Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I finally got the pictures I've been wanting to post for this cool feat for something local to me!
Number Four Farm in The World
What's really incredible is when people get to see different things other than the popular tourist traps attractions in a local area.
New England is definitely one of the more popular places around the world when it comes to beautiful scenery. Things are in the eye of the beholder of course but New England has something for pretty much everybody I would say. One of the things that it doesn't lack in is natural beauty of many different kinds. One of the travel websites, linked below, has considered Cider Hill Farm in Amesbury Massachusetts, USA, to be the fourth most beautiful farm in the whole world! Whoa, when we read that we were shocked!
https://www.thetravel.com/beautiful-farms-to-visit-around-the-world/
Cider Hill is one of our favorite farms around (we even have a Cider Hill coffee mug that says so! :D), given that we get a lot of our food from there throughout the year, it would only make sense that we've gone around and explored it and personally thought it was a beautiful farm. It's pretty cool that someone went a few steps forward to that notion and decided to think about it and it's beauty for an international travel website as one of the most beautiful farms in the world!
I am going to try and do the farm some justice with some of the pictures I've taken there. Sadly the travel website, although a really awesome feature for Cider Hill, did an abysmal job of including pictures of the place that they consider one of the most beautiful farms in the world! Those damn amateurs lol. I'll go a step further and provide some shots I took with the DSLR the other day!
With the onset of autumn here in New England, one of the things that I tend to do around this time is decide that I'm going to break out the DSLR camera. I love my camera but for whatever reason I don't take it out a whole lot during the summer. I guess phone photography is better suited perhaps! Lol. In any case though, when I heard the news from the farm via their email list that it was voted as one of the most beautiful farms in the world, well you're damn skippy I wanted to share it with the wonderful people of the Hive blockchain here!
I don't mean to do a humble brag here, but it's pretty awesome living near some beautiful places but one of the top 4 most beautiful place for me would certainly be a farm, that's pretty damn cool if you ask me! :D
I didn't realize the sheer size of the farm, that surprised me a lot!
Cider Hill farm is 134 acres nestled in the central-northeast corner of Massachusetts. We've done lots of activities like apple picking and other things throughout the grounds of the farm but I guess I didn't walk it end to end until this recent time! We made our way from the bottom of the farm out past the parking lot all the way to the very back corner of the farm and now it feels a lot more like the thing sprawls for 134 acres let me tell you lol. It was incredible exercise for me and the little man though, so no complaints there!
Being early October, apple picking in this area was in full swing. With the warmer and drier summer that we had up here, I'm glad and surprised the apples have lasted this long. The apples were also bigger than I thought they were! Cider Hill does have it's own well though, so they are able to access unlimited amounts of water which I think is important for a farm. It's one of the most important things for a farmer to be able to water their crops as much as they deem necessary, seeing how awful it was for California farmers these past 2 years and the water rationing, I'm very happy to see that Cider Hill is maintaining their own water supply. On a very dry summer that has to be used judiciously of course, but they do a great job at it.
What was fun for me was walking around all the different areas of the farm. It's been a few years since we got out there and walked around so I certainly enjoyed getting out there and exploring the areas that we didn't get to before. There is a really big hill at the back of the farm and we only previously walked up a small portion of it, and turned into one of the apple rows to pick. This time, the little man and I were determined to do some exploring so we went around the entire thing!
Having gotten the share of our food for the past few years, it is good to take a walk around the farm and see the different sections they have for the various fruits we get. This farm is great in that they do not only a lot of vegetables but also a considerable amount of fruit. We got peaches, nectarines, strawberries, blueberries, pears and watermelons this year from them. Below are a portion of the peach trees and I think as well the nectarine trees which I've never seen at this particular farm before.
What's nice being at this farm is overlooking everything from the top of the hill here. This vantage point really lets you appreciate and enjoy the wide expanse that is Cider Hill Farm.
The buildings on the left side there are important pieces of the operations! The red barn is the equipment barn and where they fix things, the building next to it on the right is the farm store, with the bottom level of it where we pick up our CSA shares and the building next to that is the food vendor area where they sell all kinds of goodies like donuts, hot dogs etc. On the other side of that near the tent to the right a few inches in the picture is the chicken coop and run. It's hard to see it here but it's pretty darn big! They've got 350 or so chickens, it's awesome! Lots of delicious fresh eggs lol.
I loved this sign here, it's certainly one of my favorites. Cider Hill, when you look at it, has so much land to it but it's also got a lot of wild bits as well! The farm owners have done a really good job at taking the land that they have and fine tuning it very well so that it is both cycled in terms of the crops that are planted in the different sections, as well as still wild so that the animals, plants and local wildlife still have plenty of places to live and help the area foster the remarkable amount of life that it supports and holds.
Typically when people think of farming, they think of the massive, wide-open plains of middle-America. There are certainly a lot of things that can be said about these types of farms, as they are important for bringing food to massive amounts of people not only just in America but throughout the world. What is difficult for those types of farms though, is that they are fairly damaging to the ecosystems that are as fragile as they are lately. Single crop agriculture is not good for the environment because it depletes the soil nutrients instead of variable planting that helps regenerate and rotate the soils. Seeing a farm like Cider Hill is great because it's a farm that sustains a lot of people in the area but it looks like it does it in a very regenerative and beneficial manner.
I loved looking down the long aisles of trees on the beautiful sunny day that we got the chance to go. It made for some really great pictures, pictures that the people who wrote the above mentioned travel article could have certainly included! Lol.
I hope I've done some justice to the magnificent farm that is Cider Hill in Amesbury Massachusetts. There were so many vantage points that could be taken and different pictures to take but I wanted to keep it to only a handful of ones that I think show and highlight some of the true beauty of the place besides just focusing on the farm store, farm house and others. I think if we can step back and appreciate these farms for what they are, massive areas of land, plants and trees, instead of just the hustle and bustle, we can learn to appreciate a lot more!
Let me know what you think of the farm and the pictures I tried to take of it!
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