Hello friends… it’s been awhile! I had intended to get a blog post out in June, but it’s taken me all summer and most of the fall to carve out the time to sit down and reflect. It was a whirlwind of a season and my first thought is to express my profound gratitude to our customers, our partners, folks that have come to our farm-to-table dinners and our first concert, people who stopped by our tent at the farmers’ market, every disc golfer that has visited our course, and so many others - we have really built a community here! While we’re only 16 months into our farm adventure here at Tripping Gnome, it feels like it’s been a lifetime since our opening day in July 2022. The clearest illustration I can give of our growth occurred last week when I made my weekly drop-off at the food pantry at Freeport Community Services. One of the amazing volunteers there saw me come in with my bag of produce and declared, “The farm lady is here!” How I went from a high school Dean of Students to the “farm lady” so quickly is still unbelievable to me, but I LOVE IT!

Despite the cold temperatures outside, activity at the farm is still in full swing. Our greenhouse is packed to the gills with fresh microgreens and we are thankful to our own market customers as well as both Bow Street Market and Wanderlust Juicery for purchasing our healthy greens every week. We are in the process of building more shelves in the greenhouse so that we can accommodate all of the microgreens as well as our vegetable seedlings, which we will start in February. On the other side of the barn, our mushroom grow room is pumping out fresh oyster and lion’s mane mushrooms daily and by the end of the year, shiitakes will also be joining the mix on a regular basis, as opposed to just making an occasional appearance. 

We continue to fully commit to letting no food go to waste here at the farm. All of our produce is either sold to our customers, donated to Freeport Community Services, or freeze dried by our partner Green Geans, which then gives the produce a second life as a shelf-stable product which adds a taste of summer into all of your favorite dishes!

We have again honed our produce list for our field production based on what grows well here and also which vegetables we enjoy working with. Saying goodbye to a few crops (sorry, turnips!) will leave more room for some of our favorites (look for our regulars plus new bean, potato, and tomato varieties coming in 2024!). 

We’ve now hosted six farm-to-table dinners and we are looking forward to 2 more ramen-making evenings with the amazing Chef Chris Toy, and then a hot-pot meal with Chris on March 23rd - stay tuned for a formal announcement soon about that event. We are also about to have our second Holiday Market (free s’mores!) and we have planned at least 2 more concerts for the spring and summer in our Folk at the Farm concert series, following up on our wonderful inaugural concert by our friends, Chris and Meredith Thompson. Our Guest House is becoming a hub of exciting activities here at the farm and we have begun to rent it out to people in the community who want to make their own fun there. If you are interested in hosting your own event at the Guest House, please let us know and we will work with you to make your vision a reality.

The adventure continues everyday here and we can’t wait to see what’s next! Thank you for your support, as always.

Hi everyone! This is Emma (a.k.a. Farm Daughter) here! I’m currently sitting in my apartment back in Brooklyn, but I just got to spend a wonderful and relaxing week on the farm and wanted to bring you all along.

I arrived mid-day last Saturday–a sap boiling day! Pulling onto Lupine Lane, I was greeted by a cloud of steam rising above the barn. I had never been in Maine during syrup season, but I learned later that this was some of the water from a 75-gallon sap haul that over the course of that day would be transformed into 13 bottles of delicious maple syrup. After the initial boil was completed in the evaporator over at the barn, my mom (the head farmer herself, of course!!) brough the remaining sap inside the house for a final boil, which–little behind the scenes glance–happens in an L.L. Bean lobster pot! Very Maine. When the water had reduced all the way, I helped run the syrup through the filter/bottler, the final step which filters out any impurities. It was a lot of work, but one tiny spoon-full of the final product immediately proved how worth it it all was.

Over the next few days, I helped collect more sap from our trees (not even a foot of snow can stop us here), chatted with some of our incredibly lovely customers, checked on plants in the greenhouse and cold frames, organized hand-dyed T-shirts, and hung out with Tripping Gnome VIPs Gina of Green Gean’s and Stella the farm dog.

But the following Saturday was really the pinnacle of the week–the day we went ~corporate~. Just kidding! But we are excited to announce that from here on out, you can find our microgreens at Bow Street Market in Freeport–just down the road from our farm. We have loved Bow Street for a long time, and it was so exciting to partner with them and bring some small Tripping Gnome Farm flair to their already wonderful produce section. Our fearless CFO (a.k.a. my dad) and I went on a little undercover mission to check out the display, and of course it looked amazing. We can’t wait for you to see it too!

That’s all for me for now! I am so proud of my family and the amazing community they have created around this project. Now to get some of that syrup to grocery stores in Brooklyn too…

With a foot of snow already on the ground and more on the way, everything here at the farm has taken on a quiet stillness. But while it might seem counterintuitive, this season is just as important for our crops as spring and summer. Just like us, soil needs time to rest and rejuvenate. All this snow protects the earth from temperature fluctuations, conserves moisture, and actually adds nitrogen to the soil that it picks up from the atmosphere.

While outside is blanketed and calm, our inside operations are in full swing. The greenhouse is complete and has provided us with the perfect environment for growing our microgreens, tomatoes, and peppers. And, of course, our mushrooms continue to thrive in our Shroom Room! We are harvesting about 10-12 pounds of mushrooms each week now and are continuing to gradually increase production. No matter how many crops we grow, we will always have a special place in our hearts for the mushrooms that started it all.

Speaking of new, we also just ordered seeds for our 2023 growing season! We can’t wait to introduce you all to some exciting new veggies (three words: Gin Fizz Tomato) and bring back all of our old favorites as well. We will be planting those seedlings in the greenhouse in the coming weeks so that they are strong and ready to be transplanted outside in the spring.

Since we are never ones to take too many breaks around here, we are also busy building our permanent indoor market, which we hope to have completed in March. We can’t wait to have a bigger (and warmer!) space in the barn to display all of our fresh and freeze dried produce and to continue to connect with our community. Stop by anytime to see how we’re growing!

Since the days are getting much, much, much colder (gotta love a Maine winter), we are currently transitioning to our greenhouse season. Over the winter we’ll be growing organic microgreens, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, spinach, and raspberries. Construction on the greenhouse is almost done, and while the sun warms the space during the day, we still need to get our heater up and running so the freezing temperatures at night don’t hurt the plants. We are also experimenting with our six cold frames, built completely with recycled wood and windows, which will stimulate growth using only passive solar energy. Winter visitors will be able to enjoy those cold frame crops, our delicious greenhouse produce, as well as fresh mushrooms and freeze-dried foods, as always.

Now, with Thanksgiving upon us, we can’t help but swell with gratitude at the incredible support we’ve received in our first four months. From our opening day on July 23, we have been thrilled to see so many people at the farm stand–neighbors, old friends, new friends, summer visitors from around the world, campers at Wolfe’s Neck Center, hikers at the state park, e-bikers, Vespa-riders, and guests simply stopping to ask for directions who ended up leaving with some yummy produce. It’s been hard work for sure, but it’s also been a wonderful whirlwind of happy moments with all of you. THANK YOU!

We’ve been open for about 6 weeks and we can’t describe how wonderful it has been to build connections with our entire community: neighbors and friends old, new, far and near. Every single one of you. We are learning and growing (see what we did there?) every day and figuring out what works best for us (potatoes!) and what is…a little more challenging (broccoli). We have done a bunch of recent plantings for a fall harvest and we will keep our outdoor beds producing yummy produce for as long as we can until we layer them with compost and other soil amendments for the winter. Then it will be time to turn our attention to the next big project - our greenhouse!

We are building a long greenhouse on the south side of the barn and plan to be open all winter (likely with amended hours - stay tuned) growing leafy greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and raspberries. We are also working on a “Shroom Room” to increase the volume of our mushroom harvests and have plans for a Sugar Shack to enhance our maple syrup production this spring.

There’s a lot going on here at Tripping Gnome and we can’t wait to share ALL of it with our community. Come visit us anytime for some fresh veggies, a round of free disc golf, or just some friendly conversation! Hope to see you soon.

What a remarkable weekend. After months of dreaming, planting, talking, planting, planning, building, and more planting, we are finally open for business!

To start things off, in one of our biggest updates to the farm to date, we decided to create a permanent store attached to our barn which (through lots of sweat and hard work) we finished in just two days! We used only recycled materials and are so proud of the warm and inviting space we created. It is truly a reflection of all the things we stand for here at Tripping Gnome.

Saturday was the big day!! And it could not have gone better. To prep, we harvested a beautiful collection of fresh produce, including oyster mushrooms, potatoes, radishes, peas, mixed lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, and more. Each harvest has brought new delights - discovering an unexpected treasure trove of early purple potatoes, seeing radishes literally popping out of the ground, watching our malabar spinach wind its way up our home-made trellis - it is all new and wonderful for us and we were so excited to finally share it with YOU, our amazing community, on Saturday.

And you came out in force! We were so excited to see so many friendly faces, and friends old and new at the stand throughout the day. As always, but especially today, we want to say a humongous THANK YOU. We could never have gotten to this day without your incredible support.

We will be open every Tuesday - Sunday from 11:00 - 5:00 from now on! Can’t wait to see you on the farm.

We are 20 days away from the grand opening of our farm stand at Tripping Gnome and we couldn’t be more excited!  Since our road sign went up a couple of weeks ago, so many people have been coming down the driveway to say hello and check out what we are doing. While we are not quite ready for business, here is a sneak peak of what has been keeping us busy!

Our field produce has been coming in nicely and we have already been able to harvest bunches of peas, radishes, chives, and lettuce. Since we still have a few weeks to go before we sell to the community, we have been freeze-drying these early crops which ensures that they will be preserved at their peak of flavor and freshness. The freeze-dried produce will be available at the farm stand along with the fresh produce that we will pick once we officially open. 

In mushroom news, the wine cap bed that we planted in March has been producing giant mushrooms (8 inches across the cap!), which are absolutely delicious sauteed with a little butter. These have gone into the freeze dryer as well, along with a batch of reishi mushrooms which we foraged from our very own woods - an exciting find! Reishis are known to have huge immunological benefits and our freeze dried reishis can be boiled in water for about a half an hour to make a tea. We also planted two outdoor straw beds of oyster mushrooms, which should be popping up any day now, and we have our indoor mushroom tent up and running in our kitchen. By opening day, we should be fully stocked for all of your mushroom needs!

If you’re in the area, you can find us at the Freeport Farmer’s Market from 9-1 on Friday, July 22 (and every other Friday after that through the beginning of October) and then of course, at our own farm stand starting on July 23! We CANNOT WAIT to see you.

We are fully immersed in planting season at Tripping Gnome!

In the last 4 weeks, we have planted multiple varieties of potatoes, swiss chard, radishes, carrots, kale, lettuce, tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, squash, beans, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, onions, spinach, peppers, eggplant, celery, strawberries, and blueberries - whoa! We can’t wait to harvest the best salad ever sometime around July!

This year, all of our veggies are growing in raised beds - either one of the four 80 foot x 4 foot wooden ones, built by our Head of Operations, Corey, or one of the seven smaller metal beds from Vego Garden. We also have delicious Tulameen raspberries growing in pots right now, which we are planning to move into our soon-to-be-built greenhouse for a winter harvest (more on that experiment coming soon).

In more technical farm news, we’ve just installed a drip irrigation system in our beds to keep the crops healthy and hydrated. Shoutout to Trevor and his awesome team at Environmental Solutions for getting that up and running!

That’s all for now! We can’t wait to welcome you when we officially open in JULY.

It’s been a busy few weeks at the farm!

We have officially finished our mushroom log inoculation and ended up with about 30 logs each of shitake and oyster mushrooms. We will keep the logs shaded and watered through the spring and summer, and they will be ready for harvest in the fall! We can’t wait to share them with you.

We also planted a new bed of wine cap mushrooms, which will be ready mid-summer. These mushrooms have a giant red top and are a great source of umami flavor for any dish.

While the mushrooms grow, we are turning our attention to the next planting season. Buds have begun to appear on our maple trees, which signifies the end of syrup production and the beginning of spring! We will be planting onions and potatoes in our first two raised beds soon and look forward to planting the rest of our veggies later this spring.

The farm is not just for produce. We are currently developing a small (free!) disc golf course for everyone to enjoy when they visit the farm. It will be designed by our very own Digital Media Director, Noah Keates. Get your throwing arms ready!

Finally, we wanted to thank all of you for the ENORMOUS outpouring of support we’ve received as we begin this new adventure! We do it all at Tripping Gnome Farm, but none of this would be possible without our incredible community. THANK YOU!

Things are finally starting to feel real around here.

Last week was all about the mushrooms, and we could not have done it without our amazing Tripping Gnome family. Cousins and friends flocked to the farm to help with our first EVER round of mushroom log inoculation. We had an assembly line of hole drillers, mushroom plug hammerers, and lots of wax daubers. After two days of work, we had inoculated 11 oak logs with shiitake sawdust and 15 poplar logs with oyster plugs. We can’t wait to see these mushrooms popping out in about 6 months (hopefully!).

For now, the logs are all in the laying yard and I am watching over them carefully to make sure they stay moist and healthy - the rain over the last few days has been perfect!

This week, we are building raised beds in the fields and continuing to work on our commercial kitchen, which will serve as the future home of our partner, Green Gean’s LLC. Stay tuned for updates!