- Hey, you're watching Preppy Kitchen, where I, John Kanell,
teach you how to make delicious homemade dishes
to share with your family and friends, except for today,
because I'm taking you on a tour of our farm.
A lot's been happening here at Hedge Hill so, I thought
it'd be fun to introduce you to some of our new additions
and just update you on what's gone on.
Let's go.
(tires squealing)
(bright music)
First stop, the new barn.
If you watch my stories, you might've seen the construction
progressing over a period of time.
It's been taking a while and it's still not done yet,
but the outside is almost done.
You might notice the barn doors aren't hung yet,
but that's where we're at right now.
Inside, we're going to have office space,
there's going to be storage space.
Um, there's gonna be a little kitchen.
It's basically like my office barn.
So, I'm very excited to have it,
as soon as it's complete.
Once it's done, I promise you will get a barn tour.
(bright music)
So, here we are in one of our hayfields
and we transformed almost all of it
into a giant
pumpkin patch.
This has been a hayfield, so we had to have
all the soil tilled.
One of our local farmers came in with his tiller,
pulled this all up, moved the soil around and then we have
big mountains here of like compost, fertilizer
and some horse manure
(laughs)
got mixed together and you have these little pumpkin nests.
They're so cute.
It's like, little baby pumpkin's growing in here.
And as you can see, even though these are so new,
we're already getting little blossoms
and pumpkins that are going to start growing.
I'm very excited.
In case you're wondering, we didn't just plant one variety,
we have many different kinds of pumpkins growing here
because I love the ones that are like gnarly
and kind of like, funky looking, as well as,
your classic jack-o-lantern pumpkin.
I can't wait to improve my skills because
I'm really, really bad at carving jack-o-lanterns.
(bright music)
On the border of this giant field, we also just threw
a bunch of wildflower seeds here, so it's going to be
like a nice border of wild flowers.
I'm looking forward to taking them around
and it'll also encourage some bees to come on over.
Do you see that white stuff in the distance?
Those boxes are bees.
We're all gonna go there in a second but first I wanna
show you one of our hay fields and what happened this year
and why it's actually surprisingly great.
Come on.
(gentle music)
Here at Hedge Hill we have a lot of hay growing.
Hay is important because our goats eat it.
Georgina and Spencer have to eat, the horses eat it
and it's just an important part of having a farm.
You're producing your own food for the winter
when everything is a dormant.
But this year we left a good portion kinda just wild.
We did not hay it and this is the result.
Things go to seed.
They go to flower.
And what you have is one, like a habitat for local animals.
You might see some birds, chirping, happily along
and two, the bees love this.
So, we had the best start ever, in part,
thanks to this big field here.
The nectar flow was wild.
Having all the flowers, making a ton of honey
and honey is not for us right now.
It's for them.
They need to like, have some food for the winter
and then we can talk about getting some honey from them
but I'm very excited and I'm so happy
it worked out this way and we just happened
to keep this field the way it is.
It's really pretty, too.
Let's go see the bees.
(laughs)
As you can see, we have five different hives.
That's five queens and a lot of busy bees.
Some of the hives are already taller than the others
because we've had to expand them, as they're just
full of honey and bees.
So, if things continue to go well and these bees
are really happy we're going to have a lot
of local, raw honey to harvest and sell
at our farm stand at Hedge Hill Farm.
And if you want to follow along and see what's new,
what's happening @Hedge Hill Farm on Instagram,
(exhales)
and you can follow along and see what's new.
You see a solar panel, you hear a clicking noise, maybe?
You see some bare wires there.
It's for bears.
It's an electric fence that's here to keep the bees safe
because you know that bears love honey.
I don't even want them to hear us talking about this.
It's too much for them to hear.
It's not going to kill them though, it's just like
a little shock to like, say, hey, stay away.
If you're wondering, yes, the winters here
are very, very cold.
This is a hybrid of an Italian honeybee
and they're a little bit hardier so, it's better
for our New England winters.
One of the things that was so interesting last spring
was seeing the variety of bees we have.
There's little tiny sweat bees, tons of bumble bees,
carpenter bees and bumblebees are actually my favorite.
They're the cutest, fuzziest things ever.
Anyways, there's one more field I really wanna show you.
So, come along and look, and yes it is bee related.
(gentle music)
Not today weeds, not today.
We just planted this cut flower garden
and I'm so obsessed with it.
So, over here, lots of lavender, so it's going to be
really aromatic.
And in these rows here that are seeded, we have sunflowers
and another variety of dahlia's, as well as zinnias.
So, lots of flowers that are gonna come up.
Half of this bed over here are cosmos.
Right next to the cosmos you can see some babies zinnias
popping their heads through.
They come in all different colors and you can get a lot of
petal variations, of form, some are really full
and some are more kinda like cosmo or daisy like,
with just like a fewer rows of petals.
All these cedar chips over here, one, they help keep
the weeds at bay.
There's a liner underneath, although there's seeds blowing
all over the place, so let's not kid ourselves.
But the other thing is they keep the ticks at bay.
Ticks hate cedar chips.
Little tick barrier, keep our flowers safe.
We can feel more confident in gardening
and it's always better to do what you can
in New England for ticks.
(gentle music)
(doors creak open)
Welcome to our farm stand to be.
This is one of our new barns and I wanna show you
what's inside.
Come take a look.
(gentle music)
So, right now this is a three stall barn.
There's one, two, three.
These are actually really nice stalls.
We're going to repurpose them in a different barn
we have behind us, that's just for animals.
All the space will be opened up and we're gonna have,
you know, just shelves and islands with
all the products from the farm.
This is such a great space.
We're really lucky to have it and I cannot wait to fill it
up with all the fresh produce, the cut flowers,
the bee's honey and those pumpkins.
Speaking of, we really have to get our act in gear
because we have 4,000 pumpkins that are growing
in that patch and I can not make that many pies.
It's not even possible.
So, wish me luck.
We have a lot to do.
(gentle music)
(goat bleating)
Right now we're in the goat paddock.
As you might hear and over in this paddock we have Billy,
our Billy goat, you might remember.
As well as Oliver and Twist, they used to be so much
smaller but they sure did grow up.
Really loud, too.
(imitates goats bleating)
(laughs)
Every five seconds.
They're not intact.
Billy is.
So, they're just, they're called the wethers.
They're here to just be friends with Billy
and hang out with him.
So, right now the boys and the girls are separated.
Just a good thing to do, until it is mating season.
So, there's less mischief around, right?
(goat bleats)
(John imitates goat bleating)
(goat bleats)
Aw, she misses Billy, that's cute.
(slow funky music)
(♪)
Look who it is, it's our goat queen Georgina.
Oh, she might be my favorite.
And I love her so much, although Spencer, I love you too.
(bright music)
Sorry.
Double knot next time, double knots.
Anyways, these are Nigerian dwarf goats, if you haven't
met them before, Georgina and Spencer, are our oldest,
we've had them for just over two years now
and Nigerian dwarf goats have the most amazing creamy milk.
It is da-licious.
Very hard to get though.
Not a lot of Nigerian dwarf goat herds out there
but we're building one.
So, if everything goes according to plan, we'll be able
to have some delicious milk and cheese, as well, right?
We'll see.
Hi.
Ah, they're so friendly.
They're so sweet.
If I stop scratching her head, she's like, um, excuse me.
And then she, that gives you a nibble.
If you have any questions about Nigerian dwarf goats
or anything you've seen here, by the way,
drop them in the comments below and I'll try to answer
as many as possible or include them in the next
farm update video.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this little tour
of Hedge Hill Farm.
Let me know if there's something that you want to see
in the next video and if you like this video,
check out our farm playlist.
I'll see you in the next one.
'Cause it's time to go inside.
I need some lemonade.