Three Stone Farm

We made it through the summer and are now gearing up for fall. Roger is outside currently digging our first pond, and Lily calved a couple of weeks ago. We named the bull calf Cricket as he butted his mom so much that he looked like he was hopping. Besides that, he is a very sweet calf and enjoys being scratched on his cheeks. We’re still waiting for Popcicle to calve. She’s about a week overdue and looks like a walking refrigerator. I will be posting pics as soon as I get them off my digital camera, I promise!

Tags: calving, cows, farm, farm animals, pond

Spring finally came for about a week and then left again, and at the risk of complaining about the weather YET AGAIN, I’ll say that this has got to be the wettest spring I have ever encountered. We also had some pretty major windstorms including one that took out our seed starting greenhouse and killed a bunch of seedlings. We rebuilt and replanted and are willing the seeds to grow faster…

During the week that we actually had warm, dry weather, we put in as many transplants that we could–probably around a thousand plants! Normally we get a few chances in the spring to get in the ground and do a few flushes of transplanting. This time we had to get everything in as soon as we had our window of opportunity so just had one marathon transplanting session. Roger built a transplanter to pull behind the Cub which made things go much faster, but not before I had spent an entire morning putting a bunch of those transplants in by hand (with the calluses and blisters to prove it). The transplanter made it go about 10x faster than by hand–I drove the tractor while Roger rode the platform behind the furrower, setting the seedlings in the trench, which then got filled in with soil by a couple of press wheels holding the platform up. Then we watered everything in with a 55-gallon water barrel mounted to the side of the Cub, piped down under the tractor with a valve to turn the water on and off. It’s pretty slick actually, and has made a world of difference in getting things watered over hauling 5-gallon buckets to each plant.

So in the ground currently: 300 asparagus crowns and 400 strawberry plants; broccoli, mustard greens, kale and pac choi that survived the greenhouse crash, chard seedlings donated by our friends from Muddy Fingers Farm, and a whole bunch of brassica and chard seedlings donated by our friends who recently moved to the area last fall and who are starting a farm (Giving Ground Farm) and intentional community out in Hector. We also have a bed of salad greens in our greenhouse which with a lot of luck will be ready by our first day at market <crossing fingers and knocking on wood>. We will be at Trumansburg Farmer’s Market on Wednesday, June 1 from 4-7pm, which is coming all too soon.

Here is Roger plowing up in our orchard where our sweet potato plants and squash will go:

500 sweet potato slips are coming our way sometime this week, and unfortunately it’s going to be cold and rainy for the rest of the week.

Grow, plants, grow! Come back, spring!

Tags: farm, garden, market, orchard, rain, weather

Sap season is just drawing to a close…it’s been an excellent run so far. We’ve gotten more than twice the amount of syrup of our previous years (almost 7 gallons!) which is amazing. And after doing some calculations, we have concluded that we must have magic trees–normally you need 40 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup, but we recorded a 27:1 ratio. That means more maple syrup for market!

We also built a new evaporator this season. Previously, we had just built a big fire under the evaporator pan, which we supported on concrete blocks. It took a huge amount of wood to get it going due to all the mass of the blocks. This year, we decided to build it Rocket-style: using a 55-gallon drum, two pieces of stove pipe joined together to make the feed tube, some Rockwool and fiberglass insulation, and some old pieces of roofing tin to make the skirt to support the pan. I am happy to say that we used much less wood this year to make our syrup.

Pictures below…

Tags: evaporator, farm, maple syrup, rocket stove