Farm Tour

  • Halychanka wheat.
  • Experiments with small-scale grain growing as a staple food for homesteading.
  • We play with small test plot to learn growing habits and usefulness of crops like flax, for food and fiber.
  • Duborskian Rice, an upland variety we’ve grown successfully in Pennsylvania without any flooding.
  • A collection of favorite potatoes. Winter is the real test for how the farm season went as it becomes time to live of it. We quickly learned to highly value potatoes as a vigorous, reliable, and easy to store stable food.
  • The sesame plants below Wapsi Valley corn were initially a test for oil but are now a favorite to have around, especially for flavoring breads. While rice and wheat are fun, corn seems to be wining out for overall best grain for subsistence living for us.
  • After staple crops, growing sugar is essential. Our first year with sorghum sold us. High sugar content and this sugar press made the process efficient and worthwhile for locally grown molasses.
  • Pennsylvania-grown ginger to complete our kimchi garden patch.
  • Carolina Runner Peanuts in our third year together and we’ve seen great improvements to this fun crop every year. The resulting peanut butter is a dream come true.
  • Crushing apples for cider.
  • The first perinnual herb for me was marjoram, required spice for making kielbasa, which also uses our own garlic.
  • Next to potatoes, dried beans would be my second pick as survival crop. Another easy and plentiful one. These are my favorite- marfax. We usually grow between 5-10 varieties. There’s nothing like long stewed beans in January. I love cooking them in cider.
  • Aside from how beautiful they are these mammoth sunflowers create an excellent protein rich seed that make eating in the winter a lot of fun.
  • Dried stallard beans on the sunflowers. This team has worked out great together.
  • The different varieties of beans are a lot of fun. Easy to process and easy to store.
  • A great reward is making products with our own crops. This is a miso made with our halychanka wheat and black turtle beans.