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.

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.

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.

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.

From Melting Heart to Skeptic to Squealsome

In the recent past, I wrote a series of missives that featured our dairy cows, and brought you a glimpse of their characters and dispositions.  Many of the cows inherit their dams’ looks, personalities, and intelligence.  It is not uncommon for us to mistakenly call a cow by their mother’s name or do a double take to be sure at whom we’re looking.

Our latest round of calves from Pippin, Ariel, and Emily are no exception to the observation, and minutes in their presence can take me back to when Pip and Ariel were calves (we did not know Emily as a calf.)

Time will tell whether they grow into more of their mother’s attributes, but for now, the basics are certainly showing through.  An entry into their pen will most likely yield a quick response from Pippin’s calf, and a heart-melting face that demands a good scritching.  Pippin had that same presence as a calf.  

Out of curiosity, Ariel’s calf will approach me, but, like Ariel, she’ll not demand.  She will quietly, patiently wait.  I hope she will get Ariel’s quiet sweetness, and her keen mind.  You don’t really need to show Ariel twice.

Emily’s calf?  She needs other engagements in order to tolerate me.  Pet her during breakfast, sure, but afterwards…why?  Emily is fairly new to Quill’s End, and has taken her time warming to my care.  She is still a skeptic.  I figured it was a nurture, not nature phenomenon.  Now I’m not so sure.  Is skepticism a genetic trait?   I am sure that I’d like to end the skepticism in her progeny.

It really is a blessing to work with the cows generation after generation.  It is something I do not get to do with the hogs we raise.  We do not keep sows, but buy in piglets.

Our last four batches of piglets have come from Emma and Trent Quinby of Spring Tide Farmstead.  Avid porcine advocates, they wax eloquent about the sows from whence our piglets come.  I get to hear about the particular personality traits that have been passed on to the piglets.  I have yet to ask about one particular piglet in our winter-spring batch.  In 20+ years of raising hogs, I’ve never had one that squeals from the moment I arrive to feed until the moment his mouth is too full to vocalize.

That little guy loves his vittles.  His excitement at mealtime is truly enviable.  He has been thinking about mealtime since mealtime, and one more second is one too many.  I have to smile while feeding this guy, and at the quiet that my efforts produce. 

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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.