View from the Farm — March 2022

By Heather Retberg, Quills End Farm

The light is strengthening and lengthening.  The first smell of change wafted across the farm this week as winter begins to yield to spring.  Mud replaces ice. The search for spring shoots has begun, the bare branches brought into the house to “force” spring where we can see the buds swelling with leaf and blossom long before they show up outdoors.

 And…the sap is rising.

 Phil found a spare hour on Monday to tap the trees and the first harvest of 2022–and a new daily chore–has begun.  Each afternoon before evening milking now, Phil and Carolyn or visiting friends check the taps, empty the sap pails into 5-gallon buckets, bring the 5-gallon buckets to the wood stove in the house, pour the sap, ice and all, into the pan, keep the stove hot, and boil that sap down.

There’s a certain sound it makes when the whole pan reaches a simmer, a sizzzzzle loud enough it is its own voice in our conversations–the company of maple syrup.  The sap that has dripped out of the buckets coats the stones on the hearth with a sugary shellac and we stick a little to the floor passing by the stove.  It’s syrup time.   The house smells and feels like a maple sauna, that time of year when we keep it cranking more for the syrup than the humans.

 The wildlife returned to the fields this week, too. So long as the cows are away, the deer and turkeys will play.  The non-domestic Quill’s Endians are first growth opportunists.  The fox looks sound and healthy, the deer have emerged from the woods looking plump and well, the turkeys are still great in number.  The winter was not too harsh for them.  We hope the ticks and parasites have fared worse.

In the cow barn, Chirp’s little feller has gotten vibrant and spritely and has caught onto drinking milk from a nipple bucket.  Good and clever for a 2 week old.  Chirp is re-accustomed to the milking parlor and has taken it all well in stride.  The next-gen Bonnie calf (sometimes called ‘Cube’ as she is our 3rd Bonnie) got weaned this week and filled the barn with wailsome protest.  All else is well and spring fever has not set into cow realms in earnest…yet.

 All told, we’re emerging from winter fairly well.  Mud and mess and boiling maple sap, green shoots, and starlings in the birches, and, oh!, the smell of spring triumphing once again over the still sterility of winter!

May your week be filled with hopeful observations and peace-instilling reminders of constancy and life.

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Heather and Phil Retberg together with 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.