Broad Valley Orchard

Hello,
Well, they say “tis an ill wind that blows no one good”, and as I clean up blown down and wind-sheared off trees in our wood lot, I agree with this wisdom.  But firewood is not our only ‘winter harvest’, and sawing it to length and storing it in our wood shed is not the [...]

Hello All,
Well the last week’s wild weather is finally clearing up and drying off.  I have been near a couple Atlantic hurricanes before, but they were rapidly dying.  Sandy was so big that even when the eye was a few hundred miles away, we got a low of wind, and 7.5 inches of rain.  The [...]

Hello all, and especially future farmers,
I guess I haven’t written for three months. It has been a busy time!  Not only do we have a good harvest of apples, pears,   and Asian pears coming in, but it has also been time to repair and repaint the buildings here, and fix some fences, and move a [...]

Hello,
I have a feeling that in 30 days I’ll be writing “August at Last!”
Is the weather getting increasingly strange, or I merely suffering from “Post-Meteorologic Stress Syndrome”?  Rather than rant and rave for too long, just let me say that this weather isn’t like it used to be 28 years ago when we bought BVO [...]

Hello All,
I apologize for not having added anything this winter.  I guess my best reason was that I was so busy fixing up the damage of last year’s record rainfall, that I had to turn off my ‘writing function’ to get this place ready for another season.
But we are now making progress.  The soil has [...]

Hello,
I’m sorry I haven’t been able to write an essay for quite a while.  I won’t make any excuses, other than to report that we have already had over 78″ of rain this soggy year.  Our previous record was in 1996 (the Pinotuvo Year) when all the volcanic ash in the atmosphere lead to record [...]

Hello all,
Nope, this record is nothing to brag about!  Our previous annual rain fall total (including snow melt) was 70.7″ in 1996, the year that Mt. Pinotuvo in the Phillipines loaded the atmosphere with volcanic dust.  Well, we have broken that record = over 74″ so far this year.  It is a record I’m not [...]

Hello,
It has been far too long since I have had a few minutes to sit down and relate the insanity I have been caught up in this awful wet year.  September and October set some records.  Of special note was a wet snowy Nor-Easter that hit us just before Halloween Eve.  Although we have seen  [...]

Hello,
Well, I can’t gripe - we just had a week of warming and dry weather.   I got the gardens under cover crop, the firewood split and stacked, the root and fruit cellars done (including the harvesting to partly fill the shelves), and the prep work for our next adventure in Hugle Kulture.
A year ago [...]

Hello,
I last wrote as Hurricane Irene rolled up the Coast.  She was followed by the soggy remnants of Tropical Storm Lee, which degenerated into a dreaded ‘Cut-off Low”.  Now other tropically spawned slop storms gather in the Intra-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) off the Azores, and head toward Florida and up our East Coast, and another [...]