Welcome to Mary Margaret's Blog

"We'll be there on Friday at 8am to start setting up," they said.  And they weren't kidding!  Just as our employees got here to start work that morning, several more cars rolled into the farm drive.  Soon after I could hear sounds of persistant banging on metal.  Sounds like they're working on the railroad, I thought to myself.  Clink, clink, clink... and I looked out of the window to see a white party tent being erected between our large hoophouse and the PYO flower garden. The folks at the Piscataquis Soil and Water Conservation District hosted their annual "Cooperators of the Year" event on Friday, September 9 from 10:30am to 1:30pm.  And this time at our little organic farm!  Gene and I were to give a tour of the farm, fields, and buildings.  Then an all-local luncheon was scheduled with an awards ceremony was to follow.  We were excited to… Read More

I love doing this.  As you know I'm the one who takes most of the photos around the farm.  Its my self-appointed job to take a photo of every farm share that we put together during the Summer CSA.  Every week I whisk around repeating, "I've got to take the share photo," which I usually do admist a rush to get everything ready for the pickups.  I've been doing this since my obsession with photography took hold in 2013. I always do it with this blog in mind every year.  I wish to provide our wonderful and supportive CSA community a fond glance back at the season.  Thanks to everyone who was a part of making this happen at Ripley Farm for the fifth consecutive year. But, I also do it for another reason.  One that is completely selfish.  During the winter's cold and dark months, I need to look… Read More

I am ready for spring.  Although it is still a while away, we are immersed in our annual planning process for the spring and summer.  It is during the winter that we make most of the decisions that govern our growing season.  Using lots of spreadsheets, we literally plan out ahead of time where and when each of our vegetables will be planted.  With close to 100 different varieties to go into five acres of land, it takes faith in the belief that spring will indeed come despite this snowy winter and consistently negative temperatures to get this significant job done. Now is also the time that we undertake the important process of planning out who will eat most of our produce by signing up the 120 CSA members that our farm will feed in 2015.  The Community Supported Agriculture program at Ripley Farm, which consists of weekly farm shares… Read More

On Wednesday when we were getting ready for the Winter CSA pickup later that afternoon, I said to Gene offhandedly, "What a nice farm share this week!  Its just how we eat!"  But, that really IS the essence of it all!  I just love having our CSA because we get to share with our members how we farmers eat.  We rely on the wonderful seasonal abundance of Maine's growing season to nourish us, which means enjoying what we have when we have it.  To me, that is CSA in a nutshell, Community Supported Agriculture.  Our members agree to eat what the farm has to offer from July through October in the Summer CSA and then November all the way through March in the Winter CSA. And of course, we farmers agree to grow it!  Yesterday we took a walk up into our vegetable production fields.  Working up there all day… Read More

The first thing that we farmers do after the growing season ends is... AHHHH!  We take a much-needed breath of relief and rack out to reclaim our bodies and minds from the busy, busy summer behind us.  The second is review our progress towards our goals.  And we had a very big goal this year: To reclaim one acre of 20-year-old trees that had grown up between our barns and our exisiting fields.  Do all this while you are cultivating 4 acres of organic vegetables for an 85 member CSA, a farmers market and a host of wholesales.  What did you say?  We had no idea if it was possible for us to get it all done during what turned out to be one of the shortest Maine growing seasons in many years.  With last winter's snow load taking its sweet time to melt, we finally started cutting trees at… Read More

Ripley Farm is 'Sharing the Farm's Abundance' with a new GIVEAWAY of a Wednesday CSA farm share! Everyone's offering Labor Day specials, so we decided we would, too!  Ripley Farm style!  This week we're giving away a one-week's membership to our popular Community Supported Agriculture summer farm share program for one lucky person who is drawn out of the straw hat! The winner will learn what the Ripley Farm excitement is all about!  As a member-for-the-week, the winner will come to the farm to pick-up your share of super fresh, organic veggies harvested just for you.  All this comes with our weekly newsletter with farm happenings, tips on how to use and store your veggies, and recipes!  Also, included in your one-week membership, you'll get a chance to pick yourself a gorgeous bouquet of flowers and get some fresh herbs to go with your week's veggies all from our organic… Read More

The thing I remember most about the first time we walked on what is now our dream farm at 62 Merrills Mills Road in Dover-Foxcroft is Gene's smile after he pranced through the tall timothy and red clover in the field tucked up out of sight from the road.  Hey, this beautiful eight acre field has a ton of space, he said.  There's no way we'd be able to sell more veggies than that, we told each other.  We're happy to report that we were wrong about that!  With the demand for our delicous organic veggies, land is becoming a premium at Ripley Farm these days, growing from less than an acre in 2010 to over four acres in production in 2014.  After perusing the aerial photos of our farm from decades ago in the USGS soil survey maps, we realized that about an acre of birch and fir between… Read More

Snow?!?  Ugh, who wants to hear about that stuff ever again after this winter?  I certainly don't, but don't worry this story isn't about snow.  It's about snowLOSS and has a beautiful ending... On April 1st, Ripley Farm was covered in an ominously deep layer of snow.  Planting was looking very far off.  Morale was way down.  Very low.  To be exact, thirty two inches of snow, complete with a thick layer of ice in the middle thanks to the December 2013 ice storm, had to melt away in order for us to be ready to plant in May.  So on April 1st, 2014 Gene and I snowshoed out to our field to measure the snow and a challenge was born.  Ripley Farm had to burn 32 inches in 30 days. Ripley Farm's snow loss challenge proceeded slowly in the early weeks of the effort...  On April 14th, Gene again… Read More

Are you a visual person?  I sure am!  The cliche, "a picture says a thousand words," is really true in my book.  That's why in 2013 I made a goal of taking a picture of every single week of our summer CSA farm share boxes that we had!  I had a lot of fun doing this and made this blog to show you the beautiful colors and diversity that can be had from our local farm from July-October!  We hope you'll JOIN US for a summer full of GORGEOUS veggies just like these in 2014! On the outside all 16 weeks worth of boxes look like this... Inside every week's box looks different!!  Check out Ripley Farm's 2013 Summer CSA Farm Share Year in Review below!  The pictures are in order from Week 1 starting on July 3 to Week 16 ending October 18. Get your box starting in July… Read More