Category: Agriculture

Webmaster’s note: The format of this column has changed a bit, with all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! This month’s column is written by Phil.

With all the animals out on pasture now, our “inter-chore time” is spent shoveling out barns and shelters and planting as much as we can as we can. This week the goat house and the heifer shed have been on the list along with getting all the potatoes in the ground at long last. As we clean up the last of winter in the barns, I can’t help but start to think of winter in the woodshed. It’s time to get firewood cut and split.

I’ve always maintained that a successful northerner has a short-term memory, but the reality is that the successful northerner knows winter is coming, no matter the season. Thankfully, this thought doesn’t extend to the rest of nature. It lives in the moment not knowing the moment won’t last.

Our bluebird land baron now occupies himself with feeding his brood and mostly forgets to maintain his supremacy in his domain only occasionally fighting his reflection in our truck mirrors. The cows now step out of the barn to head to a new paddock as a matter of course, rather than romping up into the next field or the wrong barn door just for kicks. The clover, vetch, and grasses soak in the sunshine and rain and store it all down, just as they were meant to.

For now, I feel pretty sure of what is to come. The peas, the greens, the new potatoes, the tomatoes, the apples…all of the work that bears fruit will please us (may we be so blessed) in its season. But the wood pile, the preserving and freezing, they call to us on cold rainy days and remind us of our roots. Life here takes a short memory, and a long trajectory.

For the growing season, we must live for the day and also plan for the year(s) ahead. Farmers live on a fulcrum thinking simultaneously of the decades ahead and how we can make the time of plenty last all year, while improving everyday functions and work for the moment. The bluebirds and the cows, the vetch, clover and grasses are following their internal rhythms. We’ll keep taking our cues from their textbook

---

Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Heather is Vice President of Halcyon Grange #345 and writes a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in her area and has generously given us permission to share some of her columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.

Webmaster’s note: The format of this column has changed a bit, with all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! This month’s column is written by Phil.

This month will mark 18 years since we moved from Brooksville to Quill’s End Farm.  It seems to have all started with resolve.

And continue forward in the same way.

We bought this farm from the late Paul Birdsall.  He was instrumental in starting Blue Hill Heritage Trust and Maine Farmland Trust.  Paul was a visionary in land transfer to the following generations.  He paid particular attention to the ridge that extends from Orland to Blue Hill because of the soils and traditional use.

Our farm had been vacant for nearly 30 years when he purchased it, the last owner having passed away in the mid-1970s.  When her daughter decided to sell, she remembered that Paul was interested in conserving it as farmland and approached him.  After Paul bought the property, he worked with the Blue Hill Heritage Trust to grant them development rights and certain restrictions that will keep this land as farmland in perpetuity.  He then listed the property through the Maine Farmlink program at Maine Farmland Trust.

We had mostly resolved ourselves, landless farmers as we were, to moving from Maine in order to farm.  A fellow farmer from Brooklin told us about Paul’s search for farmers for this farm.  We met Paul at the farm one bright fall day and walked the fields.  After that first meeting, he offered the Old Nevells farm to us.  He noticed fire in our bellies, he said.

In September 2004, we started to gut the old house, long abandoned by human residents, but certainly not vacant.  The horsehair plaster walls gave way to stories and clues to the past lives of the previous farmers and their families.  The ceiling bays gave way to tons of porcupine scat.  In January 2005, Kenny Jordan and his crew picked the house up and moved it 400′ over 3 days and onto a new foundation where it now rests.  In late March, we welcomed Carolyn into the world.  In May, newly remodeled inside and out, we moved in.

I don’t know that the whirlwind has stopped since or if we’ve merely grown more accustomed to it, but our resolve?

That is still there in the eye of the storms.

---

Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Heather is Vice President of Halcyon Grange #345 and writes a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in her area and has generously given us permission to share some of her columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.

Webmaster’s note: The format of this column has changed a bit, with all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! This month’s column is written by Phil.

A quote attributed to Paul Harvey reads, “Despite all of our accomplishments, we owe our existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”

Here near the 45th parallel, we make haste to work with that topsoil and rain to grow food and fodder in the few months of growing weather we have.

It really is astonishing that such a small amount of time is adequate for abundance.  For months here, the earth sleeps, the trees sleep, some of the critters sleep.  But what we have is enough for abundance.

This week, with the frost out of the ground and temperatures forecasted to be in the sixties, our places will awaken suddenly instead of slowly.  The race for abundance will begin anew.  Nature, content with such a small window of time, will amaze us with possibilities.

I’ve always held that to be a successful northerner, you must concentrate on short-term memory; that is, live in the present.  Soon, winter will fade away, and our existence will change.  We will walk out of houses with scant clothing, we will not warm up our vehicles, we will taste of our soil, and remember abundance.

---

Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Heather is Vice President of Halcyon Grange #345 and writes a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in her area and has generously given us permission to share some of her columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.