I won’t lie to you folks – I’ve been looking forward to spring since last summer. The farm is a busy place most of the year but tends to calm down for a month or two early in the year when it’s just too cold to do anything outside. While we like being busy – I appreciate the down time so I can spend a little time planning out what our spring is going to look like before all of the work starts. The bulk of our time over the last couple months has been spent planning for 3 things that will happen this spring at the farm. Maple syrup production, apple tree grafting, and the full planting of the first farm vineyard.
Maple Syrup
We’ve spent the last two years experimenting with maple syrup production. While I’ll admit that when I was younger I was never a huge syrup person – that all changed when we started making our own at the farm. There’s just something incredible about fresh all natural maple syrup and after the first year making it for fun we quickly decided it was one of the things we wanted to pursue more seriously at the farm. Last year we invested in a small evaporator which made a huge difference and opened the door for us to make syrup at a somewhat moderate scale. We started small only tapping a handful of trees to get comfortable with the process and make sure we knew what we were doing. This year we’re going to scale up production and make our first attempt at selling maple syrup as our first farm product! There’s been a surprising amount of work required to get to this point. I’ve been spending time researching production, bottling, and sourcing bottles. Laura has been working on creating the labels for the bottles (which was also a surprising amount of work given label requirements etc) and figuring out where/how we’ll go about selling it. Here’s a draft sample of the label Laura is working on…
For now we’ve decided that we’ll be selling 10oz bottles for $10 a piece and doing just direct sales. We’ll see how it goes this year and then figure out what the next steps are. We’re planning on tapping trees this coming weekend so stay tuned to see how that goes. I intend to document how much sap we collect, our yields, and the entire process in follow up blog posts.
Apple Trees
The other major task on my schedule in the spring is apple tree grafting. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 4 months researching different apple varieties and ordering scions and root stock. Last year I grafted 50 trees and ended up with 35 that actually made it into the ground and survived in the outdoor tree nursery…
If I’m being honest the initial set of trees were selected mostly at random. I found a company Maple Valley Orchards that specializes in heirloom varieties of apples and have been great to work with. I thought it would be neat to grow older less common varieties but I didn’t really have a strong purpose in mind besides the fact that I knew we wanted an orchard. Then last year I made my first attempt at making hard apple cider and I fell in love with the process. After that I spent a lot of time looking at cider specific varieties with an eye to plant a large variety of apples that we could experiment with for cider making. This, coupled with my intention to experiment with different root stocks, led to me ordering enough scions and root stocks to hopefully graft about 170 trees spread across 30 varieties and 5 different rootstocks….
The grafting will be a lot of work but I’m looking forward to it. The process I used for getting the trees started inside will likely need to change slightly because of the scale of this years grafting but I’m looking forward to experimenting and seeing how many of these trees make it into the nursery.
Vineyard
The vineyard is something we started a year ago but only did a small initial planting of 25 vines. We underestimated the amount of damage that deer could cause and ended up with a lot of those vines getting nibbled down to the ground. Surprisingly they all survived and have come back and we have since installed fencing to deal with the deer. With these problems hopefully resolved we ordered another 300 vines to plant which should fill the entire hill – about half an acre…
We already laid out the rows and installed the end posts for them so this spring we’ll plant the rows and then install the trellis wire and remaining row posts. We’re hoping to take delivery of the vines in late May and get them in the ground before it gets too hot out. We have a new model for the initial planting that we’re hoping will work a little better than our first planting so stay tuned to hear more about that in upcoming posts.
Stay tuned for more posts on all three of these projects!
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