“In addition to our roughly 70 acres of pasture land on Sugar Mountain we have about 900 to 1,100 acres of forest land. That may seem like a big variance but realize that is only +/-10% over a large area – doing an exact survey on large steep sloped irregular parcels is difficult and depends also on are you counting the vertical slice or the ortho-photo land area along the slopes of the mountain which can make a big difference. The deed says a ridiculously precise 892.2 acres and one of the forestry surveys came out to be 1,096 acres. Take your pick or just say Walter the Pooh in the Thousand Acre Woods.”, a joke that Holly makes.
We also like to say that we live in “The tiny cottage in the big woods.” This is a play on the most excellent series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
In any case, we live in a large forest which contains our farm area, marshes, woods that where we do sustainable logging, our maple sugar bush on Sugar Mountain and space for apple orchards. Because of the nearby large state forests and other private forests the area is very rural being predominantly farming, forestry and a bit of a bedroom community for Barre-Montpelier to our west.
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Have you ever considered raising pigs in woods? Sort of like Joel Salatin?
We do use the woods – our pastures are savanna style, a mix of open pasture ground forages, brush & regen as well as trees. What Salatin does is quite different from what we do. While his pigs are outdoors for part of their life they are basically grain fed where as ours are truly pastured, getting more than 80% of their diet from the pastures in the warm season replaced by hay in the winter months when snow is deep on the ground. See the Pig Page for more details about what our pigs eat and how we do managed rotational grazing with them.
Hahahaha Walter the Pooh in the Thousand Acre Woods Crazy joke.