the bedding where they were getting in. Once we have the house thoroughly cleaned, we’ll try to figure out how to patch the holes and make the house secure for the hens this winter. The rats have proved to be a really difficult problem here on the farm, and we are still exploring ways to effectively get control of them in this unique environment. 

The peaches in the home garden are slowly ripening.

We had seventh and eighth graders from the Charles River School on the farm Wednesday to Friday this week, marking the start of our fall programming season, and the first time that we have run a regular three day school visit since the spring of 2020. This was a huge milestone for us here on the farm, and it was wonderful to settle back into that old and comfortable routine again after missing it for so long. The kids, who’s school year has just started this week, worked really hard and had a lot of fun with us out on the farm. All of the little parts of a great school visit were fresh after such a long hiatus, and we were all happy to share that return to the program with such a wonderful group. Charles River has been sending youth out to the farm for many many years, and it felt great to bring the farm back to life with this foundational school partner. 

Brad cut some hay this week, pulling the new horse-drawn mower down the road to ‘Best Pasture’ to see if we could get a bit of second cut hay from that field. The drought has really stopped pasture growth this summer, so we are not going to make second cut hay on the majority of our hay fields, but Brad is optimistic that this field might be alright. Second cut hay, made when a hay field is mowed for the second time in the growing season, typically is a softer, greener and finer product than first cut hay. The forage plants in our pastures are working to produce and release seed successfully in the growing season, and most of them produce a tall rigid stem at their center and try to push their seed head up as high as they can on that to increase pollination and seed dispersal. The presence of this woody stem and chunky seed head gives first cut hay a rougher browner texture and appearance than second cut hay. Second cut, without the seed head and stem, and composed mostly of just leaves, is usually softer and greener, and has been traditionally considered to be a finer higher quality feed than first cut hay. With the short grass that Brad and the horses will be trying to cut, dry and bale for this year’s second cut hay, I expect that the baler will have quite a difficult time trying to sweep up the hay, gather it in the chamber, and pack a solid bale with it.

Tarped beds in one of the hoop-houses

The students from Charles River School harvested about five hundred pounds of potatoes before they got on their bus to head home on Friday morning, putting a solid dent in this year’s fall potato harvest. These kids also started the garlic and onion processing for the fall, cleaning both of those storage crops that have been curing in the greenhouse, and packing them into bags for storage and distribution. We also finished up the fall melon harvest this week, and that block of beds in the flat field has been mowed and tarped so that we can seed it with cover crop in a few weeks. The blocks that grew the onions, cleared a few weeks ago and tarped, were uncovered this week and seeded with a cover crop blend of oats, peas and vetch. We also tarped the beds in some of the hoop-houses so that they can be nice and clean for winter spinach and cilantro seeding in a few weeks. Harvest continued this week, with deliveries to the Mission Hill community, the Athol Food Bank, and the senior-share program. 

August 20th – September 4th

The Sungolds have enjoyed this hot dry summer.

A little more than a half an inch of rain fell on the farm this week, breaking a long stretch of really hot dry weather, and the grass of the pastures has brightened and greened a bit after having taken on a distinctly brown hue over the past couple of weeks. The rain washed away the dusty parched feeling that had really come to dominate the landscape, and I think that we all breathed a bit easier knowing that the world around us had finally gotten a drink of water after such a long dry spell. Half an inch or rain wasn’t nearly enough to break this drought, and Kristen reports that the soil in the Flat Field is still dry just over a half inch down, but I am hopeful that the pastures were able to soak up the rain that fell and that the forage plants took it in. We have a significant rain event forecasted to start next week, and if that actually comes to pass, the combination of these two storms could set us up for some pretty nice grazing through September. Our hay fields are not going to grow enough to produce a second cutting of hay this fall, so we could have some pretty great forage for the beef herd as they work their way through those big fields. We have a nice collection of bales for winter feeding already, and I think we’ll have a pretty small beef herd this winter, so I am optimistic that we can make it through the winter with the feed we have, plus a bit of nice dairy hay that we have ordered. 

Magnolia is in her new pen in the dairy barn.

We bought a Dutch Belted (Lakenvelder) dairy heifer calf this week, and we have moved her into a stall in the dairy barn and named her Magnolia. Dutch Belted cows, with a white stripe around their middle and black or red shoulders and haunches, are a medium sized breed of dairy cows that is known for producing really great milk. The fat globules in their milk are smaller than those of other cows, and this gives the milk a ‘smoother’ feel. We are excited to add a different breed to our milking line up, and to have a cute baby in the barn for bottle feeding this fall with visiting kids. We’ll get Magnolia out on a halter next week with kids, learning her manners and getting to know the farm. She’ll be bottle and grain fed until weaning, and hopefully we’ll be able to get her mixed into the herd pretty soon. Our last cow of the year is due at the end of September, so we do expect one more calf before winter. Pickle has run into a bit of udder trouble, as usual, and we decided to use her as a nurse cow this fall rather milking her. She has been moved to the pasture below the dairy barn, and she is supplying both her calf and Ruby with milk. Unfortunately, I think that Pickle is proving to be too much trouble to keep in the milking lineup, and we plan to cull her in November. 

Ali enjoying the new wash/pack shed.

The veggie team washed and packed this week’s harvest in our new wash/pack shed, marking a transition from the old wash-up area in the bottom of the barn at 80 Athol Rd. to our new facility just completed down the old Hickory Lane at the dairy farm. I think that folks enjoyed the new space, and the cleaning and packing process was pretty quick and efficient in a building designed and built for that purpose. Veggie washers say that the views from the new building, looking out over the fields, are much better than the old facility in the basement of an old dairy barn, the time saved not driving all the way down to the 80 Athol Rd over and over is significant, and the efficiency of being able to drive right up to the side of the building for loading and unloading makes a huge difference. The rolling drying racks really helped, and the drainage system is much better at moving all of that water used in washing veggies out of the building and away. The veggie crew is still working to figure out better lighting, where to hang up and store everything, and how to perfect their systems in there to fit the space. 

We have youth programming starting Wednesday of next week, so this was a staff work week here on the farm, and we worked to get the facilities cleaned up and schedules set to welcome visitors back to the program. Though we have run some summer programs, and some day trips over the spring, it has been quite a while since we were up to full speed with our school visit programming, and the fall is just about full of three-day school visits. It is going to be great to get back into that rhythm again this fall with full weeks and a lot of kids having the chance to spend some time out here on the farm.