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.