Category: agriculture

This is shaping up to be a great berry year. We’re often amused that in our work toward greater self sufficiency, we never produced enough of a staple (potatoes, corn) for our family’s consumption in a year. But we’ll wolf down hundreds of dollars of berries in one day. We seem to have succeeded at overproduction only with luxury foods like blueberries, raspberries and maple syrup. It’s nice really but one wonders about priorities.

This season is notable in that we have a great read of what the plants are doing, and have managed to stay on top of them. We’ve been good a picking a little every day, a little before ripe, at good times of the day. The chaos of previous years along with our lesser experience then didn’t allow for the slow and steady approach coupled with good calls. One of the improvements is that we are no longer trying to process the quantities before they rot. Now we simply freeze it all until Fall when a day long fire can be used for 1 big canning session. Making preserves in the Summer in small batches was far from ideal.

We’ve been getting 1 big bowl per day for the past couple of weeks, that’s what’s left for the freezer after we all splurged.

When picking raspberries, it helps to be low to the ground. The best picking is when we crawl through the bushes.

The blueberries are on a whole other level.

We’ve had bad luck with peach trees dying in the past, mainly due to us not removing all the buds as they are establishing themselves. One of the dead trees went again, bellow the graft or so we thought. So I removed all the buds this time, but there were so many I missed a few. And well, they turned into small peaches :). They’re delicious, just small. We didn’t think we’d be picking peaches in October.

A day spent on a tractor is a day well spent. Not really doing anything with this field yet, just keeping it open.

It’s rare to get firsts these days :).

Some of the stick we put in the ground 8 years ago are starting to look like real trees. They have barely yielded any fruit so far, and so we hope that they’ll decide to produce a real crop one day. It’s been interesting to compare how well everything we bought from various nurseries performed. The best nursery by far has unfortunately closed. Another one I won’t name has given us only bad performers I’m tempted to just pull out of the ground after years of tending to. Worst failure rate, worst growth rate, worst everything, bleh.

plum

pear

With plants more established, and no clear effect, I decided to relax counter measures a bit this year and see if maybe the orchard, fruit trees, and garden could do with less fencing. The sentence was immediate, we didn’t get as many berries, trees got damaged, and hard work was voided. It is now clear that while various measures aren’t 100% effective, they definitely help. With this confirmed, they’ll get implemented with more vehemence next year.

It’s a lot less work and it looks better without fences. What a shame.

It’s not much but for us it’s huge, we finally have enough water and ways to move it that we can give the gardens a good soak. For the past 9 years we’ve been reliant on the weather, which usually does its job in Vermont. Although when it didn’t, we’d be reactive and move a lot of water by hand only to keep plants alive. Now we’re able to soak several hundred square feet of soil whenever they could use it, and it’s less manual labor. Double win!

We want to build a rain capture system to diversify strategies, but that’s dependent on other projects. We’ll get there.

At some point every July we say goodbye to raspberries until next year. It’s a little sad because they hit first and they’re the best, but we’ve got other berries to keep us happy.

This year some of the plants decided to bear twice! We seem to recall some had this in their description, and I guess the season’s been long enough this year that they went for it. It’s a bit surreal to be brought back to the joys of early Summer at the very end of the season when everything is done and being put the bed for Winter. They taste just as good too.

There’s so much harvesting to do in the Fall. Nicole dug up a ton of potatoes while I was making cider.

Then I walked past the orchard and saw a whole bunch of hazelnuts ready to be picked, crap, I don’t even know what to do with them.

I’ll just grab a basket and figure it out later.

It’s that time of the year we go raid the orchard every day for desert. We could sell some, especially since the price of berries in stores is insane, but that’d be work so we’d rather gift them to friends. It gives them excuses to come over :).

I had never eaten berries until I just couldn’t, it’s so nice to enjoy them without restraint. They also taste much better fresh off the plant. As with maple syrup, producing large quantities of something drastically changes the way you get to enjoy it. I’m not worried about there not being enough for others, or thinking about the expense of it. You can just chug down as many as is enjoyable without afterthought. I’m more worried about making sure the excess doesn’t go to waste.

The chickens clean up the berries that fell on the ground. Sometimes they pick direct from the plants, but not enough to make a dent.

It’s about to hit

The hazelnuts too are getting ready

Tomato Hornworms are much easier to spot at night under a UV light:

Nicole pulled this year’s garlic from the ground, it’s now in the sugarhouse to dry.

They’re pretty big, hopefully just as tasty.

We get a good 10lbs of blueberries every single day. It’s hard to keep up with all the harvesting, processing, gifting and eating. Next year the operation will most likely be turned lucrative.

This season, I can safely say that we have enough berries for our family’s generous yearly consumption. It got me thinking about all the things we solely provide for ourselves. Heat, electricity, water, maple syrup, garlic. These are all major sources of pride, savings, and resilience. Blueberries and currants can definitely be added to the list this year, it took 6 years of tending to the frailest sticks in the ground to get there. As with many things around the homestead this year, we are finally reaping the rewards, and they are plentiful.

This year’s canning label

Soon, we’ll be harvesting en masse from Nicole’s massive garden. We might have other staples to add to the list then. Others like cider are close but not quite 100% self produced yet. Although we don’t particularly seek autonomy as an endpoint, it is pleasant where we have achieved it. It all feels unreal sometimes, that our decade old typical silly dream of leaving the city for greener pastures, could end up being so fully incarnated.