Categories
Spring

New England Weather, Local Food, Food Security

Weather station showing it was 41 degrees F this afternoon.
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.

Categories
Spring

Ghost Tree

Budding tree, coated in white powder
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.

Categories
Spring

Pruning Season

Thornless blackberries pruned
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.

Categories
Spring

And then the cows came…

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.

Categories
Fall

#WoodWarmsYouManyTimes #WinterIsComing

Wood stacked beneath solar cells
Preparing for wood stove weather

This is 1 cord of wood stacked in what would otherwise have been wasted space – underneath our solar panels. A 2nd cord is coming later this week. Stacking wood is one of those zen tasks I rather enjoy at #StarFieldFarm

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Uncategorized

Same tree, now that the fog has burned off. #StarFieldFarm #ShowOff


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Even against the fog, that tree glows. #StarFieldFarm


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Categories
Fall

Here I am

At the very beginning of March, Neil insisted I shift to #StarFieldFarm with the dogs & isolate here. This was primarily for his peace of mind – he is a physician at a Boston teaching hospital and he didn’t want to risk bring home covid-19.

When we learned more – and by the end of March it became clear that hospital workers using PPE were at low risk – he started to join me on weekends. Now I feel comfortable to come home midweek so he is not alone so much.

Still, I have spent more time at StarField than in Newton. When I arrived, it was the lingering end of winter. I lit fires in the wood stove most nights and layered on warm
clothes. 6 month later, the season is turning again. It’s time to get the woodstoves cranking. I pulled out my fleece sweaters.

Living in the woods, I am so much more aware of the changing seasons and the way light plays on the trees. I have watched flowers bloom and fade, seen a parade of birds at the feeders. It’s hard to reconcile my grief with the
peace I feel here.

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Uncategorized

So it begins. #WinterIsComing #StarFieldFarm


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I’m going to have to find another fermentation shelf soon! #WinterIsComing #StarFieldFarm


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