June 2018

Written by Executive Director, Archie McIntyre

So what to do?  Late in 2010, a group of Board members and volunteers put our heads together and came to the realization that since we were trying to preserve a farm, we should try to do some farming.   We looked at each other and rapidly deduced that none of us had the foggiest idea how to do it.   We needed some expert help and, in early 2011, we hired Adrienne who had been farming an organic farm outside Washington, DC.  Sally started those first seedlings in her living room and, sure enough, come the second week of June, we actually had real vegetables, grown in Winchester, at the Winchester Farmers Market.  It was a small, but very proud display. 

Looking back it seems pretty simple, but it was a big step for us at the time.  It marked the first real investment in our farm.  Taking on a financial obligation, when the payout is uncertain is risky business.  But in the end, that investment has paid off.  We are now bursting with activity from early March to late November, growing and selling a full compliment of market crops. We’ve added farm-based educational programs and classes for people of all ages, and we’ve opened our doors for public and private events, providing a community venue for recreation, leisure and gathering.  This time of year, there is always something going on at the Farm.  Come up and check it out for yourself. 

It takes a lot to keep a small farm going and thriving.  When the Town purchased the Farm in 2007 and formed the Wright-Locke Farm Conservancy to run it, it’s fair to say we didn’t have much of an idea of what was in front of us.  We took over the pick-your- own raspberry field and had the use of the Squash House.  The remainder of the buildings and the farmstead as we now know it were part of a life estate held by Bertha Hamilton until she passed away in 2010.

In those first several years we tended the raspberry crop and opened the fields up to our picking public each September for about six weeks until the first frost brought the season to an end.  It was a great volunteer effort that netted the Farm about $15,000 to $20,000 per year.  But that didn’t seem enough to sustain and justify a $14,000,000 investment by the Town in this last remaining 20 acres of our farming heritage.

The farm has been “saved”.  We have a long-term lease (30 years, with a 30 year extension) from the Town and we were able to buy 12.5 acres around the Farmstead with the generous support of many in the community.  And we have been able to invest in and restore our historic buildings that form the backbone of this important resource.

Anyone who lives in an old house knows it takes a lot of upkeep.  It’s no different for us with our farmhouse, 1827 Barn, Ice House, Farm stand and Squash House.  I could give a long list of all the projects – new roofs and exterior repairs, repainting all the buildings, wiring and building alarms, new public, accessible bathrooms for our many visitors and on and on.  All told, with the generous support of our community, we have invested over $500,000 in stewarding our (town-owned) buildings.

This month marks the completion of our last major exterior restoration project: our Squash House. Thanks to Scott and other volunteers and contractors, we replaced all of our deteriorated windows (34 of them in total) with historically accurate, six-over-six double hung sashes, replaced rotten gutters, soffits and exterior clapboards and repainted the entire exterior.  All our major buildings at the Farm are on the National Register of Historic Places and subject to a State Preservation Agreement so everything we do to the exterior has to be historically appropriate and subject to reviews and approval by the Massachusetts Historical Commission.  It adds a degree of difficulty and expense, but in the long run, it’s worth the extra care and attention to detail knowing that we’ve taken care of the buildings and set them, and the farm, up for a bright future. 

Now all of our historic buildings have been restored, we look forward to our next projects.  There’s always something on the horizon that needs our attention.  Top on the list is displaying some of our many historic farm implements, wagons and tools so that our visitors can properly appreciate them.  We are working on a display of our ice harvesting tools in our Ice House that’s tucked just to the north of our 1827 Barn.  One big project is to move one of our three horse-drawn Ice Sleds from below the 1827 Barn up to the Barn’s second floor loft where it can been seen by all the people who come through the Barn.  It’s a lot easier said than done to move a 1,000 lb. sled.  We’re lucky to have Charlie Silva, one of the members of the This Old House crew, to help us move and lift the sled with one of his telescoping lifts that can maneuver this unwieldy, heavy artifact.  Charlie says he needs to block off a full day for the work, making sure there’s enough time should unanticipated difficulties arise.  Checking with Amy, our Events Coordinator, and Erika, our Education Coordinator, it turns out that we have only one full day when the barn is not otherwise occupied with activity between now and mid-October.  Fingers crossed that one day works for Charlie’s schedule.

Yes, the Farm has become a busy place with lots of activities going on.  Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post on plans for a new, year-round Education Center which will help alleviate some of this pressure by providing a full 12-month calendar for all the things going on and an additional venue at the farm for our many activities. 

May 2018

Written by Education Director, Erika Gorgenyi, and long-time volunteer, Jane Hammer

To round out our series of animals on the farm, last but certainly not least are the goats. Many have made it a routine to visit them, bringing food scraps and watching with a smile as they consume nearly everything in sight. Goats are whimsical and “capricious.” Despite the debate over the etymology of that word, it seems to describe goats quite aptly. Goats belong to a genus of mammals known as capra and the word capricious refers to someone or something that is impulsive or unpredictable, subject to change on a whim. If you’ve been around goats long enough, you’d notice this to be a hallmark of their behavior!

However, goats can also be quite smart and very affectionate, prone to bonding with people much like dogs. Humans partnering with domestic goats goes deep into our evolution, at least 100 centuries! From the early part of the Neolithic Age, when people began cultivating land for crops, they began tending herds of goats in the regions of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Perhaps that’s why they are such a draw people of all ages to the farm: they speak to a deep part of being human that is relatively dormant in our society.

Goats are “ruminants” and as such, have four chambers of their stomachs to digest dense, fibrous material by fermenting it in their gut.  Other ruminants like sheep and cows are called “grazers,” preferring to eat grasses, while goats are known to be “browsers” who choose shrubs, trees, bushes, vines first but will also eat grasses when available. Part of the digestion process includes sending partially digested and fermented food (called cud) back into the mouth for another round of chewing in an effort to break the material down even further and extract more nutrients as it goes on to the next stage of digestion. This is why you might often see the goats chewing when they are laying down and not eating.

Male goats are called bucks or billies, females are called does or nannies and young, baby goats are called kids.  Male goats who have been castrated are called wethers.  At Wright-Locke farm, we have four wethers and three does. All goats, both male and female, have horns. At a very young age, before their horns have developed, many goats are “disbudded” (a procedure to prevent horn growth) so that they will be less likely to harm themselves, one another or their caretakers.  It is thought that horns are mainly for protection in the wild, so on the farm they are often seen as not necessary. You will notice that some of our goats have been disbudded and others have not.

Our goats are vital, working team members here on the farm. Goats are natural landscapers: their strong inclination to browse helps us prune trees and shrubs, mow grasses, and trim back overgrowth of vines and brush. Carefully managed, browsing goats can nurture diversity and abundant growth of beneficial trees, plants and grasses including those that are good for goats to eat!  As they exercise their bodies and natural instincts and consume such a varied diet, the goats keep themselves healthy and happy. In this way, the goats help us to maintain a forested landscape that is healthy, diverse and enjoyable for all.

Goats are fun to visit and feed–with care.  It is true that goats are very curious and will try to nibble on almost everything, even things they should not eat like your hair, clothing, and more. We’re happy to be able to “share” our goats with the public and just ask that you follow a few important guidelines when visiting.

Please do NOT give them:

• starchy foods like bread and pasta which can disrupt their gut balance
• NO trimmings from a chemically-treated landscape
• Rhododendrons and other members of the Azalea family can make goats very sick
• wilted leaves from Cherry and other stone fruit trees can be toxic to goats
• also, Holly, Lilacs, Lily of the Valley, Yew, Milkweed, Rhubarb leaves and Red Maple should not be fed to the goats
• be careful with plastic bags, which can accidentally blow into their pen during feeding
• refrain from picking growing farm crops or nearby grasses and plants to feed them.

DO feed them fruits, veggies, acorns, and woody/leafy trimmings from your yard (if you don’t use chemicals). Weeping Willow is a nice treat for goats and actually aids in their digestion.

Finally, we see our keeping of goats, and all of our other non-human friends on the farm, as a way to exemplify respect for living things and humane treatment of animals.  As we care for the goats properly and allow their “goaty-ness” to thrive, be honored and put to good work, the farm seeks to offer the community a clear view of what “humanely raised” look like. In this way, our animals on the farm help us to take a step towards healing the connections among humans, our food, and the vibrant, fertile, biodiverse natural heritage that is our responsibility and privilege to regenerate.

May 2018

Written by Board President, Sally Quinn

Having become the farm’s resident beekeeper (completely by mistake) has been an experience.  Keeping bees at Wright-Locke Farm is exhilarating, depressing, and fascinating and it certainly never ceases to amaze. It is exhilarating when you open the hive to observe 30,000 worker bees (all female) buzzing inside, making honey, caring for the queen, building comb, and constantly cleaning and tidying the hive.  The only building supplies they use are nectar and pollen from flowers (they also need a dependable water supply nearby.)  It is depressing when we lose more than half of the hives over the winter, especially if those same hives are still full of honey, proving that they did not starve. 

It is fascinating when you observe a queen cell which is a protuberance from the comb built by the worker bees when they sense they possibly need a new queen.  You may see several in a healthy hive. Either the workers have noticed that the old queen bee is not laying many eggs or they simply have a back-up plan and the current queen is healthy and laying. Slightly different-looking queen cells may hint that the bees are getting ready to swarm as they need more room. A cagy beekeeper notices this and immediately adds boxes to the top of the hive so that the bees have more real estate to move in to and will therefore not leave for larger quarters in a swarm.

Here are some fun facts about honey bees.

• A single honeybee will only produce approximately 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
• There are three types of bees in the hive – Queen, Worker and Drone.
• The queen may lay 600-1500 eggs each day during her 3 or 4-year lifetime. This daily egg production may equal her own weight. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees.
• Honeybees are responsible for pollinating approximately 80% of all fruit, vegetable and seed crops in the U.S.  To make one pound of honey, the bees in the colony must visit 2 million flowers, fly over 55,000 miles and will be the lifetime work of approximately 768 bees. 
• A single honey bee will visit 50-100 flowers on a single trip out of the hive. 
• Bees produce honey as food stores for the hive during the long months of winter when flowers aren’t blooming and therefore nectar is unavailable.
• Out of 20,000 species of bees, only 4 make honey.
• The honeybees we all know in the United States are not a native species. They were imported from Europe by the early settlers.  Who wouldn’t bring a supply of sweet honey to the new world?
• Bees maintain a temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest regardless of whether the outside temperature is 110 or -40 degrees.

We have been relatively successful at catching swarms at Wright-Locke.  When lucky enough to see a swarm that is low to the ground so we can catch it, the harvest is fairly straightforward.  Grab a hive box and knock the swarm into it. The bees fall like marbles into the box. If you have captured the queen, the swarm will likely make a new home in your previously empty hive.  If you do not have the queen, they will all fly off in search of her. Keep your eyes open this spring and let us know if you see a swarm, either in a tree or flying overhead. We can always welcome more bees to our apiary.

We keep Langstroth bee hives which are modular hives that are made up of boxes that hold vertically hung frames. These frames inside the boxes are designed to mimic a natural beehive both in distance between the frames and in the shape and size of the individual comb hexagons.  Left alone, bees will keep this specific distance between combs and will make all the hexagonal cells the same size, with the exception of some cells they make larger for the drone (or male) bee to develop. Since drones provide no benefit to the hive except for fertilization of the queen, there are not many drone cells in a hive.

We nurture these hives through the spring as they expand their colony, build out honeycomb, and allow the queen to lay lots of brood, ensuring a large enough colony for the season. As the season goes on and the hives grow, we add more boxes for the bees to grow into.  Our hives are color coded (mostly). The large green boxes near the bottoms are called “deeps” and they are where the brood and honey for the hive will be. Later in the spring we will add shorter white boxes (supers) to the top of the hives and that is where get the honey for harvest. Green boxes for the bees; white boxes for honey sales to the public.  A successful apiary insures that the bees get the honey first. Note that in the photo above we also have a white bottom entrance for the bees.

At Wright-Locke we value our bees both for the work they perform to help us grow more crops and also because we know that the honey bees of the world are threatened. We like to be a part of the solution, however small our part may be.

Come on up to the farm and observe our hives (from a distance, please.  Honeybees sting if irritated). They are down the hill from the farmstead to the left of the shed near the pond.  Sit down and watch them for a while. Bees do not spend a lot of time resting!

We are forming a bee committee to help us care for the bees this summer.  Email me at squinn@wlfarm.org if you are interested.

April 2018

Written by Executive Director, Archie McIntyre

A year or so after we first got chickens, we decided to try raising sheep and we bought in 6 baby lambs in the spring.  We raise them eating grass on our several acres of pastures.  We keep them in mobile, electrified fencing that we move every 3 or 4 days to new grass.  The rotation keeps their food source fresh as they naturally fertilize our pastures.  The sheep provide a bucolic backdrop to our farm and another educational resource for our kids and larger community.  That first year, I often wondered how many years it had been since sheep were last seen grazing in Winchester.  It’s not a sight you’d expect to see in our suburban town.

We consciously decided to raise lamb for meat. After they had grown and fattened on grass throughout the summer and early fall, we took them to slaughter.   We definitely got some push back from some about the immediacy of life and death on the farm and, with Wright-Locke right in our community, it’s no wonder it brought the issue and thought closer to home.  Even some meat eaters were squeamish.  It was mainly the adults though; the kids seemed to take it in stride as a natural part of farm life.  We are careful not to name our sheep to avoid personalizing them or making them into pets.  We think of Wright-Locke as a place to gather and grow, to experience and learn.  An important lesson we learn is that eating meat is a pleasurable experience for many but it has consequences that we often forget at the meat counter at our local market.

We found the closest USDA certified slaughterhouse in Groton – there aren’t too many in New England (which makes things complicated for farmers in the animal business…but that’s a whole other can of worms), and sometimes when their schedule is too full, we have to go as far as CT or VT. We transport them in our converted Honda Odyssey minivan, fondly referred to as the Lamb Van.  (It’s since been renamed the Lamborghini.)  I was the chauffer and I can tell you it’s quite a ride heading out Rte 2 with six baying passengers in the back seat.  I try to avoid speeding because I can’t image how I’d explain the situation to the trooper. “Well, Officer….”

Each year, the meat is very popular and we routinely sell out all our cuts quickly – it’s rare to get local pasture-raised lamb here! Also a note here: the meat is called “lamb”, but the label “lamb” just refers to meat from animals slaughtered within a year-old. Our sheep are essentially fully gown within this period – buying “lamb” does not mean you are buying meat from tiny, baby animals. Other classifications include “hogget” (over a year old) and “mutton,” which classifies meat from an older sheep.

Stay tuned for our upcoming stories on our goats and the bees!

We’re taking a break this year on our lamb production.  The staff time required to move them every several days and chasing them down after periodic escapes is straining our resources.  (I should tell you about the time we had to corral them at 10 pm at night behind the West Side Fire Station.  It was what we fondly refer to at the Farm as a real S**t Show. Refer to the picture below for a small taste of sheep catching! Look at Peter go!)  We’ll take this year off as an opportunity to focus on restoring our pastures.  We’ll be spreading compost and a new pasture mix of perennial grasses and let the pastures and the people take a breather.  That’s not to say that we won’t have pasture-raised lamb in the Farm Stand this coming fall.  I am raising 7 lambs on my farm in Dublin, NH and if all goes according to plan, we’ll have lots of chops, shanks and legs for sale again this year.

April 2018

Written by Executive Director, Archie McIntyre

The economics of modern industrial agriculture means we have fewer family farms. What was once a diversified livelihood is now more often enterprise growing just one thing – a farm of corn, or soy, of dairy cows, or pigs or chickens.  Animals have been separated from crop production and from one another.  Traditionally, a farm was a self-sufficient operation growing food for people and animals, consuming the vegetable, animal and dairy products on-farm and selling some off-farm for income, while fertilizing the soil.

When the Conservancy took over the farm in 2007, we inherited our own monocrop operation:  raspberries.  Picking lasted for about 6 weeks each summer from late August until the first frost.  Just 6 weeks activity out of 52 weeks in a year didn’t seem like enough to sustain ongoing interest and we knew there was so much potential.  So what to do?

The clear choice was to expand our efforts and diversify.  We hired Adrienne, our farmer in 2011 and we began growing a full range of market crops starting in the spring once the snow was off the ground and continuing until the fall frosts set in.  We offered a variety of market vegetables at Farmers’ Markets and eventually through an on-farm CSA.

Creating a full season of diverse crops was the first step in reinvigorating our farm, but nothing brings a farm to life like animals.  At a small community farm like Wright-Locke, chickens are just the trick to add back a little vitality and a bit of chaos, too.

So we created our own flock and found that chickens added a real energy to the Farm.  As the word got out, visitors started coming to check out the new girls in town and volunteers offered their help.  We developed a Chicken Chore program and volunteers took over their care and rotated chicken chores every week.  It’s a big commitment to care for chickens all year long but a week of chores every once in a while is a great way for parents and children to work side-by-side, learning about taking care of living things and contributing to the joint effort of running a small community farm operation.

That’s not to say that maintaining a flock of chickens at the farm is not without some challenges.  Over the years, the size of our flock has gone from a couple of dozen to over a 100 chickens.  We are now back to about 35 or 40 which seems the right number to lay enough eggs for our regular customers while not overburdening volunteers and our limited space for livestock.

It’s hard to get an accurate count of how many chickens we have at any one time.  As soon as you get a number of the chickens counted, they run around and shuffle the deck and you’re back to square one.  Did I get that Barred Rock? Was that the Araucana I just counted or a different one?  They sure look the same to me.

We raise layers, not broilers and that cuts down on the blood and guts a bit.   A few years back, I volunteered to help Pete and Jen at their Backyard Birds operation in Concord.  The day’s activity was to slaughter and process about 400 chickens.  This is just the kind of chicken operation we all want to support – a small, local farm with caring farmers raising healthy chickens on pasture, transparent to the customers who could see for themselves that the chickens were being treated humanely.   The experience was memorable and has stuck with me over the years.  It did drive home a couple of fundamentals:  the meat we eat comes from living animals and no matter how humanely done, death of an animal is not pleasant.  The second lesson learned was I sure wasn’t going into the broiler business, certainly not here at Wright-Locke Farm.

So we too, at the Farm, have to get our hands dirty.  One time, when we had over a dozen roosters that we couldn’t keep, we had our own backyard slaughter and processing. Volunteers took home a chicken for their pot and a much better understanding of chicken behavior, anatomy, and what it takes to put that protein on your plate.

Well now, I’ve gone on and on about our chickens but we do raise other animals at the farm! Sheep, goats, and bees.  Each has their own story and unique place at Wright-Locke Farm. Stay tuned next week to learn about our sheep.

But, everyone likes a chicken dinner.  Despite our best protective efforts, the occasional hawk or stray coyote swoops in for a feast.  Every year it seems we lose a couple of chickens to predators.  Once or twice over the years we have suffered larger losses to a marauding coyote or perhaps a fisher cat.  We never can be sure who’s the culprit, for it happens in a short minute during an infrequent lull in our activities when no one is around.

Unfortunately, sometimes the death of our animals is intentional. When you’re in the layer business, roosters don’t add too much value.  It’s always good to have one around to strut his stuff and protect the hens.  But too many create havoc not only for the layers but also for the many kids in our educational program who care for the chickens as part of their time at the Farm.  It can be pretty scary if a rooster decides to take a run at you.  Of course, if you’re in the breeding business the law of averages says 50% of the offspring will be boys.  When we buy in day old chicks to replenish our flock, we try only to buy females but sexing a day old chicken is not infallible and invariably we get a few roosters.  Recently, a fully-grown rooster showed up unannounced and uninvited, left behind by backyard bird keeper who couldn’t handle the crowing.