Tag: agriculture

Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.

Peak Summer

With Independence Day upon us, high summer kicked into gear for everyone around here.  Our lives become richer with the busyness.  Opportunities for leisure and play abound right alongside work.  Reconnecting with family from near and far becomes easier with the outdoor temperature and nature in full summer garb.  

We also get so many great reasons to complain.  The traffic, the lines, the entitlement.  No lack of complaints makes for no lull in conversations.  And the heat!  We northerners can wax eloquently about our near death, 85-degree discomfort with glee for hours.  Oh, the misery! 

Full swing summer puts Quill’s End Farm into 5th gear.  We got somewhere to be, and we aren’t there yet.  For the first time in twenty years, even though we are grazing more cows than ever before, the pasture got ahead of us.  Benjamin took an acre of it and made hay.

I dream of a time when we can put up all of our own hay.  The problem is, I want all of the hay to be as good as the pasture.  High legume content, desirable species hay growing on fertile ground.  That means that after you pick up your hay, you lay down compost to more than replace what you took, thereby improving soil. 

On Friday, after a late night hay gathering, we spread that acre with four-year old compost that looks like topsoil.  Satisfaction.  Benjamin also spread younger, nubblier compost on next year’s garden plot which will soon get plowed and cover cropped.  It made a hot July day extra satisfying. 

As predicted, we then received multiple showers and downpours to help everything along.  This also helped my state of mind, as taking hay from a pasture mid-season is no light thing.  I dread the possibility of feeding hay in late August should the weather turn dry and the pastures slow down too much to keep up with the cows.

As your homes and lives fill up with friends and families, we pray for ease, relaxation, and fantastic meals.  Our pork, dairy and veggies are ready to impress your company.  Whether grilling or crockpotting, we’ve got something exquisite to fill your plates while your loved ones fill your heart.

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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 permitted us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.

Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.

The Farmstead Root Cellar in June

There are many things that we do on small farms that seem logical to us, but are not necessarily logical to commodity farmers. Alongside the enterprises that earn us money, we homestead. We keep a garden, fruit trees, and cane fruits for our own larder and to share with friends. We tap maple trees to boil sap and sweeten our mornings.

There are certain things that resonate with any food grower. The excitement of the first fresh greens, the sun-warmed first tomatoes, the crisp, tangy bite of an apple while you stand beneath the tree.

Since we eat seasonally, these are things we don’t enjoy all year round, but we can extend that excitement pretty far.

We have been eating a lot of potatoes recently. We do love potatoes, but there is also an urgency for consumption this time of the year. Our supply, while holding out in quantity, is slowly degrading in quality. Today, for our second meal with potatoes in it, I uncovered our last half-bushel. I’m fairly certain that these are not potatoes of unusual size, but after fishing through the dregs of the last container for every last usable spud, they seemed like whoppers to me. A two-bite home fry! The excitement of the last of the potatoes will soon give way to the longing for new potatoes with firm crisp flesh, but for now a gigantic, medium-sized potato will do very well. 

As we were relishing our good fortune, Benjamin related a story about a farming friend of his eating apples in June. Wrinkly, soft fleshed June apples from your own farm! Nothing better, until…

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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 permitted us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.

Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.

The Mother of Invention

Some years ago, Heather and I were asked to teach a portion of a class for beginning farmers. A portion of our presentation included listing a few ideal skill sets for a small farmer. We had a little fun with this. The list was usually long and included diesel mechanics, carpentry, electrical knowledge, plumbing, heavy equipment operating, chainsaw proficiency, butchery, basic veterinary skills, welding, computer skills, etc… 
Mind you, I didn’t even get to the “farming” part!

One could spend a lifetime learning any one of these trades well, let alone being able to demonstrate a passing level of proficiency in all of them. So most of us get by. We hire out what we can afford and either dispense with the need or find a workaround for the rest.

I’ve been meaning to take a welding class for decades. Somehow, the time to do it has eluded me. Thankfully, we have seldom needed welding skills as we have not owned much equipment.

This is all changing as Carolyn and Benjamin are amassing tillage, cultivating, forage, and woods equipment for their team of horses. A lot of this equipment has been hanging out on rock walls or in barns around the peninsula for decades and requires maintenance and repair.

For Christmas, I gifted the farm and family an arc welder and an acetylene torch, two important components of metal working. The arc welder came to us from a dear friend whose husband has passed and, until now, has sat in our shop awaiting a 240v outlet. A store is still holding on to ‘our’ acetylene torch, unaware of my plans to purchase it.

Necessity is a good motivator. Last week, after cracking the loader frame on the tractor again, Benjamin and I decided to try and fix the issue. The professional welder we hired a few months ago had declared our problem fixed, emphasizing, “You can’t break that.”

We snaked the required heavy duty wire through an underground chase to the barn and found the correct outlet for the machine, wired it, and blew no fuses in the process. Thankfully for us, Benjamin has taken a welding class. Two days post-repair, the farm weld is holding! 

We hope this will continue. 

Meanwhile, Benjamin is practicing on other projects. Our ’96 Tacoma is on the shortlist for repair. Exciting.

It is apparent that more trade skills will need practicing in the near future as needs arise here. I read somewhere,”Maine only has one plumber (fill in the blank for other tradespeople), and he is not answering his phone.”

On to fence-mending this week so the cows can be turned out of the barn for the season.  Now, that is a skill in which I’m well practiced.

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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 permitted us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.

Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.

Hanging on and letting go…

As humans, we want to hold on to the good things: A perfect day.  A good hearty laugh.  A job well done.  Satisfaction.  A great meal. Love.

And yet, as humans, we also hold that all good things come to an end.

I had to let one good thing come to an end last week.  As far as things go, a Toyota Tacoma with 356,000 miles on it is at its scheduled end.  Perhaps beyond it, since it came to Quill’s End uninspectable several years ago.  Alexander got it back on the road, and for 50,000 miles, it served me well.  It also served as a great memory, as it was passed onto us by someone we loved, whose time came to an early end.

Now, I vacillate over this little truck’s future.  I want to think that it can continue on with the right fix.  I want to take it for granted and have it last forever, to hold on to the good thing.  I want to know that I’ll still think of my friend while driving down the road, and smile at his relentless kindness.

But for now, I’ll pass it twice a day, still buried in the mud from its last attempt to bring water to the hogs in the lower field, its frame cracked from the force of trying to separate it from the suction of the saturated soil.

Can I take consolation from a search for my next Tacoma?  The excitement of the possibility of another good thing?  Perhaps another story, another memory can accompany me as I drive and work.

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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 permitted us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.

Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.

At Least There’s Still Bacon…

Two years ago I resigned myself to the reality that, despite my best intentions, I would just never get to the task of improving an overgrown two and a half acres on the farm, the “Hidden Field”. I had cleared and rocked it 15 years earlier, but never improved its fertility so that it would produce good grass. I looked away for a second and it grew trees.

I had to come up with a plan that put me down in the Hidden Field every day because, as the adage goes, “A farmer’s feet are the best fertilizer.” The first step was to level the alder patch.

A friend of ours had just started a land-clearing business with a machine that literally shreds trees and incorporates them back into the soil. It is a beast of a machine that exists only for tree death. After he finished his work, and I was still ruminating potential uses for the new clearing, it grew nasty woody shrubs. Time for action.

With Benjamin’s return to the farm from college last spring, uses for that piece of land started to become more possible, so… I called in the hogs. 

We have now rotated hogs over about half of that ground. They match my friend’s machine in disruptive power, but also fertilize and produce pork on the side.  How clever am I?

Coming into this “winter,” I had to choose whether to leave the hogs on that patch or move them closer to the barn. Getting feed and water to them 1/3 mile away and across our main field could prove difficult in the shoulder seasons. I thought I’d order up two different weather scenarios in order to cover my bases. Old-fashioned Maine winter with frozen ground for easy transport of food and water OR mild, dry winter for less easy, but not all that messy, transport.  

I got mixed results with my order and got a mild and wet, wet winter. Not the ideal that I ordered up. Getting a truck to them has become tricky, and has churned more soil than I like. I’m afraid that working that two and a half acres has now become slightly more.  I’ll have to clean up my mess come warmer weather. My cleverness thwarted, at least there’s still bacon.

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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 permitted us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.