Musings from the barrel room summer 2026
Wow, what a summer – challenging – interesting – demanding – an opportunity to reflect and reset. The question of the next decade is – How to mitigate and adapt to the reality of climate change. Mother nature is not very happy with human behavior and is becoming louder and more insistent in registering her dissatisfaction.
For us, this means having our first total crop failure in decades of farming.
After an unusually gray and icy January and February, our region warmed very quickly and to unusually high temperatures. The fruit bloomed a week or two early and in a very narrow time frame. In fact, it was one of the best blooms we may have ever had until the polar vortex struck – temperatures dropped to 20°F. It simply froze everything. It stripped the tiny apricots and cherries from the trees where they were already set. It killed the bloom for apples, pears and peaches. It froze our grapevines back to within about 6 inches of the ground and our blackberry vines back to within about a foot of the ground. It froze the early leaves and blooms of the blueberries in place.
The result has been a summer where we have almost no fruit. Thankfully, we have some everbearing strawberries in a hoop house, a fig forest in another hoop house, and some very resilient black currants and blackberries. Otherwise, it would be a total loss – we have exactly 0 pears in an acre and a half of trees. We have a total of 12 apples in 5 1/2 acres of apples. We picked 2 quarts of blueberries across almost 2 acres of plants. Wow.
That is the bad news – but there is GOOD NEWS. The weather events demand we become more creative with our products and renew our already substantial efforts to be even more sustainable. Lori, Eric and Dani have been working on renewal.
Since we have freezers full of fruit we saved from last year (rather than wholesale it), we are expanding our product line. We can imagine more ways to use our space and build community. And we can become even more sustainable: we are installing a solar backup system at the farm, solarizing other buildings, installing a solar charger at the tasting room, continuing to care for French apple and pear trees which bloom 2 weeks later than their American counterparts in hopes of avoiding late freezes, expanding blueberries to other parts of the farm so as to maximize the possibility of avoiding frost, and creating new value added products and events to further diversify our offerings.
New alcoholic products include a blueberry wine and a Hewes Crab cider that will be released in September, a blackberry wine for October, a blueberry port for November and a pear-ginger dessert wine in December. And we are working on a new elderflower cider, a fig wine, and a black walnut-apple dessert wine.
For the designated driver and other thirsty folks, we continue to expand non-alcoholic products as well. House-made teas and lemonades are now available in the tasting room and include blueberry-basil lemonade, sour cherry lemonade, and fig and shiso teas. We also expanded our growing area to allow us to make a strawberry-basil and fig jams and coming in the fall. We also harvested a steer for our beef eating customers and have boxes and cuts are available.
