A Note on Organic Certification

We are committed to organic production, however, due to the cost of certification, we have opted to not get certified.

Wild Foods

We’ve harvested many wild foods, everything from cattail shoots to milkweed, but over the years we’ve narrowed the list down to a few favourites: spruce tips, nettles, chokecherries, sumac, wild plums, and wild growing apples. We harvest some of these plants from our farm, but we also venture to close neighbours to harvest others. Most of what we harvest you won’t see in our farmstand or at market – it goes to wholesale clients or gets processed into juices. But if you’re yearning for one of these gifts of nature, contact us to find out if they are in season and we may be able to send some your way.

Maple Syrup

Our maple syrup operation is unique in that it is the only one we know about that uses a combination of smaller diameter 3/16 tubing for sap collection and diaphragm vacuum pumps. The 3/16 tubing is a recent innovation in maple technology that allows a natural vacuum to develop in sap lines running downhill – and our sugar bush is all hill! However, at the bottom of the hills there is not much natural vacuum, so we’ve added a couple of small diaphragm pumps to boost the vacuum there. Research has shown that vacuum is crucial to getting good sap yields, but that is doesn’t harm the trees. This leads to a large amount of time spent during maple season walking our 20 plus kilometers of lines, fixing even the slightest of air leaks!

But our favourite bit of maple technology has to be our reverse osmosis unit. This is a refrigerator-sized machine that pumps the sap through a fine membrane, separating out three-quarters of the water from the sap, and concentrating the remaining sugars. Sap put through at 2% sugar comes out at 8-10% sugar, resulting in much less firewood needed for boiling, while maintaining a fantastic maple taste.

We boil over wood, because unlike oil, firewood is considered carbon neutral (growing trees suck the same amount of carbon out of the atmosphere as they put back when they are burned). We are lucky to have a relationship with a local arborist who dumps his leftover wood at our place, which we split and dry. He dumps more than enough wood, which would otherwise go to landfill, to fuel our evaporator.

The legal minimum sugar content for finished maple syrup is 66%. But we aim for 67%, as just that extra one percent creates a noticeably thicker and more satisfying syrup. We pack the syrup in easily recyclable glass bottles – or you can even return them and we’ll clean and use them again next year!

Eggs

There’s a simple rule in animal husbandry: the happier the animal, the healthier and tastier its meat, milk, or eggs will be. Animal welfare is important to us, not just because it meets these goals, but also because the animals in our care have a right to enjoy their lives! The ways in which our practices with our 100 Rhode Island Red laying hens live up to this include:

The hen’s winter housing leaves them ample space to move, scratch in loose bedding, receive sunlight through large windows, roost, and lay their eggs in nest boxes.

During summertime the hens have free access to large areas of pasture, and are constantly rotated to fresh ground, ensuring they have lots of live foods to eat and that the land is not overloaded with manure. This “pastured” approach is far better than “free range”, which can mean as little as a static run that quickly gets denuded of all vegetation and overwhelmed with manure.

We ensure good protection of our chickens from predators with movable electronet fencing.

We feed the hens only certified organic feed (and they serve themselves grass, bugs, worms, seeds and whatever else they find on pasture).

We keep our hens for two years, then sell them and get 100 new ones. They don’t lay well enough after two years to be used in a commercial flock, but they will still lay pretty well for a backyard flock for years to come. If you’re interested in buying some, please contact us.

Shiitake Mushrooms

We grow our shiitake mushrooms in the woods on mostly sugar maple logs (also some ironwood). Our forest has an abundance of sugar maples, and our sugar bush benefits from a bit of thinning.

We buy certified organic shiitake spawn from Field and Forest (we like their name!) in Wisconsin. We then drill holes in our freshly cut logs and fill the holes with the spawn, capping it with wax to prevent drying.

The logs then need to sit for a year before they will be ready to start fruiting mushrooms.

When they are ready, we soak them in water for 24 hours. Soon afterwards the mushrooms emerge! We soak about 50 logs a week on rotation.

The logs then need to rest again for about two months. Since the shiitakes only grow during the warmer months, we can fit in two soakings a year. We repeat this process with the same log for about four years, or until it stops producing. The log then gets split and dried and used as firewood in our maple syrup production.

We often offer shiitake inoculating and growing workshops in October – get in touch if you’re interested!