John and Vanessa oversee twenty hives of Carniolan, Italian, and Amish bees. They produce a light, super sweet raw honey with a high crystallization rate thanks to the fields of sunflowers, mustard, sainfoin, and wildflowers the hives feed on.

We grow a wide selection of grains, rotating our crops, and intercropping species that help each other thrive. Here’s flax! We also grow chickpeas, lentils, split peas, Austrian winter peas, black oil sunflowers, brown mustard, hard red wheat, emmer, purple karma barley, soft white wheat, Kernza, silphium, and winter rye. This year we are adding oats! Quinoa has been in the rotation off and on for years, it might rejoin the mix, as well as some hardy dry beans depending on trials this year.

We have raspberries and strawberries producing yearly, and young honeyberries, currants, elderberries, aronia, and cherries that are growing toward production age.

We put in an unheated high tunnel with the help of the local NRCS. We focus on heat loving vegetables like peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, and cucumbers inside, and hardier vegetables outside.

We’ve been experimenting with flour corn for a few years now, and have found a few varieties that grow well in our harsh climate and produce excellent corn for grinding into flour. If you see our cornbread mix, snap it up! we have a limited supply and it goes fast!

We grow flowers inside the unheated high tunnel with the vegetables and out in the field as well. We’re working on adding perennial flowers to the permaculture landscape of the garden and berry orchard.