Tag: Farms

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 Floodgates Are Open

Last winter, I was fighting chronic Lyme disease. Chronic Lyme disease presents differently for each individual affected by it. I thought that the symptom of brain fog had mostly skipped me, but early this morning, there was some evidence to the contrary.

Bonnie Three birthed a beautiful healthy heifer calf. Bonnie has a Three in her name because this farm always has a Bonnie. It is a tribute to our very first cow whose name was Bonnie. So…that out of the way, Bonnie Three calved this morning. She was not, according to my notes and memory, supposed to do that until the middle of May. Because her calving date was marked as May, she has only had a very abbreviated “vacation” from milking.

The cows usually are “dried off” for two months. This allows them a rest period and to put on some weight and grow a healthy calf. While Bonnie’s calving went well and she has a healthy heifer calf, she has only had a couple of weeks off. Apparently the herd is still having symptoms of my time with Lyme disease.

Case in point? We have ten milking cows. Given a two month vacation for each cow before calving, in order to keep a steady supply of milk, we should be milking 8-ish at any given time and have a calf every month-plus. Since February third, when Pippin freshened, we have had five calves. Five cows freshening in the span of a little more than one month is not an ideal dispersal of milk flow over time for a steady supply. A correction of this glut-scarcity cycle problem will require milking some of the cows longer and keeping them open (unbred) for a longer period. The repercussions of my Lyme brain fog will stretch out in the barn for another couple of years to get this all straightened out again.

As we are now milking all ten cows at once, the floodgates are open. Milk, cream, yogurt, and cheese are all available in abundance. Our pigs won’t consider a dry meal and even the hens are partaking in skim milk to wash down theirs.

Thankfully, the symptoms of Lyme have vacated my body. Hopefully, with time and proper bull control, they will leave my farm.

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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.

A Sweet Valentine

From the depths of winter, it may seem like the quiet time on the farm right now, because it mostly is, relatively. However, this little farm is never truly quiet. We have our minds on the upcoming growing season that still offers perfection…in February. And, we hope, more opportunity.

Amidst the daily tending chores: hauling water, hay, grain, firewood, and moving snow around, we are bouncing ideas and numbers off each other at every turn, troubleshooting and gaming scenarios. We’re discussing how best to add new markets to reach more of you with the limited labor we’ve got. We’re taking the beginning steps–looking at you, Blue Hill (!)– of resuming a delivery day in your neighborhood to increase ease of accessibility to Quill’s End food and help us feed more milk to people rather than pigs in 2025.

Presently at Quill’s End, we have been milking the fewest number of cows as winter sees reduced foot traffic at the farm store and less food ordered for delivery. Four of our cows have been “on vacation” and will freshen (calve) this month. The first calf of this group was born last Monday on the 3rd to Pippin. Our last bull was a Guernsey/Jersey cross, and this new little valentine of a heifer got white splashes and long legs from her sire. Her dam gave her smarts and she is already zooming her way into our hearts. We hope that she will also get some mellowness from Edmund the Bull. Mellow took years to come to mama Pippin. The other three cows, Ariel, Andy, and Penelope, all look to be on track to calve soon. We’ve got some busy weeks ahead.

This is all to say that we will soon have more milk than you know what to do with! We’d appreciate if you could work your Quill’s End love magic and spread the word far and wide so that there are more yous for the upcoming milk flow.

Getting ready for the summer also means restocking our freezers. Our offerings have been slim as we try to open up space for the next round of pork and beef which will be available in late February–just a few more weeks until we have treasure caches of bacon and sausage and all manner of steaks and beef cuts once again! We will also have veal cuts of all kinds in March to enliven our dinner menus as we head into mud season.

The frequent snow storms are brightening the landscape and storing much-needed moisture for the spring to come. The cold has made thick ice on all the ponds and lakes. It is nice to see the ice-fishing shacks back on the water en masse after years of inadequate ice. Heather and I even saw pick-up trucks plowing the snow off a lake this week. It is refreshing to see people out enjoying winter’s offerings. Frequent plowing here is helping us familiarize ourselves with the new Ford 545d tractor. A cab with intact windows and doors that keep out the weather is downright luxurious–on par with the Popemobile to this farmer.

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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.

Farm Kids

For Christmas, I was gifted a book of short stories about growing up on a farm in Maine. Short stories work well for me. My reading time is before bed. A conclusion every few pages is just right. The book was not outstanding, but relatable to life on a farm.

I was exposed to this type of living as a child, but only immersed in it for brief periods. I was a tourist to the real thing. There was no necessity to my being there, no responsibility to aid my growth or the farm and family.

With less than 2% of Americans involved in agriculture, this century will undoubtedly produce a lot fewer of these farm children. I hope that this changes. The stories in this book outline the constant work of a farm, and the necessity to be useful from an early age. Consequently, the children were needed, appreciated, and constantly learning as they worked alongside the adults. I’ve not met farm kids that are not capable trouble shooters, or fear new challenges or trades.

The book’s stories also touch on the times between the work. This particular farm boasted woods, fields, pond, creek, gravel pit, and junk piles of old equipment. Unstructured time, combined with these acres of assets, seems a pretty good recipe for childhood. The remnants of our children’s forts and kingdoms remain a great reminder of their imaginations. I’ve not yet met a bored farm kid.

So, make sure children are visiting farms: we need them to become enchanted, and to be the next generation of farmers. Farmers to feed us and to entertain us as they write about growing up on farms in Maine

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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.

Meeting the Neighbors

You never know what your neighbor is up to.

Maine sports a lot of driveways that head off into the woods.  Some for quite a distance, but even a small patch of woods disguises what lies beyond the driveway entry. 

At Quill’s End, most of what we do is visible from the road, and more so when the critters are above our farm in our neighbor’s field.  For most of the abbreviated grazing season, the draft horses have been up in that field.  Folks have grown accustomed to seeing them there and now associate these fairly new additions with the farm. 

If you have ever heard a knocking on your front door at odd hours of the night, you have your own special fears of what it could mean.  If your children are out and about, a 1:30 am banging on your door puts your heart in a place where it should not dwell.  If you happen to own livestock, well…it is hard to describe.

Friday night brought a rare occurrence when Benjamin was away in Vermont for meetings (ironically a board retreat for the Draft Animal Power Network) and Carolyn was away contra dancing, staying at a friend’s overnight.  It also brought the rare occurrence of a 1:30 am knocking on our door for animals in the road.

I’d like to say that we are inexperienced in this regard, but I’d be lying.  In our defense, though, it has not always been our animals in the road.  Sometimes, wildlife in the road has warranted a late-night passerby to call the sheriff to get us out of bed.  Yet, as the most visible livestock-owning farm, it just stands to reason that our door gets a knock.  If the animals don’t belong to us, we are often expected to know whose they are.  It is also noteworthy to mention that humans don’t see that well in the dark, or perhaps we see what we expect we should see.

After answering the door, Heather and I bundled up to head outdoors.  The woman knocking said our horses were out, running down the highway.  The temperature that night was in the mid-teens, and the cool night came with an amazing, clear sky that was punctured only by the headlamps we were wearing. We bundled up because we knew that we might be out awhile. 

A man met me in the driveway after I turned the barn lights on and mentioned that he saw the horses go above the barn. I told him that was where I was headed as the horse’s paddock includes a portion of the barn and a fenced “yard” behind the barn.

I counted all three Quill’s End horses in their paddock and walked the fence line which was intact. A second man came out of our field saying he just saw the two runaway horses in the field. 

Oh! The mystery was on.  Glad our draft horses were all accounted for and had not been gallivanting, we listened to the description of the two horses that were on the loose. Spitting images of the Belgians, we were told. We ran down the list of draft horses in the surrounding area. Newly acquainted with these neighbors of ours, they immediately started calling other neighboring horse owners to find out who was missing two horses. And off they went into the dark night, game for the adventure they’d encountered, the third in their party keeping the horses in sight and in phone contact from the lower fields.

Heather and I headed indoors to gather our wits, expecting that the end of our involvement had not yet arrived. The next phone call was from the sheriff.  The sheriff’s office apparently has our phone number on file for “loose critters.”  They definitely should.  I don’t particularly like it, but they should.  Sheriff’s deputies are not trained in the breed characteristics of horses.  They also are not very good-humored at that particular hour when asked if they are, I found out.

Since horses were on the loose and in our general vicinity, and frankly, not much else was going on at 1:45 am, I got bundled up again, grabbed a couple of halters, and headed down the road. The two gentlemen had already caught one horse. I parked my truck in a driveway and put a halter on this cunning saddle horse. She might go 15 hands and 900 pounds (a good deal smaller and quite different looking than our draft horses). The other one was soon apprehended as well, and you know what? I did know just where they belonged.  No one would ever guess because they live half a mile down our neighbor’s driveway into the woods.

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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.

Making Microbes Happy

In my life, I’ve had a problem understanding wealth and success. The message I get from the culture around me is very different from the message I live.

As a farmer, wealth and success have different iterations, but they are all connected. The base of the issue is microbial. In order to accumulate wealth, I must make microbes happy. My first billion must fit easily on a spoon.

There are many ways to make microbes happy. It’s all in the recipe that you prepare and having proper ingredients. Aerobic microbes need oxygen; anaerobic do not–different recipes for the little buggers even though they eat the same foods. Feed them well, and they will make rich compost or living soil. Treat them poorly, and your soil suffers.

This base of wealth supports the soil, which then feeds everything. The invisible is made tangible.

Soil can then be used to grow food for humans directly or indirectly. One might pick a carrot and eat it for nutrition and pleasure, or one might pick a carrot and feed it to a hog that will later be eaten.

The community that grows around a small farm sits atop the pyramid of wealth and success. Soil creation and microbial de-light occur to tickle palates with flavor. They occur to further life.

Find yourself supporting microbes and soil, the wealth and success of local farms, and local ecosystems–the dividends are fantastic! Take your lessons from the deer in the pasture or the clearing, the fox in the hedgerow, and the hawk above the garden; they all know the food is better where the bases for wealth have been flourishing. We do, too.

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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.

Apples!

Apple season presents special challenges at Quill’s End Farm.  For one, we all become less efficient at gettin’ where we’re goin’.  The daily rituals of walking to the various animals to tend to them now require a detour for walking snacks.

Sometimes just for us.

Sometimes for our charges. 

There aren’t too many critters that don’t love apples, and the mere sight of an opposable-thumbed climber triggers a doe-eyed, melting stare from all corners of the realm.  The quadrupeds are really hard to resist, and the urgency they convey makes pity swell within us. 

We must take care not to be too regular or too clever, or the melting stare’s urgency can become a problem.  Cows, goats, pigs, and horses all have nimble mouths.  Their ability to check your pockets is uncanny.  Goats will even undo a zipper. 

We have learned that apple scent lingers, not only on your breath, but also on your hands.  Convincing a cow that you are appleless is a special skill only practiced by a minutia of the population.  It is a skill that must be learned by trial and error.  Failure to convince can lead to slobbering searches. 

Much like Klondike bars, there are differing levels of commitment to procuring an apple.  I’m not sure that somersaults are off the table; we just don’t want anyone to get injured in their tasty quest. 

Apple season also brings extra milk from the late season forage and gives an extra creamy flavor to the milk, yogurt, and cheeses.  Our cream separator is also turning out quart after quart of stand-up-in-your-spoon-cream.  It is perfect for fall butter making and for whipped cream for apple or pumpkin pies.  Carolyn and Ben have just the tasty pie pumpkins for you, with names to tempt your taste buds.

With all the apple trees about, take the detour and find some walking snacks. Bake a pie. Whip some cream to go on top. And just think about your good fortune that no goat will undo your pocket zipper to find your fall treat. 

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.

Pull Up a Stump

Bruce Springsteen’s song Glory Days, though catchy, has always rubbed me a little sideways.  As someone who lives in the present, it is hard for me to comprehend longing for the past. 

However, I came to understand how that can be circumstantial.  Every week for nearly a decade, on my way to Tuesday deliveries at the old grammar school in Deer Isle, I’ve dropped in on Garfield Eaton.  He bought two gallons of milk for himself every week.  Upon my arrival, Garfield would instruct me to “pull up a stump,” and for 15 minutes, we’d talk, mostly about farming, always about how it used to be, and sometimes of what was to come.
 

An agriculturist by nature, he was suspicious of human institutions and painted a fair picture of the past he recalled and yearned for.  He knew what he’d like to have, but also knew that time, his glory days, was past.  His physical labor was what he’d had to offer, and he no longer was able. 
 

Garfield suffered a “widow maker” heart attack when he was 42 years old and was on disability for the rest of his life, a life that he mostly lived alone.
 

I first met him through Ken Rose Farm in North Blue Hill in the early 2000s. Back then, he put his energy into homesteading. He kept a large garden. He kept hogs, sheep, hens, meat birds, and dairy cows. He met Kendall and Flossie Howard at Ken Rose to secure himself a fresh milk supply after he’d discontinued milking.
 

He was always spinning a yarn and dropping off extra produce back then—a five-gallon bucket of this or that for Flossie to can, rutabagas so big there were only a few in a full bucket. Kendall would say to (mid-fifties) Garfield, “Too bad I didn’t meet you sooner… I could have made something out of you.”
 

Garfield stopped crossing the bridge on a regular basis after 2010.  Driving over 35 miles an hour didn’t suit him.  Kendall stopped milking before his death in 2013.  When Garfield heard that Quill’s End would deliver milk, he was sold.  When we met, he found me a solid BS partner.   Often, he’d start our conversations by asking, “What lies are we going to tell today, Phil?”   Our weekly stump sitting became important to us both.  I listened with new ears to tales of glory days. 

The last few months found him nearing his end here, and I’d like to think he was prepared.  As a curmudgeonly-hippie-native of Deer Isle, leaving the appropriate people pissed off was important.  Leaving before the future he envisioned came to his Island was important.  Leaving before he was “a waste of space” was important.

I pray you rest well, Garfield Eaton.

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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.

Some Calm

Over the years, we have tried to make fence-training livestock a “less-risk” enterprise.  Some critters new to an electrified fence train quickly and recoil from the pain.  Some jump forward in surprise.  Therefore, we provide a backstop and a physical barrier in front of the fence.  It seems straightforward enough.  If you train on a hot fence that carries a 5,000-plus volt jolt, a couple of times generally provides ample reason for respect.  Cattle are generally easier to contain than other livestock.  They tend to shy away from “testing” the fence more than goats and hogs do. 

Imagine our surprise to find our heifers gallivanting around the neighborhood several times in the last week!  Surprise is the gentlest word I can conjure just now.  Imagine our… surprise!

Waiting when something is amiss is a special kind of pain. But wait, we must.   We could track them only so far.  We had no luck.  We could only hope someone would spot them near (and not in) the road and alert us.  The calves were up in our friends’ blueberry barrens or nearby woods for most of last Tuesday, but not to be seen or called forth.  The first phone call came just before Carolyn and I were to leave for Ellsworth to drop off a truck for service.  With help from Noah of Rainbow Farm, the three of us were able to bring them home and put them back where they belonged.  And there they stayed, peacefully rotational-grazing in a pasture. 

Until they didn’t.

Two days later, a message left in the middle of the night alerted us they were no longer peacefully grazing in our pasture.  We tracked them to the same spot, only to not find them again.

The torturous waiting began anew.  Thankfully, we did not have to wait nearly as long the second time.  Benjamin and Carolyn brought them home and I moved their “home” to the main pasture–where we can keep a closer eye  on them.

We’ve heard there is a bear about in the neighborhood.  Although bears respect electric fencing well, perhaps he spooked the heifers to not.  Four days and counting, they are still home with no breakouts.   We can go about our business with some calm.

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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.

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.