Apprentices on the Homestead

Reader Contribution by Mary Lou Shaw
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This is our first year of having apprentices at our homestead, and over-all, it has been a good experience. I’ll be wiser about the best way to go about this after several more years and working with different apprentices, but I’m grateful this year has been a good beginning. 

I had different reasons for wanting young people to come and work with us. First of all, we can use some help. Our 13 acres includes a large vegetable garden, orchard, bees, Dutch Belted cows, Dorking and Freedom Ranger chickens, Red Wattle hogs, Narragansett turkeys and Ancona ducks. 

A second reason for wanting apprentices is that there’s so much they can learn here. Maintaining the holistic orchard and non-chemical garden requires knowledge that conventional farmers can’t offer. Besides raising crops, we milk and have herd-shares, raise meat birds on pasture — and give other breeds free-run of the barnyard. Helping to preserve rare breeds is a learning curve in itself, but dealing with their produce — milk, eggs and meat — provides many other learning situations. Creating meals from what is produced here as well as learning methods of storing food for winter is part of what we do. I hope that working with us for a summer would give people the basic skills to feed themselves. 

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