Sunday's Winter Sleigh Ride Event and other Freedom activities CANCELLED.
We will hope that 2011 brings us more **SNOW**!


March 1st, 2010.

We had a great day Sunday, meeting people at two CSA +CSF Fairs: Rockland and Belfast. There was music by Dog Wants Out in Belfast--100% fun, that band! And they have a mission to support agriculture and food security. Thank you DWO!!
I am guessing 100 or more fair goers attended the Belfast fair. It was hoppin'.

News from the Farm: It can be pretty windy out here in the winter. Without much snow, we haven't had to contend with the drifts this year. We break out the kites often in the springtime and this sunny day last week seemed like a good first kite day for 2010.

We have onions, celery, parsley and celeriac and various flowers seeded. Work on the heated greenhouse will be happening this weekend. We settled on a two phase heating system: this year we will install a propane fired heater and build benches. Next year we will outfit those benches with tubing that will circulate wood-heated water beneath the seedling trays. Sounds cozy, doesn't it?

Most days Jip is "just" a pet (and a nuisance when he takes off!) but we have been putting him to work lately. He has been guarding the laying hens. We took down the flexible net fencing for the winter (to lengthen its life) and when we started seeing fox prints in the snow, we decided that our hens needed to have a body guard while they roamed and scratched about. So Jip has been spending some time with the layers. He seems to be enjoying the new responsibility and we are grateful for his contribution.

CSA sign ups are coming in. Let us know if you think of a place where a poster would be good.

All the best from here,
Polly

Winter Fun in Freedom POSTPONED.

Please join the fun in bustling downtown Freedom on March 7th.


Here is what will be happening:

• The Dirigo Grange will host a pancake breakfast with coffee, juice and sausage from 8:30-10:30.


• Village Farm will host local teamsters for FREE sleigh rides from 10-2.


• The Freedom Volunteer Fire Department will sell hotdogs, cocoa, coffee and sweets at the Village Farm during the sleigh rides. Proceeds will benefit the Department.

Let's all hope the farm fields look like this by March 7th!
Let it snow!!

Hello out there!!
It is winter on the farm.
King Winter keeps it interesting around here.

Current winter activities:
Keeping a hole in the ice open for hauling water for the cows and calves.
Listening to the cows munch their hay in a quiet barn.
Collecting frozen eggs from in the coop but only on the coldest days.
Ordering seeds, amendments, soil mix, tractor parts, and more seeds.
Selling organic eggs to the Belfast Coop
Getting our CSA brochures printed and distributed.
Planning for the CSA + CSF Fair on Feb 28 (1-4 at the UU Church.)
Planning for the Sleigh Rides!! (See below)
Enjoying our new logo (artwork by Siri Beckman of Stonington)
Updating our website.
Eating root vegetables from the cemetary's crypt (our root cellar!).

FEB 21st --Winter Fun in Downtown Freedom!!!

Dirigo Grange will host Pancake Breakfast 830-1030

Village Farm from 10-2. Free Sleigh Rides with local teamsters.

Freedom Fire Department will be selling hotdogs, cocoa, cookies and coffee at the farm during the sleigh rides.

Spread the word!

Hope to see you all soon!!
Polly and Prentice

Happy New Year!

January 1st, 2010. . . The snow is coming down every-which-a way out there. The cows are in the barn, the chickens in the coop and the farmers in the house. At the moment, I should say.

We have been busily tying up the loose ends of 2009 in this last week. Figuring, tallying, and analyzing all the many sets of numbers of the past year. Not only dollars and cents but pounds, bunches and yields, row feet and amounts of seeds. We are turning the corner into 2010 informed by the 2009 records. As seed ordering deadlines (for discounts) loom, we need to know now how many seeds we will drop into the soil nearly a half a year from now.

News from November and December: Before Prentice returned to his off-farm/winter work as a cabinetmaker, he and his father, Tony, spent several days erecting a used hoophouse frame that will hopefully house our seedlings come spring. We really would like to burn farm-raised fuel to grow our seedlings. That sounds simple but it is not. He has been trying to figure out the thermodynamics of heating such a structure with firewood and the various boilers and storage tanks needed to do so. Stoneset Farm of Brooklin loaned us one of their farmers, Nathan, for a day of greenhouse construction this November. I guess he loaned himself to us. . . Thank you, Stoneset!

This trench that Nathan hand-dug (just kidding!) will bring power to the new structure for fans and thermostats, and of course, the radio.

Hannah Converse worked with us for six weeks this fall and it looks like she will be returning for the 2010 season. We are really happy to have one piece of the apprentice puzzle figured out for the coming season and even happier that that piece is Hannah!! Digging trees from the nursery in mid-November can be an arduous task but the digging proceeded at a great clip and nearly 1000 trees and shrubs were delivered to FEDCO Trees of Waterville. The dormant "whips" will hang out in bundles with their roots in moist sawdust until spring when FEDCO will send them to mailorder customers and sell them from their sub-terranean warehouse. We are proud to be members of the FEDCO Trees Growers Cooperative. Their spring sale in Clinton, Maine each spring is a bookend to the summer for me. See their website for ordering info and sale dates.

These are red maples dug, bundled and "heeled-in" to the garden until delivery day.

Another November event, popular with the little boys around here was when Joe Fortin, a dairy farmer from Albion, used a deep tillage plow on our new vegetable ground. After plunging a penetrometer into the new plots on the west side of the driveway, it seemed clear that there was significant sub-surface compaction (leftover from pre-2001, when 25 of our 40 tillable acres were cropped to corn) and that using this "paraplow" could fracture the hardpan. Though farmers everywhere saw their fields fill with puddles this past spring, we speculated that our drainage problems in 2009 may have been due in part to this layer of hardpan that acts as an obstacle and catchment for rainwater between the soil surface and the subsoil. The results of this tillage action, of course, will be hard to measure but we will be watching how these fields dry out in the early spring and we will again test with the penetrometer. We will wait and see.

2009 CSA Members will receive a letter from us in the next few weeks with some specific year-end details from 2009 and an invitation to purchase a farm share again in 2010. We are in the process of doing some website and brochure updates but please direct any interested friends to our website's CSA page for prices and details. The price of the shares will remain the same in 2010.

We will be attending a CSA-CSF Fair in Belfast on February 28th from 1-4 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 37 Miller Street (right behind the Library). Farmers and fisherpeople will be promoting their offerings and answering questions. It's a great event that we will be publicizing widely in the weeks ahead.

Best wishes to one and all in the new year ahead.

For all of us,

Polly

Garlic planting tomorrow and an ode to brussel sprouts

Greetings,

Did you think we'd forgotten you for the shifting of the season? No! We miss you! Things here are good. The season is certainly shifting. We're cleaning up the gardens and organizing the outbuildings. Harvesting some for various wholesale accounts and wrapping our heads around the possibility of putting up a seedling greenhouse to go online this Spring. We also need to plant roughly 2400 garlic seeds (cloves) for 2010, and we plan to start

THIS FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, AROUND 10 AM.

Please come and join us if you are able and so inclined. We would be happy to have you.

Also, we have brussel sprouts. We planted nearly 400 plants this Spring and intended to have them for everyone in the CSA with some additional for wholesale. They, however, were among the crops (also, notably, sweet corn, peppers, eggplant, and winter squash) which really suffered for the cold, wet early summer. However. . . .we did save a few plants and they have matured respectably. If anyone is a brussel sprout fan (I am!) and would like to come by the farm for some, please do. (Belfast and Camden sproutheads, we could make arrangements).

Here's the ode, as promised:

Oh fine, tender sprout

for our pleasure you unfold

in dappled light

resist temptation to overwhelm

You are no tomato! No!

we worship your humility and

prepare you with heavy cream (and nutmeg)

Take care, Prentice (and co.)

***************************************

And some new pictures. . .

Hannah driving Allis Chalmers G in from prepping garlic beds. Late October. Picture by Joseph.

Joseph took this picture of Hannah peeking out from behind the bolted parsley.

This is Hannah incorporating compost and amendments in next year's garlic beds.

The chickens have been helping with the garden cleanup. Their eggs will be showing up at the Belfast Coop and at Farmers Fare (Rockport) soon. They are always available from the green dairy fridge in the shop, too!

Our last distributions of 2009!
Friday, October 9th in Belfast and Tuesday, October 13th at the Farm.

Thank you for being a part of our farm!!!

SPINACH ~ CHOICE OF HERBS ~ BEETS ~ CELERIAC~ CABBAGE ~ WINTER SQUASH ~ POTATOES ~ CARROTS ~ CHOICE OF KALE, ESCAROLE, BOK CHOI ~ ONIONS ~ GARLIC ~ BUNCHED CELERY ~

This link can help you store all these vegetables for the weeks ahead. Some like it cool, moist, dry, etc, so if you are not sure, take a look!

A note about winter squash. We are big squash fans, so it is enough to make us cry to see the dozen or so bushel boxes of winter squash that our farm produced this year. It should have been, could have been, dozens and dozens of bushel boxes. Last year we loaded a trailer towed behind the tractor with pumpkins and winter squash . This year we planted 6X that amount! You have heard enough about the cool temps, cold, wet soils and held back seedlings. . .let's just say, the winter squash crop took the biggest hit. You will all get a few varieties.

Also, conspicuously absent or rare were a few other vegetables: Peppers, sweet corn, eggplant. We grew LOTS of all of these but they, too, seriously underperformed this season. Each fall we tally what we distributed to "basic" and "abundant" shares and calculate a relative share value. We believe, despite the few "failed" crops, that the CSA distributions were bountiful and diverse and still afforded all of you a good value.

To put a brighter spin on things, may crops did well! We trialed many zinnias this year and had hundreds of blooms each week to sell to our wholesale accounts.

Prentice and I are already looking forward to next year.

Did you ever watch that pig video? Well, Prentice has been at it again.

What do we do when we aren't tending, picking, cleaning, packing or delivering vegetables?

Hang out together in the woods. The woods ask nothing of us. They provide playthings, beauty, space, quiet and so much more. Here is our "Special Spot" in the woods of Village Farm. Developing the trails through the 80 acre woodlot is a goal of ours in the years ahead. Quite a few neighbors enjoy daily walks on the existing trails but we envision a few miles of loops that could be used by many more people. If you like to walk, snowshoe or X-Country ski, you are invited to use the trails anytime!!

Prentice and I will be facilitating a discussion at the Belfast Library on Nov 3rd (election night) after the film, Fresh, The Movie. See the trailer here. We would love to see any CSA members there and we would hope that you might participate in the discussion about the CSA concept and how it worked (or didn't) for you.

Other than that, we have more harvesting of root crops still to do. Planting garlic, cleaning up the barnyard and we will be constructing a heated greenhouse this fall. The four pigs and a steer or two will go to slaughter, we will dig our trees that we sell through FEDCO Trees, and we will do some more preserving (applesauce, jam from frozen berries, greens and pesto to the freezer. . . ) Prentice will fill his winter days with some woodworking projects and I will settle into winter bookkeeping, farm planning and boy tending.

<>

We look forward to collating your comments and suggestions that come through the evaluation/survey form and will be in touch with a 2009 wrap up letter when we can "do the numbers." We will also be in touch in early 2010 with CSA information and offerings for next year. We are thinking about a 2010 Flower Share and will most likely have seedlings for pre-order and sale at the farm.

Eggs are rolling in and though the Rhode Island Reds' eggs are not full sized yet, we are pricing the dozens lower to reflect that. Stop by anytime and grab some from the fridge in the shop (money box on top of the fridge) or be in touch and we can rendezvous in Belfast on Thursdays.

As always, be in touch with thoughts or questions. We love hearing from you.

We are grateful for your support and patronage this season. We are also grateful for the wonderful efforts put in by our farm crew: Andy, Amanda, Laura and Hannah. Some of you pitched in at our work parties and we hosted 50 or so college students from Colby and Unity for brief work sessions. Many hands!! Friends and family delivered meals around Abe's birth and as always, our parents helped in all ways imaginable.

Best wishes for a lovely fall and winter,

Polly, Prentice and all at Village Farm

Work Party postponed!

Due to the rainy forecast for tomorrow, we are postponing the Work Party from tomorrow to Wednesday afternoon, October 14th from 3-6 p.m..

Hope to see many of you Tuesday (October 6) for the Autumn Potluck at the Farm starting at 5 p.m. Always a good time . . .

Take care, Polly