Threshing Jon Strieff’s ‘Sirvinta’ winter wheat at the Common Ground Country Fair. Photos by Geoff Johnson By Mark Fulford The lack of right-sized grain and bean processing equipment for Maine’s many small farms is a decades-long problem that is especially acute today, as demand for locally-grown dry crops is strong and enthusiasm high among both
By Roberta Bailey My husband is more of a house person than I am. He can visualize what a project will look like, and he has strong opinions about what he likes. I know what I like if I see it but rarely put thought into interior design. My focus is the farm and fruit
By Eric Sideman, Ph.D. I always have fresh cream at home from mid-June until mid-August. Berries are good with milk or yogurt, or plain, but they are best with cream. And the best berry? The one that is in season! For people who do not farm or garden, that season can be hard to determine,
By Diane Schivera, M.A.T. Raising rabbits for meat is an increasingly popular farming operation in Maine. Rabbits don’t take a lot of space to raise and are efficient feed converters, with a feed-to-meat ratio for fryers of 4:1, or 20 pounds of pellets to 5 pounds of meat. Broilers’ ratio ranges from 2 to 6:1,
Brad Johnson Ben Coerper Elizabeth Koltai By Peter Hagerty This is the first of a regular column that will note what graduates and instructors of MOFGA’s Low Impact Forestry program are doing. For more about our work, please visit https://www.mofga.org/Programs/LowImpactForestry/tabid/227/Default.aspx and look for us at the Common Ground Country Fair. Brad Johnson, Randolph, Vermont, LIF
By C.J. Walke Update: Arctic® Apples In the spring 2014 issue of The MOF&G, I wrote about the genetically engineered, non-browning Arctic® apples, created by Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc. of Summerland, British Columbia. Arctic apples are engineered to resist enzymatic browning when sliced or bruised, which proponents claim will make apples more appealing to consumers
By Céline Caron Recently I listened to “Dr. Mercola and Courtney White Discuss Carbon Sequestration” (YouTube, Aug. 27, 2014; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSgroKuuJFA). Both talked about incorporating wood chips into soil (with or without composting) and using them as mulch. Neither distinguished between wood chips and ramial wood chips. They obviously have not read my many articles about
A strip of buckwheat growing at MOFGA’s Common Ground Education Center. English photo. By Will Bonsall The terms “green manure,” “cover crop,” “soiling crop” and “catch crop” are often used interchangeably, which is not quite accurate, but for this article I’m lumping them all together. I refer to any crop that is planted not for
Pigs forage in the woods at the Deer Isle Hostel. Photo by Anneli Carter-Sundqvist A Tamworth pig grazes a wooded area at certified-organic Frith Farm in Scarborough, Maine. Photo courtesy of Frith Farm. By Anneli Carter-Sundqvist The end of our homesteading season has for five consecutive years been marked by the butchering of our pigs.
You can start hundreds of native plants in a small area to create your own nursery. Heather McCargo photo By Heather McCargo The traditional nursery industry has been following an ecologically destructive trajectory similar to the path of conventional agriculture. Most plants are mass produced using an arsenal of synthetic chemicals; many varieties are
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