South Hill Forest Products is a completely student-run business that produces high quality non-timber forest products. The business runs out of a classroom, where students learn both the theory and practice behind production methods. Our three main specialty products are maple syrup production, oyster mushroom cultivation, and bee-keeping/honey harvesting. 

Non-Timber Forest Products

Maple syrup production is by far our most intense and exciting season of work. Every February we tap and hang buckets on about 95 sugar maple trees.  Student workers go out every day to empty the buckets into large barrels, and once we have enough barrels we boil the sap down to syrup.

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The syrup season is extremely labor intensive, with many tasks that need to be completed in a timely manner. Outdoor boils go all through the night, and sometimes amount to almost 24 hours straight. I took the lead on coordinating workers for those boils, contacting students to fill shifts and making sure the job was done well. I also took a leadership role in planning our annual maple syrup open house, focusing on budgets, event planning, and advertising.   

We cultivate pohu oyster mushrooms in an indoor facility.  Our goal is to mimic ideal outdoor growing conditions in an indoor facility to allow year-round production. We have a dark, humid colonization room, and a light fruiting room. 
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As a member of the non-timber forest products team, I have learned and carried out every step of the process, from creating agar and growing mushroom culture, to sterilizing straw as our growing medium, to harvesting and selling our mushrooms.  

As part of a smaller team within the company, I am working on building an apiary garden to be installed next to our hives.  Currently, our bees struggle to find enough of a food source to live on all year.  We hope to install a two-acre garden space that will provide a wide variety of flowering plants as a food source for our bees.