Star Field Farm – A place to cultivate imagination

Ready, Set, Grow…

Post author By ljcblue
Post date May 29, 2023

The growing season in Central Massachusetts is absurdly short. The night temperatures were dropping into the 30’s (farenheit) until a week ago. The past few days have been perfect blue-sky days full of sunshine and warmth.

Which means we’ve been busy in the dirt.

Last year we devoted a few rows in our main garden area to straw bale gardening – in which you prepare the bales for planting with applications of fertilizer and water for about 10 days.

Last year’s results were a bit disappointing. Partly because we hadn’t done the best job in preparing the bales, partly because the drought stressed everything we planted. We’re trying it again this year, armed with more knowledge and experience.

The advantages of the straw bale method include having the plants higher up – easier for the farmer’s back, weed control, and better control of the growing environment, especially if the soil is less than optimal.

We also started planting our potatoes, corn, and winter squash. It always feels like a race against the coming winter, given how long these take to maturity.

It’s definitely a frenzy of planting right now, but once everything is in the ground and the watering is set up with their timers, the day to day work of weeding isn’t too onerous.

We’ve already been enjoying the fresh asparagus. I need to harvest the rhubarb (I’m planning on doing a country wine with rhubarb and some fruit I have left over from last year in the chest freezer). Soon we will have fresh peas and leafy greens.

Inch by inch, row by row.

Tags corn, farming, local food, potatoes, squash, straw bale gardening

Spring on the Farm

Gifts for Future-Us

Post author By ljcblue
Post date May 14, 2023

First, dig a hole — We have an amazing crop of rocks.

I doubt there’s a single place on our 54 acres where if you dig, you don’t find rocks. That’s the real reason New England is synonymous with stone walls. Robert Frost certainly knew that…

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
–From Mending Wall, by Robert Frost

We have built many walls on our property from rocks dug out during the excavation for our house addition and have added to them from working in the gardens.

Setting the 3 bare-root apple saplings in a common hole

Months ago, I ordered 3 different but pollinating-compatible apple trees: Roxbury Russet, Sundance, and Galarina. Why these? I have been curious about the Roxbury Russet and started my research with it in mind. It’s thought to be the oldest named apple variety in the US and was discovered in Roxbury MA. It’s a disease resistant apple and a good storage apple. The other two are newer varieties, but will cross pollinate with the Russet. They are both the kind of apples we love – sweet and crisp, and they are all good storage varieties and have some natural disease/pest resistance.

My apple trees after the first pruning and with their tender trunks protected.

Because the fruit trees that were already on the property when we bought it were overgrown and difficult to prune down to human scale, I was determined to start these trees right. I am using the guidance in Ann Ralph’s book “Grow a Little Fruit Tree”.

That meant making a nearly heartbreaking prune to take all the whips down to knee high.

This cherry looked a lot happier after a long drink of water

My spouse bought this cherry tree from our local ag co-op. It was already in a 5 gallon container and scaffolded out. I was a little worried that I’d have to prune it harshly to get it started, but it had been well pruned initially. All I have to do now is to thin out branches that will shade others and do some shortening cuts of limbs.

This aronia bush has been sitting in its 1 gallon plastic pot out in our back garden, essentially being neglected for 3 seasons. I honestly thought it had died over the winter, but then it began to leaf out. Anything that determined to thrive gets a spot in my orchard. Because it’s a bush and not a tree, I’ll prune to keep it from getting scraggly, but that’s all.

The old, scraggly apple tree I couldn’t bear to cut down

Planting an orchard is a leap of faith and a gift for our future. It will be years before any of the trees I planted today bear fruit.

In the meanwhile, this old, gnarled apple tree continues to bear little crisp and slightly sour, misshapen apples that we primarily let the deer enjoy.

Tags fruit trees, pruning

Spring on the Farm

The Best Time to Plant a Fruit Tree

Post author By ljcblue
Post date May 10, 2023

bare root apple trees in plastic bag — 3 bare root apple trees

According to an old proverb, the best time to plant a fruit tree is 10 years ago. The second best time is today.

So these three varieties – Roxbury Russet, Galarina, and Sundance, along with a peach I grafted last year, a cherry tree we bought at the Hardwick Co-op and an aronia bush cutting will be planted soon in a small orchard area we created last year.

We have a 40′ by 50′ space that has an existing old apple tree and some large rocks. (Hey, it’s New England, there are always rocks.)

While this may feel crowded for the number of trees we’re planning, the method I’ll be following is to keep the trees small with judicious pruning both in early spring and at the summer solstice. According to Ann Ralph in her book “Grow a Little Fruit Tree” Early spring pruning sets the architecture of the tree. Mid summer pruning controls size.

I’m hopeful this will keep our trees at human and homesteader scale, giving us enough fruit but not too much to handle.

We’ll keep you posted!

Tags fruit trees, pruning

Spring on the Farm

New England Weather, Local Food, Food Security

Post author By ljcblue
Post date April 19, 2023

Last week, it was in the upper 80s F.

We are back to running the woodstove in the kitchen. Spring weather in New England is fickle at best and now that we live in a rural farming community, the extreme shifts are more than inconvenient. They can spell the difference between fresh food later in the year and poor harvests or no harvest of certain fruit or vegetables.

Central and Western Massachusetts is an absolute haven for growing, finding, and eating local food. In a few square miles from StarField Farm, we can source meat, chicken, pork, milk, cheese, flour, stone fruit, apples, pears, pawpaws, berries, and every vegetable you can think of.

If the past few years have taught us anything, it taught us that our food supply chains are fragile. Local food is more than just a “bougie” fad: it is a matter of security and health.

It’s easy for people living in places where food is simply a commodity to get in a grocery store to take for granted that what they wish to eat will always be available.

The two major pressures local farmers face are climate change and development. Both together could spell disaster for local food availability.

Just on our little homestead farm, we already know we won’t have any peaches this year. It’s sad, but it won’t affect our livelihood as we only grow for our own larder. For farmers who rely on markets and CSAs it could mean a huge financial hit in a business that already struggles with the thinnest of margins.

And farmland is disappearing at an alarming rate.

I wish I had easy solutions. All I know is if we don’t value local food and local farmers, if we don’t protect land from irresponsible development, if we ignore climate change, we will feel the impact on our food bills and on our plates, and ultimately in our health and wellbeing.

Tags climate change, development, farming, local food

Spring on the Farm

Ghost Tree

Post author By ljcblue
Post date April 15, 2023

Plum tree, coated in white

In the six years we’ve been at StarField, we’ve harvested a scant handful of plums. The trees set flowers, get visited by a ton of pollinators, make fruitlets, and then sometime in June – just when we’re thinking of all the plums we’re going to get to eat, the tree decides life as a fruit produces is just too stressful and drops nearly all of its plums.

So I moved on. Focused all my love and care on the peach trees. *They* gave me bountiful harvests each August and the plums? Well, I labeled them prima donnas.

And then earlier this year, we had a brutal February deep freeze. Peaches set their flower buds early and without a coating of snow to insulate them, they all died.

Peach branches in a canning jar vase on the dining room table. — Peach branches putting out only leaves

There will be no peaches in New England this year.

:sob:

So, I turned my attention back to the plums. While there was some fear that *all* stone fruit would be affected by the February freeze, our plum trees actually set a ton of flower buds. Which meant I had to figure out how to shepherd a crop to ripening.

And no, my plum trees are not prima donnas, they have the dreaded plum curculio. My first salvo in the battle against the destructive beetles is a coating spray of surround – a finely milled kaolin (clay) that acts as an irritant to the beetles and discourages them from laying their eggs.

Gray-haired woman in overalls stands on the front porch with her hands out. She is dotted in white clay.

It’s a bit fiddly to use – it can clog up sprayers, gets all over – and it needs to be sprayed frequently through the season, especially if rain washes off the protection. But it’s not an insecticide and isn’t harmful to pollinators.

So we’ll see.

Tags fruit trees, peaches, plums

Spring on the Farm

Pruning Season

Post author By ljcblue
Post date April 13, 2023

Floricanes of thorne-less blackberries

When we bought StarField Farm, it took us several years to discover what our land contained. In fact it took us until just 3 years ago to realize we had thorn-less blackberries! That was the year the weather didn’t cooperate and we couldn’t effectively mow the area around what we call the kitchen garden and discovered that we had been mowing down these blackberry canes.

Lucky for us, they are hard to kill!

Now, Neil has a vandetta against berry canes. And I know – they do take over – but big, juicy blackberries! Totally worth a bit of a tangle in the yard.

So I promised to keep the canes in check and have them twined around this trellis.

I probably should have pruned them earlier, but between the cold weather and a back injury, today is when I was able to get to them.

I try to keep the main canes under 4′ tall and the side branches about 2′ or less.

Since we won’t have any peaches this year :sob:, I’m hoping it will be a bountiful berry year.

I also got to the aronia (chokeberry) tree that I had done a bit of a hack job pruning last year. It had become wildly overgrown and was rubbing against the siding of the house. Because of how aggressive I was last year, we got little to no berries then, but it’s also a very forgiving plant and with a better pruning job now, we should have a nice crop come late summer/early fall.

Tags berries, pruning

Spring on the Farm

And then the cows came…

Post author By ljcblue
Post date April 5, 2023

A dozen cows milling around at the bottom of our driveway — Our visitors

When you live in a rural, right to farm community, you sometimes have unusual visitors.

What started out as a delightful surprise for me meant a frustrating and difficult day for our neighbors at Chestnut Farms when a bunch of their cows decided to go walkabout.

You know you’re not in the city or the ‘burbs anymore when you call the police dispatch number and they don’t skip a beat when you tell them there are a dozen cows on your property – and you don’t actually have cows.

Ultimately, all the cows made it home safely, our lawns got some free fertilizer, our dogs had something new to bark at, and I enjoyed our temporary herd.