As the year comes to a close, I circle back to permaculture principle 1, Observe and Interact, with special attention to principle 3, Obtain a Yield. I’ll start with reflections, then share our harvest numbers.
Every year I try to come up with a title that captures something unique about the season. That has not worked as well as I hoped because events that were strange are becoming all too normal, like droughts. However, we did just have an event I sure hope won’t repeat often, which leads me to call this the Year of the Hailstorm.
Hail-damaged Zucchini
Weather
While the spring began with lots of rain, it didn’t last, and we lapsed into another record breaking drought year. In fact, it was the driest summer in the 131-years of keeping records for NH, according to NOAA. It was also slow to warm up, with many crops just taking off when the rain stopped falling. That was a challenge, but we were doing well with our water saving and reuse measures.
Then, on August 27, we were hit with a short but intense hail storm. I have never seen anything like it. Sheets of ice pouring down, bouncing around, covering everything, and shredding plant leaves and damaging fruit as it fell. It left an inch of ice on the ground covered by shredded leaves. The big, fragile leaves of the squash were ripped apart, and the developing fruit ended up covered in cuts. That was a huge loss for us as we usually grow hundreds of pounds of winter squash to feed to the goats and chickens as well as ourselves all winter long. Last year, we brought in 878 pounds – this year we harvested 289 pounds, all of which are too injured to last long.
Hail Damaged Squash Plants
The cuts healed over, but these butternuts will not last long
Rodents, Pests and Diseases
In this category, we are happy to have multiple successes to report.
Our new vole-thwarting raised beds and barrels are working well, especially for carrots and beets. We used found materials of imperfect metal roofing and wood pieces to construct four more that are extra tall. We create the soil in them using sheet mulch and hugelkultur techniques – rotting wood, manure, animal bedding, fallen leaves and seaweed, topped by finished compost to plant into. So far, voles have not infiltrated them, and the height makes them much easier to access and care for.
Building Vole-proof Beds
Carrots & Beets Thriving in the Raised Beds
We’ve also been more diligent in covering our brassica crops – kale, collards, broccoli and Brussels sprouts. Without the cabbage loopers (Trichoplusia ni), imported cabbageworms (Pieris rapae), cross-striped cabbageworms (Evergestis rimosalis) and diamondback moths (Plutella xylostella) reaching them, they grew into big, beautiful plants, especially the collards. They did have aphids multiply under the row cover, but aphids don’t do very much damage compared to all those
Collards big enough to shade the kale!
caterpillars. The Brussels sprout plants grew tall, but never made sprouts. My research shows there can be many reasons for that outcome, and I suspect the drought was the problem this time.
This was by far our best strawberry year, on the whim of the chipmunks to let us have them. I had given up on competing with the rodents and was thinking of the carpet of strawberries in parts of the orchard as a ground cover not a food crop. Then, they just gave them to us this year. I mean, they took a few, but usually they eat every one of them before they even turn red. My only guess as to why, is that the wet spring added some water weight to the berries and they were not super sweet. Whatever the reason, we harvested 97 ½ pounds, which I canned into 34 pints of berries and 10 pints of juice. After boiling them down, they were plenty sweet for us!
Peaches Preserved
The squirrel population did grow over the season, and some of our late season peaches were gobbled up by them, leaving just pits around the trunk, but we still got our share – 304 pounds. Last year’s harvest was twice that, but 2024 was the Year of the Peaches here and I don’t expect another bumper crop like that anytime soon.
Labor
Having enough time to spend tending the homestead despite our other off-farm demands will always be a challenge. We do feel that we have found a decent balance, not taking on too much in a season that we cannot keep up. We lean into the crops that take less of our time, like winter squash, drying beans, and root crops, and are careful not to overdo the more time-intensive ones, like snap beans and peas.
Animals
Here again the trick has been to learn what the land and our workload can handle for optimal health for us all (Observe and Interact). Over time we have created systems that make management easier, like the wheeled chicken “tractors,” the movable electric netting for rotational goat grazing, and the water catchment stations. The poultry thrived, and we continue to keep the predators out despite knowing we are surrounded by wild critters who would love to eat them.
The goats are doing well, although not all went exactly as planned. Georgia had an accidental (in our opinion) pregnancy, and the kidding ended up being a complicated one. We were able to reposition the stuck kid, so it worked out, but it was stressful. We are also having trouble selecting one of Luna’s daughters to join her. Luna has been our best milking goat, but so far her kids have not been living up to her legacy of health, productivity and ease of managing. My ideal is to have four does in milk, two mother-daughter pairs, but we have not been at that level for a couple of years. At our small scale we have to keep the number of goats low, but that makes breeding and selecting a slower process. Hopefully our new doeling, Lucia, who is Luna’s granddaughter, will help get us back on track.
Meet “Living Land Lucia”
This year’s drought has made getting enough good quality hay difficult. We did bring quite a bit of nice extra forage home for them, between Steve’s landscaping work and fall apple gleaning around the Seacoast.
Paw Paw Tree
Also…
One of our paw paw trees is finally taking off! After failing to get them established for years, we seem to have figured it out. Early planting of very small trees, giving them shade the first two years, and being very patient is what seems to have worked for us. There is a second variety nearby, which is a little younger and still very small – but alive, so we are hopeful.
We continue to succeed at growing all our own seedlings to start the garden. It is another great yield for us. We’re happy to get to start them out with more sustainable materials, organic methods, little transport stress, and we have no risk of bringing back diseases or pests, like cutworm.
Our Own Seedlings
2025 Harvest Numbers
Alliums – garlic – 17.5# (130 heads); 130 garlic tops – ; leeks – 61#, perennial onions – 8.5#
Beans & Peas – snap beans – 52.75#; dry beans – 10.25#; sugar snap peas – 6.25#
Brassicas – broccoli – 4.25#; brussels sprouts – 1.75#; kale – 8.75#; collard – 20.5#
Corn, popcorn – 7#
Cucumber – 11#
Eggplant – 0#
Lettuce – 13.75#
Herbs – basil – 4.25#; dill – .5#
Mushrooms, winecap – .5#
Potatoes – 31.5#
Roots – beets – 25#; carrots – 56.75#; parsnips – 53.25#; radishes – 204, turnips (gold ball) – 1#; dandelion roots – 30.5#
Squash – summer – 69.25#; winter (butternut and long pie pumpkin) – 289#
Tomato – slicing – 39.5#; cherry – 11.5#
Perennial Veggies: asparagus – 1.5#; rhubarb – 23.5#
Hazelnuts – 1.5#
Fruit: blueberry – 7.5#; crabapples – 30#; currants, red & white – 4.5#; clove currants – 6#; goumi – 7.5#; grapes – 3#; honeyberry – 9#; jostaberry – 2#; mulberry – 3#; peaches – 304#; raspberry – 1#; strawberry – 97.5#
Honeyberries
Maple syrup – 5 pints
Sea salt – 1.25 gallon
We brought in 58 gallons of goat milk; 114# goat meat; .5# goat lard
Our poultry harvest came to: 1,487 (124 dozen) chicken eggs from 10 hens; 492 (41 dozen) duck eggs from 5 ducks; chicken meat – 76#
Gleaned crops: apples – 550#
Food Preserving
Preserving food is how we eat from our farm year-round. Here’s a summary of what I put up this year:
Canned: peaches – 28 quarts; strawberries – 34 pints; honeyberries – 9 pints; clove currants – 7 pints; grape juice – 1 pint; strawberry juice – 10 pints; goumi jelly – 6 ½ pints; currant jelly – 3 ½ pints
Dried: peaches – 10#
Refrigerated: lactofermented cucumber pickles – 6 quarts
Frozen: blueberries – 1 gallon bag; snap beans – 8 pts; basil pesto – 11 ¾ pints; chevre cheese – 20 pints; mozzarella cheese – 12#; and most of the meat.
Root cellared: carrots, beets, parsnips, dandelion roots.
We store these crops in a cold room: garlic, potatoes, winter squash, and apples.
These are stored on the shelf: dried beans, popcorn.
Other yields we enjoyed included: wood for heating, water captured for the garden and animals, medicinal herbs, exercise, clean air and beauty.
In looking it over now, we can see that our particularly successful crops this year were strawberries, snap beans, collards, leeks, parsnips, radishes, zucchini, carrots and parsnips.
We had disappointing yields from our winter squash, Brussels sprouts, eggplant, grapes and pears.
Looking Ahead
Fall projects freed up more discarded metal roofing so we will make more raised beds to get our root crops back to thriving, able to fill the root cellar again.
Our fall Fedco tree order will bring us Asian pears to plant in the spring. They are not as tasty as European pears, but they mature faster. I love pears and am getting impatient with the many trees we’ve put in here that have yet to produce any fruit for us.
After taking a fall workshop in the forestry practices of coppice and pollard management, Steve is excited to improve our forage potential on site through better silvopasture systems. That will include experimenting with hedge-laying, which he has winter reading lined up to prep for.
Thank you all for reading, even to the end of this post! We hope this next year is a productive one for us all, individually and collectively. There is a lot of often messy work to do – may it bear beautiful fruit.
Goumiberries
