Spring Heat Wave & Maple Sugar!

Wow! This heatwave is getting us ready for a hot summer! 5 days in the low to mid 90s is enough to wear down even the most experienced farmer. When your livelihood is made by being a farmer you have to train yourself to overcome heat waves. It is important to balance your work with plenty of rest and hydration. We enjoy filling our cattle troughs with ice cold hose water and using it as an outdoor ice bath to help us cool off after hours in the hot sun.

In terms of farm work for the week; we haven't slowed down because of the heat! We have full removed all the stakes from last year's tomato field- which was over 2,000 stakes. We typically try to get that job done in the fall after the tomatoes have stopped producing, but unfortunately that doesn't always happen as we'd like it to and then we are stuck doing it in the spring. Over the last week we've had one of our former gymnasts, Ian, out here helping us on the farm. It's always a blessing having young muscle out here on the farm doing tasks like these!

Maple sugar; it's something we have never made before but we've always talked about doing. With this heat wave and the intermittent rainfalls we decided it was time to try it! We did a bit of research beforehand so we knew what to expect and what to look for. From there on we just went for it! It has been a fun experience learning how you can start with drilling a hole in a maple tree to get sap (which is essentially water) and end with fine crystalized pieces of maple sugar! Maple sugar can be used in recipes in the same way as cane sugar is used. It can be used to sweeten drinks, top oatmeal or incorporated into a flavorful rub for meats! Maple sugar is on average twice as sweet as cane sugar, so it makes for a wonderful substitue for making sweet treats and desserts!

New mower!

A new mower may not sound very exciting to most, but living on the farm we have acres of land that have to be mowed! Having a quality working mower can transform the look of the farm! We made it through 2017 using an old mower with 1 working blade and a battery that needed to be charged every time you used it. Now we have a brand new 46" 22hp Cub Cadet mower!

Spring time on the farm comes with many things to do beyond working in the field. There is a lot of upkeep that starts in order to keep the farm looking great! We have many acres of mowing, a treenline that needs to be kept up, flower gardens to be cleaned up and mulched and so many little projects all alround the farm. We could work from dawn until dusk every single day and still not be able to be fully caught up.

When it comes to field work, we have accomplished plenty of that as well! We continue to plant tomatoes, of course. We started three fields of pumpkins, squash and gourds. We have finished most of it but have also been delayed due to wet fields and lack of time. We have also planted onions, beans, peas, radishes, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, zucchini and more!

We are off to a fantastic start to our season! We're very excited to have a fantastic farming season with outstanding produce!

5.15.18 Tomatoes and Potatoes!

We are very excited to let everyone know that we have started transplanting our heirloom tomatoes!

This planting is a couple weeks ahead of last years schedule, so we are hoping for some early season tomatoes! The last couple of days we have transplanted over 1,000 tomato plants! We plan to be planting tomatoes over the next month or so. Last year we had an immense amount of rain through the spring which set us back on planting because the fields were too wet. This year we feel like spring skipped us- we went straight from winter to summer weather! This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just as long as we get some rain along with the sunny weather! When it doesn't rain we are forced to be watering the plants by hand.

Along with tomatoes, we also planted potatoes! We planted some blues, some reds and some double reds (red skin and red inside). Potatoes are unique when compared to most produce because to get potatoes for this year we simply plant leftover potatoes from last year!

There are many spring jobs on the farm which we enjoy however trimming apple trees is not one of them... If it weren't essential to do, we would not do it. It's one of our least favorite jobs on the farm but we love good apples so it's a must! When we trim the trees we mainly try to cut off the water sprouts, unless more major trimming is required. If we let water sprouts continue to grow they'll turn into full branches. Water sprouts typically grow straight up reaching out to get as much sun as possible. When trimming apple trees you don't want branches overlapping, growing together or growing straight up. This causes issues as they get bigger. This is why we work hard to eliminate those sprouts to keep the trees growing healthy and producing good fruit!

2.26.18 Maple tree tapping has begun!

With temperatures now teatering above and below freezing, we decided it's time to begin tapping our maple trees! We tapped 29 trees trees along the driveway. We always start with trees along the driveway, because that is where the sun and warmth hits first! Maple trees begin flowing once the trees warm up during the day and then freeze again at night.

Last year we tapped around 49 trees, we hope to add more taps this year so we are able to yield more syrup for all of you! Tapping trees and set up are the easy part. Once we get syrup flowing, we are going to have hours of hard work before us! We will have to rebuild our boiling station and then we'll be carrying hundreds of pounds of sap to be boiled over an open fire!

We'll update all of you once we are onto the next steps of the process!