More about our changes...

   For the past two years we have been transitioning our business and property from retail nursery & landscaping to a farm where we grow healthful food of all sorts. The nursery component still offers many unusual perennials, shrubs & trees like many of you have come to expect from us, but our focus is largely on plants that produce food.  We still offer the same comprehensive landscaping design and installation services including rock walls, patios, paths, and decorative & edible gardens, but now you will find us incorporating more edibles that provide beauty as well as home-grown treats!  We raise chickens for meat and chickens for eggs as well as sheep for meat and wool.  We raise a couple of pigs twice a year and typically have the pork available in the spring and autumn.  We have small crops of berries, fruits and vegetables that will be available seasonally at the Proctor Farmers Market.  We started down this track because we wanted to know exactly what went into the foods we eat.  As it turns out (not surprisingly) most of our customers want to know this too.  So...we grow good things for life, for you and for us. Enjoy!

   About our chickens -

   Our egg layers (casually referred to as 'The Ladies') are truly free range birds.  They have a 1/4 acre of hillside pasture to roam through, nibbling all the grass, blackberries, and bugs they can find. Periodically throughout the year, we need to let the grass recover and grow up a bit so then the ladies are restricted to a 1200 square foot 'heavy use area' for a couple of weeks.  We feed them a standard mixed grain food designed for egg laying chickens as well as lots of produce from our garden and other farms.  We are very careful to lock our ladies in their hen house every night to protect them from predators (Jill has even been known to tell the younger ones stories once they are all in bed).  As egg production is daylight dependent, we have a light on a timer to give them a full 16 hours of light each day, which helps with production in the winter.  Nothing is as effective as the real thing, though, and the summer months are the peak season for egg laying.

   Our meat chickens are a breed called Cornish Cross.  It is the prevalent breed you will find as meat in any grocery store. The difference is in our raising techniques.  Starting with day-old hatchlings, they graduate through a series of pens in one of our out-buildings until they are big enough to move to the main chicken coop where they get to roam freely throughout the property, foraging for grass, weeds & bugs. They also get a diet of mixed grains designed to keep them healthy as they grow quickly to about 5 pounds.  This coming year, we plan to experiment with another breed called Red Ranger.  It is the primary breed grown in France and is slightly hardier, though it takes longer to reach full size.