LUCKY DUCK FARM

Here at Lucky Duck you’ll find dogs, cats, chickens, honeybees, vegetable and flower gardens, an old apple orchard, lots of maple trees, endless woodpiles, and acres of hayfields. Between fixing up the farmhouse and outside projects, there is always a job to be done. Some pretty cool things that go on around here are:

KEEPING BEES
HARVESTING HONEY
CHICKEN FARMING
VEGETABLE GARDENING
CIDER-MAKING
PUTTING UP FIREWOOD
MAPLE-SUGARING
PERENNIAL GARDENING

“It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth, to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season.” – Kate Morton

The Farm’s Story:

Apples hang heavy on the old trees. They're far from perfect, but still quite tasty! — Apples hang heavy on the old trees. They’re far from perfect, but still quite tasty.

One morning I was out collecting apples in the orchard and I came across a beautiful, huge, gloriously red Empire lying on the ground. I got so excited – Empire apples are my favorite, so sweet to eat right off the tree. The skin is such a lovely, shiny color, it practically glows in the sun. But they ripen early and don’t last long. Pleased as punch, I reached down to scoop it up and found a fat, yellow slug chewing it’s way happily through bottom. “You lucky *$#@&^* duck,” I said to him. And the name stuck (well, most of it).

My dog Hannah chews busily, trying to help dispose of a never-ending supply of sticks.

Like some people who say they have a farm, mine is more of small-time operation. A hobby farm, if you will. All around me, however, are real farms: farms with a thousand acres of corn and wheat; dairy farms that have existed in families for generations; and farms where beef cattle or sheep graze in vast numbers. So my little slice of acreage isn’t much in comparison. But my farm is mine, and I love it.

The old greenhouse waits to be re-covered and used again someday.

It was once a more hard-working place, a commercial vegetable farm to be precise, about 30 years ago. I have the skeletal remains of an old greenhouse and the footprints of where two more used to stand to prove it. And there is more evidence of the farm’s former life left behind: Here and there an asparagus plant sprouts up through the undergrowth, and berry bushes run wild through the fields and along the edge of the woods, armed to the teeth. It’s a riot of weeds and vines in some places, and oases of green fields and forests in others. When you have a farm that isn’t exactly a farm, you have to learn to appreciate contradictions.