North Star Homestead Farms, LLC

It’s been quite a season down on the farm—no one can argue with that.  There was the PBS filming, the big storm, a huge hay crop, Pizza Farm Nights, and so much more.  And while you’ve had a chance to hear some of the stories from our summer and fall interns who have joined us in these endeavors on the farm, this year’s path has been intersected by many others who have extended themselves above and beyond the call of duty to lend a hand or fill a need to help keep the project going strong.

They come from an amazing variety of backgrounds and interests, from saw mill owners to musicians, grandparents to IT specialists and lake-home owners.  Each has found a kindred spirit with the mission of our farm and Farmstead Creamery, some as far back into the story as 2002, others within just this last summer.  These folks who offer to help during a busy event, hold down part of our patch-work delivery system, or pull us out of a pickle become part of the farm team, and all their efforts help make the fabric of this family farm strong and lasting. 

This last week, in honor of the Celtic New Year, we decided to throw a party for our team of volunteers, many of whom had never really met one another.  During a feast of fire-roasted leg of lamb, honey glazed squash, fall salad, potato dinner rolls, savory Brussel sprouts with crispy leeks, and an array of festive desserts, the crew shared stories of how they came to be involved with the farm and a favorite memory from the past season.  Here are some favorites from the evening.

Dave:  From milling the wood for our house and Farmstead Creamery to taking Kara water skiing on hot summer afternoons, Dave was also one of the first to head our way after the September storm hit, cutting trees off our lane and checking the culvert where the stream crosses under our road several times a day in case of a washout.  This winter there was the total breakdown of our farm truck right at the end of his driveway, where the back left wheel fell off and went gallivanting down the road without us!  Dave was able to use his “crawler” (a huge piece of equipment used at the mill) to lift the back end of the truck so the wheel could be replaced and we could limp home in the blizzard. 

Then, late this summer, our air conditioner began raining on the table below.  We pulled it apart, cleaned out the filters, and tried everything.  But within minutes of turning the unit back on, water would start drizzling inside once more.  Dave happened to stop by to check the culvert one more time and asked why we were scratching our heads at the air conditioner.  After all this putzing and reading the manual and feeling outwitted by the apparatus, Dave waltzed outside, grabbed the drain hose, and blew on it.  Immediately, the internal rain shower ceased and our air conditioner returned back to normal.  Some folks just know how to fix those kinds of things!

Tom:  From being the guy to help set up early and take down late for nearly all of our live music events to filling chicken waterers while staying over for recording projects, Tom has ruts in the road from our place to his!  He’s also been dubbed the lettuce man, since many of his return trips to Ashland include boxes full of fresh produce for the Chequamegon Food Co-op or Northland College. 

Wholesaling is an important outlet for the farm’s products during the quiet season, when tourism quiets down and farmer’s market season is over.  But there’s never an end of things that need doing on the farm, which can make it hard to get away for such deliveries.  I can remember a couple times last winter when I did manage to deliver the lettuce myself and the folks at the receiving end wondered who I was!  But Tom also lends a hand on the farm in many ways, like endless buckets of compost and mulch last fall to cover the asparagus and strawberries against the hard winter (a task that leaves room for telling stories while you work) or butchering chickens on an autumn day (not so high on his favorites list).  But even when those chicken waterers spill and soak his shoes or we’re hauling a sled-load of hay in 20-below weather, Tom always has a smile and a laugh to share.

Kelli:  From my co-pilot for farmer’s market to Hayward’s CSA delivery lady, Kelli’s involvement with the farm goes back to her part-time internship well before Farmstead Creamery ever opened.  We’ve shared storms and pig escapes, ladies luncheons and crazy attitude customers.  Kelli and I often cheer each other on during the often grueling farmer’s market season, keeping up the spirits as we share the tastes, smells, textures, and story of the farm.  Kelli takes pride in sharing that between the farm and the woods (her husband who built Farmstead Creamery and two sons are avid hunters), she hardly ever needs to use the grocery store.

Our CSA (farm shares program) began in 2007, with delivery days to Hayward on Mondays and Wednesdays.  This was later condensed to just Wednesdays at 1:00 pm., which worked just fine until the lunch-hour at Farmstead picked up.  Into our second year of being open, it became quite apparent that having one of the three of us away at deliveries just wasn’t working.  But the precedent of a specific date at a specific time and location also felt difficult to break, so it was a real blessing when Kelli was able to take over managing the pickup.  In a whirl of coolers and totes, boxes and bags, each Wednesday we pack up Kelli’s car, handing over a clip board of special notes about who ordered more eggs, who has a food allergy that requires substitutions, and who needs to pay for something.  It’s a lot to keep straight, but Kelli’s been a real team player in helping keep this important service going strong.

Shani:  From great brainstorming and networking to can-do help, Shani has a knack for stepping in when you’re in that crunch you weren’t sure you’d survive.  After the interns headed back for school, she helped with chores on mornings I was gone to farmer’s market as well as bussing wood-fired pizzas that evening during a concert, all while having her foot in a brace from a fall!  Shani also connected us with a CSA program in her area that was in need of some aquaponics produce to help them stretch the season, as well as many other new faces we’d been lucky to meet.

Steve:  From slaying the dreaded swamp monster (that was eating our internet projection to the rest of the farm) to throwing firewood, Steve originally found us by searching for a Wi-Fi café.  Since then he’s warned us about many an oncoming storm (sometimes right in the midst of a Pizza Farm Night), to the point where his appearance during the summer months warranted a worried, “What’s coming now Steve?”  Since then he’s helped with many complicated IT troubleshooting, as well as helping us get started in podcasting, which will be coming out soon!

And there are so many more stories, I could take all night!  There’s the day our beverage distributor stopped carrying Joia soda, right before the 4^th of July and John and Gini’s diligence to drive over several cases to us from the company so we’d be covered until a new distributor could be arranged.  There’s helpers during butchering, special events, photography shoots, yardwork, and much more.  As we sat around the table that night, we felt so blessed and honored to have this supportive community who’s there to help things happen.  They’re part of the team here at the farm, and we want each and every one to know how much we appreciate them.  Maybe you’re one of those people too.  So thank you, and we look forward to seeing you down on the farm sometime.

Laura Berlage is a co-owner of North Star Homestead Farms, LLC and Farmstead Creamery & Café. 715-462-3453 www.northstarhomestead.com

They say that those who make their own firewood are twice warmed.  Well, it’s been a pleasantly warm enough autumn not to have to worry about that too much, but everyone knows that winter is approaching, sooner or later, and with keeping those wood stoves and boilers going well into June, supplies are in dire need of replenishing.

Back in early September, Steve, a Moose Lake neighbor, stopped in the store and asked if we knew anyone who could help him fell a few trees on his property for firewood.  We did some calling together and sniffed out a few leads, but then the storm hit like a hurricane, and Steve found himself trapped at the cabin with maples across the driveway and pines laying across the dock.

“I had wood,” he chuckled.  “But I also couldn’t get out!”

Across the area, this story repeated itself, and for weeks the chainsaws have been roaring away.  While skylines (and sometimes rooflines) are drastically changed, everyone has wood to cut.  By the time we finally get everything sorted out, woodsheds should be full!

Steve calls it “making wood,” and it’s part of northwoods life, whether or not you’re even a full-timer to the area.  Someone usually has a fireplace or fire-ring by the lake.  For us, between a fireplace and a woodstove, there’s always a need for wood during the cold months.  Added to that demand, we now have the pizza oven, which uses aged oak and maple.

While maples are plentiful in the woods behind the barn, oaks are few and far between, and we like to keep the stand strong.  So Kara sent the word went out to the neighborhood in case anyone had more oak trees down than they could manage.  Pizzas would be in need of firewood next summer!

So this weekend, we made wood.  First, Kara had worked with Larry, one of the Fullington clan, cutting up trees that were down in the trails behind the barn.  Weaving the truck and trailer between the standing trunks, we hauled the massive to modest logs into the trailer bed.  In some places, the trail narrows to ATV size, which meant some serious jockeying back and forth to ease the rig through the space.

The pile in front of the woodshed had begun, stocked with a few logs from sawing up debris in the yard from the storm.  Here it would cure a bit before our legendary Christmas holiday family wood-splitting party (which every family member knows is part of the tradeoff for eating great farm food during their stay).  First a pile, then a hill, and hopefully a small mountain before it gets snowed in, this pile once split would cure in the shed for a couple of years before being pressed into service.  At least that is the general plan, so long as the stash lasts.

Then on Monday, we ventured off towards the lake to work on a huge oak that lay across a neighbor’s trail for pizza wood.  Down the sloping hill, crunching the wrinkled, dried leaves, we made our way with truck and trailer.  Steve was on board, as well as Tom, my musical partner in crime.  We had our work gloves, ear protection, and chaps in hand, as well as the chain saw, bar oil, gasoline, and all the rest.  We were ready to make wood!

It was a surprisingly warm, sunny day for late October, and the mosquitoes were hatching out of the exposed lakebed from opening the dam before winter.  They buzzed and bit and pestered us as we picked up some pre-sawn pieces and surveyed the situation.  Either an oak tree had Y’d at a very young age or two sibling trees had grown up so close together that their bases had almost fused.  While one was still standing with a few orange-brown leaves clinging to gnarly branch tips, the other had cracked off at the roots from the storm and toppled right across the trail and into the hillside.  The branches had been sawn off at this point, and what remained was a tapering trunk that was almost too wide at the base for me to step over.

Grandpa’s chainsaw can be a persnickety beast, and this day was no exception.  First, the bar oil wouldn’t come through the orifice to keep the chain lubricated, then the throttle wire would shake loose inside, then the chain would seize up or need sharpening again, and the process moved in fits and jerks of hurry up and wait.  The oak was solid, heavy as sin, and very dense, which made for slow cutting and smoking blade.  Soon we realized that our biggest priority was to cut the tree enough to pull it out of the trail so we could get back to the road, then focus on firewood lengths.

A cut nearer the base had Kara curious, and we each took guesses about the tree’s age as she counted rings.  Some were closely tight, others wider with faster growth, reflecting the different conditions the tree had faced over the years.  The wood was a lovely red with a golden edge and under other, non-pizza motivated hands, might have made beautiful furniture.  Then Kara offered up the count—at least 104 years old.  So sad to think that one mighty storm could wreck a century of growth.  This tree was but a sapling when the Fullingtons came north to carve our homestead from the stump-studded landscape. 

But everything has its purpose, and though this tree would no longer grow beside its twin, people would be warmed and fed by its gift of timber.  Attaching a strap to the front of the farm truck, we were able to pull the massive stump out of the trail, scraping the top few inches of earth with the tremendous weight.  The saw behaved itself long enough to fill the trailer, and we headed back along the winding road to the farm before dusk settled.

The chickens don’t have quite the same view to the east now that the wood mountain in front of the shed is growing.  Though maybe, if you’re a chicken, the thought of all the bugs to peck and scratch make a woodpile more interesting than the view of the sunrise.  But either way, our wood-making adventures are making progress.  Once the chainsaw is back in order, we’ll have at that grand old oak again.  Those seasoned logs someday are going to make some mighty tasty wood-fired pizzas or fire-roasted leg of lamb, I’d say.  And like the squirrels, we spend these autumn days piling it away while we can before snow flies.

Have you been out making wood today?  Just be sure everyone out there is staying safe with those chainsaws.  Halloween is for makeup folks, not the emergency room, so we’re thinking about the folks out in the woods and hoping everyone stays safe while working to stay warm.  See you down on the farm sometime.

Laura Berlage is a co-owner of North Star Homestead Farms, LLC and Farmstead Creamery & Café. 715-462-3453 www.northstarhomestead.com

If you’ve ever visited Farmstead Creamery, you probably noticed the long, white plastic-film greenhouse lightly humming away next door.  Some folks don’t, asking, “what greenhouse?” even though it’s bigger than the creamery.  But if you’ve driven down Moose Lake Road on a winter’s evening, you’ve probably seen the golden glow of the grow lights and wondered what on earth those crazy ladies at the farm were up to.

Growing vegetables and tilapia fish, that’s what!  The symbiotic relationship, in tandem with beneficial bacteria that processes the fish waste into nutrients the plants use to grow, is called aquaponics.  The roots of the plants filter the water so that it returns fresh and clean to the fish, and so the cycle begins again.

Our beloved kale salad and mixed greens all come from the aquaponics, which needs tending multiple times a day.  But some days the system needs more of an overhaul, which is what occupied this last Monday (rather than barn muckin’ chicken pluckin’ or hay balin’).  This Monday was a greenhouse day.

First, there was the usual fish feeding and plant watering.  Mom harvested that day’s round of fodder (sprouted grains for supplemental animal feed) while I poked lettuce seeds into growing medium.  In a week or two, the cheery seedlings will be ready to plant in the system, waving their eager green and red-flecked leaves towards the sun.

In our aquaponics systems, there are three main types of growing systems:  two large rafts with floating rigid-foam panels that have holes drilled in them for the plant roots to reach through to the water below; NFT (nutrient film technology) trays like long rain gutters with lids that also have holes for the plants that access a thin ribbon of moving water at the bottom of the tray; and media beds filled with baked clay marbles that offer structural support for plant roots.  Each system works best for different types of plants.  The rafts are great for lettuces but also kale, Swiss chard, and bok choy.  The NFT works best for smaller plants like cut-and-come lettuce, endive, young basil, and brazing greens.  The media beds serve the needs of root crops like carrots, beets, and radishes, as well as offer a stronger footing for longer-term crops like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and cucumbers.

Last fall, we expanded the media bed system by adding Dutch buckets (individual square, black pails for growing long-term crops) along the west wall.  A year later, eggplant bushes tower higher than me and tomato vines stretch across the ground.  It was a little tricky to work out the kinks, with the occasional bucket overflow and finessing the draining system.  Surely, there must be enough PVC pipe in the greenhouse to serve at least five homes!

This fall, we are expanding the media bed system again but with flood-and-drain beds.  Instead of a continuous inflow of trickling water with a continuous outflow through a drain pipe back to the sump tank, a flood-and-drain system is watered heavily but periodically and then allowed to drain.  It also allows us to place beds farther away from the water source (sump tank) and in places inaccessible for water return.

In short, any bare floor space that has more room than is needed for walking, washing, or care of plants is up for grabs for additional growing space.  That means yet another phone call to our rep Zack at Farmtek to order supplies.

“Can we use this 100-gallon reservoir as a flood-and-drain grow bed?” Mom asks.  We walk through the concept that involves a slotted PVC pipe at the base to collect excess water and draw it out through a bulkhead fitting to the drain.

“That should work,” Zach consents.  “If the plastic walls bow out too far, you could make a reinforcement structure from wood or metal, but it’s already built to hold the pressure from the water.  Let me know if this works!”

It used to be a huge grumbling scene with the delivery semi-trucks, but now that we’ve expanded the parking lot at Farmstead, turning around is much easier for them.  Still, when that ship ticket comes in, they probably draw straws for whose turn it is to roll down that gravel lane to drop off the next odd item we’ve purchased.  This time, three large white water reservoir tanks, 30 bags of the clay media (which likely weight 40 to 50 pounds each), and a few odds-and-ends fittings was the stack with our name on it.

“You got that greenhouse full yet?  What are you going to do with all those plants?”

“Eat them,” we grinned.  I already had baby cauliflower plants ready to go in, along with kohlrabis.  We lugged in the white tubs, over two feet wide and nearly seven feet long, and hauled in the bags of media.  The day was cloudy and cool, perfect for a long work-day in the greenhouse with heavy lifting.  Keeps you warm!

It took a little troubleshooting to get the white tank-turned-media-bed up on enough rigid foam to drain into a shorter blue bed for growing cut-and-come greens (hopefully including spinach!) before heading to the drain.  This system allows two rounds of plants to pull nutrients from the water before it’s returned to the earth. 

After finishing all the PVC hookups, we piled in the clay media pebbles.  Seven bags each in the big white tanks, a bag and a half each in the smaller blue tubs.  I also had seven Dutch buckets to refurbish, pulling out old pepper or tomato plants, washing up the tubs, sifting out the roots and debris, then refilling the tubs with a mix of old and fresh media, and planting new cherry tomato plants.  In the washing process, I’d pour off the rich, brown water from collected fish nutrient and pour that over the new media beds as an inoculant to give them a jump start.

Between the hauling, the washing, the sorting, the filling, the fitting, and at long last the planting, I smelled of clay dust, was soaked from the knees and elbows down, and had a few fresh scrapes on my knuckles.  But five new beds were ready to start growing great foods all winter—baby greens, zucchinis, cauliflowers, beets, radishes, and more.  It’s one step closer to personal and community food security during the long winter months by increasing the farm’s ability to grow its own. 

In just a few weeks, the brown clay pebbles will be lush with little green leaves—a testament to hard work on a greenhouse Monday.  I’ll bet that first bite will taste sublime!  See you down on the farm sometime.

Laura Berlage is a co-owner of North Star Homestead Farms, LLC and Farmstead Creamery & Café. 715-462-3453 www.northstarhomestead.com