Virtual Farm Tour
A lot of you have been to farm to pick up your CSA share or your seedlings.
But most of you have never ventured back to the production areas where all the magic happens.
Here’s some behind-the-scenes views!
First, a little context. We’re in Berwick just off of Route 4 between South Berwick and North Berwick.
It's a 70 acre property with about 30 open acres and 40 wooded acres.
It's all under an Agricultural Conservation Easement via Maine Farmland Trust. It will never be developed.
1. The House
The on-farm CSA pickup is on the deck of the house.The fields around the house usually stay pretty wet, so our production area isn't really visible from the road.
2. The Barn
The barn is a 16' x 32' structure with two levels.
The barn houses an off-grid electrical system powered by an 18 panel solar array.
Energy is gathered from the roof panels and brought inside to the batteries where it is stored until needed.
An inverter/charge controller then makes the electricity available for all the farm’s needs.
3. The Greenhouse
Our greenhouse is a 15' x 50' structure with semi-circular hoops that are 9' tall in the center.
Most of the vegetables and flowers we grow start their life in this little structure.
It's full of plants for about 5-6 weeks starting in mid/late April.
As seedlings move out to the garden through the season, space becomes available for other important tasks like curing onions (August) and winter squash (September).
This is where we spend most of our time in March and April.
Onions have just started germinating this past weekend!
4. The High Tunnel
In late 2020, we built this unheated 30'x96' structure to help us extend our growing season.
This is the protected space that allows our CSA to offer more variety and start earlier in the season than many other local farms.
6. The Garden
Our garden is about 1.5 acres with only about .8 acres in active cash-crop production each year.
The garden is organized into 15 plots that rotate annually (except our perennial plot).
Each plot is 4,000 square feet (about 1/11 acre) and contains 10 beds which are 30” wide with 18” paths in between.
We're only growing cash crops on about half of these plots. Different cover crop combinations are grown in the other half for various reasons:
building up organic matter in soil
growing straw to use as mulch in other plots
suppressing weeds
adding/controlling nutrients for future cash crops
