Yesterday we threshed our trial wheat from last year. This was a challenge. Hand threshing is extremely time consuming and insufficient, but mechanized threshing machines are prohibitively expensive for the small farmer.

A few weeks ago, Ellen Mallory, a professor at the University of Maine at Orono, came to our rescue by letting us know about a very small scale, affordable hand-held combine used by researchers to sample crops. The MInibatt sample harvester is manufactured by a French company and available in the US.

We were taken in by the Minibatt’s price and convincing sales videos, and went ahead and ordered one. After a few false starts - we blame the badly translated French instructions, and some annoying but fixable design flaws - Dave got it working pretty well. Yesterday we threshed all of our trial wheat and barley so it is ready to go in the ground. Oats and larger scale wheat and barley are next up.

For those of you who have been following, or have been forced to sit through our rants about industrial wind coming to town, you will know that this is a good headline.

On Feb. 6, the townspeople of Jackson enacted a strong wind turbine ordinance. This means that if industrial wind turbines come to town, the developers will have to negotiate deals with those living within a mile of them. These are the people that will have to live with the noise and the decreased property values that the turbines bring. Go to our wind page for more details.

We had a big party a couple of weeks ago with all of those who have fought the battle in the last year to celebrate.

So now, after spending about 40 hours a week on average between the two of us working on the “damn wind turbines”, we hardly know what to do with our time. Wait a minute..... we do. More updates to the farm and its website!!!

After a glorious several weeks with blue sky and no rain, we finally got rain last night with more predicted. We also had a hard freeze!

So we got the potatoes and squash out of the ground, and put cover crops in. Beets, carrots, parsley, kale and brussels sprouts still very happy in the cold.

We also planted several varieties of winter wheat that Dave had started as seedlings. This is part of the grain trials we started in the summer. At some point, I will provide a full report!

We spent a very pleasant Sunday afternoon at the Common Ground Fair, the country´s largest organic agricultural fair. No visitors to show around, no agenda, just wandering about. We ran into about 20 people we knew, which either tells you that we get around, or that the progressive community here is very interconnected. Maybe a bit of both.

Looking forward to Heather´s parents visiting this week.