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.
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.
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.
The Farm School Manual 