2012 Vegetable Subscriptions now available!

After allowing last year's vegetable subscribers the first chance to resubscribe, I'm opening up to new subscribers! The set up is essentially the same as previous years, with the major change being more pick up locations as opposed to individual home deliveries. This mostly just affects suburban neighbourhoods as they will have to stop at another home to pick up their vegetables when they might have had direct home delivery in the past. With continuously rising gas costs and the insanity of last year's suburban delivery run, we need to cut down on the number of individual stops we make.

The subscription has also been simplified in that it's a straight 10 deliveries over 20 weeks, for a total cost of $400, instead of having to wait to confirm a start date, and therefore how long the season will be in the end. And the amount of vegetables in packages from week to week may vary more, depending on what's available each week, averaging out to a value of $35 in vegetables per week over the season. So if one week's package has less vegetables, that will be made up in another week.

We're also not growing any eggplant, peppers or melons this year. They just haven't produced at all reliably in the last three seasons, so very few people even got to eat any of them anyway. Jeremy will grow some different varieties of each in his own plantings, so hopefully we'll have some to bring to farmers' markets with us if they turn out.

My sister has again put together a beautiful brochure for me this year (see below), which I will be distributing in select neighbourhoods over the next little while. Hopefully that will drum up some interest in those areas so our delivery route can become more concentrated.

Fingers crossed that word of mouth, email forwarding, brochure/postcard papering and coffee shop posters will get us enough subscribers for this year!

Article published about Ramses & Agnes!

One of the things I've been inspired to do this winter is to submit an essay about my experiences with Ramses and Agnes to the Globe & Mail's Facts & Arguments section. I wrote it at the end of January and hit submit on the email to the editor with fingers crossed that my little story about sheep might be amusing enough to be accepted. A few weeks later, I got a reply and as of now, my essay's been published!

As you can imagine, I'm pretty excited about this. And have been shamelessly self-promoting as a result ;P I just had a lot of fun writing the piece and thinking about all the great things about having Ramses and Agnes around, that it was just such a thrill to be accepted. Definitely a good energy boost for a rather lackluster 'winter' so far. There hasn't been enough snow for any snow shoeing yet this year :(

The article can be reached as a link in the title above, or here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/the-essay/my-birthday-gift-to-myself-a-little-black-sheep/article2342595/

Enjoy!

Reflection on the 2011 growing season

I can't believe how long it's been since I last updated this blog! After having finally, but not quite, caught up on sleep from the frenzied activity of last year, I can reflect on what went right and what went wrong with the farm in 2011.

In case it wasn't evident from last year's few blog posts, 2011 was a crazy busy season for the farm. More delicious vegetables were harvested from the field than ever before and their overall taste and quality were a joy.

The season didn't start off that way...it started off rather frighteningly cold and wet, making me wonder if there would ever be enough vegetables to fulfill sold subscriptions. Then came weeks of sun (a near drought for much of southern Ontario) that necessitated the use of irrigation. But that heat and sun produced lots of vegetables, definitely more summer squash than anyone really wanted ;P

So that's the first thing I'm thankful for, the field produced lots of vegetables! Of course, there were some crop losses (onions, leeks, most brassicas), but overall, it was a relatively bumper year for the farm. And those vegetables were tasty. Now that it's deep winter, I've had to buy a few staples from the grocery store, like organic carrots. These store-bought carrots lack anything resembling flavour or sweetness compared to the carrots that were grown at the farm! I've been dipping into the few frozen vegetables I managed to have time to put away for the winter, and their deliciousness reminds me of how lucky I am. So, for 2011...yay for great vegetables!

The other major thing I'm thankful for: that I survived having my first farm intern. I had no idea what I was getting into, having another person at the farm, spending almost every waking hour working with me. We're lucky we didn't kill each other by the end of the season. While it was much more challenging than I had anticipated (in terms of planning, explaining myself, just expending the energy of communicating with another person all day), things worked out well enough that Jeremy will be returning this year for another season at the farm.

I am also hugely thankful for all the new and returning clients I had last year. The one highlight of making deliveries into Toronto every week, was the chance to see and talk with clients on deliveries. Their enthusiasm for the vegetables and interest in how the farm was doing were a huge encouragement to me. Having this farm/eater connection is one of the major reasons why I started farming in the first place! The yearly open house in September brought out lots of visitors and I was pleased to serve snacks made mostly from farm produce. And overall, I had tons of visitors throughout the year, which was wonderful! Looking over my calendar, there were over 35 different visits to the farm throughout the year, from day trips to week long visits, not even counting open house visitors. In addition to driving into Toronto to deliver vegetables over 20 weeks, I certainly didn't lack in social interaction this past year ;p

The major negative lesson I learned in 2011...30+ delivery locations in one day is just insane! That definitely has to change for this year. I will have to have more drop off locations for people to pick up from and fewer, if any, individual drop offs. Unfortunately, this may lead to losing some clients, but I'm hoping most of them will be ok with going somewhere close to their work/home to pick up their vegetables, because if I have to make as many deliveries as last year, I will not last at farming.

And that lesson goes hand in hand with "doubling production/clients isn't only double the work".  Realistically, more than double the amount of vegetables were planted/harvested than in previous years, as any of you who were vegetable clients would know. You definitely got more vegetables in your packages than in 2010! I went from a 1 person, 0.75 acre vegetable field, with about 20 vegetable packages per week operation, to 2 people, 2 acres and 40 packages a week. To try and make sure that there were more than enough vegetables each week for 40 packages, I planted an additional 20%. Add to that working with a new person (thankfully who works super hard!), and you can imagine how busy things were.

For 2012, the farm is going to stay about the same size, 40 clients per week, with 2 acres of planted vegetables. We're also going to try adding a Toronto area weekly farmers' market. Jeremy and I have some new production ideas which will hopefully make things more efficient and vegetable growth a bit more predictable. That said, we'll have to keep our fingers crossed for the weather. In my three growing seasons at this farm, each one has been completely different from the last, as have the winters! So there's really no telling what the weather will be like this year...the new norm in our climate change reality.

This winter so far has been somewhat busier than I expected. I need to deal with more wood chores since I'm not leaving the farm at all this winter (no Christmas One-of-a-Kind show with my sister, or other random short trips). This is because I now have two sheep, Ramses and Agnes, to look after. I'm quite excited (and scared!) at the prospect of lambing in February, though that's in no way guaranteed as I still can't tell if Agnes is actually pregnant or not. Taxes need to be filed, budgets finalized, seed orders placed, fields planned, tools bought (this year's major tool purchase will be a 20-block step-in soil block maker, to save time compared with the hand held 4-block maker!) and various winter home and barn fixing jobs need to be completed. And of course, marketing for this year's vegetable subscriptions needs to start in the next few weeks. I can't believe how quickly time flies by!

In a nutshell, 2011 was really crazy because there were tons of great vegetables and lots of socializing. Who can really ask for better reasons to be so tired? Here's to 2012, still with tons of vegetables (but more efficient production techniques!) and even more social interaction. Book your farm visits soon as I'd love to see you all here :D

Delivery woes

I'm writing this blog as Jeremy drives our vegetable packages into the GTA this week. Our 'suburban' run is a mammoth delivery route, with over 30 stops going from Brampton to Mississauga to Oakville to east Toronto to uptown Toronto to North York. From 7 am departure from the farm to last delivery in North York, the whole run takes almost 12 hours, non-stop. Then we stay overnight in the GTA before making the 2+ hour drive back to the farm the next morning. It's brutal.

Traffic in the GTA this year is worse than the past two seasons. Then, I could drive from central Mississauga to Victoria Park & 401 in about 20 minutes in the 11:30 am to 1 pm window. We tried a similar drive (from western Oakville, which I've regularly driven in the past in 30 min.) twice this year in the same time period and took an hour each time, stuck in traffic on the 401. After the first 2 deliveries with Jeremy to teach him the initial route, I made 3 solo trips, trying alternate highways each time, before settling on our current route, accepting that it couldn't be done by 1 person much under 12 hours. The route changed to using the QEW/427 and then crossing Toronto on deliveries. It's probably not any faster, but feels less soul sucking than sitting in stop and go traffic on the 401, about the ugliest road I've ever seen. I sent Jeremy on his first solo run for delivery #7, after bringing him on #6 to show him the final route. Today, at #8, both of us dread the suburban delivery day.

One new thing we're trying out this week is an off-road break. Whenever I'm on the road, I don't want to take breaks because I'm hoping (foolishly) to beat traffic if I just keep on trucking, and just generally wanting to get the whole thing done with so I can then rest without deliveries hanging over my head. But 12 hours straight without a break just isn't any good. Taking one could make the entire delivery day longer by an hour or 2, but our hope is that the time spent outside of the van and off the road will help rejuvenate for the last deliveries. I'll find out from Jeremy later tonight if it was any help at all.

I'm scheduled to do delivery #9 solo, and both of us will go on the final 10th delivery Nov. 2. We will certainly have a celebratory dinner after that! And next season, a delivery run of 30+ stops just won't happen at all. I don't have the time right now to fully plan out how things will change, but it will involve changing the delivery method from individual home deliveries to drop off points where multiple families come to pick up when they can, and very likely, cutting down on the number of subscribers.

Next season clearly isn't set yet, but even if Jeremy comes back next year, we'll likely have to cut down our subscription base from 40 packages/week to 30-35. Right now, I don't know if that will work out at all financially (this year doesn't quite do so even at 40 subscribers/week), but there's just been too much work this season for 2 people to do without feeling completely burnt out. I went from being a 1 person operation, with 20 packages a week, on a field just under an acre in size, to 2 people with 40, on a new, larger field, producing probably 2.5 times as many vegetables as last season. The packages this year have had more produce in them than previously due to the vegetable bounty, which meant more harvesting than the 2 of us could do without long hours. We both work probably an average of 10 hours/day/6 days a week for 7+ months, much of that quite physical, totalling about 3720 hours for the season. All for a gross income of $30K, maybe netting $15K after business expenses, not including labour costs. I definitely won't have netted enough income after all expenses (max. about $8500) to pay for living costs this year, even trying to be as frugal as possible. So I'll either have to just accept an increase in debt or try to find a temporary job over this winter.

It is quite a dilemma trying to figure out how to farm sustainably. While I certainly don't expect to have a solid answer figured out this early in my farming career, I do know that this year has taught me a lot about how much work is too much work. And how even so-called 'expensive' vegetables don't generate enough revenue to cover the minimum costs of living. I certainly haven't given up on my quest for a farming business that is actually economically, environmentally and physically sustainable, but I'm definitely a long way from that yet. Hopefully as the season ends in November, I'll have a chance to review these past few seasons, looking at things that worked and didn't work and hopefully coming up with ways to be more productive and to generate more income. It has to be possible for farming to actually pay the bills, or how can any new farmers be encouraged to go into farming? Because if we don't get new farmers in the next few years, how are we going to have food to eat? There are definitely days where I really wish I had a partner with an off-farm income so I wouldn't have to shoulder all the costs of owning and maintaining a property on my own, but then I have to remind myself that God led me on this path, and He will truly provide for me. I have no lack of that evidence in my life so far! I just need to remind myself to have faith...and ask everyone to pray for me ;P

Into the home stretch

I can't believe how busy this summer has been! I completely missed both July and August for blog posting because there just wasn't any time to sit down for a moment to collect my thoughts. Reading the previous post, I realize how much has happened since then. First off, the weather did an about face and became hot and dry, almost drought-like at times. The irrigation drip lines were rolled out and used to make sure plants wouldn't die off during a 3 week stretch with no rain. But all that heat paid off in tons of summer squash! In our peak production weeks, Jeremy and I hauled over 400 lbs of them off the field each week. In multiple trips of course...even with both of us pulling the cart, 150-200 lbs were a struggle!

The hot, dry weather was also good for making sure the tomato plants didn't get blight. Instead, the tomato horn worm hit, which meant some unwelcome worm picking for me (uggh...absolutely hate the tomato horn worm!) and feasting for the chickens ;P The potato plants were also hit with potato beetle, which meant picking off potato beetle larva...yet another unwelcome task. I'm really not a bug person, so manual pest control is not something I look forward to, but it's definitely high on the farm priority list.

In late June/early July, after all the tomato, pepper, hot pepper, eggplant, cucumber, summer squash, winter squash transplants and sweet potato slips were finally transplanted into the field, I was nearly overwhelmed mentally looking at all the weeding that needed to get done. Two acres of vegetables to weed, even with two people, looked like a lot more than what I had to weed on my own in previous years. Thankfully, some farmer friends came to the rescue and on the first Saturday in July, four of us hit the field with wheel hoes and regular hoes and took down the weeds between plants for about 1/3 of an acre. At the same time, Jeremy hooked up the hiller attachment on the rototiller and hilled all 8 beds of potato plants. Jeremy got a bit heat stroked from all that activity in the heat, and I'm not sure how the rest of us avoided the same.

We celebrated our weeding/hilling achievements (and my birthday!) with some great organic, biodynamic red wine from Tawse Winery and the Fellowship cheese wheel from the cheesemaking workshop I went to at Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Co. back in April. Absolutely delicious!

The carrots and beets have also done really well this season, tasting amazing and growing so much bigger than in my previous two years. When I fork up the carrots, I'm always amazed by how long and big they've grown given how hard and compacted the soil is under the top few inches. Gardening experts always say that carrots won't do well under such conditions, so I'm thankful that my carrots chose to ignore all that.

The one crop family that seems to be a consistent failure in my field this year is brassicas. This includes bok choy, cabbages, turnips, broccoli and brussel sprouts. There are a number of possible reasons for this ranging from the extremes in weather (too cold and wet to too hot and dry) to pests (flea beetle and swede midge) and most likely, to deficiencies in trace elements in the soil (to be addressed over the years with the addition of compost and building up of organic matter). I did get one harvest of bok choy early in the season, and the fall planting of bok choy seems to have germinated well, so we'll see if there will be some to harvest before the season's over! Otherwise, many of my clients have been very happy that both turnips and brussel sprouts haven't turned out ;P

Of the first time crops this year, the most resounding success has been edamame! Specifically, the Beer Friend variety that I bought from William Dam Seeds. It was a pleasure to watch the soy plants grow, from their fresh leafy stems, to their tiny, delicate flowers to the pods, fuzzy enough to pet! And it was amazing to sit down to a bowl of freshly boiled and salted pods with a beer :) I'm definitely growing edamame again next year!

There's still lots to do this season, especially if the fall stays warm. Last night was the coldest night with a definite risk of frost, which didn't happen (thank goodness!), so there will still be tomatoes and summer squash for a bit. And the fall crops need to get harvested, like the potatoes (Purple Viking and Russian Blue are already in, next are the fingerlings!), winter squash and pumpkins.

If things ever slow down, I'm going to tackle the leeks and onions which haven't gotten weeded at all this season and are completely lost in brome grass right now. I'm hoping they will be early leeks and onions for next season at this point ;P

Starting the delivery season

I should be washing dishes right now, but realized that I had to write at least one post for June! And the topic's been on my mind for most of this month...when to start harvesting and delivering vegetables to the farm's subscribers. It was a really tough call this year as the early crops weren't growing as I'd hoped/planned. Usually, I use the timing of the sugar snap peas to determine when I start deliveries, but with the loss of my Asian greens crops (bok choy mostly) to cold, wet, flea beetle, you name it, and slow growth and sparser than hoped for germination on my salad green, spinach, herb and chard plantings, there wasn't necessarily enough other produce to deliver along with the sugar snap peas! Plus, every week that I delayed past my hoped for start week of June 21 would be a tough loss of revenue for the season.

So on Sunday, June 19th, I walked my field, saw that the first plantings of salad greens and spinach were big enough to harvest and that the first picking of sugar snap peas was ready, and decided that I would start my deliveries that week. Monday morning, Jeremy and I cut the first bed of salad greens, which didn't yield nearly enough, so we went on to the 2nd planting as well. We did the same for the spinach, hoping that there would be enough to make deliveries (now a necessity!) worthwhile. After weighing and packaging the greens, I made the decision to do a partial run for the first week, delivering to 25 downtown subscribers out of the almost 40 that would normally get vegetables on my 'downtown' week. And of those deliveries, the majority didn't get enough vegetables for a full package, so I owe them additional vegetables later in the summer when there's more produce (fingers crossed!).

This week, I again decided on a partial run, 22 out of 40, but all with full packages. We cut greens from the 3rd planting which yielded the same poundage as plantings 1 & 2 combined. And the first planting of sugar snap peas definitely came into its own, yielding about 15 lbs over 250 linear feet, with another 15 lbs from the 2nd planting of close to 400 linear feet. Next week, that 2nd planting should yield lots more too.

It's amazing how much of a difference the weather at different planting times can make. The first 2 greens seedings were done when the weather was still pretty cold, so by the time they started growing well, the 3rd had already almost caught up, and in the end, surpassed them for production. I wonder how many years it will take before I can look at a row of salad greens and get an accurate estimate on how much they'll all weigh once cut. One thing's for sure, I'm definitely increasing the linear feet I plant for early greens next year!

So for this season, I won't be making full subscription deliveries to all my clients until July :( I guess I should feel lucky as I hear of many farms and gardens which haven't started producing anything yet due to wet fields and a cold spring. And certainly being able to start deliveries 'on time', even if abbreviated, is a vast improvement over my first year where I didn't have enough volume of produce to bring anywhere until September ;P I should feel quite lucky that my field has produced as much as it has considering it's a new field (for me and my vegetables). It's certainly been a different experience so far as this field is much wetter than my previous one (which was a slightly sloping hill on a higher part of my farm), and having been worked a lot more over the years (by previous croppers), has a lot less organic matter and more compaction. It will definitely be a few years before it will be in a state that 'guarantees' any sort of vegetable production ;P

Hopefully as the season progresses, I won't have to stress so much over having enough vegetables to deliver to subscribers. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there aren't any major crop failures, and that this year, the tomatoes don't get blight. So far, they're looking healthy and happy...but so much can change overnight! Sometimes I can't believe how much my life has changed, with my whole livelihood dependent on so many uncontrollable factors. But perhaps there's some peace to be found in that. All I can do is work hard and do my best and the rest is out of my hands. In my previous city working life (as in most of yours I'm sure!), so much that could go wrong with work had to do with people and politics, which is much more frustrating because you feel like maybe you have power over the outcome. I've accepted that I have no power over the weather ;P

Field prep and planting

It's been a while since the last blog update because the past few weeks have been a frenzy of field prep, tree planting, soil blocking and seedling starting. If you've been paying attention to the weather, we've been having a very cold and wet spring, especially compared to the unusually hot and dry spring last year! In all of April, there were maybe 2 one-day windows for field cultivation and then a stretch of 3-5 days in May in which pretty much every field crop farmer in my area had to cultivate and then seed their fields from dawn to dusk. Any farmer that didn't manage to take advantage of those few days have now been waiting in vain for another stretch where fields could dry out. According to Environment Canada, some areas of Ontario had record rainfall in April. And so far, May seems to be super wet too!

I was lucky in that my neighbour who helps me out with field work once a year, was home and available the first almost dry day in April. For my farm, that was April 13, and he used a cultivator with S-tines and rolling baskets to break up the soil for the southern, relatively dry, half of my field. I say relatively dry because it was not ideally dry for any cultivation, but with more precipitation expected in the next few days I didn't want to lose my one day window to get the field ready for direct seeding. And it's definitely a good thing that it was done then because the next time the field was dry enough to be worked was May 9th! That's when the unworked northern half of the field was disked up.

In between the first and second cultivations, we direct seeded sugar snap peas, radish, salad mix, spinach, bok choy, gai lan, turnip, daikon radish, beets, carrots, chard and herbs to the field. The first sets of direct seedings were almost into frozen ground and were snowed on a couple days later. And then parts of the beds sat in snow melt puddles for days after that :( Subsequent plantings were doubled to make up for any drowning losses. It amazes me how much some seeds can actually take. The very first planting of sugar snap peas germinated relatively evenly given all these adverse conditions. I definitely expected more seed losses.

We also planted 400+ trees along the western and southern edges of the field to be future wind/shelter breaks. Many of the cedars were planted into very mucky puddles indeed! Planting trees is definitely a long-term investment as I don't expect the trees to get much bigger than their seedling size for the first 5-6 years. And I'll be lucky to see any of the oaks reach their full growth in my lifetime.

My vegetable field for the first two years was up on a hill that dried out fairly early, and the first two years weren't as wet in the spring as now, so I didn't truly appreciate what a benefit that was until this year. Each day in early April, Jeremy and I would check out the field to see if it was dry enough to start using. My first time venturing into the field when it was really wet resulted in a fall in the mud when my boot got sucked in. We really shouldn't have been walking in the field at all, to avoid compaction, but I just couldn't fathom how different things would be compared with before. Now I know!