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Friday,
April 16th, 2021
Volume 30 Issue 4
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In This Issue of The
Wood Prairie Seed
Piece:
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Big Spring
Sale!

Milliken
General Store, Bridgewater, Maine. Circa 1954
This remarkable shot was captured on the cusp of a
new era. It was taken by acclaimed American
photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). Only in the
years following the close of World War II did Towns
and the State begin to plow snow from wintertime roads
in Northern Maine. Until that changeover, snow was
packed by horse-drawn ‘Rollers’ and winter travel was
limited to a horse-drawn pung or sled plus - for
greater distances - the railroad. Cars and trucks
would be parked in the Fall only to be started up
again after snowmelt in the Spring. Schools followed
the rhythm of the seasons by beginning in November
after Fall farm fieldwork had been finished, and
continuing until March when mud-season made travel
difficult. This pattern allowed plenty of time to
haul, cut seed and plant potatoes. The old joke was
that either you were living through Winter or getting
ready for Winter. While we humans are still very
social beings, it’s hard to imagine seeing the same
sort of camaraderie and loafing today that is depicted
in the photo.
Here on the farm, loafing has been the thing farthest
from our minds as we put in long weeks working extra
hard trying to keep up with shipping out orders.
Shipping has peaked and that expected seasonal
development is now allowing us to make progress on
catching up. Turnaround time on orders has been about
a week but thanks to our dedicated crew we’re
beginning to trim that back.
In case you are wondering, YES we do have good
supplies of most varieties of our Organic Seeds
including Organic
Maine Certified Seed Potatoes, Organic
Vegetable Seed, Organic
Herb Seed, Organic
Flower Seed and Organic
Cover Crop Seed. We have a BIG
Spring Sale going on right now – please
scroll down to find the details and enjoy huge SAVINGS!
Thanks for your business – and patience - and we
hope you are enjoying a wonderful Spring!
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Caleb,
Jim & Megan Gerritsen & Family
Wood Prairie Family Farm
Bridgewater,
Maine
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Maine Tales. The Fall
Wendell Berry Visited Aroostook County. Presque
Isle, Maine. Circa 1984.
We picked up Kentucky farmer and author Wendell Berry at
the small airport in Presque Isle. In the remaining
daylight hours we squired him around the farm fields of
Central Aroostook. In time we parked by the side of the
road when we came upon one of Hershel Smith’s massive
fields where a large crew of farm workers were laboring,
hand-harvesting jade green broccoli.
Our friend, Stan Scott, an English professor at nearby
UM-Presque Isle was that year in charge of the
outside-speakers-committee. Stan had miraculously been
able to secure Wendell for a three day Aroostook visit in
which among other events Wendell spoke before a large
crowd at the college and answered questions posed by the
honors English class at Presque Isle high school taught by
author Glenna Johnson Smith.
It was the end of October and by that time the Aroostook
potato crop had for weeks been safely harvested and put
away into local potato houses. What is now the 40-year old
Aroostook broccoli industry had gotten its start as a
promising rotation crop for potatoes just a few years
before in 1980. The workers were hacking the broccoli
heads off their stalks with a heavy harvest knife, then
tossing those heads into an accompanying wagon slowly
creeping across the field. We sat in silence watching the
workers work.
After a while, Wendell – steeped in the nuances of
labor-intensive hand-harvest of tobacco in Kentucky –
began a blow-by-blow, detailed expert’s narration of
process and the workers’ individual movements the rest of
us were rather cluelessly watching. He singled out one man
and noted how his motion was not as fluid as those of his
co-workers. Wendell interpreted that after a long day of
harvest this man’s back was troubling him and that in
response he had adopted a certain back-saving technique so
he could keep up with the work flow and make his back pain
bearable.
That day we came to understand better that there are deep
layers that may well remain hidden and undiscovered. Many
of us ramble along in a fog while rare others - benefiting
from depth and experience - reap a richer harvest from
life. We are indeed fortunate on those occasions when
circumstances line up and others with insight generously
share their bounty with us.
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Special
Offer: Welcome to Our Wood Prairie Spring
Super Sale!
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Wood Prairie Family
Farm Photos.

The Real Reason
World Procrastination is Alive & Well. By early March snow
depth had reached its peak. While others of us slaved
working a Saturday shift trying to keep up with shipping
seed orders, outside under striking blue skies two local
Sargent brothers - Howard (pictured) and William – were up
on the roof earning gas money and ‘shoveling’ snow from a
notorious roof valley. Starting in at 645am when it was
+5ºF, they used "snow scoops" which slid along the rooftop
and minimized the back-breaking lifting required by actual
shovels. The roof had 2 feet of wind packed snow
throughout, but it rose to four feet deep in the valley
they are working over to. By Sunday afternoon the boys
had finished. Weren’t we surprised by the next weekend when
an early warm spell had effortlessly melted the snow from
all other roofs on the farm.

Caleb Rotating a Pallet Box of Potatoes onto Grading
Equipment for Final Inspection. From
November to January we pre-grade our entire crop of organic
seed potatoes into thousand-pound-capacity wooden pallet
boxes. This step allows us to generate a pretty accurate
count on the tonnage of each variety of potatoes available
to sell and ship to gardeners and farmers like you in all 50
States. Then, as they are needed during the main
Feb-June shipping season, the seed potatoes get one last
inspection just before they are packaged up and
shipped out. Here, Caleb is using our newly installed
forklift pallet box Rotator to gently empty a box of the new
mid-season Maine variety, Caribou
Russet. Potatoes get graded into
manageable fifty-pound-totes which are then palletized and
sent upstairs for the crew to bag.

One Thousand Wood Prairie Orders Packaged Up and
Ready-to-Go. Demand for
seed has remained strong all year. Despite the nation’s farm
labor shortage we’ve almost been able to keep up. In this
weekend session, Caleb (blue shirt) and his packing crew
stack parcels head high on three pallets awaiting pickup by
the Post Office. Kenyon (out of view) grew up without
electricity inside the wilderness Baxter State Park where
both his parents were Park Rangers. He drove his snowmobile
12 miles every day to meet the school bus to East
Millinocket. Cathy (orange hat) also worked at BSP and used
to commute an hour-and-a-half to Wood Prairie. That was
before she could move into her new old farmhouse in Easton,
next door to Old Order Amish neighbors. High schoolers Jim
O'Meara (reaching for a 'pink box' full of Blue Seed Tags)
and his brother Tom (working with Jim in the underground
potato storage grading potatoes) travel an hour to help on
weekends from their organic farm in New Sweden. Young Jim
has taught himself to become an accomplished blacksmith and
built himself a shop last Summer, sawing out the needed
lumber on his family's sawmill. Out of sight in the
office, Megan, Rob and Caleb's sister, Amy, sort orders
and print shipping labels. After working during the
week, RJ and Miguel use the weekend to catch up on school
work. Laura and Leah work from their homes stickering bags
and filling vegetable seed packets while tending their
families. Longtime co-worker Frank (our local IT genius)
plus Gail, Emily and Michelle work from home answering the
phones. Here in Maine it takes a village to fill an order.

Wood Prairie Cats Admiring Our Maine State Bird.
A winter-long obsession for Goose (left) and Ginger is to
watch Black-capped Chickadees grab a lunch of oil-seed
sunflower seeds from the bird feeder outside the kitchen
window. Perched in the ultimate safety of adjacent spruce
trees, they will dart in momentarily, rapidly eat their fill
then fly back to the security of the boreal spruce. Chickadees
are the State bird of Maine and Massachusetts, as well
as the Provincial bird of our neighbor New Brunswick,
Canada. They aren’t snowbirds so they go through the Maine
Winters right along with the rest of us.

Bright Winter Days Inside the Wood Prairie Cattle
Barn. While our cowboy
ancestors might be turning over in their graves,
truth-be-told our reasons for having cattle center around
the need to clean up cull potatoes. Potatoes with gashes,
gouges and defects are 'picked out' into 5-gallon buckets.
As needed for feed they are ground to smithereens with a
noisy potato grinder built for us thirty years ago by
local-metal-fabricator Lawrence Bros in Mars Hill. Our
'tarp barn' is a converted year-round snow-shedding
greenhouse mounted on a four-foot concrete knee-wall.
The covering is two-layers of heavy-duty UV-treated
polyethylene which creates a bright and appealing abode. Out
of boredom the cows sometimes abrasively lick the inner
layer with their rough tongues. Here, looking south, Megan
is eyeing her Irish Dexter and Dexter-cross cattle
(increasingly crossed with beefier Low-Line Angus) as
one-year-old Australian Shepard, Oakley, looks on. The door
on the south is always open allowing regular access to the
outside world. We use a warm, deep-bedding system in which
sawdust, waste hay and manure accumulate throughout the
Winter. Once a year after planting we clean out the barn
with our Skidsteer Loader and then refill the loafing-area
with a foot or two of fresh sawdust. The bedding-mix becomes
fertilizer for next year's potatoes and Fall-thinned beef
becomes grass-based sustenance for our family.
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Caleb & Jim & Megan Gerritsen
Wood Prairie Family Farm
49 Kinney Road
Bridgewater, Maine 04735
(207) 429 - 9765
Certified Organic, From Farm to Mailbox
www.woodprairie.com
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