Weekly time in our home garden provides the opportunity to gain confidence in growing for a family or community. We work our ½ acre farm house garden entirely with hand tools, nurturing each plant and carefully observing plant health and insect activity. Our goal is to grow food for our ‘family’ for the year. The course includes planning, seeding, sourcing plant starts, weed management and garden composting.

Preparing meals for one another with the food from the farm is an integral piece of the program and enables students to gain confidence and experience to draw from when educating customers about what we’re growing. Almost immediately upon arriving on the farm, students begin learning to quarter a fresh roaster, make bread from scratch, wield a knife effectively and prepare wonderful dishes from our fields.

This course provides ongoing experience with dehydrating, freezing, canning (both pressure and water bath), the ancient craft of lacto-fermentation and cold storage management. Instruction focuses on understanding food safety with a goal to have food from the farm in the pantry for the next class of students! Also, in an effort to utilize as much of our animals as possible, we teach student farmers how to safely process old layer birds into chicken stock, beef bones into beef stock and back fat into lard for cooking.

In this course we explore milk composition and chemistry and then begin to play with milk—student farmers practice making butter, ice cream and yogurt. Student farmers then move onto the world of cheese, first exploring the various styles of cheese, the distinction in working with sheep, cow and goat’s milk and sourcing basic equipment. We then work through fresh cheesemaking and graduate onto mould ripened and aged cheeses. Instruction includes formal classroom discussion with a focus on cheese as a value added product for a farm business and includes lots of hands-on practice.

In this several-part course, students will have periodic classes and farm work periods throughout the year. Students will learn about the biology of bees, hive behavior, tools, and strategies for managing bees in a small apiary. Students will take on the feeding, any work to be done, and the honey harvest at the end of the summer.

This course follows the fleece from sheep to shawl. Each student farmer is guided through the delicate and laborious process of shearing our sheep. Students then skirt, wash, dye and card their wool and learn to felt, spin and knit.