winter rye & barley – We have around 96 acres now dedicated to growing winter rye, barley and legumes/green manures to feed the soil and to give the land a rest as we rotate every third year out of grain. After these grains are cleaned for the third time, we smoke the barley on the farm with apple and cherry wood and then mill them on the stoneground mill at Elmore Mountain Bread. This flour is then transformed into Thornhill Farm smoky rye whiskey at Caledonia Spirits and shared with bakeries and coops in Vermont.
elderberries – currently 2.5 acres under cultivation, seven cultivars including Lewis Hill’s two cultivars Coomer and Berry Hill. The elderberries will be used by Hill Farmstead Brewery, Greensboro, Vermont, to make beer and by Black Heath Meadery, Richmond, Virginia, to make mead. Lewis Hill’s home and nursery is less than a mile away from this land, where he planned to cultivate elderberries on a commercial basis.
honey bees – on the farm will pollinate our flowers. I began a relationship with honey bees over 50 years when my brother Tom, 9 years old, and I bought our first hive for our family farm. We were enchanted by how industrious the bees were, giving us honey, pollen, propolis and beeswax for candles and salve. Around 40% of what is eaten is pollinated by insects, this to a great degree by honey bees. Because there are so few nectar & pollen plants on Thornhill Farm, we are planting these plants for the bees. We know the soil is worn out on the farm because our honey bees make so little honey. This is why we have pigs. When the forest is cleared, we do not burn the wood that is left behind, but chip it and mix these wood chips with manure and fungus mycelium to make piles of compost to improve the soil. Last summer we grew peas and oats as a green manure crop, and the pea flowers gave voluminous amounts of nectar to the honey bees and pollinating insects.
field report
Angus finds an apple. ...
6” of new snow has fallen on the farm. Angus and I went for his first ski, through fields of winter rye, deep into the woods and down to the roaring brook. 17° F.
As a Border Collie, his life is to be the advance guide, always circling around me, and bring up the rear. Day One of skiing was to teach Angus to stop pouncing on the tips of my skis and bite them as they moved through the snow. He herds me.
This fall after the fields were planted to rye and cover crops, we opened up this 100 year old road in the forest. Years ago my brother-in-law Joe, a forester, corrected the farmer - these are “forest roads, not farm roads”. Young trees were growing growing in the middle of the trail, and elder trees had fallen across the the path. Now the neighbors and I can ski here. I knew that Angus was coming, and he would help explore the lower part of farm, 3/4 of the acres are forest below the fields of grain.
Our project this winter is to explore, map out and cut a path through the mystery 1/4 mile in the forest to get from the brook we skied to today to our lower grain fields and cross into Jasper Hill Farm and ski to Barr Hill and to Craftsbury. Last winter Mateo and I mapped out the openings between both farms.
In this video, we are in a 6 acre parcel of the forest that we have approval to clear and transform into a field of grain. Our forester mapped out the soils, and we walked with the land trust, the NEK wetlands chief (we agreed that there are no wetlands here) and our USDA agent (no jurisdiction, but he is the best, and always an honor to have him on the farm to help us with agronomy - soils, cover crops, plants for pollinators, organic weed protocol).
Suzanne Simard’s book, “Finding the Mother Tree” changed the way that I look at the forest. Now I see the mother trees in the woods and observe how she is connected to and nurtures all of the younger trees around her by the mycorrhizae in the earth.
Continued in comments. ...
three generations and Todd - August 21, 2021. Wayne County, New York State, a few miles south of Lake Ontario
L to R
Kadan Winter, Dan Winter, Todd Hardie, Bonnie Winter, Wayne Winter
I have worked with the Winter family for 40 years. The goldenrod-aster honey from their bees in the northern Finger Lakes is my favorite honey every year.
When Honey Gardens Apiaries brought back raw honey to the country after a 60 year pretty much absence, the demand for truly raw honey grew to be so strong that we did not have enough honey with our 1,900 colonies of bees in yards across the Champlain Valley of Vermont and St. Lawrence River Valley of northern New York. Then we started to bottle the honey from the bees of the Winter family. Once a week for years I drove to the Winters’ honey house and picked up 14 drums of honey and returned 14 empty drums.
Runamok is now bottling basswood and also goldenrod honey from the bees of the Winter family. I love all of the second generation relationships in my life.
Pure basswood honey like this is rare. It is a credit to the vision and courage of Eric Sorkin, Runamok, that we are spending the time to source single flower honey, cultivate relationships with beekeepers across the country, and keep the honey raw as we bring it to market.
We have just spent the day “pulling honey” from bees in the yards that Dan Winter felt would have basswood honey. His team then started Day One of honey extraction in the honey house for the season and selected supers of basswood honey to extract. Dan is holding a jar of this basswood honey.
Wayne and Bonnie Winter are legends in New York State beekeeping and elders that taught me how to be a farmer with honey bees and make a crop.
Beekeeping is tough these days. It is a testimony to the long days and hard work that these traditions and taking care of insects that pollinate much of our food are being passed down to the generations that follow.
Dan is finishing up his last term as President of the Empire State Honey Producers Association and will become President of the American Beekeeping Federation in January.
It is an honor to work with you, my friend.
Todd ...
This error message is only visible to WordPress admins