by Simple Gifts Farm | Jul 8, 2021 | Uncategorized
The climate models predict that here in the Northeast, we will be seeing increased precipitation overall, but with less regularity, meaning periods of intense rain interspersed with periods of drought. This week has showed us am example of that; we received close to 4...
by Simple Gifts Farm | May 14, 2021 | Uncategorized
Last year, about this time, we came to a spot in our no-till experimentation where I was about ready to throw in the towel. We mowed a rye cover crop and ripped furrows through the field with our subsoiler so that we could make a little trench to plant tomato...
by Simple Gifts Farm | Apr 9, 2021 | Uncategorized
When I started out farming in 1999, farmer’s markets closed up shop in late October, with only a few farmers going past the first frost. Farmers got to go do a lot of reading, skiing, or whatever between then and spring. Eliot Coleman was breaking new ground...
by Simple Gifts Farm | Apr 2, 2021 | Uncategorized
How are we going to keep producing food for our community if the weather goes nuts in the future? What can we do to lessen our impact on the climate, and even draw down some of the excess carbon in the atmosphere? Over the winter, I started on a Climate Adaptation...
by Simple Gifts Farm | Mar 12, 2021 | Uncategorized
While it is disappointing to miss an hour of sleep this time of year, that time change always seems to happen when we are just feeling like we could use an extra hour of work. Here’s a little run down of what we are working on this week: The greenhouses are...
by Simple Gifts Farm | Feb 19, 2021 | Uncategorized
I’m having a little trouble sorting through our records to find when this started, but somewhere around 2010, which would have been our fifth year in Amherst, we started into a new crop rotation. We thought we had gotten our vegetable production to the scale...
by Simple Gifts Farm | Feb 5, 2021 | Uncategorized
This week, I took the plunge and made some chicken wings with buffalo sauce from scratch. The results were fantastic. I learned a great trick from the internet: coat the wings in baking powder (along with some other spices) before baking them, and this allows them to...
by Simple Gifts Farm | Jan 29, 2021 | Uncategorized
I am cranking my way through our 2020 financial analysis, and have come across a staggering number: $20,179.25 is the total we spent on credit card fees last year. You can imagine that if you multiply that number by all of the small businesses in our community, it is...
by Simple Gifts Farm | Jan 21, 2021 | Uncategorized
We always want to do better. We run a complex enterprise with many moving parts; I’ve often joked that maybe we should have named this place “Complicated Gifts Farm.” There is always somewhere we could tweak our system to make our lives easier and...
by Simple Gifts Farm | Jan 15, 2021 | Uncategorized
How does one small farm do it’s part to combat climate change, while increasing soil productivity and adding resilience to extreme weather? Many farms are turning to reduced- and no-tillage systems to accomplish the job. In 2020, we decided to take the plunge...
