Today the future of interoperability was discussed and endorsed by a joint meeting of the Standards and Policy Committees.
We began with a preamble clearly stating that the roadmap we’re working on is a process not a finished product.
Karen DeSalvo, Jacob Reider, Paul Tang and I offered framing comments for the day.
I suggested that Health IT is in its “trough of disillusionment” moment before it moves toward the “slope of enlightenment”. In the past two weeks, many of my incoming emails have been punctuated with negative feelings about EHRs - Ebola caused by a lack of interoperability, physician/patient relationships strained by the distraction of new electronic workflow requirements, and poor usability. The work ahead is to focus on interoperability, building on the lessons learned and progress made to address key workflow issues.
Erica Galvez from ONC provided initial interoperability framing, illustrating the progress we’ve made thus far.
It’s clear that millions of transactions are being exchanged today, addressing many use cases including public health, quality measurement, and transitions of care.
Erica then continued with the draft 10 year shared interoperability roadmap.
Key milestones included
2017 - providers and individuals send, receive, find, use a basic set of essential health information
2020 - granular information access, expanded uses of information.
2024 - learning healthcare system
This effort will be based on a foundation of standards, certification, security, culture change, and governance.
We broadly discussed the presentation. Commenters described the tension between functional requirements and overly prescriptive standards, the need for innovation and the desire for adoption of mature standards, and the need for privacy and while at the same time fostering increased sharing.
In the afternoon we discussed governance, recognizing that both top down and bottom up models have their supporters. Additional work will be down by the Policy Committee’s HIE Workgroup.
The capstone of the day was a presentation by the Jason Task Force, reviewing the Jason Report.
The six key points from that presentation were:
*Focus on Interoperability. ONC and CMS should focus their efforts on interoperability, realizing that healthcare IT stakeholders cannot accomplish every goal simultaneously given limited time and resources
*Industry-Based Ecosystem. A Coordinated Architecture based on market-based arrangements should be defined to create an ecosystem to support interoperability .
*Data Sharing Networks in a Coordinated Architecture. The architecture should be based on a Coordinated Architecture that loosely couples market-based Data Sharing Networks (which might also be called Data Sharing Arrangements)
*Public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as a basic conduit of interoperability. The Public API should enable data- and document-level access to clinical and financial systems according to contemporary internet principles.
*Priority API Services. Core Data Services and Profiles should define the minimal data and document types supported by Public APIs.
*Government as market motivator. ONC should assertively monitor the progress of exchange and implement non-regulatory steps to catalyze the adoption of Public APIs.
The group discussed the challenge of focusing on interoperability while also pursing the prescriptive goals of meaningful use. One commenter proposed examining the collective burden/impact of all ONC/CMS requirements and then deciding on phasing.
The group approved these 6 points by consensus as part of a transmittal letter from the federal advisory committees to ONC.
The key takeaway - the approval of these 6 points begins the movement away from a model in which data is extracted from an EHR and then pushed from point to point. Instead the future belongs to real time query of document-based and discrete data from the point of origin where it is stored, to the point of use, such as another EHR, patient mobile device, or population health registry. Standards that are generally used on the internet such as JSON, OAuth, and REST are likely candidates, especially as implemented in FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources).
The next step at the government level is joint federal advisory committee/ONC work over the next 90 days to finalize the roadmap combined with private sector work (industry, standards organizations, academia, patients, providers, payers) to accelerate standards that support the 6 points in Jason Task Force report.
A remarkable day with great energy and enthusiasm to move healthcare toward the same interoperability approach used by Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple App Store, and most non-healthcare industries. 2015 will be a pivotal year for real time query-based data exchange.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Unity Farm Journal - Second Week of October 2014
Several important updates.
Mint, one of our pregnant alpacas, had a false pregnancy. Although she gained weight and had all the features of a pregnant camelid, she is no longer pregnant. However, she is 30 pounds overweight and we’ll now have to restrict her access to grain. Time for the alpaca stairmaster.
Mulan, our Harlequin duck with aspiration pneumonia is improving after 10 days on tetracycline. She’s regaining her quack (for almost 2 weeks she’s been voiceless) and is now running with the other ducks. She’s still a bit fatigued, but is on the mend.
It’s apple picking time. My daughter and I picked six varieties of cider apples and organized an apple tasting at the farm to inform our cider making activities.
We decided that Empire was our favorite eating apple, followed by Rome Beaty and Macoun. Our heirloom cider apples - Ben Davis, Northern Spy, and Roxbury Russet were good but had a very firm consistency with a bittersharp taste. Our plan for the upcoming weekend is to crush cider using 1 bushel of Macoun (aromatic), 3 bushels of Baldwin (sweet), 1 bushel of McIntosh (tart), and 1 bushel of crab apples (astringent). Although our apple harvest this year is in the hundreds of pounds, we’ll hopefully have thousands of pounds when the trees mature in 5 years.
Our existing cider fermentation is going well and we have developed a standard process - crush, ferment for 2 weeks, rack, add malolactic fermentation cultures, age for 4 months, bottle, age for 2 months, drink!
As winter approaches, all the creatures of the forest are storing up reserves for winter. The squirrels are storing the acorns that are falling at a fast clip. The bees are stockpiling nectar and pollen. Even the preying mantis (find it in the picture below) are eating their fill.
Leaves are falling, birds are migrating, and mushrooms are popping everywhere.
This weekend (Columbus Day) is all about manure management - moving 10000 pounds of “llama beans” into windrows, a new squash planting area, and our garlic beds. During all that hauling I’ll also move one of our wood chip piles into a new mushroom area using a new technique to first grow Agaricus spawn on cardboard then inoculating chips. I’m hoping for a great spring crop as we expand the number of mushroom species on the farm. Japanese Nameko and Shimeji are my next experiments.
Mint, one of our pregnant alpacas, had a false pregnancy. Although she gained weight and had all the features of a pregnant camelid, she is no longer pregnant. However, she is 30 pounds overweight and we’ll now have to restrict her access to grain. Time for the alpaca stairmaster.
Mulan, our Harlequin duck with aspiration pneumonia is improving after 10 days on tetracycline. She’s regaining her quack (for almost 2 weeks she’s been voiceless) and is now running with the other ducks. She’s still a bit fatigued, but is on the mend.
It’s apple picking time. My daughter and I picked six varieties of cider apples and organized an apple tasting at the farm to inform our cider making activities.
We decided that Empire was our favorite eating apple, followed by Rome Beaty and Macoun. Our heirloom cider apples - Ben Davis, Northern Spy, and Roxbury Russet were good but had a very firm consistency with a bittersharp taste. Our plan for the upcoming weekend is to crush cider using 1 bushel of Macoun (aromatic), 3 bushels of Baldwin (sweet), 1 bushel of McIntosh (tart), and 1 bushel of crab apples (astringent). Although our apple harvest this year is in the hundreds of pounds, we’ll hopefully have thousands of pounds when the trees mature in 5 years.
Our existing cider fermentation is going well and we have developed a standard process - crush, ferment for 2 weeks, rack, add malolactic fermentation cultures, age for 4 months, bottle, age for 2 months, drink!
As winter approaches, all the creatures of the forest are storing up reserves for winter. The squirrels are storing the acorns that are falling at a fast clip. The bees are stockpiling nectar and pollen. Even the preying mantis (find it in the picture below) are eating their fill.
Leaves are falling, birds are migrating, and mushrooms are popping everywhere.
This weekend (Columbus Day) is all about manure management - moving 10000 pounds of “llama beans” into windrows, a new squash planting area, and our garlic beds. During all that hauling I’ll also move one of our wood chip piles into a new mushroom area using a new technique to first grow Agaricus spawn on cardboard then inoculating chips. I’m hoping for a great spring crop as we expand the number of mushroom species on the farm. Japanese Nameko and Shimeji are my next experiments.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
The View from Underneath the Bus
EHR causes Ebola! EHRs hold data hostage in stovepiped legacy systems! There is no interoperability in America!
How many headlines have you seen over the past month that are either completely false or a vast oversimplification of complex issues.
As I tell my staff, there is no problem that cannot be morphed into an IT shortcoming.
There a point at which CIOs, EHR vendors, and those working on policy feel like each day is spent being thrown under a bus.
The journey of the last decade has been the continuous progression of technology, policy, and cultural change that has moved us from 10% adoption of EHRs to over 70%.
In Massachusetts, millions of transactions are exchanged for care coordination, population health and quality measurement every month.
Web-based, mobile friendly, cloud hosted products are either live or soon to be live from all the leading EHR vendors.
Am I satisfied with our position? No. We still have work to do.
Am I satisfied with our trajectory? Absolutely. There is a pace of cultural readiness that cannot be accelerated if adoption is our measure of success. Alignment of economic incentives, public education, and the evolution of technology are necessary pre-requisites for change.
When I was growing up in Southern California, I remember dropping envelopes into the Diebold "after hours" bank repository. Then one day, a machine became available that automated transactions with that one branch of that one bank.
A few years later, those machines worked with all branches of that one bank.
A few years later, those machines worked across different banks in California.
A few years later, those machines worked across the country.
A few years later, those machines worked across the globe in multiple currencies.
Automated Teller Machines evolved over time to address growing demands once workflow redesign, changes in consumer expectation, and worldwide network enablers were in place.
EHRs are in the biplane era and we’ve not yet invented jet engines, but we’re working on them.
We cannot go directly from horse drawn carriages to the Dreamliner.
I’m optimistic.
At the October 15, 2014 joint meeting of the Standards and Policy committees we’ll review the JASON report which will emphasize the need for open EHR Application Program Interfaces (APIs) without impediments (such as high fees) to data exchange.
HL7 is likely to have the necessary Draft Standards for Trial Use (second version of FHIR) by mid 2015.
Meaningful Use Stage 3 is likely to focus on interoperability.
So instead of a view from under the bus, it’s time for everyone to recognize the progress we’ve made, acknowledge the hard work ahead, and agree that there are unemotional next steps to address specific needs in specific timeframes.
I’ll do my best to educate all those stakeholders and journalists who focus on the absence of flying cars instead of the fact that horses have already turned into Teslas.
How many headlines have you seen over the past month that are either completely false or a vast oversimplification of complex issues.
As I tell my staff, there is no problem that cannot be morphed into an IT shortcoming.
There a point at which CIOs, EHR vendors, and those working on policy feel like each day is spent being thrown under a bus.
The journey of the last decade has been the continuous progression of technology, policy, and cultural change that has moved us from 10% adoption of EHRs to over 70%.
In Massachusetts, millions of transactions are exchanged for care coordination, population health and quality measurement every month.
Web-based, mobile friendly, cloud hosted products are either live or soon to be live from all the leading EHR vendors.
Am I satisfied with our position? No. We still have work to do.
Am I satisfied with our trajectory? Absolutely. There is a pace of cultural readiness that cannot be accelerated if adoption is our measure of success. Alignment of economic incentives, public education, and the evolution of technology are necessary pre-requisites for change.
When I was growing up in Southern California, I remember dropping envelopes into the Diebold "after hours" bank repository. Then one day, a machine became available that automated transactions with that one branch of that one bank.
A few years later, those machines worked with all branches of that one bank.
A few years later, those machines worked across different banks in California.
A few years later, those machines worked across the country.
A few years later, those machines worked across the globe in multiple currencies.
Automated Teller Machines evolved over time to address growing demands once workflow redesign, changes in consumer expectation, and worldwide network enablers were in place.
EHRs are in the biplane era and we’ve not yet invented jet engines, but we’re working on them.
We cannot go directly from horse drawn carriages to the Dreamliner.
I’m optimistic.
At the October 15, 2014 joint meeting of the Standards and Policy committees we’ll review the JASON report which will emphasize the need for open EHR Application Program Interfaces (APIs) without impediments (such as high fees) to data exchange.
HL7 is likely to have the necessary Draft Standards for Trial Use (second version of FHIR) by mid 2015.
Meaningful Use Stage 3 is likely to focus on interoperability.
So instead of a view from under the bus, it’s time for everyone to recognize the progress we’ve made, acknowledge the hard work ahead, and agree that there are unemotional next steps to address specific needs in specific timeframes.
I’ll do my best to educate all those stakeholders and journalists who focus on the absence of flying cars instead of the fact that horses have already turned into Teslas.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
First Week of October 2014
Mornings are dark, temperatures are dropping, rain is more frequent, the apples are ripe, and the fireplace is glowing with coals every night. It’s Fall.
Last weekend we picked 147 pounds of apples and made hard cider as follows
8% Crab Apples (Astringent)
56% McIntosh (Tart)
21% Honey Crisp (Sweet)
15% Macoun (Aromatic)
Specific Gravity 1.050
pH 3.34
I added 30ppm of Potassium Metabisulfite to kill wild yeasts and after 24 hours added 5 grams of Pasteur Champagne Yeast and 6.25g Yeast Nutrient.
The Speidel fermenters will keep the juice protected from dirt and bacteria for 14 days and the fermented juice will have a specific gravity of 1.0000 with a 6% alcohol.
Then I’ll add Wyeast 4007 Malo-Lactic cultures and age it over the winter
In March, I’ll add 4 ounces of dextrose for a slight effervescence (2.5 VCO2) and bottle it in swing top 16 ounce containers.
Best consumption will be in Fall 2015.
For the holidays, we’ll toast with the cider we made last winter.
On the animal side, we continue to wait for our next baby alpaca. There are only two possibilities - a false pregnancy (possible but unlikely) or an extra long gestation. Alpaca typically have an 11.5 month gestation but 15 months is possible. A baby born in winter would require the use of a “cria coat” - a down jacket for the baby. We’ll see. The barn loft is now filled with 300 bales of second growth hay. Grain and alfalfa are fully stocked for winter. The heated buckets are in place and we’ve touched up the windows/paint in the barn to keep everything warm.
Our duck with aspiration pneumonia continues on antibiotics and is still breathing hard. It’s hard to find a duck specific veterinarian, but our large animal vet will visit next week for alpaca mom/baby care and will spend time with the poultry.
The work of the farm is slow evolving from harvest to winter planting, from forest management to wood splitting, and from outdoor projects to indoor projects.
We’ll complete the construction of the walk in refrigerator this weekend just in time for the flood of mushrooms that will be ready. The oyster mushrooms have fruited like clockwork - golden oyster in August, Italian Oyster in early September, Gray Dove in mid-September, and Polar White in late September. The remaining 7 varieties are cold loving so they’ll fruit in October. We’re expecting 100’s of pounds.
I’ve been harvesting a few pounds of Shitake each day and they’ve been in lunchtime mushroom soup and dinner stir frys.
We’ll have more bee work this weekend, feeding the bees our homemade “bee tea” during the nectar nadir. One of the hives was weak and we consolidated two hives together to give them critical mass for the cold days ahead.
It's a great time to a farmer.
Last weekend we picked 147 pounds of apples and made hard cider as follows
8% Crab Apples (Astringent)
56% McIntosh (Tart)
21% Honey Crisp (Sweet)
15% Macoun (Aromatic)
Specific Gravity 1.050
pH 3.34
I added 30ppm of Potassium Metabisulfite to kill wild yeasts and after 24 hours added 5 grams of Pasteur Champagne Yeast and 6.25g Yeast Nutrient.
The Speidel fermenters will keep the juice protected from dirt and bacteria for 14 days and the fermented juice will have a specific gravity of 1.0000 with a 6% alcohol.
Then I’ll add Wyeast 4007 Malo-Lactic cultures and age it over the winter
In March, I’ll add 4 ounces of dextrose for a slight effervescence (2.5 VCO2) and bottle it in swing top 16 ounce containers.
Best consumption will be in Fall 2015.
For the holidays, we’ll toast with the cider we made last winter.
On the animal side, we continue to wait for our next baby alpaca. There are only two possibilities - a false pregnancy (possible but unlikely) or an extra long gestation. Alpaca typically have an 11.5 month gestation but 15 months is possible. A baby born in winter would require the use of a “cria coat” - a down jacket for the baby. We’ll see. The barn loft is now filled with 300 bales of second growth hay. Grain and alfalfa are fully stocked for winter. The heated buckets are in place and we’ve touched up the windows/paint in the barn to keep everything warm.
Our duck with aspiration pneumonia continues on antibiotics and is still breathing hard. It’s hard to find a duck specific veterinarian, but our large animal vet will visit next week for alpaca mom/baby care and will spend time with the poultry.
The work of the farm is slow evolving from harvest to winter planting, from forest management to wood splitting, and from outdoor projects to indoor projects.
We’ll complete the construction of the walk in refrigerator this weekend just in time for the flood of mushrooms that will be ready. The oyster mushrooms have fruited like clockwork - golden oyster in August, Italian Oyster in early September, Gray Dove in mid-September, and Polar White in late September. The remaining 7 varieties are cold loving so they’ll fruit in October. We’re expecting 100’s of pounds.
I’ve been harvesting a few pounds of Shitake each day and they’ve been in lunchtime mushroom soup and dinner stir frys.
We’ll have more bee work this weekend, feeding the bees our homemade “bee tea” during the nectar nadir. One of the hives was weak and we consolidated two hives together to give them critical mass for the cold days ahead.
It's a great time to a farmer.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
The Standards Committee Work Ahead
On October 15, the Policy Committee and Standards Committee will meet to review the draft interoperability roadmap that will guide our work in the post Meaningful Use era.
The draft to be presented is a work in process and will be iteratively improved over the next 4 months with multi-stakeholder input. Clarifying the Modern Healthcare story, October 15 will include a straw man for Federal Advisory Committee reaction, not a finished plan.
We’ll also hear an important presentation from the JASON task force, translating the general recommendations in the JASON report into actionable policy and technology next steps, especially around the need to extend interoperability from the sending/receiving of CCDA documents to also enable the data-element level query capabilities of well defined, secure application programming interfaces (APIs), likely using HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).
Meaningful Use Stage 3 regulations are currently in draft and will be released as NPRM before the end of the year. My hope for these regulations is that they will be less prescriptive than previous stages, reducing the burden of implementation for providers and vendors.
It’s purely my opinion, but I’m optimistic that simplification will happen, given that the 2015 Certification Rule is likely to decouple Meaningful Use and certification. Certification is likely to be incremental year to year without the tidal wave of requirements we’ve seen in the past. Certification of health IT (not just EHRs) will be with us for a long time and may be leveraged by more programs than just the EHR incentive programs. Imagine that modules for patient generated data (such as wearables), health information exchange (HISPs), and analytics services (such as those used for care management by ACOs) could be certified and used in any combination to achieve outcomes.
I look forward to a future of FHIR-based APIs with security enforced via OAuth2 and transport facilitated by RESTful approaches as the Meaningful Use program ends and ONC moves forward with its mission to improve quality, safety and efficiency, using policy and technology levers that enhance interoperability.
The draft to be presented is a work in process and will be iteratively improved over the next 4 months with multi-stakeholder input. Clarifying the Modern Healthcare story, October 15 will include a straw man for Federal Advisory Committee reaction, not a finished plan.
We’ll also hear an important presentation from the JASON task force, translating the general recommendations in the JASON report into actionable policy and technology next steps, especially around the need to extend interoperability from the sending/receiving of CCDA documents to also enable the data-element level query capabilities of well defined, secure application programming interfaces (APIs), likely using HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).
Meaningful Use Stage 3 regulations are currently in draft and will be released as NPRM before the end of the year. My hope for these regulations is that they will be less prescriptive than previous stages, reducing the burden of implementation for providers and vendors.
It’s purely my opinion, but I’m optimistic that simplification will happen, given that the 2015 Certification Rule is likely to decouple Meaningful Use and certification. Certification is likely to be incremental year to year without the tidal wave of requirements we’ve seen in the past. Certification of health IT (not just EHRs) will be with us for a long time and may be leveraged by more programs than just the EHR incentive programs. Imagine that modules for patient generated data (such as wearables), health information exchange (HISPs), and analytics services (such as those used for care management by ACOs) could be certified and used in any combination to achieve outcomes.
I look forward to a future of FHIR-based APIs with security enforced via OAuth2 and transport facilitated by RESTful approaches as the Meaningful Use program ends and ONC moves forward with its mission to improve quality, safety and efficiency, using policy and technology levers that enhance interoperability.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Stakeholder’s Progress report for FHIR
The following blog entry is a guest post from Grahame Grieve, creator of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR):
"During the week of Sept 14th to 19th, HL7 held a working meeting during which the organization worked on further developing the FHIR specification.
FHIR is an important new standard, not just because it does what the existing specifications do in a simpler fashion, but because it does entirely new things as well. Because of this, market interest and hype concerning FHIR is astonishing (see Wes Rishel’s comments ) . The FHIR project team is aware that there is a duality here: expectations and excitement about FHIR are high, but what we have published is still an early beta, and FHIR is not yet ready to meet the expectations that people have about it. We intend and expect to get there, but it there is still a lot of work to be done.
One of the key gaps the project team has identified is that the clinical content parts of the specification are not as solid as the underlying technical framework. We know that the strength of FHIR isn’t because we’re clever, but because we keep testing it through implementation experience, particularly connectathons – a relentless cycle of test, refine, test…. Our regular developer connectathons are continuing to grow in participation, depth and sophistication, but they don’t test of FHIR’s clinical features well. So this meeting, we did something new: we held a clinical connectathon – a group of clinicians using the FHIR specification to communicate with each other about some prepared clinical scenarios. Like our first technical connectathon, the potential of the specification was clear, but we identified a number of areas where we need additional development before FHIR is ready for real world usage. We plan to make clinical connectathons a regular feature in the future.
During this meeting, we started preparing the next full release of FHIR – DSTU (Draft Standard) 2. We anticipate publishing this in the middle of 2015. It will feature new functionality for clinical records, assessments, claiming, consent management, and more, and we agreed to a number of significant changes to the specification in response to implementer experience. Several organizations (including ONC and HSPC ) and countries are working on implementation guides for FHIR, and their experiences are starting to drive the specification and the development of additional implementation tooling.
Up to now, FHIR has primarily been a standards project: a group of people with a core task of producing a standard. But now, the FHIR project and management teams are going to start placing increasing focus on engaging with the wider implementation community. Connectathons are effective forums for validating the specification, building an active implementer community and seeding specific exchanges. One important part of this will be ever closer cooperation between HL7 and IHE as IHE starts adopting FHIR in the future."
For a more detailed technical progress report, see Grahame's Website.
.
"During the week of Sept 14th to 19th, HL7 held a working meeting during which the organization worked on further developing the FHIR specification.
FHIR is an important new standard, not just because it does what the existing specifications do in a simpler fashion, but because it does entirely new things as well. Because of this, market interest and hype concerning FHIR is astonishing (see Wes Rishel’s comments ) . The FHIR project team is aware that there is a duality here: expectations and excitement about FHIR are high, but what we have published is still an early beta, and FHIR is not yet ready to meet the expectations that people have about it. We intend and expect to get there, but it there is still a lot of work to be done.
One of the key gaps the project team has identified is that the clinical content parts of the specification are not as solid as the underlying technical framework. We know that the strength of FHIR isn’t because we’re clever, but because we keep testing it through implementation experience, particularly connectathons – a relentless cycle of test, refine, test…. Our regular developer connectathons are continuing to grow in participation, depth and sophistication, but they don’t test of FHIR’s clinical features well. So this meeting, we did something new: we held a clinical connectathon – a group of clinicians using the FHIR specification to communicate with each other about some prepared clinical scenarios. Like our first technical connectathon, the potential of the specification was clear, but we identified a number of areas where we need additional development before FHIR is ready for real world usage. We plan to make clinical connectathons a regular feature in the future.
During this meeting, we started preparing the next full release of FHIR – DSTU (Draft Standard) 2. We anticipate publishing this in the middle of 2015. It will feature new functionality for clinical records, assessments, claiming, consent management, and more, and we agreed to a number of significant changes to the specification in response to implementer experience. Several organizations (including ONC and HSPC ) and countries are working on implementation guides for FHIR, and their experiences are starting to drive the specification and the development of additional implementation tooling.
Up to now, FHIR has primarily been a standards project: a group of people with a core task of producing a standard. But now, the FHIR project and management teams are going to start placing increasing focus on engaging with the wider implementation community. Connectathons are effective forums for validating the specification, building an active implementer community and seeding specific exchanges. One important part of this will be ever closer cooperation between HL7 and IHE as IHE starts adopting FHIR in the future."
For a more detailed technical progress report, see Grahame's Website.
.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Unity Farm Journal - Fourth Week of September 2014
As we prepare for winter, we’re busy splitting wood, preparing the winter garlic beds, and finishing the building maintenance tasks for the cold and wet months ahead.
We burn about 3 cords of wood each winter, all split from fallen trees on the farm. We use small amounts of cedar as hot, fast burning kindling. We use Oak, Maple, Ash, Hickory and Black Bird for hot, slow burning sustained warmth. We do not use poplar, which burns cool/quickly, instead saving it for mushroom production.
Last week I created a system for labeling all our half-cord wood racks (21 of them). I painted galvanized strips of metal which now hang from hooks on each rack, coded as follows
Cedar - Red (Red Cedar)
Oak - White (White Oak)
Maple - Gold (Golden Maple)
Ash - Green (Green Ash)
Hickory - Unpainted (Hickory has no color names)
Black Birch - Black (Black Birch)
This winter we’ll have fully cured wood of all types, so we’re ready for whatever Mother Nature throw our way.
We’ve found good homes for many of our Summer guinea offspring and the total count is now down from 88 to 68. Ideally we’d like to overwinter about 50.
We’ve picked McIntosh and Roxbury Russet Apples. Our Empires will be ready in a week or two. We’re looking forward to 3 more weekends of cider pressing in October/November. The fermentation of our first batch is going well and we’ll likely rack it this weekend and then start malolactic fermentation, turning the sharp malic acid into rounded, complex lactic acid.
We continue to harvest tomatoes, turnips, and greens from the hoop house. Peppers and eggplants are nearly done producing. We’ll replace those raised beds with winter lettuces soon.
We'll plant the garlic in mid October, but the outdoor raised beds for overwintering garlic are ready.
The big project over the weekend will be building our room sized refrigerator for storing all the mushrooms of Fall between picking and delivery to farmstands/farmers markets. Our Italian and Grey Dove Oysters are fruiting. Our Native Harvest Shitake are pinning and we’ll pick them soon. We’ve optimized our mushroom workflow by using plastic picking boxes from an agricultural supplier in Canada. We use one container from log to refrigerator to market.
The bee preparation for winter continues as we feed them, optimize the hive configuration to reduce moisture/cold, and ensure pests/diseases are minimized.
One of the ducks aspirated some water (caused by rough underwater mating behavior) and we’re treating her with antibiotics for pneumonia. Her breathing is labored but she’s eating/drinking, and alert.
I look forward to a weekend of crisp Fall weather, harvesting, hauling, and preparing for the months ahead.
We burn about 3 cords of wood each winter, all split from fallen trees on the farm. We use small amounts of cedar as hot, fast burning kindling. We use Oak, Maple, Ash, Hickory and Black Bird for hot, slow burning sustained warmth. We do not use poplar, which burns cool/quickly, instead saving it for mushroom production.
Last week I created a system for labeling all our half-cord wood racks (21 of them). I painted galvanized strips of metal which now hang from hooks on each rack, coded as follows
Cedar - Red (Red Cedar)
Oak - White (White Oak)
Maple - Gold (Golden Maple)
Ash - Green (Green Ash)
Hickory - Unpainted (Hickory has no color names)
Black Birch - Black (Black Birch)
This winter we’ll have fully cured wood of all types, so we’re ready for whatever Mother Nature throw our way.
We’ve found good homes for many of our Summer guinea offspring and the total count is now down from 88 to 68. Ideally we’d like to overwinter about 50.
We’ve picked McIntosh and Roxbury Russet Apples. Our Empires will be ready in a week or two. We’re looking forward to 3 more weekends of cider pressing in October/November. The fermentation of our first batch is going well and we’ll likely rack it this weekend and then start malolactic fermentation, turning the sharp malic acid into rounded, complex lactic acid.
We continue to harvest tomatoes, turnips, and greens from the hoop house. Peppers and eggplants are nearly done producing. We’ll replace those raised beds with winter lettuces soon.
The big project over the weekend will be building our room sized refrigerator for storing all the mushrooms of Fall between picking and delivery to farmstands/farmers markets. Our Italian and Grey Dove Oysters are fruiting. Our Native Harvest Shitake are pinning and we’ll pick them soon. We’ve optimized our mushroom workflow by using plastic picking boxes from an agricultural supplier in Canada. We use one container from log to refrigerator to market.
The bee preparation for winter continues as we feed them, optimize the hive configuration to reduce moisture/cold, and ensure pests/diseases are minimized.
One of the ducks aspirated some water (caused by rough underwater mating behavior) and we’re treating her with antibiotics for pneumonia. Her breathing is labored but she’s eating/drinking, and alert.
I look forward to a weekend of crisp Fall weather, harvesting, hauling, and preparing for the months ahead.
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