Reflections on 2021 and our new business
This year was HUGE! We went from having a garden, some trees, shrubs, ducks and chickens to being an actual business. The year started rather slow and inauspiciously. Vermont winter is long! The maple sugaring season started and we were ready to get a whole lot of syrup made but we had a small fire that made our evaporator a no go so that ended that. The next big problem was that as the snow melted down in the field and the ground turned to soup, the greenhouse anchor pegs had nothing to hold on to and we had some huge high wind storms leading to our greenhouse cart-wheeling up the field while we tried to stop it and then in desperation to pull it apart. We were able to reassemble it as best we could (many pieces were broken and some panels were lost) and some people visiting our farm may have wondered why we have the greenhouse in the partial shade of a tree on one side and a barn on the other since the whole point of a greenhouse is the sun! The reason is that the prevailing wind that almost blew our greenhouse to Oz is blocked by the barn and that the ground near the barn does not get as soupey during snow melt. The greenhouse actually worked very well in spite of the shade and all our seedlings flourished and were protected against the early spring flea beetles that prey on any young brassica that we plant in the garden. We do plan on building a new wood and glass greenhouse from scratch in 2022 (perhaps using reclaimed windows) with a proper foundation down in the field.
The next adventure was the beehive. We had helped with some aspects of beekeeping when we were in Kauai so we set out with lots of confidence, purchasing the beehive and the bees. One thing we didn’t get on quick enough was bear protection! One morning I looked over toward our hive and saw it completely pulled apart with live and dead bees everywhere. We suited up and put the hive back together: many frames full of honey, bees and brood were salvageable but after a few days we realized that the Queen must have been one of the casualties on the destroyed frames. No Queen means no hive! We were lucky to be able to buy a nucleus colony (a few frames of bees with a Queen) and we installed it in the hive with fingers crossed that our old colony would accept their new ruler. They did!! Our bees worked hard for the rest of spring, summer and fall (surrounded by an electric fence to keep the bears away). They pollinated like mad and we got our best yields from our fruit tress and bushes this year. We didn’t take any honey from them as it was the first year of the colony and as I mentioned before Vermont winters are long! We are hoping that they survive this winter on their honey stores and that next year we will get some of their sweet sweet honey. We also plan on getting a few more hives!
I’ve blogged before about the finishing of the kitchen, the start of the farm stand and the introduction of baby goats so I’ll skip ahead a little. The first successful farm stand day was by far not our only one! Every weekend I was stunned to see new faces and the faces of my new regulars. People bringing their kids along in wheelbarrows or on quad bikes, cyclists stopping for lunch and Pam and her dogs! Word of mouth spread and soon it wasn’t just people from our street but people from further afield, our customers were taking cookies to gatherings of friends who then came along themselves. When I had initially envisioned the farm stand I had imagined it unmanned with an honesty box but I found that I enjoyed being there at the stand chatting to people about their lives, describing our products and taking people young and old over to see the baby goats! That aspect was priceless to me and so the farm stand will not be unmanned (if I’m not there I’m usually nearby: showing off the goats or harvesting a vegetable that we have run out of). Another thing that wasn’t like what I had expected was that the baked goods were the main draw, every week we were having to bake more and more and my beautiful organic produce was sitting unsold. A customer put the issue very succinctly “I see that whole cabbage and I see work”…and from that I saw opportunity. The cabbage got chopped and mixed with carrot and chives and became bagged slaw, the kale became pesto and the zucchinis became bread, zoodles and sauce! That being said though the baked goods were still the stars and we sold out early many days!
As we got further into fall it started to be a wee bit chilly to be out for 6 hours so we trimmed our hours to 3 but it still worked out well: word had got out that if you want to get the biggest variety of baked goods you have to show up early, so we still seemed to make the same amount of sales in half the time. Eventually it got too cold for me to be out at the stand so we had our final weekend at the end of October. It was really sad to say goodbye but we hoped that we could live on in the form of special orders of eggs and baked goods picked up at the house and my lovely regulars did not disappoint! We have been getting orders every week and man we had some busy weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas!! We go into the new year knowing that we may have a quieter January as people try to cut back on their baked good intake but we will be using that time wisely doing some recipe testing!!
Wow I got this far without gushing about our babies (baby goats that is)! They are growing upward and outward and have thick winter coats right now. Peanut is still such a greedy girl-butting away the others until she gets her treats first but she is the one who most likes cuddles from us. Juniper (or Juney as we now refer to her) is a very good forager: on our goat walks she is usually the first to try munching a new tree. Maple is still the adventurer and is usually the first to climb on to any new structure or toy. The goats bring us joy every day and even though they were bought with future milk and cheese in mind it is seeing their little faces that makes them worth the money we paid!
So, the title is reflections on 2021 and so far it feels more like a diary entry so I will try to draw together some summary thoughts. Firstly I think it is important to not get swallowed up by the setbacks: starting the year with evaporator fires, cart wheeling greenhouses and dead bees was so disheartening and some days we felt like just giving up but if we had we wouldn’t have been able to save half a colony of bees and we wouldn’t have had anywhere to start our seedlings. As to the evaporator, it did stop our sugaring this season but we ordered an amazing new one from a Vermont company that also acts as a grill, smoker and pizza oven so watch this space…
Secondly and somewhat related to the first is that this year made us learn to be adaptable. The farm stand was meant to be unmanned with whatever surplus vegetables we had, a couple of boxes of eggs and the odd baked good on there but it ended up being more of a manned little shop for baked goods, jams and dinner fixins!
The third reflection is that it is so nice to get to know your neighbors and have that sense of community. Before the farm stand I didn’t know the names of anyone living nearby, now there are people that I truly miss seeing! I can’t wait until spring and the return of the people who don’t winter in Vermont and seeing if the rhubarb crown that my most regular customer Pam gave to us grows (and then making her something tasty with it!) I can’t wait until the spring opening day of the farm stand where the neighbors will greet each other after the long winter.