The ground is officially quite frozen – hurrah! With about two dozen hazelnuts displaying beautiful and adorable little male catkins in their very first year (planted bare root this past spring), we couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds for Nutwood Farm. Of the 225 hazelnuts we put in the ground, there were only TWO that seem to have not made it through the season – but even on that we’ll have to wait and see! Most of the little nutkins have 4, 8 or even 12 additional root sprouts around the leader showing signs of healthy and robust shrub development. And with another 200 bare root hazels on order for next spring, we can’t wait for our visions of gorgeously contoured edible hedgerows to start taking shape.
As we transition our energies indoors and as close as possible to our lovely warm woodstove, the work ahead of us can seem fairly daunting. For the most part, we know what we want. Now we need to figure out how to get there. But in Wendell Berry’s essay, “American Imagination and the Civil War,” he writes, “imagination, amply living in a place, brings what we want and what we have ever closer to being the same.” So I am reminded, even as I oscillate between daring confidence and bewildering doubt, that all really we lack (other than an egalitarian society) is the imagination necessary to bring these two states of want and have into one. It is a creative challenge indeed, but, with patience, and grit, and sprinklings of self-love, and the courage to do what we are quite aware is not commonly done, our dreams will only continue to come true.
Below are images from our architectural drawings recently completed by our dream team who were willing enough to buck the conventions with us and figure out what it would really take to make our strange and wonderful house concept fully MA building code-compliant. Imagination is the limit! We can’t wait to build this baby!
Entrepreneurs talk expansion at slow money showcase –Oct 23, 2016
Sara Tower and Kalyan Uprichard, who own Nutwood Farm in Cummington, speak about their business during the Slow Money Pioneer Valley Entrepreneur Showcase, Thursday at Smith College. GAZETTE STAFF/JERREY ROBERTS » Buy this Image
NORTHAMPTON — About 110 years ago, Joseph Serio started selling fruit and vegetables off the streets of Northampton. He went from crate to horse and wagon, until he had a heart attack and could no longer take his business mobile. Serio then set up a stand outside his home to keep the business going.
In 1950, he opened a Serio’s Market on 65 State St., a popular store that is still selling locally-sourced goods some 66 years later. But Jaimie Golec, general manager of her family’s business, said the shop is struggling to stay alive.
With fierce competition from corporate stores, the local market is looking to alter its business model from a grocery selling locally-sourced goods into an eatery.
To do that, however, Golec needs help. So last week, she pitched her idea to a group of individuals, investors and philanthropists who are interested in supporting the region’s local food economy.
Golec was among six entrepreneurs that presented their businesses and goals for future growth at event hosted by the nonprofit Slow Money Pioneer Valley at Smith College. The workshop’s aim was to bring investor and food system supporters together with local farm and food businesses interested in support.
Slow Money was started in 2008 by Woody Tasch, an Amherst College alum, after he published the book “Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered.” The group now has 18 local networks and 11 investment clubs.
Krya Kristof, a member of the local chapter’s steering committee, said Slow Money helps startups with business plans, networking and resources. The group works in collaboration with PVGrows which focuses on ecological and economic sustainability and vitality of the Pioneer Valley food system, according to pvgrows.net.
The Pioneer Valley chapter hosted its first entrepreneur showcase in 2014. The showcases give businesses an opportunity to share their stories and what is needed for economic growth.
A one-man brewery
Take Stoneman Brewery, for instance. This small, one-man brewery is located on a 74-acre farm in Colrain, where owner Justin Korby does most his business based on the model of a beer CSA, or community supported agriculture. That means he uses almost entirely locally sourced ingredients.
Driven by high demand for the beer he brews, Korby hopes to expand production from his farm in the hills to the center of town and wants to upgrade his equipment from a one-barrel to a 10-barrel system, which would expand the CSA membership as well as distribution to stores.
“I constantly sell my beer faster than I can brew it,” he said.
Korby seeks to make his brewery sustainable by bringing in people to help brew and distribute the beer. He is also looking into purchasing an old church in Colrain to house the brewery. Korby said the business investment would lead to revitalization of the town as well as a possibility of a restaurant collaboration with his brewery.
Other business presentersBree-Z-Knoll Farm in Leyden started in 1968 with two cows on 20 acres of land, according to Randy and Angie Facey. The Facey’s say the dairy farm now has about 300 cows on over 500 acres of land.
“We still know them all by name,” Angie said.
However, the business still needs investments to grow. At the showchase, the Facey’s said they would like to invest in a robotic milking facility that would allow the cows to voluntarily milk themselves without human interaction.
Nutwood Farm, a startup by Sara Tower and Kalyan Uprichard focused on hazelnut production, also sought investment support. Tower and Uprichard said they have planted over 350 nut trees on 1.5 acres of newly plowed land in Cummington and will continue to plant over the next four years.
The farm will harvest its first hazelnuts in 2018. In 10 years, they expect to harvest 10,000 pounds hazelnuts annually. Tower said residents of Massachusetts will then have the option of purchasing cost competitive, locally grown and locally processed nuts and nut products.
To expand their business, the farm wants to invest in a solar greenhouse and facilities for drying and storage.
Still, some investors are looking to help in ways that go beyond money.
Sadie Stull, a resident of Plainfield, said came to the event to show support and said she invests her personal time helping soil the land and planting trees. Stull said her form of investment is “much deeper than money.”
A display by Nutwood Farm in Cummington was part of the Slow Money Pioneer Valley Entrepreneur Showcase, Thursday at Smith College. —GAZETTE STAFF/JERREY ROBERTS » Buy this Image
Kyra Kristof, second from left, talks to a group of people including Kalyan Uprichard, right, during the Slow Money Pioneer Valley Entrepreneur Showcase, Thursday at Smith College. GAZETTE STAFF/JERREY ROBERTS » Buy this Image
Kyra Kristof speaks during the Slow Money Pioneer Valley Entrepreneur Showcase, Thursday at Smith College. GAZETTE STAFF/JERREY ROBERTS » Buy this Image
Seasons change is by far the greatest part of living in the northeast country. When the first day of September arrived, the change in light, in temperature, in sound, in breath, was like a warm mid-afternoon nap in dapple shade on a luxurious moss bed. At last…
Our field is outrageously overgrown.
We are unceremoniously snapping off enormous daikon branches heavy with seed pod (and still flowering!) wherever we find a little nut tree pushing up through the tangle. The vigorous and unrelenting brambles and stump sprouts have put us in our place – certainly not by our will alone will they give up. I have been reading more recently about the colonial invasion of New England in the 1600-1700’s, and discovering in my own small way what it means to cause a wholesale ecological disturbance and transformation. The colonists, of course, believed they were “taming the wilderness” and reproducing the flawless virtues of their English countryside in the New World. We have a slightly different motive in mind – and yet the parallels are not without some merit. We have clearly disrupted (and are continuing to disrupt) an ecosystem dynamic in its full exploitative phase of forest (re)generation. But instead of seeing ourselves as a force against nature we prefer to think of ourselves as forces of nature. Our “disruption” is perhaps more akin to a small forest fire or patchy ice storm than some kind of epic battle or conquest. True, we are very much guiding the reorganization of the system with our selective preferences, encouraging certain species growth while discouraging others. We are making excellent use of the sickles we purchased on Amazon from some small forge in Thailand. Still, we are attempting to work within the framework of integration, modifying our environment to improve its suitability for our human activities without limiting its habitability exclusively and unforgivingly for us.
Soil is our primary concern – keeping the air, moisture, carbon, and minerals in the ground, feeding the biology and making plentiful the bacterial and fungal microbes that support all other life on the planet. We worship (at times mournfully) nature’s cleanup crew – the bacteria, fungi, and macroarthropods that so diligently and dependably clean up the mess of sick and weak plants. We know our job is not to take care of our trees so much as take care of the soil that feeds and nourishes them. We will know we have done our job when we can begin to feel (and see) the changes in the soil, and by the glossy sheen on the leaves of our healthiest and most productive trees. This is also why we are aligning ourselves more with the “ecologically-grown” camp of agronomists. To us, “organic” food does not condone the appearance of bug-eaten and overly-stressed vegetables on the produce shelf. As one soil guru-mentor of ours, Dan Kittredge, points out, ‘if your weeds look healthier than your vegetables, you should be eating your weeds.’ He no longer bothers to consume aphid-infested kale or powdery mildew ridden squash. It’s as good as trash – nature is cleaning it up. Any plant with a functioning immune system (which is essentially its nutrient exchange system in the soil biome) should have no trouble fending off simple pathogens and insects (the “common cold” of the plant kingdom). Truthfully, USDA Organic Certification is simply an indication of what was omitted in the growing system (i.e. certain, but not all, toxic petro chemicals). It says nothing about what WAS included, how much organic matter was in the soil, what was the total count and ratio of bacteria to fungal organisms, and whether or not any phytoalexins, or plant secondary metabolites (PSM), were measured during the crop’s productive life cycle. These are the indicators that would inform us just how robust and nutritious our food is, and whether or not it is truly fit to be consumed as “medicine.” Because we all know that’s where the real health is. It’s not enough really to eat more kale; we all should be able to know the soil where that kale came from. Better yet if it was grown in your own watershed. Better yet if you have personally gotten to inhale its sweet perfume of glomalin, humic and fulvic acids. Ahhhh.
Growing soil – this is our prime motivation both as aspiring nut farmers and as ecosystem stewards. Our land, while biologically diverse thanks to over a decade of harboring an excellent bird habitat and, as a result, all manner of seeds implanted in bird feces, was building soil at approximately the same rate as any cold temperate forest: S-L-O-W-L-Y. Because our human life spans are far shorter than that of a dynamic old-growth forest ecosystem, we have decided to speed things up a bit, by cutting down fast growing soft woods and pines, laying them on contour, burying them under long mounds of churned earth, slowing down the flow of surface water, and planting new shrubs and trees on top to facilitate a more rapid conversion of carbon into soil organic matter. Our friends in Holyoke, MA have grown nearly a foot of top soil on their barren urban lot in under ten years – with the help of some three-hundred different species of herbaceous perennial vegetables and herbs and a handful of diverse edible vines, canes, shrubs and trees. The take home message here: rather than struggling to minimize our human “footprint” on the “environment” and thus erase our very existence and raison d’être, we can begin to discover ways that our impact can in fact be positive and powerful. This is the process of human reintegration, of embodying the human-in-ecosystem, of healing the rift of separation, the “original sin” of our social and cultural demise of the last millennium. It may call for some measure of ecological disturbance, perhaps even on-going ecological tinkering. But we hope, in our lifetimes, it will initiate the development of a fully integrated “resecrated” landscape and habitat providing for most of our needs and our simple leisurely delights, intertwined with and alongside those of hundreds – or perhaps thousands – of other species of flora and fauna. And not just within our bounded stone walls, but all around and beyond them.
The last few weeks we’ve been in the high-noon of a brief and delightful summer. Work both on and off site has kept us busy — sorry for any delayed or lacking correspondance! We have been gradually (and not very successfully) trying to keep up with the vigorous burst of early succession regrowth in our new field. Our abundant prickly friends have done an excellent job covering the bare soil, but the soft grasses are moving in too, and with some delicate slashing we hope to continue to nudge our ecology towards meadow rather than forest dynamics while the nut trees are still young. Maintaining a meadow will help keep small rodent populations down with pressure from raptor predation above, hopefully minimizing damage to the young roots and trunks by hungry mice later this winter. On the other hand, the brambles are serving to deter local deer from walking through and finding any succulent new growth in our field. Raspberries, blackberries, and other brambles often blanket the ground of newly emerging forests by sheltering the young trees and allowing them to regrow rapidly until the brambles are eventually shaded out; in this case, we just need to keep them from sheltering all the stump sprouts and seedlings we already removed so we can create a truly productive nutwood!
–A few quick updates:
We have a new brother-in-law and a beautiful new nephew, all in the space of three weeks. Many congratulations to sister momma, new dadda, grandma, and the rest of the family!
Papa bear was laid to rest as ashes into soil and river, bringing us many moments of fond memory and helping us to continue to see the life we have in death.
A visit to a good friend manifested 6 flats of vegetables and herbs that needed quick transplanting – good thing we dug a half mile of raised garden beds this spring! They may not be the most pampered vegetables in the world but so far we have leeks, kale, cabbage, fennel, celery, peppers, and eggplant filling in some of the space in-between trees, shrubs, and herbs. Why not?
We finally had our well drilled on site, a pre-requisite for pulling future building and occupancy permits. Very rattling experience, literally! Make sure you have ear muffs if you ever need to drill through 280′ of earth and rock. We are still looking at options for well pumps and are likely going to put in a Bison hand pump for now. Yay for off-grid living!
Our third round of conversations with engineer Chris Vreeland and architectural drafter Shaun Batho went exceedingly well with another even more-refined set of drawings and a fun spreadsheet of numbers calculating the (super efficient) heat load of our future house, the amount of Btus made and lost through each month of the year, the size of the solar thermal array we will need, and the ideal capacity of our thermal tank. We are working with an excellent team and it is incredible to see the house develop from sketches and playdough to CAD drawings and technical specs!
Today has brought the rains we’ve all been missing the last several scorching days. But, the trees are continuing to do swimingly well atop their mulched berms, reaching into deep soil and staying happy and moist. We are so so fortunate to have the water we do. It is the mead of life.
With the pounding rain and intense rumblings above us in our first big thunderstorm of the season, we are dry, full of gratitude, and completely giddy thinking about all the beautiful trees rooting into our berms and drinking up all the water and nitrogen falling from the skies right now. Over the last several days we have planted some 426 trees and shrubs in our hugelberms; hazelnuts, American chestnuts, Chinese chestnuts, English walnuts, Michigan pecans, and native hickory and butternuts found on our property and nearby, with their versatile nitrogen fixing companions Siberian pea shrub and seaberry, and a host of other perennial edibles and medicinals in between. Our home-land has been transformed, multiple times, with the help of many, many hands over the last several months; and still this is just the beginning!
For all those who have spent few hours or a few days with us, coming to our winter work parties or showing up right when we needed a spurt of motivation to finish chipping the twenty-something-eth brush pile, raking another long berm full of rocks and roots, or spreading yet another hundred wheelbarrows of wood chips: thank you. We have received more support than we ever expected from all of you, and we hope that this project continues to meaningfully engage as many people as possible as we develop, transform, plant, and diversify this land into a farm that will provide both staples and treats to our local community; our family; you!
So, what’s next you ask?
After a couple days swingin’ in the hammock under the birch trees and splashing around in the brook, and another day planting cover crops, medicinals, flowers, and a veggie garden… as well as a concert, a wedding (not ours), and a baby being born (also not ours)… and after our driveway gets finished so that we can finally drill our well… we start thinking again about the next major phase of our adventure: building our house!
In two weeks we’ll meet with our intrepid design team, engineer Chris Vreeland and draftsman Shaun Batho to review another round of nearly-completed drawings, throw some more rough estimates around, and try to wrap our heads around what exactly we are attempting to do here. It is our hope to be able to build and pour the main water cistern later this summer/fall which will serve as principal thermal storage for the house, feeding our radiant floors and keeping us warm in the winter. Since it has to be built in place, we can do this first and then pour the rest of the house foundation around it next season.
And in between this and all that, we’ll be swinging our shovels and hammers and chef’s knives, doing our best to stow money away in the piggy bank so that the mortgage lenders will play along and give us an obscene amount of cash right before the global financial system crashes for good! (Hey, we are apocaloptimists, afterall.) But really, at the end of each day, we’ll be singing to our trees.
We have been hard at work digging our new contour swales and mulching them with woodchips, and the end is in sight. We are almost done! Huge thanks to everyone who has helped out so far and now comes the fun part!
We have 413 new bare-root nut and companion trees that need to be planted and we have 11 large earthen berms varying in length from 150′ – 415′ totaling somewhere in the range of 2400 linear ft of berm to plant into. We also have 1+ yard of rich compost, a bag of brix blend basalt rock dust, and some mycorizal innoculent for the tree roots.
We are hoping that people will show up excited to dig small planting holes, mix in compost, innoculate the tree roots and tuck the trees gently into their homes atop beautiful hugel berms.
Thank you all in advance, we will have food and refreshments throughout the day and more with homebrew mead and cider when we are finished ^^
Tree Planting Work Party!
Saturday, May 21 2-7pm at Nutwood Farm
76 Porter Hill Rd, Cummington, MA
We are getting ready to install a series of contour swales across two acres of our new property in Cummington, MA in preparation for a large-scale planting of hybrid hazelnuts, chestnuts, and other mixed perennial edible trees and shrubs. We are looking for enthusiastic helpers to cut their pdc teeth or hone their skills in marking 200+’ contour lines, digging swales (with the help of a mini-trac excavator), and leveling and mulching berms for edible hedgerows and alley crops on a budding permaculture nut farm in the hilltowns.
Come be a part of an exciting new project in our region to bring more local hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, stone pine nuts, and much more to our local food shed. Sara and Kalyan are both novice and avid permaculturists finally putting down roots in our local community. We are looking to create an ecologically integrated 7-acre farm and homestead that builds on many of the best ideas of our generation to serve as our “proving ground” for the kind of local abundance that we know is within our collective grasp. We are also adventurously exploring the viability of growing perennial and staple foods – hazelnut oil, hazelnut butter, chestnut flour, short grain rice, etc. – on a small commercial scale to support the growth and adaptation of these resonant agricultural practices that build soil, sequester carbon, clean the air, and retain water in the landscape.
Join and learn with us as we transform this land into a farm and forest of food. RSVP to nutwoodfarmers at gmail dot com or call 413-834-one.four.three.seven, or just show up! Friday and Saturday all day, April 29th & 30th, at 76 Porter Hill Rd, near the Fairgrounds in Cummington, MA. ALL hands are welcome, there will be many kinds of tasks and revelry to partake in; potluck lunch if you can (gf + v options appreciated); good footwear, hats and gloves recommended. Call with any questions; See you there!
Kalyan & Sara
Nutwood Farm
PO Box 38 | 76 Porter Hill Road
Cummington, MA 01026
