This past Saturday I attended a workshop on growing paddy rice right here in the northeast! The Aakaogi’s farm in Putney, Vt is quite a vision.
(In their two rice paddies(about15×15 and25×25) they grew 45 varieties of rice
and yielded 500lbs, or 4600lbs per/acre!)
Yes that’s right…rice CAN be grown productively in the northeast. The photo(photos courtesy of ...
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light at the lake

someone’s handmade flowers

giggling cousins

an apron for Genevieve

a long overdue pedicure for Cole

. . . and a broken refrigerator and broken toes.  But we don’t need photos of those, now do we?

It occurred to me that many of you may be wondering – Why get a horse?  Or even, as one customer put it, “What on earth are you going to do with a 1600 pound horse?”
The answer to the second question is both simple and broad.  We’re going to farm with our horse, including plowing, ...
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Last March we went to the Northern Grain Growers Association winter conference at Randolph Tech to hear the considerable expertise that was to be shared. It never made it into our newsletter but I wanted to share the photos and story with everyone. First we heard from Will Bonsall, a Maine based farmer, rare seed ...
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The scene:
Sunday afternoon (our second day with Cole),walking down the street with Ben, Ella on my back and oats in my hand, looking for Cole. 8 ft cedar posts and 4ft hog wire fencing(our dog fence)is simply no match for a 1600lb curious horse named Cole. The crunch of  fence under Cole’s hoof(yes he crushed ...
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He’s a 9 year old 1600lb Belgian gelding(male with no goods) and he’s running around exploring the grounds behind our house. He’s a full well built draft who’s very sweet and ready to get to work! We have a plow, disc harrow, and row cultivator and our first job will be plowing and seeding the ...
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We ventured out to the UMASS trial fields to see 96 varieties of “landrace” wheat under evaluation for possible production in the Pioneer Valley. Eli Rogosa and Ruth Hazzard led interested local/regional farmers through the field and their process. This project was funded by NESARE and will run for several years working to link farmers ...
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(photo by Ben)
Yesterday we had the good fortune to help out our friends Roy and Lauren bale their hay out in Princeton, MA and bring it in before the rains came.  Since Ella wasn’t too keen on me actually helping, I got to walk around and around the field and help out. They were using ...
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Ben and Seth joined Adam at the New England Small Farm Institute yesterday in Belchertown, to check out some freshly arrived equipment!
Here they are putting some rye through the new seed cleaner, which will take out any weed, pebbles, or any other debris, leaving behind beautiful clean grain.

Then they went down to the fields (aka ...
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