Author Archives: stonyhillfarmwilbraham

With all the rain this past week, we’ve been doing lots of transplanting. You may have noticed that many of the beds in our pictures are covered in white row cover. This serves two functions–it provides slightly higher temperatures, and helps keep out insect pests. In particular, we use them over beds of spinach (to […]

It’s been a busy week! The chickens have moved out into their newly renovated coop, where they have more space and better access to their yard. The greenhouse is just about full to overflowing with seedlings, although we’ve begun transplanting seedlings out into the garden, including lettuce, beets, chard, onions, and lots of spinach. Turnips, […]

With plans to start transplanting seedlings out into the field in the next few days, we’ve spent a lot of time this past week getting beds prepped for them. We plowed and harrowed with our tractor, but have dug raised beds by hand this year (we don’t have a bed shaper). We’ve also been continuing […]

When we moved here in 2014, the house had been vacant for a couple of years and some of the fields had not been recently farmed. In particular, the fields farther from the house had been overrun by a variety of different invasive shrubs. This is common in disused agricultural land; invasive plants are able […]

Having made it through a 17-degree night with our unheated greenhouse full of seedlings, we’re feeling better about our design! Our setup includes a number of 55-gallon barrels full of water that absorb heat during the day while the sun shines on them, and release it at night to moderate temperatures inside the greenhouse. Our […]

With the warm weather we’ve been having, we were able to prep beds to seed our first planting of sugar snap peas this week. They should be fine through the snow this weekend, and hopefully won’t be slowed down too much by the lows in the teens that are predicted this week. Either way, it […]

We’ve been mulling over plans for greenhouses of various different flavors for the past few months–something to house our seedlings and our goats–and we finally reached the building stage this week. It’s made of a recycled carport frame, covered with a sheet of poly. Half of the greenhouse is a shelter for the goats. The […]

We have four new additions to the farm this week: goat kids! We got them from a farm in Holland, MA, where we’ve been volunteering for the past few weeks to learn the ropes. When they’re older, we’re hoping that they will help us with clearing invasive shrubs, and we’re looking forward to fresh goat […]

With the warm weather we’ve been having, we were excited to see that our bees are not only active, but bringing lots of yellow and orange pollen back to the hive! On a walk today, we noticed that hazelnut trees back in the forest are in bloom, and that’s probably where the bees are finding […]

Our biggest news this week is the arrival of our chicks! We picked up some Rhode Island Red/ Rhode Island White cross chicks last Wednesday, and quickly decided to get an additional 15 Barred Rocks. Both will lay brown eggs, starting some time in July or August, which we’ll have available at the farm stand. […]