Our ram lambs have settled in the hay field on the south side, happily grazing on salty-sweet grass, with a dreamy view of Lucy Vincent beach.

The bottle-fed lambs are still in their home plot, greeting visitors and often settling under the window of the shop as they eavesdrop on customer chit-chat.

We have a new black ram to join our white ram, and they are enjoying their time between the marshes of the lower pasture and the south side.

The rest of the flock is grazing rotationally on the remaining pastures on the north side of the farm, finally free from the uncanny humidity that this summer brought forth without much of a reprieve. The lambs are growing rapidly, now with noticeably thick wool coats often specked with burdock seeds they will continue to spread without fail across the farm. If only we had the wit and the patience to harvest the wild burdock root and consume it on a daily basis. We would all be better for it. Perhaps that is a goal for 2020…

As for the rest of the animals, the chickens are laying again a rainbow of eggs, we have two new baby goats – Midnight and Twilight – and our meat birds are just about ready for processing. Our donkeys – Maude and Catherine – are keeping our horse, Panama, good company and our dog, Boli, very busy as he corrals them into the shade of the swamp maples.

The shop is busy as customers are finally able to envision themselves wrapped in wool, after the dreadful heat of summer when even the thought of a wool blanket could send you straight into the waves. We are approaching our final wedding of the season, greeting our fall tenants in time for the derby, and getting some time to gather ourselves and prepare for the colder months ahead.

This week we harvested apples, autumn olives and wild grapes along Fulling Mill, and heaps of pears from Clarissa’s grandmother’s pear tree in the garden. Best for cider, we’ll spend the next few weeks pressing them while Mitchell makes as much applesauce as can accompany the pork in our freezer. The greenhouse still holds the remnants of summer colors in the tomotoes that are hanging from endless green stems, though we are a bit impatient as we wait for them to peter off so that we can move ahead with our winter plantings – kale, claytonia, arugula, and spinach for miles.

This is truly the most glorious time for all of us here on the farm, and on the island. 

They had come from the Ag Hall where there had been an advertised “Barn Babies” event, which led them to believe there would be loads of baby animals wandering through the big timber-frame barn for all these tiny, eager, island children to pet. Instead they found a few other toddlers with scooters and tricycles, just riding around a big empty agricultural hall. So they drove up the road to us, in hopes of appeasing these now disappointed little ones.

I took the girls around in our garden cart, bundled with blankets, to see the chickens and collect their eggs. When we got there, little Loretta didn’t seem too excited. She stayed in the cart while we gathered dozens of eggs of all different colors and placed them gently in our egg basket. Tavi, our daughter, was proudly showing off her egg collecting skills to a disenchanted Loretta. Finally, back in the cart, Loretta, with a glimmer of hope in her eyes, turned to Tavi and said, “You got pigs?”

“No,” said Tavi.

“Well whatchu got?” asked Loretta.

Tavi listed off the other animals – sheep (with their baby lambs), horses, donkeys. But alas, no pigs. Loretta took a few eggs home to eat with her parents.

Hopefully she’ll be back soon, though, because a few days ago we picked up our pigs from our friends over at Native Earth Teaching Farm on North Road. They are 75% Berkshire, 25% Landrace, and they are pretty great. It’s been 5 years since we’ve had pigs, and we’re glad we got ’em back.

Whitney’s family has been going to Martha’s Vineyard for generations, so it was an obvious location choice for her wedding. Staunchly against any kind of event that felt preppy or cookie cutter-ish, she held all of the festivities up island. “It is much more pastoral and bucolic,” she says. “I love how there are stone walls in fields that go right to the ocean, surrounded by old trees, beautiful lighthouses, and cottages. I wanted the vibe to be laid-back and natural, and not take away from this stunning setting where horse fields meet the beach.” Having driven by the Allen Farm for years on trips to Aquinnah, she always thought it was the most picturesque spot on the island. “I loved the idea of the wedding party spending the day swimming and having fun at the beach in front of the farm, then glamming up for the big event later that night,” she says.

By Alexandra Macon
JANUARY 19, 2017 

http://www.vogue.com/13523175/whitney-weeks-doug-pickett-marthas-vineyard-wedding/

A Day With Mitchell Posin: Mixing the Compost for a Life Well Lived

By Mollie Doyle

Thursday, May 5, 2016 – 6:10pm

It’s a misty May morning in Chilmark and Mitchell Posin doesn’t seem to have an agenda for the day. While other farmers race up and down South Road with their trucks overloaded with supplies, Mitchell strolls around the farm house kitchen. He wears a blue Allen Farm hat, stained yellow shirt, workpants, boots and a ripped black sweater. While sipping some water (he doesn’t drink coffee or even tea) he chats with his wife Clarissa and the farm’s weaver, Clare Ives. The conversation wanders from how the lambs are doing — none need to be bottle fed yet — to what needs to get done to prepare for an upcoming wedding, which will be held in one of the fields overlooking Lucy Vincent Beach.

– See more at: https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2016/05/05/day-mitchell-posin-mixing-compost-life-well-lived#sthash.vgDsOC8u.dpuf

From the salad greens to the flowers to the meat served to the guests, the celebration honored not only the beauty of the landscape, but also that of the life it cultivates from the soil to the sea.

Our friend Chris helped bring the animals we had raised to the tables we set for our wedding guests. This is a short film, by Conor Hagan, that conveys a bit of that piece of our wedding story: https://vimeo.com/80848878

Tavi helps with lamb check

This year, lambing began on April 17th. We prefer lambing later rather than earlier in the season to avoid severe weather. By the second week of May we had about 60 lambs, with a handful of bottle fed babies living in our kitchen. Our first bottle baby immediately bonded with our dog, Boli, and our daughter, Tavi.

While we are lambing, the gardens also request guidance. We seeded our usual crops – onions, leeks, a wide array of herbs, a few varieties of kale, some chard, romanesco cauliflower, and tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, okra for the greenhouse – and also added a few new ones including South River Duborskian rice. Following Ruth Stout’s methods and our own biodynamic practices, we planted most of our crops in mulch beds using old silage bales. For our potatoes we used absolutely no soil; just mulch. What a beautiful sight to see the mulch covering and protecting the soil, particularly during one of the driest springs we have seen.

South River Duborskian rice

Lambing ends, and the gardens pick up speed. Mulch gardening helps not only with water retention but also weed prevention, and it encourages the biology in the soil to thrive in an incredible way. It requires solid labor to set up, but once the mulch is down there is a lot of what Masanobu Fukuoka would call, “do nothing agriculture.” We really sit back and give the microorganisms the space to build their own resilient ecosystems.

Before we know it, May comes and goes and it is time for shearing. The end of May is also the time when the family does a shuffle from house to barn, and from barn to shack, to leave the main farmhouse open for spring weddings and summer tenants. And, as the island readies itself for incoming tourists, we are busy tidying up and restocking the farm shop with woolens, soaps, and other handmade items from the island and afar. Spring: longer days, just never long enough.

I write this now as we are in the steady hum of summer, past the wild race of spring, and it feels like we can all take a few deep breaths. The flock has welcomed the yearlings, and together with the lambs are about 120 in all. The ram is happy with a companion in his paddock on the south side pasture. The bottle fed babies are weaned, healthy and strong, and greet our shop visitors by merrily prancing along the fence line, open to receiving some pats and the occasional hug from a toddler. The tomatoes are strung in the greenhouse, and the first sungold was tasted, with pure joy, just yesterday. And we’ve been finding time to gather in the garden to weed at a gentle pace, and to kayak across the pond for a dip in the deep blue sea every now and then, and to share our gratitude for the life this farm continues to give.

Over the past several years, Mitchell and Nathaniel have been brewing compost tea, using the highest quality compost mixed with our own biodynamic preparations, and applying it to the land. Billions and billions of microorganisms thrive, first in the brewer and soon after on the fields and in the gardens, bringing life back into our soil. After decades of overgrazed land, tilling, compaction, and depletion of topsoil, the land is coming back into a state of equilibrium. And we follow. Our health is dependent upon the health of our soil. Of course, not just here on the farm, but across the world.

Our greenhouse is bursting with life right now – from red russian kale, to winter spinach, to claytonia and winter marvel lettuce. Luckily, our fall (and early winter) was quite warm and my late planting turned out to be a blessing in disguise. There was no early bolting of lettuces, and instead we are still harvesting the leaves of greens that sweeten by the day.

Before we know it, it’ll be time to start our leeks and onions, and then a wave of brassicas, and then nightshades, and then…another growing season begins just as quickly as the previous one concluded.

How lucky we are. Here is to a year full of health, happiness and hope for our land to continue to regenerate life and bring us all back into equilibrium.

This year, our bottle-fed lamb Dandelion, kept an eye on the process.

Nathaniel brings the flock down to the barn in the days leading up to shearing. If there is rain in the forecast, the sheep must be kept indoors – there is no shearing wet sheep!

Nathaniel and Mitchell are in charge of the feet, worming the sheep, and guiding them to Andy. Once the sheep is shorn, one of us picks up the fleece carefully, and in one piece, and we fling it over the wheel. A few of us pick through the fleece, removing any foul parts. Then we climb up the wool bag and throw the fleece in. Every few sheep one of us climbs into the bag and, just like Lucy and the wine grapes, stomps on the wool to pack it down.