Happenings on the Farm: March

A steady march forward

The birds are chirping, the snow is melting, and our road is a muddy mess, all sure signs of Spring! Just like the natural world, I feel myself waking up again to possibility and am so excited to get back to playing in the dirt. One of the things I truly love about farming is being connected to the seasons, there really is nothing like going out to do barn chores on that first warm morning after trudging through a long and cold winter. 

Winter snowmelt cascades over the waterfalls at one of my favorite spots on the farm

Seedlings are coming along and greenhouse prep is underway!

Snapdragon seedlings looking happy under the lights!

Ranunculus ready to get transplanted into the greenhouse

CSA Shares are going fast!

Our Flower Bouquet CSAs are filling quickly but we still have a few shares available starting in Mid-June. There are 3 options, a 6-week, 8-week, or 14-week share with pick up locations at the Farm in Braintree, at Wee Bird Cafe in Randolph, and, for Gifford employees only, at Gifford Health Care. Check our website for more details and to sign up!

An Update on our Sugaring Season:

Due to a number of factors, we have made the very difficult decision that we will not be able to produce maple syrup this year. We know that many have been looking forward to our traditional maple syrup and we are making every effort to be able to produce again in future seasons.

When we first started producing maple syrup, Jackson was not working a full-time job and we had significant flexibility during the sugaring season. After all, sap flows when conditions are right and we need to be ready to collect and boil whenever that is. As a rewarding job in Historic Preservation has taken him off the farm these past few years we have had to make some difficult choices about how we spend our farm time. We spent this winter trying to figure out how we could make sugaring season work and we thought we could go for it but what it ultimately came down to were hours, there just aren’t enough in a day for all the things.

We have such a love for sugaring that we know we will soon be back in the woods. We want to thank everyone who has purchased syrup from us in the past and know we have our sights on being part of your pancake breakfasts, or however you enjoy our maple syrup, someday soon.

One of my favorite signs of spring, the crocuses bring such cheerful color to an otherwise bare landscape.

Happy Spring! Here's to longer and warmer days ahead ~ Katja

February Newsletter

Happenings on the Farm: February

The snowy path to our front door

As I look out the window and see all the snow on the ground it seems safe to say we’ve had a more Vermont winter than in recent years. We are finally hitting temps above freezing but for the last few weeks the snow has been falling and the wind has been whipping. The deep snowfall this past weekend brought some challenges to the farm as we worked to keep roads and greenhouses cleared, animals fed, and water buckets full. With weather like this it’s hard to imagine there will be an abundance of flowers in just a few short months! But, while it’s blustery outside, we’ve been busy inside with all the behind the scenes details. Read on to see what we’ve been up to!

In late January I was able to attend Flowering in the North, a two-day flower farming conference held by the University of Southern Maine. It was a wonderful experience and I learned so much. I got to hear from some amazing New England growers and make new connections with area farmers and am already looking forward to next year’s event.

These last two months have been the big planning months. Much of that time has been spent at the computer, creating an array of spreadsheets, working on our website, and mainly mapping out the entire year. Putting this energy in during the “quieter” months helps us come up with a really detailed game plan for how the year will unfold. There are so many small details and it really helps to think through them ahead of time! 

A typical morning of spreadsheets, seed catalogs, and snacks!

In flower news, the first seeds are getting started indoors under lights. We have so many varieties of flowers planned for this year

Experimenting with some new plants this year including eucalyptus. Though they’re one of the first to get seeded, they’re some of the last to get harvested!

Summer Flower CSAs now available!

We are so excited to offer 3 options of CSA shares to the community this year. Sign ups are open now and shares start in mid-June. We will have pickup available on-farm and at Wee Bird Cafe in Randolph (and a special drop at Gifford Health Care for Gifford employees). Head to our website to learn more about our CSAs and Flower Cash, our farm stand bouquet certificates.

Speaking of our website, we’ve been working on updating and adding all of our farm info to the website. If you haven’t visited it lately, it has some great details on all that we’re doing here on the farm. Visit us at www.ravenhillvt.com

Looking ahead….
 

Maple Syrup - we are in the final planning stages for the 2025 season and it looks like we will be back to boiling soon! We typically tap the trees right around Town Meeting Day and hopefully the snow pack will have settled enough to get the horses in the woods. We will definitely send out an announcement once those first drops of sap are dripping into the buckets!

Farm Stand - the farm stand will be opening in Mid-June, possibly sooner depending on flower availability. There you will be able to purchase mixed bouquets and single variety bunches as well as redeem Flower Cash certificates. We can’t wait to welcome you to the stand!

Farm Stays - we’ve been working on a major renovation project at the farmhouse and are planning on opening it to farm stays this summer! It will make a wonderful vacation spot where you can explore the fields and forests of Raven Hill Farm or venture throughout Vermont. We can’t wait to welcome you to The Red Barn Farmhouse at Raven Hill Farm! 

We gutted the entire upstairs of the farmhouse! Here's a before and after of some of the work that's been done on one of the bedrooms. We are nearing the home stretch of this extensive renovation process and have worked with great local craftspeople to get us there!

There are so many things happening on the farm this year and we can't wait to welcome you!

-Katja 

January Newsletter

News from Raven Hill...

We want to start by saying a heartfelt thank you to all of those who have supported Raven Hill Farm over the past years.  We have enjoyed learning about our land and finding what works for us and our family when it comes to farming.  We have been lucky to try a number of endeavors, from raising pigs and goats, to producing maple syrup with our neighbors at Bass Brook Farm (formerly Anchor Light Farm).  We feel so fortunate that we are able to grow and learn new things and are excited about where farming is taking us.  

As some of you know, after years of dreaming of doing something with flowers, Katja jumped in and started growing cut flowers last year.  It was a lot of learning and patience as we navigated our first season of both field and greenhouse growing and the ins and outs of raising flowers as a crop.  Seeing customers enjoy our flowers has been overwhelmingly fulfilling and it’s shown us that this is another offering we want to add to the farm.  There is still so much to learn but we are excited to share our passion and love for these flowers with our community. That said, we have big plans for this year so read on to learn more.  

Looking Ahead to 2025

Flowers, flowers, and more flowers!  2025 will see us increase our flower production, offering more of the varieties that we have come to love and allowing us to get flowers to more people.  We will be offering a CSA, bulk flowers for DIY events, and our farm store will be open on weekends starting in June with fresh picked bouquets.  This summer, we hope to have a few on farm events where you can learn more about the flowers and pick your own bouquets. More information about the CSA will be available by early February, including dates and pick up locations!

Maple Syrup - We are in the planning stages for the 2025 sugaring season and hope to be back in production with our small-batch, horse-powered maple syrup.  As our syrup customers know we make our syrup with traditional methods, including taps, buckets, and a horse-drawn collecting sled.  We are fortunate to sugar with our friends and neighbors at Bass Brook Farm (formerly Anchor Light Farm) and their teams of draft horses.  It’s really special to do things the “old fashioned way” and you gain a real appreciation for the final product.  We know that this makes our syrup stand out from others on the market.  Stay tuned for more info about availability.

Garlic - We’ve teamed up with our friends at Bass Brook Farm to grow garlic for both culinary and seed production.  Stay tuned for more details as 2025 supplies will be limited. 

Farm Store - We are excited to open an onsite farm store in 2025.  There you will be able to purchase our farm products, flowers, and more!  

Farm Stays - Farm stay bookings will be opening this summer, can't wait to share more SOON!

We hope to see you in 2025!
Katja and Jackson Evans

Farm Trees in the Age of COVID-19

Farm trees take a lot of abuse. That’s the thought that somehow found room in my head yesterday. Somehow, amidst the uncertainty, mental rearranging and burgeoning paranoia that had occupied my thoughts for most of the day, the notion that “farm trees work hard” found purchase, if only for a brief moment. With our kids school closed, social distancing becoming the norm and empty shelves at the grocery store, finding room in my thoughts for anything but the what ifs was a challenge. But this idea got through and I latched onto it. 

It was during evening chores and I was walking back down the road from feeding the little pigs. There’s a black cherry tree beside the road, along the fence line that I walk by at least twice a day, sometimes more. This tree served as a gate post for the old five strand sheep fencing that our farm’s previous occupants had installed some time in the 1980’s. When we got here the bed straw had consumed the lower two or three lines of wire and the top lines were sagging, pressed down by fallen trees, or just missing all tothere. But despite the failing nature of the overall fencing system, the gate attached to this black cherry tree stood strong. It swung open and closed and latched tight. Critters could come and go as they pleased across or under the old fence, but through this strong gate, none would pass. 

When we had the old fence replaced with high tension woven wire, we decided to move the location of the gate that had been attached to the black cherry tree. As I was disassembling the gate, I had the chance to inspect this tree. It was obvious that the gate was not the first fence part to be attached to its trunk. Looking closely I found white ceramic fence insulators, black plastic insulators, a variety of nails, staples, eye bolts, gate pintels and various other bits of hardware imbedded in the wood to support farming infrastructure for the last half century. 

To a farmer, a tree in the right position, is the best fence post you can ask for. It will stand a lot longer than a post driven into the ground, will only get stronger as it ages and its canopy provides shade from the sun. If a fence line is planned carefully, new fence post trees can be grown up to replace old ones, creating an almost endless succession of fencing. This black cherry has served the farmers at our place well, and today bears the scars of a lifetime of hard work. Everything here plays a part in the operation of the whole system. 

This black cherry is not a perfect tree. Once it had a second leader which must have died and been cut off. Half the trunk is dead. A new leader started growing up a while back and gives the tree an unbalanced look. Add in the veritable hardware store driven into its trunk, and you get a pretty ugly tree. But it’s a survivor and so we will let it stand, a reminder of the utility of everything, a memorial to functionality and service.

Why I Quit My iPhone

This post is not about farming. It's about focusing on what's important and being productive and mindful and present. All things that are required to succeed at farming and life in general so maybe it is about farming, in an indirect way.

This is also not a New Year's Resolution. Although it started only 10 days into 2018. I did not decide at the end of last year that on day one of 2018 I'd give up using a smartphone. But I did resolve to quit my iPhone not very far into the new year. So it is a resolution of sorts. Maybe I should make it a formal resolution. Maybe that would help solidify my resolve.

"Be it resolved that...
whereas, I have found it increasingly difficult to keep myself free from distraction
and whereas, I would like to have more time to be engaged with my family and friends
and whereas, I am striving to rearrange the neuron chains that have led me down a path of obsessively checking my email, news feed, weather, social media
and whereas, I am trying to be more mindful in all things
and whereas, the phantom phone vibrations I feel in my left leg, near my pants pocket is irritating my to no end,
that I will cease now and forever more to be obliged to carry around, take care of, dutifully keep charged at all times and be responsive to all notifications from my iPhone.
Signed this day....". 

Maybe that helps. Time will tell. 

This is also not a sermon. We're all adults and have to make our own choices in life. What hasn't worked for me, might be working just fine for you. As adults we have to take stock of our lives from time to time and at present, the stock I have taken is forcing me to make some choices. I'm far from perfect. That's not going to change. But maybe I can make a few changes that will redirect the ship, hopefully towards less unsettled waters. I'm not here to evangelize but maybe some of what I've been thinking about will ring true for you. Maybe it won't....

An Attempted Trip Down Social Media Lane

I know when the resolution to put down my iPhone first took hold. It was January 10. I had been off Facebook for a few years and had been taking a break from Instagram for several months when I accidentally opened the Instagram app on my iPhone. Once opened, I decided to take a look around. It had been a while. Maybe the feelings I had when I was using Instagram daily would have changed. Maybe I would not feel compelled to scroll through the feed multiple times each hour. Maybe I had grown in the time I'd taken off and could easily look at everyone else's posts and not be filled with a mix jealously and mild rage at how tidy, functional and curated everyone else's lives seemed, while I knew that my own real life was messy, unkempt and chaotic? So hopeful was my outlook when I accidentally re-opened the instagram app, that I actually took a few pictures and posted them. Seemed like a good idea. Engage with folks. Share.

Then the first "like" came in... and another one after that. And then a couple more. And before I knew what was happening I had spent the morning hours moving from task to task all the while stopping at 15 to 20 minute intervals to check my feed, see how many likes my pictures had received and who had given me those likes. And while I had the app open, why not get caught up with the feed? See what people are up to... and let the rage, jealousy and emptiness seep back in.

No, nothing had changed. Fear of Missing Out or feelings of inadequacy or just feeling bad, whatever it was, it was still there. I had not somehow evolved in the ensuing months since last using Instagram to be able to handle social media in any kind of productive way. I was still insecure, impulsive and obsessive, unable to moderate my use of the technology. The dopamine rush that social media provides proved all too alluring for me and I quickly realized that despite not being engaged in social media for a number of months, I had been finding other delivery methods for the dopamine rush.

First it was obsessively checking email. But I soon learned that I'm simply not important enough to make my inbox lively enough to provide any great rush. On a busy day I may get 10 emails... most of which do not require a response. But Apple News... now here was a thing that was always updating! Like a great endless dopamine fountain! I could check the headlines any hour of the day or night, close it up and open it again 5 minutes later and read a whole new set of headlines! There was always something new and exciting; a story that would remind me of a friend or family member and to whom I could, at the swipe of a finger, send the story to for their edification. "Saw this, thought of you." The perfect message to accompany a news piece that will likely never get read. And that in all likelihood, I only read the first few lines of anyway because, honestly, who has the time to read an entire news story on a smartphone?! You've got to get back to the headlines because something has surely happened since you were there last.

I started to realize that while I may have taken a break from social media, I had not gotten away from the thing I was really trying to take a break from: my addiction (there, I said it...) to my iPhone. 

The TED talk that broke the camel's back

The day after my return to Instagram the elementary school our three kids attend had a two hour delay due to icy roads. After building a fire in the wood stove and brewing some coffee I sat down to enjoy the peace and quiet before the kids would be awake. Of course I turned to my phone to occupy the time. But instead of the emptiness of the Apple News feed, I typed "living without a smartphone" into Safari. The top search results were blog postings by people who had given up their smartphones. I read the top three results and was moved by what each of the stories told. They each described why they gave up their phones (tired of chasing the dopamine, not feeling engaged in their real lives, wanting more time for more meaningful activities, not wanting to be available 24-7, etc). Their stories also told about how they were able to live in the 21st century without a smartphone (dedicating certain specific hours to checking email, using paper day planners and remembering how to use a map or asking for directions when lost). Each story described how giving up a smartphone meant being more self-reliant, having to be better prepared, and being more present in all things. All of these parts of these individual stories (the why, the how and the results) were exactly the things I was looking for.

But it wasn't until I looked at the fourth result in my internet search that the die was truly cast. What finally moved me from idea to action was a YouTube video of a TED talk given by Anastasia Dedyukhina entitled "Could you live without a smartphone?" At over 18 minutes long and with my kids likely to be looking for breakfast at any moment, I was hesitant to start watching but I did anyway.

Her premise, which she lays out in the video in a delightfully heavy eastern European accent, is that we are far more addicted to our devices than we admit. And until we understand this, we can't move beyond them to become more productive and fulfilled. She advocates for keeping our devices out of sacred personal spaces like our bedrooms, bathrooms and diner tables, and for eliminating our use of them entirely if we can. 

I won't repeat everything she says but it moved me to take action and if you're interested in cutting your ties with your smartphone (or even reigning in your use), I recommend given Anastasia's TED talk chance. 

The Rugby Rises Again

I was able to watch the whole YouTube video before my kids woke up. And with a new sense of purpose and a mission to ditch my iPhone I quickly hatched a plan: I would dig out my 10 year old Samsung Rugby II flip phone, charge it up and see if it still worked. If it did, I'd take it with me when I left to do errands later that day and see if they could reactivate it for me at the AT&T store. 

I quickly found the phone and to my great joy, after a minute on the wall charger it started right up! (The mere fact that I still had the phone, the wall charger AND the car charger all these years later and was able to find them within minutes of looking is another story altogether... sometimes it pays to be a packrat.) Later that morning, after dropping the kids off at school, I set out on my errands with my first stop being the AT&T store.

I have often found myself in comical situations with sales clerks. It's something I enjoy. Anytime I can bring a salesperson, what I consider an interesting request, I feel like maybe, in some small way, I've made what might be at times a boring job just a little more enjoyable. That day as I walked through the doors of the AT&T store, ready to start my new life without a smartphone, I felt that sense of joy. I was going to give the kid at the cellphone store something to tell his friends about.

And so I plopped my rugged old Rugby down on the shiny counter, surrounded by the latest in bible sized smartphones, VR glasses and smartwatches and told the kid behind the counter (he was maybe 20... or in other words, he was in 4th grade when my flip phone was born), "I'm done with my iPhone. I want to reactivate my old phone." 
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yup. I can't get anything done anymore and I just want something simple."
"Ok. Well, let's see if it works." He held down the power button and the Rugby chimed to life with a cool 'AT&T 3G' swooping graphic and unobtrusive low-fi sound effects.
"Cool graphics," the kid deadpanned. I wasn't sure if he was being ironic or sincere but the slowly creeping smile on his face gave away his enjoyment of the novelty of this unique sales situation.

Satisfied that it worked, he sold me a $5 SIM card, punched some buttons on his computer which adjusted my cell service agreement down to "basic", took off the insurance I was paying for (we insure our phones... that's how bad it's gotten) and asked me if I was sure about all this?

"I am. I'm done with smartphones," I told him.
"Ok. You're all set then." He smiled and handed me my new old phone.

I thanked him, flipped the phone closed with a satisfying clap and put it my pocket where it easily fit without me really knowing it was even in there. Which is exactly how I wanted my cellphone to be.

In Summing Up the Moral Scene...

There's more to say and I'll do my best to post again on how things are going living a life free of my iPhone. I'm hopeful that taking this step back in tech-time will allow me to have more of my day to dedicate to things that are meaningful. I'm hopeful it allows me the headspace to get real things done and end my days feeling like I've accomplished something and not just spent the hours scrolling and swiping, endlessly updating feeds and turning a never-ending hamster wheel of digital technology. But who knows, maybe in a few days I'll be back at the AT&T store asking the kid to reactivate my iPhone. I hope not.