Our chickens are raised outdoors on pasture so that they get plenty of fresh air and sunshine, which makes for tasty and healthy chickens. Being outdoors also allows them to eat a healthy balanced diet of fresh greens and bugs, supplemented by certified organic grain grown right next door in New York State. Organic, humanely treated, locally produced chickens are in short supply in New England, so don’t miss this chance to stock up for your family.

Delivery details

Order your items using the shopping cart buttons below, then meet us at the Busa Farmstand in Lexington, MA from 11:00 until 1:00p.m. on September 10. While you’re at the Busa Farmstand, be sure to sample their freshly picked, locally grown veggies and other favorites such as Baer’s Best Beans. Busa farmstand has been extremely generous in providing an opportunity for us to deliver our special gourmet treats to you right in Lexington, so please remember to show them some love when you stop by.

How to Order

Use the buttons below to put items into your shopping cart, and press the appropriate button depending on how you want to pay: online payments are processed through Paypal (you can use a credit or debit card, or your paypal balance), or you can bring a check/cash with you at pickup time. Paypal orders incur an additional 2% fee. As always, please feel free to email or call us if you have any questions about the growing conditions or animal husbandry practices for any of the products on the order form.

Shiitake logs

Grow your own gourmet mushrooms
Workshop at Grace Note Farm
66 N Main St., Petersham, MA
Sunday, April 10 1:30 – 5:30 (subject to weather)

Mushrooms are a great crop to extend the repertoire of home food production for the backyard gardener or homesteader. They are easy to produce, requiring minimal maintenance after you’ve done the initial inoculation process, and nothing beats the flavor of mushrooms grown outdoors on real wood. Do you have a spot that’s too shady for fruit or vegetables, but that you’d like to use for food production? That’s a perfect spot for growing mushrooms.

Come learn about growing culinary mushrooms from Kent Byron of Grace Note Farm. Kent has been producing culinary mushrooms on his farm in Petersham, Mass for 5 years. At this workshop, you’ll learn about mushrooms, inoculate oak logs with shiitake spawn, and tour the mushroom operation at Grace Note Farm. Each participant can take home an inoculated log to start their own shiitake farm.

Cost to participate in this workshop and take home one log is $35 per student ($50 for multiple members from the same household), or if you’d like to attend just to learn about the process and you’re not quite ready to take home a log, the cost is $25. Supplies will be provided (shiitake spawn, beeswax, power tools), but please bring your own work gloves, ear and eye protection, and wear sturdy shoes for outdoor work. The participation fee includes a light dinner for those who want to stay for a communal meal.

The class is scheduled for Sunday, April 10 at 1:30 to 5:30, but will be rescheduled for the following Sunday if the weather is wet. We need dry weather for the logs to be inoculated and capped properly. This class time is chosen to work with the MBTA train schedule for Fitchburg. If anyone from Eastern Mass wants to come to the class, let us know and we will meet the 1:00 train in Leominster.

Space is limited to 12 students. Use the buttons below to reserve your spot. You can pay either in person at the class, or pay online using your credit or debit card, or your paypal account.

We make every attempt to be very strict with our electricity use, but our usage is probably still a little higher than an average household. The electric fence is necessary or the chickens would get taken by predators, and there are times when more than one freezer is placed into service to store frozen meat while it awaits a buyer. That’s one expense we hope to eliminate over time, as we build up a client base and can sell batches of chickens or pigs as soon as they are available.

Knowing what environmental devastation takes place in order to produce electricity from coal has been a burden on my heart for many years. I’m glad we’ve taken this small step to convert to more environmentally friendly inputs. Maybe some year we’ll have a solar panel of our own.

Here at Grace Note Farm, we believe that animals deserve to have a happy life, even if they are destined for your freezer at the end of that happy life. Unlike commercially raised pigs that are raised indoors in tight confinement, the pigs we raise at Grace Note Farm roam in large fenced pastures and get rotated onto fresh ground every few weeks. They eat, nap, romp, play together, and socialize as their natures direct them, outdoors in the fresh air when they want, or lying about indoors on a pile of hay if they prefer that. They also eat a varied diet of plants and animals as they forage on the land (pigs are omnivores), supplemented with free-choice certified organic grain. This is good for the animals and good for our land as well.

We raise Tamworth pigs, a heritage breed that is prized for its tasty meat and good lean-to-fat ratio. Tamworths do well on pasture and are listed as a ‘threatened’ food animal. They are social and smart and we enjoy having them on our farm. We use them as ‘brush hogs’ to clear and prepare areas for future plantings. We buy piglets from breeders who feed only certified organic grain to their breeding stock and to the piglets once weaned.

Tamworths have a reputation as the tastiest breed of hog. See this testimonial to the Tamworth on Chow Hound. It is reported on the web that Bristol University carried out taste tests using both commercial and rare breed pigs in a scientifically controlled experiment, and the Tamworth was judged as having the best tasting meat.

Click here to see current availability and prices.

Once they are large enough to live outside safely, we house our broiler chickens in portable pens so they can live on pasture, eat grass and bugs, and get plenty of sunshine. You will find many, many web pages on chicken tractor construction. Even with all those posts, it’s still tricky trying to decide how to build a chicken tractor yourself. Some tractors seem either too large to move without a tractor or too small to give the chickens room to roam. Many are designed to use PVC pipes, which we do not ever buy due to the toxins released during their manufacture. For us, we want the tractor to be constructed as cheaply as possible, while still lasting for many growing seasons with little or no maintenance. It also needs to provide adequate space for the birds in addition to protecting them from the elements and from predators. Most posts do not actually provide much detail about construction considerations, though, and most are built for laying hens rather than broiler chickens, so the requirements are slightly different. For broilers there are no nest boxes, or perches, for example.

I do not claim to be an authority on chicken tractors, but we have learned some things that worked and didn’t work in the domain of portable chicken housing, so here I offer a short list of design considerations to keep in mind for building a portable pen for broiler chickens.

1. Keep it light, but not too light. This is the trickiest design criteria, in my mind. If you want to be able to move your chicken pen by hand, rather than needing a tractor to pull it, it should be as light as possible, but not so light that it will tip over in heavy wind. One thing we’ve learned in our few years of farming is this: never underestimate the forces of nature. I see many lightweight PVC or hoop-house style chicken arks that I know would not withstand our worst New England wind gusts, and a bear could easily push them right over and snatch out the yummy chickens within. We build the structure of our houses from wood rather than PVC, using 2×2 beams instead of 2×4 wherever possible to reduce the weight. But the bottom rails are 2x4s so that the structure is bottom-heavy. The height of the pen also factors into the total weight, so you don’t want it unnecessarily tall. We think 24″ is too short for the birds to be comfortable, but 36″ high is unnecessary for meat birds, since they don’t perch. A 36″ wall makes it hard to lift the 3-gallon waterer over the side and into the pen. We find that 28″ is a good target height.
   

   28 inches tall: gives the birds plenty of head space, without being too tall for humans to reach in

2. Plan for human as well as chicken access. You’ll need some portion of the pen to open up to lift out the food and water containers. Then on slaughter day, you’ll need to be able to get the chickens out of the pen. For both of these functions, we build our pens with a hinged lid to allow for easy human access. A key detail is to design in a kick-stand to prop the lid open while we refill their food and water. You could also just let the lid flop backwards when working with the feeders, but over time that would stress the hinges, and the chickens are more likely to jump out if the roof is totally opened up.
   

   Kick-stand props up chicken tractor lid

3. Predators are smart, and they have all night Our property abuts a conservation forest, so bears, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and weasels make frequent visits to test the security precautions we’ve built around our animals. On our chicken tractors, we apply an inner layer of 2″ chicken wire, as well as an outer cover of 1″ wire. When a raccoon spends time plucking the first layer of wire out of its staples, it is confronted with the 1″ wire. The alternation also means there’s not an easily-expandable opening for a raccoon to reach through and pull a body-part out through the mesh. The wire is wrapped slightly around the bottom edge of the pen, so that it sticks out into the interior just slightly, along the ground. Predators trying to dig under the pen come to the wire pricking them before they hit open dirt. Also, the lid closes with a covered hook-and-eye so that raccoons can’t open the lid.
   

   Hasp on chicken-tractor lid

4. Build for strength Although the chicken tractor’s main function is to provide cover for the chickens, it is more than a portable tarp on wheels. All that pulling and tugging will create stress on the frame. Someone will forget that the roof is just made of chicken wire and set the feeder up there. We reinforce all corners with plywood triangles, and the lid has multiple cross-pieces for stability and strength.
   

   reinforced corners in chicken tractor

5. How to pull it? I like the chicken tractors that have gurney-style handles built right in, but we haven’t built ours like that. Our first chicken tractor had a rope attached at each end, but rope is probablematic. I would pull with all my might and the tractor didn’t move, the rope just stretched with me. Because of that, we’ve switched to chain pulls that are covered with an old piece of hose to make the grip more comfortable. We install eyelets at both ends of the pen, so the chain can be clipped to either end to move the pen in either direction. Be careful not to make the chain too long, because you need to get the end of the pen lifted up off the ground slightly to overcome friction and slide it forward.

pull handle on chicken tractor

If you’ve built a portable chicken pen, please add your insights into the comments. We hope you find these tips helpful.

We grow shiitakes on oak logs back in our woods. Getting the spawn into the logs to make mushrooms grow is an arduous process that I promise to photograph at some point. Kent planted his first set of logs in 2007 and ads to his collection each year. The oak trees have to be felled at just the right time of year, the crown and all the limbs removed and the trunk cut into 4-foot sections. Larger is better, to prevent the log from drying out before the mycelium takes hold. Then you shlep the logs over to the workbench and drill a whole bunch of holes all over the trunk, insert the mushroom-spawn-sawdust into each hole, and paint over the hole with melted beeswax to keep the moisture in. Then take the innoculated logs into the woods and set them into position and WAIT. A year. Or two. The logs Kent prepared in Spring of 2009 will fruit this autumn for the first time. It makes me tired just writing all that down.

But all that effort is worth it when the logs miraculously begin to fruit. Kent’s shiitake logs seem to be really happy in the spot he picked for them, because they have fruited several times this year. The mushrooms grow in that pith between the wood and the bark. Here’s a photo where you can see the mushrooms breaking through the bark.

Shiitake mushrooms emerging from log (click to enlarge)

The shiitakes are so lovely when they are growing. Our logs produce a couple of different strains.

Star crinkles on shiitake	Shiitakes with smooth top
Some have star-shaped grooves on the top	Some are smooth on the top with more pronounced white lacy markings around the bottom

Cooking with fresh mushrooms is such a treat. Just like anything else, freshly picked mushrooms have a terrific flavor that cannot be matched by store-bought mushrooms that were harvested god knows how long ago. So far, my favorite mushroom-enhanced culinary creations have been:

• scrambled eggs with mushrooms and fresh peppers

• American style cream of mushroom soup
• French style mushroom / leek / potato soup (more butter, less flour than the recipe above)
• Mushroom ravioli
• Mushroom cream vol-au-vents

a teenie shiitake

winecap mushrooms growing by a blueberry bush

One of the techniques we’ve learned from studying permaculture is to try to find ways to make our farm resources serve two purposes. Here is one example. Fruit trees need lots of mulching or they do not produce much fruit. Our fruit orchard contains 30 or so different kinds of fruit trees that we mulch with a very thick apron of hardwood chips. Hardwood chips make great mulch because they break down slowly, providing good moisture retention and slow nutrient release to the fruit trees, and they are sustainably harvested from tree-pruning activities in our woods and the surrounding area.

Wood chips can also serve double duty by providing habitat for certain kinds of culinary mushrooms. Last spring we planted winecap mushrooms (sourced from Field & Forest) in a dozen or so of the woodchip aprons. I typically think mushrooms want to grow in the woods, but I guess these mulch aprons provided a similar habitat: moist and shaded. Mushrooms are fickle and you really don’t know when you plant them if you will get any harvest at all. So we were really thrilled to see winecaps emerging in mid-August. They seem to fruit whenever the weather changes (a sudden rain storm or especially cold night will bring up mushrooms). Now we will see if the presence of the mushrooms helps the fruit trees themselves get stronger.

Our wood-cultured mushrooms grow at their own pace outdoors, and we do not do anything strange or un-natural to encourage them to fruit faster. Since we provide them with a mineral-rich growing medium, they have a terrific, intense flavor. Some store-brand dried shiitake (so I hear) are grown indoors on paper, so they do not have any way to develop their flavor. I suppose they look like a mushroom but taste like paper.

Winecaps have their pros and cons. They emerge all of a sudden and grow quickly, so it’s easy to miss them. They can be past the stage where you’d want to eat them before you even notice they’re there. For this reason, I’m glad ours are planted in the orchard, which is right by the house and we walk through it every day. Other mushrooms, like shiitake, grow a little more slowly, so we can grow them back in the woods and only check on the logs a couple of times a week. Compared to shiitake, one downside of winecaps is that they do not keep well once you pick them. They need to be cooked the same day or the day after picking at the latest. Shiitake, on the other hand, will keep in the refrigerator a few days longer. Also, fewer people are familiar with winecaps, unlike shiitakes, which practically sell themselves. But the taste of the winecaps is really exquisite. Having never eaten them before this harvest, we are so pleased with the taste. And the smell of the house when mushrooms are dehydrating is like heaven.

Our broiler chickens are raised in these portable pens. Each morning we move them onto a fresh plot of ground and they get very excited about having new green forage to eat. As these photos show, they come forward when the pen starts to move, as soon as they can see the yummy new grass to eat.

Our pens are built for fewer chickens and are smaller than the chicken tractors made famous by Joel Salatin. His 10×12 portable pens are typically moved by a tractor or other vehicle and house 100 birds in each tractor. Ours can be moved by one person, and have a narrower footprint so that we can move them around our orchard, where the paths are planted in clover (one of the chickens favorite treats).

Why is it called a chicken tractor?

The chickens scratch up the surface of the ground looking for bugs, and take down any plants growing there, so having the chickens on a plot of ground for the day is a little like running the tiller. In this photo,

One day of chicken damage

you can see the difference between the perimeter area that is still green grass, and the ‘tracturd’ left by chickens from the day before. The grass is effectively mowed, but will grow back.

What could be cuter than 50 day-old chicks? I can’t think of anything. Every couple of years, we need to replace the chickens we lose to attrition and old age. The previous batch were hatched right here on the farm from our own flock of Black Australorps in October 2008. Although that was fun, hatching chicks ourselves has a variety of pros and cons which I will post about separately. This year, we ordered a new set from Mt Healthy hatchery in Ohio. They arrived in really good shape and are healthy and happy so far.