What a Great Weekend!

This past weekend was one of those weekends that makes me feel blessed and grateful to live in the Charlottesville area — a place with some many interesting things to do and people to hang out with.
I started my weekend off on Friday evening at the opening reception of “Our Water, Our Future” at the [...]

Bundoran Farm – Your Land of Winter Wonders

With this season’s record snowfalls, Bundoran Farm has become a winter wonderland.  The verdant pastures and majestic forests are covered with a broad and deep white coat making it quite easy to understand and appreciate the land’s features and resulting life experiences of this distinctive place and time.
By means of a short poll, we came [...]

Baldwin Center is Open for Business

The Baldwin Center for Preservation Development is open for business 8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday, and by appointment on the weekends.  You are invited to stop by to see and learn about all the interesting things happening at Bundoran Farm. 
Our new contact information is:
Bundoran Farm
5005 Edge Valley Road
North Garden, VA  22959
434-295-3700
info@bundoranfarm.com
Since its [...]

Residential Development and the Working Landscape

We received a nice mention of our inaugural symposium in the new issue of The Piedmont Virginian, a beautiful publication focusing on landscape and culture of Virginia. Apologies for the scan: there’s no online version:  
BCPD-Symposium-PVMag-Jan-2010

Welcome to the Country

We just saw an interesting short feature on the economic impact of agritourism in Augusta County. Augusta is seeing a comeback in farm acreage, swimming against the tide of decline.  This story focused on some of the non-traditional recreational activities, some very distant from what we’d call agriculture, which are becoming essential economic engines for [...]

Fabulous Prizes, The Respect of Your Peers…

…are the laurels you can now garner on the Field Notes blog.
In order to see who’s actually reading our blog, and with what urgency, I offer the following challenge to readers:

 The first person to correctly identify this fairly common Virginia native wildflower wins a brand-spanking new Brunton compass, a reliable guide on even the longest of Bundoran [...]

Dark Skies at Bundoran

 The inaugural event of the Baldwin Center last Spring was a Star Party, jointly hosted with the Astronomical Society.  For folks whose interests run to the celestial, Bundoran Farm’s promotion of dark-sky certified lighting is a welcome relief, and the farm’s broad, protected valleys offer a prime location for looking up.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, NASA [...]

Cub Scout Rocket Day – Super Fun!

Last week about 100 kids (Scouts and siblings), 50 to 70 parents attended the launching of 300+ rockets in pastures in front of Fred Scott’s home, Lower Bundoran.  Joyous kids were running everywhere to retrieve, reload and re-launch their model rockets.  In typical scouting fashion the event was very well run by a scout leaders [...]

The Baldwin Center Revisited

The last few weeks of Baldwin Center construction were pretty hectic.  More than once, carpenter Matt Crane and I wondered if we were finishing the building, or vice versa.  Followers of our progress will note that blog entries declined precipitously in September, blog frequency being a pretty good indicator of stress.  Below are some images of the [...]

Darden Students Visit Bundoran Farm

Last week, I met with several members of the Real Estate Club at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business down at Bundoran Farm.  The goals of this meeting were to learn more about the hands on practice of community and real estate development and find out more about the Preservation Development approach underway [...]