Our Unique Location
Tucked away in the heart of Manchester Center, VT on 4 acres with a pond, and abutting 70 acres of preserved wild lands and the Dana L Thompson Memorial Park, is the 1768 homestead that houses Fiddleheads Farm and Forest School.
Fiddleheads Farm and Forest School is a registered family child care home with the State of Vermont
Our home and facility was originally erected in Bennington, VT in 1768 by Oliver Rice, (a distant ancestor of Tim, Jessica’s husband). His descendants owned the property until 1978 when it was set to be destroyed by the construction of Rt 7. A craftsman named Peter Palmer bought the house, took it apart, and painstakingly reconstructed it at its current location using as much of the original material as possible. This building has served as a family home, an antique shop, a school, a museum, and now it is a family home and school again.
Our Access to Wildness
Much of our programming takes place in nearby wild places, but we are lucky to have a wealth of resources to draw upon right at our site. We have open fields, wooded patches and a wetland and brook just outside the boundaries of the property.
The real magic of our program happens in our regular exposure to wildness though. Through access to the abutting Dana L Thompson Memorial Park we are able to visit a piney forest, a rushing brook, the edges of a thicket wetland and to be able to be in daily exposure to all of the other species that inhabit these places. We interact with a landscape of beavers, bears, foxes, coyotes, otters, herons, crows, ravens, mink and skunk and these are just the wildlife that we have found tracks, scat or had sightings of. This daily time spent in nature is what allows us to expand our sense of self and to come into deep relationship with the landscape around us. This personal connection with the earth is the lifelong gift of Fiddleheads that keeps on giving.
Our Gardens
The garden is where the cycles of the natural world intersect with the traditions of the human world in the pursuit of sustenance. Jessica is passionate about gardening, and weaves food traditions into each season’s curriculum. In the fall when we talk about seeds we harvest grains and thresh, winnow and grind the seeds into flour for baking. In the winter we snack on homemade apple fruit leather that reminds us of the sunshine and sweetness of fall. In the early spring we tap trees and boil sap to witness the magic as it turns into maple sugar. Later we start seedlings and watch them unfold while we amend the soil for planting and look for worms and soil invertebrates as the earth wakes up. We can watch the bees build natural comb in the Warre hive and see the flowers that they pollinate in the garden. The garden helps ground us into the cycles of the year and connect what we observe and experience in the forest with what we eat, drink and enjoy in our home lives.
At our site we enjoy fruit trees, open field, wooded patches, vegetable and herb gardens, a greenhouse, a beehive, a small sugarbush and 15 laying hens.
