Sorry, folks, for all the waffling, but I have decided to stick with the old blog on blogspot for the time being–this one doesn’t look or act right to me.  See you back over there, with two new entries!

A much-welcomed rainy day affords time for the computer, so I bring you all the next episode of snippets of life on North Branch Farm.

One of the many treasures we inherited with the farm is a 1989 Woodmizer LT28, which is a sawmill not so very different from the one we borrowed last summer to mill up wood for Seth’s and my (then) cabin. Tyler and Seth have been working persistently on getting this one up in running condition, and just a couple days ago, the final replacement parts we needed came in the mail and we fired up the old machine! The sawlogs we’re working with in the pictures are from the red pine and balsam fir that we had to cut down to make room for our new driveway, and are a little on the small size. However, the red pine is already coming in handy; Elsie is custom making us a set of wooden CSA boxes to carry our vegetables safely to the homes of our brave CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members. The boxes are beautiful, functional, and made by us and our farm!

Two too sweet brothers!

Tuesday was our first CSA pick-up day, and I was thrilled to send off a fine mix of farm treasures: head lettuce grown by Lucretia, spinach, Egyptian walking onions, garlic scapes, curly parsley, and soft cheese with garlic and herbs made by Elsie. I have worked on CSAs before, harvested on many an early morning and packed many a box, but I have never run one of my own. It brings an interesting mix of responsibility, obligation, solidarity, and adventure–I have a captive audience, and I want them to be caught absolutely breathless by the beauty and quality of the food when they open their box. Can I do it, week after week, for twenty weeks in a row? I hope so.

May the soft rains be followed by warm sun in your gardens and on your faces.
Until next time.

Happenings on the farm just keep…happening. Yesterday we had only broken tractors, and since our tractor hero with the tractor ambulance and his son came by, we now have working tractors and a few easy fixes left to perform. Today was a beautiful day, and Seth and the Oliver and the New Idea Cut-ditioner (mower/crimper) put down about 5 acres of hay. It got showered upon this afternoon but we hope it might be okay anyway.

Here is the mower on the first pass around the perimeter of the field.

Seth and the set-up.

Yikes! Farming!

Today, the well drillers up and left, their work complete; we now have a well with 10-12 gallons per minute of flow that is attached to absolutely nothing. Not too shabby! I can’t wait to plumb it into our system. Last week, to give the well a little more leeway, seven of us picked up and moved the outhouse, hence a new view of and from the loo. You may also notice a classy half-door that Gib put on the outhouse, for which we are so grateful. The mulched area you can see in both pictures covers the new septic line, tank and leach field. Hurray! No more shower commutes!

Friends!
The past days have been an exciting mix of projects and events and people.

Almost two weeks ago Ben and Oleh, a pair of WWOOFers, arrived at North Branch Farm. WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, formerly known as Willing Workers on Organic Farms, and is an organization that we have signed up with as a host site. People who are traveling and want to spend time living and working on a farm in return for room and board contact us and then come by for anywhere from a couple days to many weeks. It’s a very neat set-up, a big help to our farm, and something that both Elsie and I have done in the past as the travelers.

With Ben and Oleh, we’ve reclaimed many garden beds at the upper North Branch Farm (Chris and Jonathan’s place) that had been swamped by an early flush of annual and perennial weeds brought on by the unusually warm spring. They also have single-, or rather quadruple-handedly, stripped the asphalt shingle siding off the entire south side of the barn and most of the east and west sides. They’ve mucked stalls, put out transplants, mulched, milked, and cooked many a delicious meal. We are so grateful for their willing help!

Our cruising friends, Mick and Bee, were in town and recently sailed away heading Northeast for Canada–I mention them because they are some of our most loyal blog followers; they win the prize for Most Engaged Non-Biologically-Related Blog Readers, and their reliable ragging and berating has prompted more blog productivity than I’d like to admit.

Bovine report: Maple, our only milker at the moment, has been producing close to 3 gallons of sweet and creamy milk a day. She still kicks like the dickens without the use of some dairy-lore anti-kick methods, and last night we discovered that she has mastitis in one quarter (a cow’s udder is divided into four distinct quarters, each with its own teat). We’re putting her calf, Filet Mignon, back with her because apparently one of the best ways to treat mastitis is to prevent any milk from accumulating in the infected quarter. Unfortunately, this means he will be drinking ALL of our our milk for the next day or so, but it seems worth it to hopefully cure and prevent the spread of the infection. Sadie Rose is due any day now–she is “bagging up,” which means her udder is starting to fill with colostrum for the calf, so we’re now pretty sure she is, in fact, pregnant. But when will the baby come? There’s no telling. Based on her temperament and last calving, we’re likely to come out for chores one day and notice that she has a calf walking at her side that didn’t use to be there.

Ovine report: We are signed up to buy about 12 sheep! They will be for meat and wool, but we don’t know when exactly we’ll get them. All ewes and some ewe-lambs, and one solitary ram-lamb. Some of them are Coopworth/North Country Cheviot crosses. Talk to Elsie for details.

Caprine report: We don’t have any goats. This is very sad.

Swine report: Chris and Lucretia got us two little shoats, just weaned, about 6 weeks old, one boy one girl! They are total cuties, and that comes from someone who has beef (or pork?) with pigs. We have had them a couple weeks now and they have already grown tremendously.

Water report: The toilet’s connected to the septic tank, the septic tank’s connected to the leach field, the leach field’s covered with grass seed and hay! We can flush and shower to our hearts’ content. Simultaneously, H2O Well-Drilling showed up yesterday and put in the first twenty feet of casing towards our new well. Today they are back with more casing and have just set up to start drilling again. Soon we may have potable water! Below is a picture of the drill rig that Seth took just as they were starting to set up yesterday.

Baby Shapley-Quinn report: alive and kicking! 5:30am daily is apparently a great time for in utero aqua-aerobics, which is fine by me.

Garden report: After over half an inch of rain yesterday, eight acres of plowed and cover-cropped fields are starting to sprout up, the dry beans are coming up, and our transplants are glorying in plenty of hydration. Can’t wait to be eating more fresh veggies!

A driveway for the new house! The first three pictures were supposed to be a panorama, top would be on the left and bottom on the right, but I don’t have the ability to stitch them together.

And a slab! Seth and Jonathan making final adjustments to the staked-out footprint (26′ x 32′) of our future house.

Less than an hour later: Wade has dug out for the slab.

The view south from the future house

We have had a long run of hot, sunny, intermittently steamy days with temperatures up to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which irks me mostly because we do not yet have ideal watering systems in place for animals or plants but also because when I moved away from North Carolina I thought, “Well, at least I will get away from the oppressive summer climate.” Come to find out that global warming is plotting against me personally.

But truly, things look to me like they will turn out alright. Last summer was incredibly cool and wet, and yet still we had enough food to eat through the winter. If this summer proves to be the opposite, just look out for our killer melon crop and an abundance of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and squash.

Below is a series of photos of the initial day of plowing and disc harrowing in the future vegetable fields. Oai and Minh are buzzing around on the lawn tractor they found in our barn that Oai fixed up.

Four-bottom moldboard plow at work.

Jonathan and Tyler plowing off into the sunset…

Welcome, everyone, to a time of pretty cows on pretty pasture!

What else is new? Seth, Tyler and Elsie are taking turns on our two biggest tractors the International–“Big Red”–and the Oliver–“The Green Giant,” one with the recently repaired four-bottom plow and the other with the disc harrow. Yesterday, they opened up close to three acres of fresh ground which we will seed into a cover crop of peas, vetch and oats (PVO) as soon as possible. I’m trying to avoid the fumes of gas and fountains of hydraulic and transmission fluids that periodically come spraying out of the tractors and their implements.

Our noble hero Wade of Guy Hanson and Son is here with bulldozer and excavator, having already built a driveway to the future Seth-Anna-little person house. He is now grinding away on a leach field so that someday in the not-so-distant future we may be able to let our dish- and bath-water down the drain instead of dashing it all over the front lawn.

Wildlife sightings:
A pair of Baltimore Orioles (Jonny said they are suckers for citrus fruit, so after I first saw them I put out some oranges that I got from the Belfast Co-Op compost and lo and behold there was the momma bird!).

An old man in a truck stopped by to say he had seen a lynx or a mountain lion in our back field that same day, and that he thought it was 5 or 6 feet nose to tail.

Neighbors shot a wild turkey on our farm and gave us the carcass. Yum!

A pair of ospreys was spotted circling over the barn and checking out the river a couple weeks ago.

Bald eagles hang out around here too. Come see them!

We thought about baiting the feline predator with Mignon the calf, just so we could get a glimpse of it, but decided against it in the end.

Progress in the garden, dark soil after a night of rain.

This non-descript photo tries to show the new driveway, but mostly shows off one of our new topsoil mountains.

I’m signing off, everyone, to go enjoy the last few hours of daylight. Enjoy!

Spring has been charging forward with a vengeance here at North Branch Farm, and we are soaking it all in! A little over a week ago, Tyler and I spent some time on the barn roof and between our efforts and a couple of other stints around the same time, the north side of the barn is ALMOST completely roofed. There are only twelve more panels to put up (we’ve done more since the photo I’m posting here was taken).

In the cattywampus photo below, you can see the garden on the north side of the barn and Seth’s and my cabin platform behind it. The heavily mulched area in the near left corner of that garden is where we recently put in 350 baby blueberry plants. The plum trees on the far side of the garden are now in full puffball bloom and smell riotous. You can consider this a “before” picture, because on May 10th we’re expecting Wade the Heavy Equipment Operator to come and start digging a driveway behind those fruit trees, a foundation for Seth’s and my house in front of the platform, and a leach field between the garden and the barn.

Here is the view looking south from the barn roof–Mt Waldo is the looming peak on the left in the background, and in the foreground is a second garden plot we’ll be using this year. In the middle are many many acres of beautiful but neglected pasture and hay fields.


Here you can see the detail of the hip of the metal roof, where the shallow upper pitch meets the steeper lower pitch.

The barn as it looked at the end of April:

Gib and Sammy, the 6 1/2″ long painted turtle he found sunning itself on Rt 139.

For Lucy: Bleeding hearts on the front walk that I noticed were blooming when I got back from dropping you off at the airport. They haven’t quit yet.

“Still Life with Peas”

This is the amazing seeder that I loved and thought I would never own, because the manufacturer stopped making it. Johnny’s Selected Seeds is now carrying it again and Seth gave me one as a gift. There is nothing better for seeding medium-to-small patches of greens and many other small-seeded crops, and this was my seeder’s maiden voyage.

Looking back at progress in the garden south of the barn on Wednesday, there are peas in the nearest bed, mixed greens in the back left, and spinach, radishes, cilantro, carrots and beets all crammed into the back right bed. More to come soon, I am sure!

Good day, all dear friends!

It’s the season for spending every daylight moment outside, for listening to the American woodcock and the spring peeper, for ahhing and aweing at fresh, hidden wildflowers, for joining the families out hunting fiddleheads and fishing in streams. Exodus from the hearth fires! Banishment from the computer screen and its horrible buzz!

But today it chilly and grey, so I’ll take the chance to share a bit with you and look at the big picture of what’s been going on lately. Last we spoke, new cows had just arrived on the farm and Lane had spent a week at North Branch Farm. Exactly a week after Lane left, my parents and our good friend Lucy Pryor arrived at the Bangor Airport from the Sunny South (NC and VA, respectively) to spend a week pushing our farm forwards. And in the midst of their efforts, someone else was pushing too…

Part 1: A Son is Born
The following are pictures of our new mama cow Maple and the birth of her Jersey-Devon bull calf, Filet Mignon. When Tyler got home from teaching weekly violin lessons, he found her with the water bag already out, and after an hour or more of labor, this was as far as she had progressed: front hooves out:

Chris ruptured the membranes and she and I each grabbed one not-so-little hoof to assist in getting the little guy out.

Before long, Jonny and Tyler joined the fray, and while Maple nobly pushed and heaved, the humans hauled away.

Within a few minutes, out the calf slipped, and Maple the good mama checked him out and licked him down.

Chris and Minh also checked him out, but they did not lick him down.

A stiff breeze was blowing and the little calf was starting to shiver, so Elsie did follow-up duty to Maple and rubbed him until he started trying to stand up.

Up and at ’em!

We were all pleased with the healthy status of both mama and baby, and not too alarmed by the fact that we had had to pull the calf out–though it was Maple’s second calving and should have been a breeze, she was bred to a Jersey bull and Jerseys are a good bit larger than Milking Devons. Chris claimed that just by the size of the hooves she could tell a bull calf was on the way, and a bull calf is a good thing for us: he’ll keep our fields shorn and poop on them, and in a year two we’ll send him to the freezer. Welcome, Mignon!

Part 2: Digging In
One of the most exciting projects of the week was The Planting of the Blueberries–Seth received about 350 baby plants by mail and they needed a nursery home. We dug into Ralph and Barbara’s old garden and found fluffy, sandy, loamy soil–slightly deprived in organic matter, but with a lot of potential and nothing bigger than pebbles in the mineral department. The sod, however, was creeping in from the edges and took a good bit of beating back. Below, Seth is using the hand-forged broadfork we won in an auction. Behind him you can see up into the field where we’ll eventually move these blueberries when they’re big enough.

Blueberries in their temporary holding pens in front of the barn.

Looking back towards the barn, Mom/Kathleen strips the peat pots off of the blueberry plants and Anna then plants them.

Part 3: Victories
One project that Dad/Todd–sometimes with a team, sometimes solo– stuck with throughout the week was the removal of the fence surrounding our front yard.

Lucy and Mom took care of our chicken tractor, whose tarp covering was so old that the chickens could just pop out through the holes when they wanted to and poke around in the icky old sludge pile nearby. They put on a brand new tarp and then added PVC-pipe skids so that the tractor could be towed around easily even by people weighing under 150 lbs.

There are two victories implicit in the photo below: number one is that we managed to get Tyler and Elsie’s beautiful tent platform and tent set up before our guests arrived, and number two is not only did our guests not freeze to death, they actually enjoyed their guest house on the river!

Part 4: Lucy’s Eye

Milkweed Pod

Hellebore

Trout Lily

Cinnamon Fern

View of the loo (new addition: avian apartment)

View from the loo (new subtraction: the next day, the funky elm tree was cut down to make way for our future leach field)

After an incredibly productive week, the parental clan headed out and left us to our own devices. In the intervening period, we have made yogurt from Maple’s extra milk, put five more panels on the roof, stripped shingles off the entire north (silo) side of the barn, and gotten multiple new wwoofer requests. We can’t wait for more great friends and friends-t0-be to spend time with us on the farm!

This has been a GREAT week because we have been visited by a very dear friend of mine, Lane. She is a star. Below, you can view her participating in the activity of the morning, tree-limbing. We climbed in trees along the edges of fields and cut off limbs below 20 feet. It was kind of like practicing to be a porcupine or a koala bear.

The other reason it was a great week is because we tripled our herd of Milking Devons. Tyler and Elsie drove to northern Vermont on a epic one-day cow recuperation mission. They arrived back in Monroe with a full trailer (two pregnant mama cows and their two daughters) just after dark on Monday and we gave them a full-on welcoming party. Lane was the official cow photographer.

Above: Maple and Ryan, the two mamas, on their first day. Below: The welcoming committee.

Below:
Anna: “How much poop does this cow have on her butt, before I go shoving her around?”

On Monday, my first day off from work with Lane, she and I hiked Bald Rock Mountain in Lincolville, and both the weather and the location were beautiful. This is the only picture of the two of us there that doesn’t look like I am having a major illness.