Approaching Johnny's Research Farm

The high tunnel, still covered in plastic

Will and Randy in front of the uncovered high tunnel (plastic is bunched up along the length)

A few hardy plants growing in the tunnel

Finally, Some Snow!

It’s a cold February day and the sun is sparkling on recent fallen snow – so beautiful! I went out on snowshoes this morning and it was -18 degrees but -27 with wind chill, however I don’t think it was that cold for a lot of the walk because we were sheltered in the woods. I was well bundled up and quite comfortable and Cory was, as usual, oblivious to the cold as long as there were smells of wildlife to keep him occupied. We have had so little snow this winter that I’ve only had snowshoes on twice, so when we got a foot of the white stuff a few days ago, I was out there, blazing trails!

Will and I are just back from a couple of days in Maine where we went to pick up some farm supplies from Johnny’s Seeds. We had ordered all of our bulky supplies (those not available locally) from Johnny’s so we could pick them all up in one run and avoid the very high shipping charges of stuff purchased from Quebec and Ontario. We have invested in a pipe bender to make high tunnels and also bought the greenhouse plastic from Johnny’s. We bought lots of row cover (another bulky item) and we hopefully won’t need any more of that for a while. We also invested in a new seeder, a Jang for more precision seeding. Friends of ours who bought one last year raved about it and we reckoned the cost of it would be offset by the reduced need for thinning (carrots, beets and turnips) and getting these root crops to marketable sizes quicker. This is especially an issue with turnips because we are always trying to outrun (out-fly?) the root maggot.

We had lots to organize for this less than 20 hour adventure: a large order with Johnny’s (they don’t keep all items on site and have to ship them from different places), a contract with a customs broker so we could import everything hassle-free, organizing dates with Adrien and Sophie (our farm-sitters) plus we had to schedule it on two days guaranteed snow and ice-free because our truck doesn’t have snow tires! Yes, a miracle of planning and luck and we managed to pull it off. We even managed to pick up our season’s organic seed potatoes on our way through Fredericton (thanks to Good Spring Farm). The only small hitch came about 40 minutes into our 6 1/2 drive to Johnny’s: all the truck’s brake failure warning lights came on! I was driving at the time and when I told Will we had warning lights (one orange, one red), he immediately reached for the manual. He confirmed that the lights meant we had no brake system so we pulled off the highway at the next exit to check this out. Fortunately the brakes were fine and there was no loss of fluid. We reckon the sensors were malfunctioning and eventually the warning lights went off and the rest of the trip continued without any problems.

We were very impressed with Johnny’s Seeds. It is huge and located on three different sites: seed storage and packing, a call centre and a research farm. We didn’t have time to see everything but had a tour of the research farm and got to see their high tunnels. Johnny’s employs around 200 people and, even though the seed business is highly seasonal, by juggling different duties, people manage to get full-time employment. For example, the people who work on the research farm, growing out all the different varieties of vegetables, herbs and flowers in the catalogue, switch to being on the phones during the winter. One of the benefits of this is that if you phone to ask for more information on particular varieties, the person you’re talking do may very well have actually grown these varieties, so you get good quality information. Johnny’s is worker-owned, too, so everyone working there has a share in the company and interest in making sure it works at its best. I’ve always had really good service from Johnny’s and I now understand why. It was also interesting to learn that seed companies work together and Johnny’s will often sell seed to smaller companies (Vesey’s or Halifax Seeds) since some seed that comes from Europe is sold in sizes larger than small companies can handle. I am sorry we didn’t have time to tour the seed handling facilities, but I’m sure we’ll get back there again one day.

This was also a bit of an escape weekend for Will and I: we sometimes have some of our best talks when we’re trapped in a vehicle together for 13 hours! We stayed the night in Bangor and ate out but were dismayed to discover that the city had no sidewalks! Imagine looking at a restaurant across the road from your motel and realizing the only way you could get there, other than by driving, was to brave 4 lanes of traffic, dashing from one icy roadside to the other. We walked around after dinner, too, and discovered that there were no sidewalks, no walk lights and no crosswalks anywhere in at least that part of Bangor. Maybe there were sidewalks and they just hadn’t been ploughed, but there were still no walk lights or crosswalks. I guess this is what we call faulty city design and you wonder how much it contributes to a high obesity rate in a particular area.

Sophie and Adrien did a great job of minding the farm. The goats were shy at first but took to them as soon as they realized they were the food bringers. We arrived home by mid afternoon and were pleased to be welcomed by a wonderful meal in the oven and were catered to right down to ice wine with dessert and the all the dishes washed. Thank you, Adrien and Sophie, once again, we consider ourselves very lucky!

This coming week is packed with activities. Windy Hill Farm is joining Ferme Alva and L’Oasis de Fines Herbes to form NB’s first organic marketing co-operative. It started small, as these things usually do: we wanted to create a more noticeable stall at the farmer’s market, have an earlier start in the season and better selection throughout the season. So we started talking with Alva last year, got together this year to talk seriously and were joined by Ginette with her herbs. Once we started talking about who sells what at the farmer’s market, we realized that we needed another outlet for surplus produce and decided to look into restaurants. We now have an agreement with The Green House Restaurant in Shediac to supply them with one full share of veggies from each CSA farm, plus all the herbs that Ginette can supply, and offers of any extras we may have available (when all those broccoli plantings come on at once). The chef is from Calgary and the sous-chef from BC and they are used to working with local, organic produce. They had been unable to find reliable supplies of local produce and by using our CSA system, I think we’ll overcome this. This year will definitely be a “get to know you” year where we’ll probably iron out lots of rough areas and hopefully next year, we can expand the CSA option to a larger number of shares. It’s nice to meet chefs who are excited at the thought of getting seasonal surprises each week! We are also looking at connecting with a restaurant in Bouctouche this season and may consider other restaurants in the future.

I am also working with a nonprofit group in Cocagne (Groupe de Developpement Durable de Pays du Cocagne Sustainable Development Group) on a food security project. I am collecting information on the numbers of farmers in Kent County, what the farm produces, how much and what room there is for expansion. It is not easy info to collect mainly because the most currant census info isn’t out yet, government departments aren’t able to give out names, government info isn’t broken down by county and there are so many farmers who don’t register their farms officially (with NB Agricultural Alliance or the National Farmer’s Union). A lot of my information is coming one farmer-contact at a time, so it’s slow and sometimes awkward (“there’s a guy who bought the place off of so and so a few years ago, I think he grows strawberries”). I am working through it and gathering some useful information, though as everywhere, the biggest constraint to food security is the lack of farmers. The existing farmers are ageing and few of them have family or others to take over. We have lots of land and an amazing number of facilities in Kent Co. (three inspected abattoirs, two cheese-makers and two big grain handlers) but all I keep hearing over and over again is how much has disappeared. I really think we need to work hard to get people farming, any way we can.

Well, I think there’s a really nice little segue here: we have ourselves an apprentice for the 2012 season! Sarah will start with us early in May and stay on for six months, learning all we have to teach (and more because we’ll take her to a few other farms, too). Sarah is keen to learn a bit of everything and wants this experience to find out if she really wants to become a farmer. She has an interest and some experience in wild-crafting medicinal plants and preparing dried preparations and teas. We will support her in a small medicinal herb business on the farm, some wild-crafting and some cultivating, while she helps us out with the fruits, veggies, goats and whatever else we have going on. Sarah is also a yoga teacher and may help us be better at incorporating healthy things like yoga into our busy farm lives. For now we are getting organized for her stay: equipping the tiny house with everything you need to be comfortable and writing up our farm emergency plan, safety plan and a curriculum for learning farm skills.

Well I think I should finish this off and send it to the blogosphere. The groundhog said that there were 6 weeks of winter left – as if there would be any less in this part of the world! Hopefully we’ll get a bit more snow, too.

A picture our neighbors took of a lynx (bobcat?) behind their place, back in 2009 - I would love to see one of these!

Happy New Year!

At last, the long awaited-for update on Windy Hill Farm and its farmers! It has been a while, indeed, and I hope our regular readers haven’t given up on us altogether. It is a rainy day today and there is no snow in sight. The ground is still frozen and we have had a few small dumps of snow, but nothing like the last two years. I hope our perennials are okay – they are usually much happier under a nice blanket of snow for the winter. The strawberries, garlic and new apple trees are all well mulched with straw to protect them from this sort of weather; however the raspberries are bare this year and I hope it won’t do them any harm. We know the snow will arrive eventually and accumulate to its usual high level and we are ready for it: we’ve bought a new (second hand) snow blower! Will had been keeping his eyes open for a second hand Lucknow blower (a recommended make) larger than our old one Last year it was difficult to move the snow far enough to clear the high drifts so we knew we needed more power. Kijiji came through once again and we managed to find the blower we wanted at a good price and the buyer took our old one in trade. I tried it out to move a bit of snow while Will was away but it wasn’t a real test of its potential. We will know what it is capable of soon enough!

We have survived another holiday season and, other than a few extra pounds on our frames, things are more or less back to normal. Will and I both went away for short trips; I spent a week in Ottawa visiting friends and family and Will went to California for Christmas. My Ottawa trip was great: I visited some fiddling friends, an old friend from my Botswana days and my sister and her charming family. It’s nice to see different places and people but it’s always great to be back on the farm again. Will enjoyed his time in California, too – the weather was warm and sunny and he was able to visit his mother, brothers and aunt and uncle. Will’s brother, Steve and his wife, Jeanne also grow organic vegetables and run a CSA but on a much larger scale than us (www.highgroundorganics.com). They serve about 800 customers, their season runs from March to November and they offer things like avocados in their boxes – wow! They also offer a flower CSA with organic flowers from Will’s cousin’s farm nearby. They recently bought a second farm and are putting up high tunnels for growing tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and other hot season crops which their original farm (located near the coast) is not as well suited for.

Winter work on the farm these days consists mainly of planning for next year. I am working on our crop plan which is actually much harder to do this year than last because we now have so much more information to work with! Now, instead of taking educated guesses (okay, stabs in the dark) at planting times and quantities, I need to consult last year’s records to see what we did and how it worked. We’ll be planting a bit more land next year but not a lot more. We had thought we had 4 acres to work with but the most recent measurements have brought us down to 3.3. So next year’s crop will cover 1.65 acres, still plenty of land to meet our 50-60 full share CSA. I’m more inclined to start working on the livestock side and offer eggs, chicken and goat meat to our CSA customers rather than growing a larger vegetable CSA. However we’re also planning to put up some high tunnels next year and if they work for us, more the following year. This may enable us to grow more in the same small acreage and expand our numbers again in the future.

Our farm business develops slowly and organically as we work with our available resources: land and human energy. We’re not really limited on either since we can always plough more land, but because we’ve already made use of the best land, everything else will be of slightly lower quality. We can also expand our human resources by hiring labour, but this brings in a whole bunch of new issues and challenges and the farm business has to grow quite a bit to provide a third livelihood. For next year we’re planning on having an apprentice on the farm so we will learn a bit about how much we can do with extra hands, as well as share some of our knowledge and experience with keen young farmer wanna-bes. We like the idea of having partners on the land, running businesses that compliment ours and sharing equipment and markets. We need to think about our long term plan for the farm and for us since the day will come when we won’t be farming as actively as we are now.

I’m reading and enjoying Joel Salatin’s newest book “Folks, This Ain’t Normal”. For anyone who doesn’t know Salatin he is a farmer from Virginia who raises pastured livestock: cattle, poultry and pigs. He writes and talks on pasturing livestock, sustainable agriculture and more and calls himself a Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist farmer. He writes well and brings a common sense perspective to so many things in this world that desperately need to be seen in their true silly light. I don’t agree with everything he says but I enjoy his writing and learn lots from his farming experiences. I am still trying to figure out how to incorporate chickens into our operation: laying hens and broilers. I think I will try and pasture broilers on our cover cropped veggie land this season and would love to build an egg-mobile to share pasture with the goats. Perhaps with some apprentice help on the veggie front we can explore our livestock potential more fully. Will is planning to get bee hives up and running this year, too – mini livestock!

The goats are doing well and enjoying the lack of snow, though it is hard to get them outside even when the weather is nice. I managed to take them for a little walk in the woods a few weeks ago but they seem too comfortable in the barn these days. I think I need to cut down on their hay so they’ll be more interested in finding other food sources like tree needles. The first kids are due in early March and the big bellies are just starting to show. I really look forward to seeing the Boer cross kids that come out of Freyja (3/4 Nubian) and I really want to find a Boer buck for next year. Our last two little boy kids from 2011 are in the freezer now and we ended up with about 70 lbs of meat and bone from them, not too bad considering their dairy parentage. We should get an even heavier kid next year with the injection of Boer genes plus the improved pasture we’ll be seeding this spring.

I learned something very interesting while visiting my sister in Ottawa: it is no faster or easier to make a basic cake from a mix than to make it from scratch. You still have to add eggs, oil and other liquids, grease the pan, wash the bowls afterwards, etc. Why would anyone want to make a cake from a mix and pay all that extra money, create all that extra packaging, consume those chemical preservatives and end up with something that doesn’t taste near as nice as the real thing? This is just a little rant inspired by Joel Salatin and I think I’ll leave you with it.

End of Season Pics

Planting our new baby apple trees

The row of apple trees along our driveway

Half ploughed goat pasture

Motor inspects the bags on the last CSA drop-off of the season

The last full share of the season: still lots of goodies!

Another successful cheese: a Fourme D'Ambert - delicious!

The End of Another Season

It’s a cold, sunny Saturday and we are just back from the Dieppe Farmer’s market. We haven’t been setting up to sell for the past few weeks but have been going in every Saturday to drop off CSA veggies to the 10 or so people who pick up at the market. We wait in the parking lot with a flag on our nondescript little grey car and, so far, everyone has managed to find us and get their veggies each week. Will and I both go so we can spell each other off, one person stays in the car and the other gets to go into the market and shop and socialize. It’s a great market and today I came away with some smelts (first of the season!), yogurt (goats are drying up) and goat cheese (ash ripened Valencay type). Will picked up eggs, a cup of coffee and two amazing cinnamon sticky buns from one of the bakers. I bring my knitting and am quite content, waiting in the sun-warmed car, listening to the radio, knitting and chatting with the people picking up their veggies.

We are coming to the end of our CSA season and I think we will miss putting those bags of veggies together! It has gone better than we could have hoped for in our wildest dreams and I think our CSA customers are happy, too. We have sent around a link to a survey, organized by ACORN for all interested CSA farms in the Maritimes, so hopefully we’ll get some feedback to help us do even better next year. We’ve had lots of inquiries about getting in for next year from this year’s customers, which is nice, and we have a waiting list for next year, too. Of course not everyone from this year will be able to, or want to, sign up for next year and we know those on the waiting list may have found another CSA farm, but for now it looks good to increase our membership for 2012.

I am excited about next year’s CSA already, planning our crops based on this year’s successes and failures and thinking of all the neat things we can offer in 2012. I want to go over this year’s records so we can be more accurate in planning quantities; this year a lot of our plantings were guesses, some of which worked perfectly (carrots) and some not so great (beets), though most of our crop shortages were due to insect or disease damage or poor sizing up due to crowding or poor soil nutrition. One of my important fall jobs (and the one I seem to be able to put off most consistently) is to get soil tests done in each of the fields and a separate one in the coldframe. We may have some specific nutrient deficiencies that need to be addressed. Usually my approach is to feed the soil with lots of good manure, compost, organic material, organic fertilizers and green manure crops and assume that the healthy soil will support plant growth. However there are a few particular nutrients, boron for example, which can cause major crop yield reductions if they are deficient and sometimes you just have to add a bit of boron to get things working for you.

We managed to get the garlic planted by the end of October and I put in the same amount of cloves as last year as well as an extra 120 bed feet (4 rows) of bulbils. Bulbils are the tiny little garlic cloves that form at the top of the plant if you don’t remove the scapes. The bulbils will give us green garlic for sending out in early CSA boxes and small bulbs if we leave them till the tops die down. They will eventually form full-sized garlic bulbs after another year or two of planting and growing out. I planted later than last year because the weather has been so warm, and it has continued to stay warm pretty well up until now. Last Friday was a gorgeous, sunny 15 degrees – not at all like a typical November in NB but certainly well appreciated! It’s supposed to be fairly mild again this week and then temperatures look to be dropping to more seasonal norms from then on. It’s been a reprieve for the season, which started late with a cold spring and early summer, partly for us who are still working outdoors in it and partly for the vegetables that have continued to grow well into November. I was glad I left the carrots in the ground because they grew quite a bit since mid October (the date we picked them last year), and I dug the last of them on Friday. Brussels sprouts weren’t very impressive back in October when I picked them for the Thanksgiving CSA, but since then I’ve been able to pick twice more and each time they improve in quality and flavour. I’m hoping we’ll get a few more for ourselves for Christmas dinner, though I may need to dig them out of the snow when the time comes!

I’m pretty much organized for my trip to Ottawa in two weeks and Will managed to find a cheap seat on a flight to LA for Christmas. We were amazed at the low cost of flights, especially flying out of Moncton and double especially for during the Christmas season. I was sort of looking forward to a train journey but the cost of a berth on the train would have made the journey almost twice as expensive as flying and I don’t have the flexibility of youth to enable me to spend long journeys sitting up in coach any more. Flying enables me to spend more time with family and friends so I’m biting the bullet and going by air.

The organic greenhouse course last week was amazing and I learned lots. The course was in French and we had professional translation but I think I still missed a good 20%. Another good reason to learn French! However we have all the slides and lots of good reference material, plus it was great to meet other farmers growing in greenhouses and coldframes. It was geared more towards heated structures for year-round growing but much of the information was still relevant. Unfortunately there was too much information to cover in the short time we had in the classroom and one of the topics I was most interested in (water management) got left out. Perhaps we’ll have him back again to continue where he left off. The workshop was on a Wednesday, CSA pickup day, and Will took care of all the packing, setting up and dropping off. Everything went without a hitch and next week I get to do that job as Will is at a farm business self-assessment workshop in Moncton all day Wednesday. At this time of the year it is a one person job and it will be fun to do the Moncton/Dieppe run for once.

We finally got the apple trees I’d ordered back in 2010. It was a bit of a challenge: we’d ordered some particular varieties of zone 4 heirloom storage type apple trees from an orchard in Ontario and were expecting them in the spring. Early in the spring of 2011 we got an email saying they couldn’t fill our order and then no further communication. I waited until summer and finally contacted them again to find out what was going on. I’d sent a deposit (over $100) and really wanted to know whether I’d get the trees, or my money back or something. My emails went unanswered and for a while I thought they’d gone out of business, but then I checked their website and it was up to date so I phoned and left a message, which wasn’t returned, and then phoned again and actually got hold of somebody. To make a long story short, they finally sent the trees and now here it is November, we have 7 little apple tree whips and I’m not quite sure whether to store them in the cooler for the winter or plant them out now. I’ve consulted two orchardists and each one has given me different answers. I’ve just left a phone message with a third and hopefully I’ll get some tie-breaking information. The people who sent the trees apologized for the communication breakdown and even waived the shipping fee and the balance of payment for the trees, which I really appreciate. However I don’t think I’d do business with them again, at least not from a distance. The trees are some varieties that we grew in BC that I really liked (Belle de Boskoop, Liberty and Blenheim Orange) and some that sounded interesting (Salome, Pomme Gris and Keepsake). I really hope they do well here – I’d like to have apples for us and for the CSA, especially for the late season CSA when you want to send something that’s not a root vegetable or a brassica.

I’m hoping all the goats are bred now. They were bred a little later than last year so kidding season will be a bit later, too. The advantage to this is that the weather will be a bit warmer and the goats will get to go out on grass a bit earlier. Last year kidding started in mid February and the goats were barn-bound until well into March because of the heavy snow accumulation. The barn felt really crowded and I could sense a real collective caprine sigh of relief when those bouncy little babies were finally able to get outdoors and run around a bit. This year we sent our girls to our neighbor’s place to visit his very handsome Boer buck. We had hoped to pick the buck up and bring him here for the season but he was not tame enough to let us get close enough to catch him. Bringing the girls to him was a bit of a stress on the girls but we are 3 for 3 so far for successful breedings so it seems to have worked. It is a real pain, though, to have to catch them in heat, load them in a truck and drive down the road. I think I’ll look for our own buck for next year though keeping a buck also has its own challenges.

I managed to plough up part of the goat pasture for spring seeding of some good pasture grasses. The pasture is pretty much all weed now: goldenrod, bedstraw, yarrow, dandelion, plantain and some red clover. Goats eat a wide variety of plant species and they do enjoy the weeds, but they also need something of a greater food value. I’ll plant a grass/legume mix and overseed with a cereal grain to give a bit of soil cover and keep the weeds down while the perennial grasses get established. Fall ploughing is great because it means there’s one less job to do in the spring and also the freezing and thawing that happens over winter helps to break up the soil that we’ll be cultivating in spring. I wasn’t able to plough as large an area as I’d hoped because tree roots extended way beyond I would have expected. The plough could rip through the roots but kept getting caught with roots, sod and soil and it made a real mess of the area. So we’ll still have lots of weeds for the goats to feast on even once we get some good grasses established!

Rewards of Cheesemaking Night

Sample of our cheesemaking: waxed Gouda, Brie and Castle Blue

Delicious! The Blue was the best, then the Gouda and then the Brie which was quite firm and probably should have aged a bit longer

Pictures from Daniel

Some of the girls

Two of this year's little boys

Freyja, in all her beauty!

Snowball

"Cuore di Bue" or "Ox Heart" tomatoes

Cory looking cute for the camera

Milking Ruby

Cluster of lovely, ripe tomatoes in August

Thank you, Daniel, for these lovely pictures! Daniel Vautour has been visiting our farm every now and again throughout the summer, taking some great pictures. He helps out his partner, Nicole, who works for La Recolte de Chez Nous/Really Local Harvest co-operative doing promotion of farms on websites, facebook, radio, newspaper and every other medium she’s been able to access. They are both very talented photographers and great promoters of local agriculture and we really appreciate their dedication to the cause.

It’s a rainy, windy, cold day on the farm after many warm, sunny days. This autumn has been extraordinarily mild and dry which has been great for the late crops still in the ground and for the farmers working outdoors in October. Some crops didn’t do very well because of the cool, wet summer but many managed to recover over this nice fall and we were able to finally pick some nice looking beets, brussels sprouts, cabbage and will soon pick our leeks and finish picking carrots. Our potatoes, parsnips and celeriac are in the cooler now and squash and onions are in another storage area. Tomatoes are still alive and ripening in the coldframe though we have had two hard frosts already. I haven’t planted garlic yet, partly because I’m waiting for the weather to cool off a bit and also because we were waiting for a load of compost. Well, the compost arrived yesterday and the days ahead look to be dry, sunny and cool so we should get garlic in the ground and covered in straw mulch by Monday next week. Once this is done, once tomatoes are finished and coldframe cleaned out, strawberries are mulched and carrots are harvested, then this season’s field work will be pretty much finished. Our CSA continues until November 19 but by then, all crops will be in storage so if the ground is frozen or covered in snow, our CSA members will still get their veggies.

I’m in the process of getting our girl goats bred to a buck down the road. We sold our Nubian buck last summer though we still have a smelly family in the boy’s area (this year’s boys), which is helpful in detecting heat in the females. Our neighbor has a Boer buck, a meat breed, who I think will help us in building some meaty kids for next year. We had hoped to pick him up and bring him here for a little holiday but he wasn’t interested in letting me get anywhere near him. So Plan B has been to bring the girls to him. He has done the job with three of them but we still have to confirm their pregnancy when their next heat comes around (or not). It is so much easier breeding does when you have a buck on property so I’m re-thinking my plan to avoid over-wintering bucks and maybe we’ll find ourselves our own little Boer buck to keep (with a friendly wether to keep him warm in winter) on property.

We decided to finally get rid of our old washer and dryer (came with the place) and invest in a new, low energy, low water using front loading washer. We ditched the dryer altogether after confirming, after a year of not using it at all, that we don’t need one. The space the dryer occupied will sport shelves for storing wine and beer-making equipment. Now how is that for getting one’s priorities sorted out? The new washer is a real treat because it washes great and spins clothes so dry, you barely need to hang them out. Considering that we dry our clothes outdoors in the dead of winter on sunny days, or else on a rack in the living room in front of the fire, the less water there is to remove from the cloth, the better.

What else is new? Well, after obtaining his Canadian citizenship, Will immediately applied for his passport and will re-enter Canada after this winter’s trip to California, as a Canadian! I’m tickled at how much Will loves being a “real” Canadian (with documentation to prove it!), it makes me realize how lucky I am to be born here. Of course Harper is doing his best to make Canadians world-wide pariahs with his outdated, backwards thinking policies like supporting tar sands developments, giant oil pipelines and building more prisons at the expense of rehabilitation. When Canada starts getting advice from Texas’s governor about how to better and more cheaply manage crime and punishment, we know we’re heading desperately down the wrong road. The saddest thing of all is that most Canadians didn’t vote for this man – how’s that for irony?

Enough of my ranting. I will be attending a workshop on organic greenhouse management in a few weeks and I’m looking forward to learning more about managing crops under plastic. There will be a tour of local greenhouses and our farm is part of the tour. We will be demonstrating the low cost, low input option and, boy, do I need to tidy up that structure before lots of farmers descend on our place. It’s one thing to give tours to the interested public and something else altogether to open your farm up to other farmers. It’s kind of like when Nathalie MacMaster plays traditional fiddle tunes in Cape Breton – she’d better get them right! So I’ve started picking up fallen fruit, pulling out plants that are done for the season and removing some of the larger weeds. It won’t be beautiful but it will at least look like it’s been taken care of for the past few months!

I am looking into putting up some high tunnels on the farm next year. A pipe bender is on my Christmas list so we can make our own high tunnels out of fencing material. These are structures that support plastic only in the summer so we don’t have to construct them for winter snow load. This means using a lot less galvanized steel though we’ll still need to make sure they won’t blow away in heavy spring and fall winds. I’d like to cover our raspberry beds to get an earlier and better quality raspberry crop (fewer mouldy berries if they don’t get rained on) as well as create another covered area for early spring crops and heat loving crops. We tried to grow ground cherries this year and managed to get very large, healthy looking plants but they set fruit too late to get a crop before the frost. Ground cherries are wonderful, tasty little things and they yield hugely if they get the heat. We had an abnormally bad spring and early summer this year but with climate on the change, we can’t count on anything much better in the future. I think we’ll need to be more creative in how we use our land to get as long a growing season as possible and, though plastic isn’t terribly sustainable, well utilized plastic structures can give us more production in our short growing season. That can only be better than having to count on imported food for half the year.

Update on the Farm

I’ve just finished filling and sealing 27 bottles of salsa made from our own tomatoes, garlic, onions, sweet peppers and hot peppers. Unfortunately we don’t have any cilantro but this batch is strongly tomato-y, cayenne hot and delicious so I don’t think we’ll miss it too much. I cooked up about 20 lbs of tomatoes to make a thick sauce and then added the other ingredients plus vinegar and salt. We’ll enjoy it all winter long. Will and I cleaned and organized the freezer this morning (a good, cold morning for freezer work) so we have a better picture of what we have to sustain us for the winter. There are still lots of frozen chickens (from 2010 but still good), a bit of goat meat and quite a lot of broccoli, beans and cauliflower. I am still cooking down and bottling tomato sauce and I want to blanch and freeze more kale and chard before I consider the freezer full. We are starting to cure squash for the winter, the garlic is curing nicely and we have plans for converting our cooler into a root cellar for winter storage of potatoes, carrots, turnip, beets, parsnips, cabbage and celeriac. Unfortunately our onions are not looking great for winter storage as they are still bulbing up and may not dry down before cold weather hits, though you never know, we may get lucky and get a few pounds of storage onions out of them.

Our CSA and farmer’s market are all going really well. We get so much positive feedback from our CSA members that I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to do a CSA, it’s such an ego boost! We appreciate that our hard work is appreciated though I know some of our members are challenged by some of the unfamiliar or unpopular vegetables. Our market stall started out modest but is starting to look like something reminiscent of my days selling Glen Valley vegetables: big piles of beautiful carrot bunches, glowing white cauliflower, fine lettuces and flawless garlic – great stuff that is beginning to attract some regular customers. It’s starting to get quite cold out and the 6 1/2 hour market is a long one to spend outdoors on the north side of a building in a cold climate in late September. Hopefully we’ll be able to move indoors before it gets really cold because we’d like to continue the market for as long as we have our CSA veggies going out (late November).

Ripening tomatoes

We are getting amazing tomatoes this year, both from inside the coldframe and outside on black plastic. We’ve been putting them in every CSA box for the past 4 weeks and selling lots of them to other keen sauce and salsa makers. The hybrids did best, especially after disease hit the coldframe, but we did have one heirloom variety do really well: the old Italian plum type of tomato (seeds I saved from fruit I got from my Aunt) set huge, tasty, saucy fruits on very vigorous vines that showed absolutely no sign of disease. The fruit, averaging about 1.5 lb each, are making their way into pretty well every batch of sauce and salsa we’ve created this year.

View of the fields in early September

Racoon-proofed corn

Racoons are the scourge of anyone trying to grow sweet corn out in these parts. The only way of protecting the corn, other than late night shotgun patrols, is electric fence. Will built this fence with three wires powered by a solar-powered fence charger (the corn is far from farm buildings and electrical outlets). It seems to be working and good racoon control means that the corn is actually making it into the CSA shares. Unfortunately we haven’t found as effective a solution to the corn earworm, a nasty critter that gets into the corn ear and eats the good part. We’ve been cutting the tips off the cobs (we’re at pretty well 100% infestation) and cleaning out the worms before sending them out in the boxes. Fortunately the corn is tasty enough that you can overlook its truncated appearance.

Garlic curing in the hayloft

Our garlic harvest has been very successful with the Glen Valley garlic far outperforming the local. We will definitely be keeping it for seed for this fall’s planting. We saved a lot of the bulbils, the tiny little garlic bulbs that grow from the scapes that come up in early summer. These will also be planted this fall with some to be harvested as green garlic in the spring and some to keep to grow again for eventual garlic seed.

Elderberry bush loaded with fruit

It’s another good year for elderberries and this year I plan to try to make some elderberry wine. I need 17.5 lbs and have managed to pick 12 lbs so far. I’m sharing them with the birds, who love them, and if I can’t get enough for the recipe, I’ll add a few blueberries to make up the total. Last year I made lots of elderberry jelly and still have quite a bit; the wine will be an interesting experiment that will be low cost and possibly quite delicious! I got the recipe off the internet, from a bit of a long winded description that takes 20 minutes and 4 youtube videos but sounds tried and true and well worth a shot.

Will is Canadian!

Will swearing his oath of allegiance to Canada (and the Queen!)

A very proud new citizen!

Celebrating Will's new status as a Canadian

We’re all very proud to have Will as a Canadian! Mom, Dad, Peter and Bert and I met at the Heritage Centre in Memramcook to watch Will being sworn in on August 18. A total of 58 people from 27 different countries participated in the ceremony and became new Canadians. It was an emotional time and a very moving ceremony and we were all honoured to have been a part of it.