For a few weeks a year, the maple trees along Beebe Hill Road are adorned with metal buckets from which a distinctive plink, plink sound emanates.
Sunny, forty degree days and freezing nights wake up the vascular system of the trees around us (all of them, not just the maples) and nutrients begin to flow from roots to buds in preparation for the explosive growth of spring. Each year during this perfect window for intercepting a little of that sweet sap, we drill shallow holes into the trunks about three feet up, place a spile in each, hang a bucket to catch the flow, and watch them fill with sweet liquid. Maple sap is sweeter than that of other trees in our area, but the taste is still very faint with you sip it. To turn it into syrup that can be drizzled on pancakes, we have to boil off the water. After schlepping the sap from Beebe to Isabella Freedman's campus sugar shack, we pour it into an evaporator pan with a raging fire underneath. If you drive by Johnson Road in late winter and notice a cloud of steam that smells like IHOP, you're passing by the evaporator. Slowly, slowly, the liquid thickens until we've reduced it down forty times. Potowatami Botonist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls our northeastern region Maple Nation- a distinction beyond state or country that celebrates the delicious, storable food source that generations have delighted in. She says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "It is said that our people learned to make sugar from the squirrels. In late winter, the hungry time, when caches of nuts are depleted, swuirrels take to the treetops and gnaw on the brances of sugar maples. Scraping the bark allows sap to exude from the twig, and the squirrels drink it. But the real goods come the next morning, when they follow the same circuit they made the day before, licking up the sugar crystals that formed on the bark overnight." Anyone who has driven up Beebe Hill (if you haven’t done so at sunset, I highly recommend) has likely wondered what those skinny white tubes are sticking out of the ground near the apex of the road. In the spring of 2020, we planted two hundred Chestnut saplings. Young trees are vulnerable to nibbles from deer and rodents, so we are protecting them in tubes that also act as mini-greenhouses, speeding up growth until the leaves begin to pop out of the tops. Why Trees? When Adamah was generously gifted the forty acres uphill of our main farm, we took a full year to observe the land. It was steep, so not great for growing vegetables, had no irrigation or electricity, and was full of brush and invasives. We imagined the hill as it might have been five hundred years ago, likely a forest stewarded by indigenous peoples to better produce forage crops like nuts and berries. We thought about the needs of our planet at this current moment when we have too much CO2 build up in the atmosphere and not enough of it in the soil where it can be stored and support food production. Trees became the obvious direction we wanted to go- edible reforestation to sequester carbon and learn/teach about the potential of agroforestry for our global food supply. Why Chestnuts? While American Chestnuts used to populate these mountains with huge, towering trunks of resilient wood and millions of nutritious nuts falling to the ground, they are no longer viable due to the presence of a disease called Chestnut Blight. We have planted European and Asian chestnut varieties that are resistant to the blight as an homage to the chestnut-rich history of the region and because they are a crop well suited to our slopes. Chestnuts can handle the moisture on Beebe Hill, appreciate our climate, and don’t need much picky tending during the spring and summer when we are busy with other crops. Chestnuts are a tree-grown source of carbohydrates- a huge boon to a food system in which we rely so heavily on grain crops that require a lot of tillage (which releases carbon) for carbs. Chestnuts can live many years, an erosion and climate solution for the generations. Did I see a goat? Yes! Our flerd (herd + flock) of goats and sheep graze in the agroforestry area in paddocks we rotate with electric fencing. As the trees mature, the area will be a proper silviculture with the animals grazing directly underneath the trees, allowing the grasses and brush between trees to be useful forage instead of a nuisance that needs to be mowed. We think the animals will also enjoy the shade of the leaves:) When Do We Eat? We hope to have our first nut harvest in 2027! Good things come to those who wait. Agroforestry is an exercise in patience and in appreciating a timeline outside of our usual calendrical hustle and bustle. Cash flow budgets don’t easily coincide with tree-time, so we are very grateful to those who have supported our agroforestry venture including Berkshire Agricultural Ventures, American Farmland Trust, and USDA's National Resource Conservation Service. When it’s time to harvest, we hope to host community nut harvest days, to store our own nuts for roasting, and, depending on yield, potentially to sell into the emerging Chestnut flour processing industry in the region. From Hummus to Humus The gorgeous native flowers in bloom and juicy vine-ripening tomatoes draw the Adamah visitor's eye- but the heart of our farm might be the compost yard. Five foot tall towers of rotting material seem to stand still- some dark brown/black, some dotted with kale stems and bamboo forks, always one pile that is freshly covered in spaghetti marinara, eggshells, and orange peels- although they are anything but static. The wild activity in the yard is a partnership between us and billions of invisible microbes to turn trash into treasure. We use a process called thermophilic composting, creating the right conditions for heat-generating microbes to thrive. We pile carbon-heavy materials like raked up autumn leaves and spoiled hay in the right proportion with nitrogen-heavy materials like pizza crusts, apple cores, and goat manure. The pile stays moist from our New England rains, and we aerate it by turning it with the tractor bucket. The most obvious organisms to enjoy this concoction are our chickens, who graze on the piles like mountaineers, spending their days plucking up a burnt popcorn kernel here and a wilted salad green there. They take great pleasure and fuel their egg production with the nutritious food we humans rejected, eliminating our need to buy them expensive grain feed produced far away. Under the chickens’ little dinosaur-like feet, a whole host of other organisms are also having a feast. Worms, ants, centipedes, and beetles are ripping the material up into smaller pieces while bacteria, fungi, and actinomycetes are breaking it down chemically. When a pile is big enough, we stop adding material and start a new one for fresh waste. We grind up the materials with a rototiller to help them break down more quickly. Aerobic bacteria give off a lot of heat as they feed on the organic matter. We monitor temperatures with a thermometer big enough to check Paul Bunyan for a fever, and we use carefully timed aeration to keep the cooking pile between 130 degrees (hot enough to kill pathogens and weed seeds) and 160 degrees (the highest temperature preferred by our thermophilic bacteria friends). When the bacteria finish licking their proverbial plates, without any material left to consume, the pile cools down and fungi and actinomycetes take over. We continue to let the pile sit for at least a few more weeks to allow the fungi to break down woody bits. The chickens continue to enjoy the pile, scratching at it with their talons to unveil wiggly worm treats. The chickens seem to spend time on the almost-done piles the way we graze on snacks at a movie- a relaxing pleasure more than the hunger-crazed buffet experience they have on the fresh piles. Finished compost smells amazing, like a fresh rain, and there is no evidence of the individual banana peels or grilled cheese remnants that it began as. What used to be hummus left behind in an unfinished pita sandwich, has become humus- the organic component of soil. We spread the rich black humus before planting vegetables, fruits, or trees. The infusion of organic matter feeds the soil’s microbial population, who, in turn, release essential nutrients in forms that plant roots can readily take up, while simaltaneously aerating to improve drainage and structure. The pizza crust rejected by the Kellogg kindergartener, or the cantaloupe rind tossed in the bin at Isabella Freedman, represent hard won carbohydrates synthesized from atmospheric CO2 and sunlight and precious groundwater by wheat plants or melon vines back in the field where they began. By composting them, we cycle that energy back through the carbon cycle, with the help of microbes and invertebrates, so that it can again give life to those who eat our fresh bell peppers and cherry tomatoes. Unlike manufactured fertilizers, this is all done with very little fossil fuel use. Adamah fellows schlep food waste from the Isabella Freedman dining hall with a cart each morning. We pick up the food waste from Kellogg School down the road twice a week, and Salisbury School students drive their dining hall’s waste from the next town over. Local landscapers drop leaves off from only a few miles away. All the invasive phragmites that we harvest to cover the sukkahs at Isabella Freedman get brought up the steep but short hill from campus. The chickens, of course, make their manure contributions just by hanging out on top of the piles poking their beaks at corn on the cob and baked ziti. Thank you to all the hundreds of holy schleppers out there who have contributed to our piles over the years. One soil! |
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