This spring, our first on new land, feels especially energizing because we’re learning and developing new things every day. In addition to our regular spring tasks – endless bed prep and endless seeding in the greenhouse – we’ve also learned how to prune our prolific 40-year-old blueberry bushes (thanks to the patient teachings of our next door neighbor, who grew up in our house and has pruned the blueberries for decades), how to effectively use our new BCS tractor, and how to establish and care for our new bee hives. It seems only fitting to be undertaking so many new projects on our new farm, and we’re proud to announce our recent organic certification from Baystate Organic Certifiers. You can read a more detailed explanation of our growing practices here, but we’re very excited to finally be certified organic!
After what felt like a deep and endless winter, spring has been announcing her arrival in lots of creative ways lately. We have been eagerly expecting the budding of our magnolia tree, the blooming of the daffodils, and the sprouting of our rhubarb patch, but we didn’t know to expect the raging thunderstorm we got last week that pummeled us with driving rain and bitter cold winds for 24 hours. We all woke up in the middle of the night to bright lightening and deafening thunder, and wondered if it was raining inside the house (it wasn’t, thank god). By the time it finally stopped we had gotten 2.5 INCHES of rain. That’s a lot of rain, even for an August thunderstorm, let alone in mid April. Of course the storm hit us the day after I’d gotten our first two beehives set up, and I spent the evening of the storm outside in yellow rubber rain gear trying to shelter the hives from the rain and wind, certain that all 20,000 bees were going to die. Bees are resilient though - over the course of last week they completely recovered and are happily getting their combs established while they wait for the pollen to come in.
With the patient and tireless help of our #1 favorite tractor guy, Jon Hubbard, we have plowed and harrowed one of our two fields. Elise feels superstitious about even so much as saying the work ‘rock’ (what if they are hiding? what if they all sneak in one night while we’re sleeping?!), but I will say that so far we’re very happy with what we’ve uncovered. It seems that our southern field is composed of nice deep topsoil and a completely manageable number of rocks. PHEW.
We are very lucky to have an amazingly talented artist and architect friend, Tessa Kelly (her etsy shop is here), who carves the most beautiful stamps by hand – we were so delighted when she agreed to carve our new logo for use on all our signage. She used sketches of a baby kale leaf that we gave her in a bag of salad mix last year as the inspiration for the leaf on our new logo, and we love it. Thanks Tessa!
