We wish all our readers, family and friends a very happy and prosperous New Year....and want to thank you all for a month of record readership!
For our farm, the Holiday Season has been joyful, but like the rest of the American North East, we finally got our dose of Winter snow. This is where you really learn to appreciate the country community, where neighbors actually come unannounced to clear your driveway (something we certainly have never experienced in the city).
Although we were not hit as hard as Montreal, we still managed to accumulate our fair share....and this is now making work on the Kiwi trellises impossible.
With a professional Swiss forester on hand (Alois Dober was over for the Holidays), this did not deter us from at least tackling one major project: clearing trees.
We decided this week would be ideal for the clearing of some large pines on our ridge.
Five of these trees were damaged by the overgrown vines that we had cleared last summer. In fact up to two third of their branches were dead (in one case it was the entire tree).
If we were to do anything this was the time. When our Spring planting starts, removal of the trees would have been extremely difficult.
Tristan and I took the opportunity to learn a thing or two from Alois, such as how to use a wedge and a sledge hammer to ensure the tree falls where you want it to (most important when you're working close to a house!).
This was also an opportunity to try the old Massey Ferguson in the snow. We ended up using it to clear the trees from the ridge and the old tractor performed marvelously.
Having cleared the trees, it was time for a major clean up and again we had to start a large burn. In this case, we decided to keep the large logs; these we will let dry to make Swedish candles (for those not familiar with the concept, I'll explain it in the Spring when we expect to light our first candle).
With half of the site cleaned up, we were stalled again (because of more snow!) and we now hope to finish the job next week.
In any case, we are quite happy with the result of this week's work. We now have a much better view of our land from the house....and of course a much better view of the back of the house. You can now clearly see the second bell tower on the South side of the west wing.
The snowy weather provided a lot of time to finalize and confirm our orders of new stock for Spring planting (something we are now really looking forward to).
So on their way to our farm (sometime in April), we have:
375 red raspberry plants,
240 cassis (or black currant) plants,
150 yellow raspberry plants,
168 red gooseberry plants, and
50 purple raspberry plants (to fill some gaps in our current rows).
We also decided to order 10 Chestnut trees from Grimo, a great local nursery specializing in nut trees.
We love Chestnuts and it is an extremely versatile food. In North America, we only tend to think of roasted chestnuts. However, these nuts can be used as a delicious vegetable side dish (great with game), as a desert (the key ingredient to our Christmas cake), preserved (they make a delectable "puree" and they are highly prized when glazed), flour (for both breads and pastas - a Corsican specialty), and even beer!
We're obviously looking forward to having some productive Chestnut trees.
In the meantime the snow, provides a great backdrop to our forest and tree line. It allows us to identify a lot of the trees previously hidden by the brush.
In our tree line, we actually found two very tall trees of the genus "Platanus", more commonly known as Sycamore. We are in fact on the very northern edge of its habitat in North America (Candice in the picture below provides scale to one of our Sycamores).
I must finish the blog this week by saying that this editor is off to Kuala Lumpur next weekend. Tristan and I will be in Asia for a very short time but this means that our next posting will not be before January 20th...see you then!
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