Join us for a farm tour, casual mingle, and dinner featuring local, pasture-raised meat on our spit.

You may have heard that I am taking time off to work on my writing. Which raises the question: writing what? 

While our restaurant has been put to bed until St. Patrick’s Day, we are enjoying some family time, and projects are being planned, new visions are being refined, and we are looking forward to a great 2026 and beyond.

Planting beans is one of the easier things that we do. We weed them a couple of times, give them trellises, and then for the most part leave them alone. Most of the work comes later. After picking them and allowing them to dry in their pods for several weeks, the beans need to be shucked, in other words, separated from their pods. This way they can be stored long term.

Each fall, a group of us from the kitchen take the short trip to the bog and spend a couple of hours picking, by hand without the aid of flooding, all of the berries we will need for the upcoming festivities. It has become an Orchard Kitchen tradition.