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.