The Farm

Be careful what you wish for!

Gardening is in Gayla’s DNA! Her family has known for generations, the value of growing and harvesting their own food, including her Great Uncle George, her grandmother, mom, and her dad, who tilled a garden for us the summer before we were married in 1976. Since we were both vegetarian then, ours was organic. Happily, this legacy continues with our daughter, Valerie, who served in the Peace Corps and, until recently, was Program Director at a non-profit, farm-to-school program in Massachusetts. Happily,  Chris and Heather now have space and are joining the family tradition.

Since that first garden, Gayla has created organic gardens wherever we live so it was automatic that we would have another when we moved to Westmoreland in ’91. What started as a small garden continued to expand over the years and is now almost 80′ long by 40′ wide. Since we had so many delicious veggies and flower gardens growing, we decided in 2008 that we should try keeping bees for pollination. This challenging – yet incredible – hobby is chronicled in John’s blog; New Hampsha’ Bees.

Jumping to 2013, the problem became; since we live in the woods, we needed to provide habitat for the bees to flourish (and so John had something to do that does not drive Gayla crazy when he retired in 2016). Soooo…let’s clear some land, build a barn, put in 15 fruit trees, 50 blueberry bushes, 4 varieties of raspberries, 2 varieties of strawberries, a raised asparagus bed, expand the garden, add more hives plus another 2 out yards (offsite apiaries), add a pollinator habitat, and just to make it all interesting, since the rest of the property has been managed organically since 2004, let’s keep it all organic. Was there even a choice? And this is where we are today and we couldn’t be happier!

Continuing in her dad’s footsteps, Gayla is in charge of the vegetable gardens.

You can almost name the veggie and find it somewhere at Honey Meadow Farm, where summer eating first entails a trip to the garden! Fall means freezing and canning, so the homegrown food just keeps on coming all year long! Tomatoes are our favorite, and Gayla’s marinara, salsa, vegetable juice, and soups are to die for!

Gayla also tends to our flock of, you guessed it…organically raised chickens. This was first John’s and Valerie’s idea and Gayla was vehemently opposed. Now those are her girls and John’s involvement is to make sure there are never too many organic eggs on hand by eating as many as he can!

John is responsible for what he calls “the fruit salad” and the apiaries.

With help from our friends at the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the Cheshire County Conservation District, The National Center for Appropriate Technology, and the NH chapter of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association, we manage all of our fruit following the plan Michael Phillips lays out in his book, The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way.

Our apple trees were planted in 2013 as bare root stock obtained from Fedco, in Maine. This summer (2020) will hopefully be our first year with a sufficient apple harvest to finally make cider!

That same year, our peaches, plums, pears and pie cherry trees were purchased as 3 – 4-year-old trees from Walker’s Farm in Vermont. 2017 and 2018 were great years for peaches, tho’, in 2018,  squirrels stole every one of our 600 – 700 organically raised peaches just days before harvest while I was away for 3-days (insert a string of expletives here…). They did not even leave one peach on the ground! As an associate supervisor of the Cheshire County Conservation District, I wrote about “Squirrel-mageddon” in our October blog. Meanwhile, the plums are delicious and the pears are still coming. The pie cherry remains a dream as the birds are huge fans but that is OK.

The 5 varieties of blueberries, also planted in 2013 as plugs from Nourse Nurseries in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, are maturing nicely. If the deer quit pruning them for us during the winter, we will have larger harvests! We appreciate their concern but prefer to take on the task ourselves, thanks. With 50 plants, we certainly have enough to eat fresh and freeze for use in the winter. The goal, however, is to be selling them, and hopefully, we will be selling organic blueberries this year.

Our strawberries and raspberries are for personal consumption, tho’ John keeps threatening to add more raspberries in order to provide friends and neighbors with a source of tasty organic berries.

The satisfaction gained from this aspect of our lives is we know where a lot of our food originates and are responsible for making it as nutrient-dense as possible. It tastes great and,  like the solar panels on the barn that power the entire property, the orchard and gardens greatly reduce our carbon footprint as we walk to our home-grown marketplace!

For as hard as we work, we realize ours is a very small scale farm – the operative word being “small”. Our experiences the last few years humble us and makes us even more grateful for the true, small local farmers, whose daily lives and economic viability revolve around Mother Nature smiling on them, working almost every moment they aren’t sleeping, and dealing with a public where many do not understand the true value of their food or the sacrifice farmers make to feed them.

With the current disruption in the national food chain, everyone should be looking to support those who locally grow food for sale! Here are 3 of our favorite organic CSAs (farmers who sell shares of their harvest as part of  Community Supported Agriculture) in the Monadnock Region:

Foggy Hill Farm, Jaffrey, NH

Hillside Springs Farm, Westmoreland, NH

New Dawn Farm, Westmoreland, NH