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For Lissa Goldstein, June is the best month of the year.
“June is like – most things are in, they’re looking good, it’s under control, things are starting to come into fruition,” she said. “But there’s not a lot of spent stuff in the field, so it looks very beautiful.”
Beautiful is an understatement. Wild Work Farm in Keene Valley, with its neat rows, lush surrounding fields and the backdrop of High Peaks, is like something from a storybook. Goldstein and her staff have been maintaining the fields, coming into harvest as a heatwave brings temperatures into the 90s and June turns to July.
They also spent the relatively calm month implementing an agroforestry project called alley cropping. Agroforestry mixes trees with other agricultural systems. Livestock farmers might do silvopasture, planting trees on pasture to help with shade and foraging for the livestock. With alley cropping, annuals (veggies) are planted in between rows of perennial trees. Just like the Asian pear trees in between rows of squash and cabbage.
“It was part of a climate resilience grant that Ashlee Kleinhammer (of North Country Creamery) was also a part of, and that got quashed,” Goldstein said.
Goldstein decided that since they’d already done a lot of the leg work, she would proceed on her own.
Then, as fate would have it, the project ended up funded anyway, in part through the Adirondack North Country Association and Essex County Soil and Water. It’s now partially implemented, with some of the trees in the ground and others still in pots.
Read the full story in the Adirondack Explorer.