A Certified Naturally Grown Farm - Saint Marys, Pennsylvania
For the Love of Farming – Before One Season Ends, the Next One Has Already Begun
Farming could be considered a variation of insanity if you truly do exactly the same thing year after year, however IMHO, a good Farmer…while toiling away in the fields year after year is the same…the tools, techniques, and tact must adapt for it to…
A Family Hop Farm’s Love of Stringing The Hopyard
For hop Farmers in the Mid Atlantic, the middle of May means it’s time to string and train the hops! That’s where we found ourselves recently @HoffAppFarm. While exhausting, stringing the hopyard is something this family hop Farm loves. We’re up in the “siege…
Snap, Crackle, POP!
The evening of Thursday, 21 July, Northcentral Pennsylvania was visited by a pretty intense storm cell. High winds, humid air, rain, thunder, and lighting…a classic thunderboomer. As is normal during the week, I was at our place in Montoursville. When Jenn woke me up…
Sub-Soiling Between Two Posts…Deep Thoughts
The time had come to begin preparing the large hopyard for round 2 of its existence, this time with better-prepared soils and hills. We (I) took out the remaining two hills in 2022 after we’d given up on the three initial hills about four…
Nose To The Grindstone
There is a saying that runs through my mind often. It was uttered by Sr. Evangelist, O.S.B., who has long since passed. But back in the days of my youth when I was an altar boy, she was part of the Sacristan tag team…
“God Bless Us, Every One!”
Like most, it’s that time of year where we reflect on the good, the bad, the happy, and the sad of the year we’ve come through. It was a challenge for sure at the Farm – starting and completing a solar irrigation project installation…
2021 Season – “It’s Done”
Apologies upfront. I’d stepped away from the weekly blog in late Spring as we began in earnest on our Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) solar pump/irrigation grant project. Although we’d been awarded the grant back in 2019, with the pandemic running its course through…
“Sincerely Yours, the Breakfast Club”
If you’ve followed along with the blog posts from this season, you may note a trend. I’ve been pulling images, storylines, or quotes from popular media – television shows, movies, both present-day and ones from my younger years. I’ve then been tying them or…
“Compost Piles Full!”
As noted previously, we are very thankful to have a local source of good horse manure to use as a base for our compost. We turn this pile for many weeks, monitor and record the temperatures before using it as a mulch layer in…
