Black Brook Farm

Black Brook Farm We nurture wildlife habitats, and in the process grow safe and healthy food.

Rewilding the Finger Lakes through regenerative agriculture and native pollinator gardening for more than thirty years.

...and yet big agriculture would have you believe Roundup leaves the soil in six weeks so it is safe. Large farm operat...
12/20/2025

...and yet big agriculture would have you believe Roundup leaves the soil in six weeks so it is safe. Large farm operations are not growing food. They are growing corn, soybeans, and planetary destruction.

Being closely connected with nature, our food sources, and the role we play in this interconnected planet, we are often ...
12/10/2025

Being closely connected with nature, our food sources, and the role we play in this interconnected planet, we are often confronted with examples of both the fragility and strength of life. The majority of humans on this planet are removed from the realities of survival in the wild, and so are our pets.

In the colder months when the vegetation dies back, bones of the dead who did not survive an encounter with a predator, illness, injury, or old age are laid bare. Wild animals face the perils and bounty of the seasons from early on, learning from their parents or having the instinct to find food, ferret out shelter, and deal with predators. Unfortunately, we see far too many remains from domesticated animals like this cat. It was likely was dropped off at the nature preserve we were hiking in and lacked the skills to survive, or it was left out at a neighboring house and was gotten by a large raptor. Whichever the case, domesticated animals have the same chance of surviving in the wild as we do, which is almost zero.

If you have a pet that you can no longer care for, do the responsible thing and find them a home or take them to a shelter. Dropping them off is not an option. If you have a cat that is an indoor/outdoor pet, be diligent, keep an eye on them, and bring them in at night. They are reliant on you to keep them safe.

There is never enough thyme in the garden. I have been designing a culinary and medicinal herb garden for a customer he...
12/09/2025

There is never enough thyme in the garden. I have been designing a culinary and medicinal herb garden for a customer here in the Finger Lakes. Herb gardens are easy to grow and tend to require less care, but thought needs to go into the plants that will most benefit the kitchen or medicine cabinet you intend to fill.

Perennial herbs are the backdrop of any culinary garden. Winter thyme, oregano, sage, chives, and French tarragon are a good, solid base of traditional, cold hardy herbs that should provide lasting success.

For home gardeners in CNY, German thyme (aka winter thyme) is the best choice. It has a stronger flavor than the delicate French floral or the earthy, woodsy English types, but it will be there every spring, which is not always the case with the other two.

I will be adding several fun thyme cultivars into this new garden including creeping varieties like Leprechaun, Annie Hall, and elfin between the stepping stones. However, because I am focusing on flavor, I will be adding lemon, rose, and French thyme, which work well in both savory and sweet dishes, and caraway thyme for special cocktail concoctions. These are all great additions for your own garden, but may require some planning and care to ensure they overwinter. If you start now, you will have plenty of time to plan and thyme to enjoy them all!

Suggested thyme varieties for home gardeners wanting to spice up their dishes and beverages:

1) German aka winter thyme
2) Lemon thyme
3) Caraway thyme

Life is to short to spend it inside staying clean. Get outside and get dirty, connect with life, explore and enjoy, and...
12/08/2025

Life is to short to spend it inside staying clean. Get outside and get dirty, connect with life, explore and enjoy, and learn something new every day.

In the long winter months when spent leaves skip across the ice capped snow and last year's seed pods nod atop brittle s...
12/07/2025

In the long winter months when spent leaves skip across the ice capped snow and last year's seed pods nod atop brittle stalks, the bounty of summer seems so far away.

If you are lucky, you have some of that bounty put away in your pantry just waiting to be opened like jars of delicious tomatoes, braids of garlic, and bags of dried beans.

Seeds are one of those storage crops that home gardeners often overlook. North America has many native edible seeds, but none quite so iconic as the sunflower (or so easy to harvest and store). The Indigenous people of North America relied on them to provide healthy unsaturated fat and vitamins through the winter months, and so can we.

Sunflowers are easy to grow. They have very shallow root systems for such tall plants, so adding a layer of compost right in the row when you plant the seeds should suffice.

Once sunflowers have finished their long floral display (each head is actually hundreds or even thousands of tiny, individual flowers), their petals will fall, pollen will drop, and seeds will begin to plump out. That is when you can take recycled mesh or brown paper bags and tie them around the heads with jute.

After the bagged up seed heads begin to dry on the stalk, cut and hang them somewhere mice and squirrels cannot get to them. The seeds can be harvested any time after that. Each head should contain between 1,000-2,000 seeds - not a bad return for one seed planted in the ground.

Of course, you can always feed these seeds to the birds. Just hang the dried heads out in your trees and they will quickly take care of them.

These are my recommended varieties for seed production: Mammoth Grey Stripe, Mammoth Russian, Titan, Hopi Black Dye (this one works well for dying fabrics as well, but definitely stains your fingers when you harvest them), and Tarahumara White Seeded.

Happy gardening!

Everyone has to eat, especially during these coldest of months. If you have a bird feeder, it is likely you have witnes...
12/06/2025

Everyone has to eat, especially during these coldest of months. If you have a bird feeder, it is likely you have witnessed a hawk stalking nearby.

I looked out of the kitchen window this morning to find a Cooper's Hawk dining on a Mourning Dove. His small curved beak was methodically tearing strips and eating them.

Cooper's Hawks lack a killing notch, aka tomial tooth, in their beaks, so they rely on their talons to catch prey. They have very long toes, especially the middle toe, which allows them to snag flying prey, grab unsuspecting birds off of branches, and pierce their meals mid-air, securing them in a tight grip as they reach short burst speeds of up to 50 mph. They are small raptors, reaching no more than 20 inches long with wingspans of up to three feet. These little flying machines are truly magnificent to watch in action.

When he finished his meal, he leaned sideways resting until he was reluctantly forced to move when I went out for a closer look. He could barely lift himself more than five feet off of the ground in flight, and landed in a nearby tree, stuffed and heavy.

There was zero meat or bone left, just feathers. No waste. Those high nitrogen containing feathers will likely line rodent nests this winter and eventually decompose to create rich soil.

Cooper's Hawks are listed as special concern in NY, meaning their overall survival is at risk due to habitat loss, consumption of poisons used to control rodents, and impacts with vehicles. They are slowly adapting to urban environments where food like pigeons and rats is plentiful, but the thought saddens me. I love to watch them darting through the skies and swooping like heat-seeking missiles through the pines. It is important that we protect their hunting grounds and the wilderness that supports them.

No other flower holds more sentiment for me than Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota), aka wild carrot. My mother and I us...
12/04/2025

No other flower holds more sentiment for me than Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota), aka wild carrot. My mother and I used to pick them to make delicious battered blossoms. I fondly remember warm summer days wading through waist high fields to get at the largest, freshest blooms.

Daucus carota is not a native plant, though not federally listed as invasive. In England it used to be called "rantipole" or "reckless wanderer" because It pops up in disturbed areas like roadsides.

Queen Anne's Lace was named after Queen Anne of Great Britain who apparently enjoyed making lace. Legend has it that one day she challenged her ladies in waiting to a lacemaking competition. The woman who could make lace as fine as the rantipole flower would win. Of course, none would dare best the queen, and her lace was declared the finest.

As a consolation, the queen gave a bouquet of rantipole flowers to all of the competitors, but one of her ladies in waiting noted that the queen had pricked her finger and bled on one of the flowers. She exclaimed that the queen's blood looked like the dark spot in the middle of the wild carrot flower and the flower was renamed Queen Anne's Lace.

Most Daucus carota flowers have a dark spot in the middle of their lacy white flowers, and its purpose is a hot topic of scientific debate. Charles Darwin hypothesized that it was a vestigial organ (basically a leftover that had no real purpose). Recently scientists have challenged that theory and they have some compelling evidence to back it up. They believe the spot, which is actually a tiny purple flower in and of itself, mimics an insect, indicating to pollinators that there is some tasty nectar to be had. Another theory is that it acts like a bullseye or landing spot indicator for flying insects. After days of watching flowers (best job ever), researchers found that the Queen Anne's Lace flowers that had the spots had a significant increase in pollinators visiting them, indicating that the dark flower mutation is in fact a beneficial mutation. Nature is amazing.

I will leave my mother's recipe for battered blossoms in the comments. Enjoy!

When you are planning your garden for next year, try to imagine what you would be eating right now. Those tantalizing c...
12/03/2025

When you are planning your garden for next year, try to imagine what you would be eating right now. Those tantalizing catalogs hook us in with images of juicy tomatoes, snappy beans, and crispy lettuce, but if you are planting a practical home garden, you want to prepare for the time of year when all of that cool stuff has been packed away in jars, dried, or frozen. If you plan it right, you can be harvesting fresh from your garden or eating long-term storage crops when those catalogs arrive in the mail next December.

One of my favorite food groups (if you can call it that) is the root group. Yanking or digging up vegetables hidden in the dirt feeds my inner child - the one who is still looking for treasure. This time of year I am still pulling up winter storage radishes, salad turnips, carrots, root parsley, and rutabaga. These vegetables last for a long time in the cold, but are also great to store in the root cellar, basement, or refrigerator, especially when the ground gets too frozen to work.

Here are some of my favorite tried and true roots that grow well in our clay-rich CNY soil:

1) Cylindra beet
2) Oxheart carrot
3) Shin kuroda carrot
4) Yellowstone carrot
5) Hilds Blauer Herbst und Winter radish
6) Misato Rose winter radish
7) White egg turnip
8) Hakurei salad turnip
9) Hinona kabu turnip
10) Brilliant celeriac
11) Berliner parsley root
12) Kral Russian parsnip

Feel free to mention any of your favorite root veg varieties in the comments. Part of the fun is the anticipation of next year's harvest. Happy garden planning!

Snow on sumac.
12/02/2025

Snow on sumac.

12/01/2025

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Rickard Road
Skaneateles, NY
13152

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+13152373856

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