FarmQuest

Delivery woes

2011-10-05T10:12:00.000-04:00

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

2011-09-17T11:41:00.000-04:00

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

2011-06-28T21:23:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-26T16:23:00.000-04:00

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!

Farming and politics

2011-04-22T13:07:00.000-04:00

I'm currently inside the house, warming up with a hot cup of tea from a wet and icky fall in the mud, and thought it would be a good time to write about politics ;P

I attended my first all-candidates debate for my region, Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, on Wednesday night in the community centre at Keady. It's actually the first political debate I've ever attended. I've never really been one for watching the leaders' debates on tv or listening on the radio, but have chosen more to read party platforms downloaded from their websites. While I've always exercised my right to vote, and have tried to be an informed voter, I find myself more motivated to care about our democracy since getting into farming than ever before.

The debate I attended was organized by the National Farmers' Union (NFU), the Christian Farmers' Federation of Ontario (CFFO) and the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), so of course, the debate questions all focused on agriculture and food policy. I didn't learn anything particularly new about the various parties' agriculture-related platforms at this debate as I do generally keep track of the issues on this front. I found the format of the debate itself lacking as the audience didn't get to participate in the process, other than submitting written questions, of which only a small handful were presented to the candidates for debate. While I understand this was done for efficiency's sake and to avoid any public outbursts, it did not make me feel engaged in the process at all.

The candidates that impressed me the most with their responses were Emma Hogbin for the Green Party and Kimberley Love for the Liberals. They seemed passionate and informed about their positions. Kimberley was especially impressive with her ability to answer questions on point and a very confident public speaking style. However, Emma was much more pointed in her views on the problems with Canadian agriculture and what the Green Party would do to address them. Essentially, organic and local agriculture, especially of small and mid-size farms, is their focus, which you can imagine, is especially dear to my heart.

Large, corporate agriculture has had decades of government support and subsidies and I can't see how that has been successful to now. In one of my previous posts, I had discussed how I had gone looking for all the 'government money' that was out there to help me farm, and had discovered that this is a hoax that many Canadians believe in, but is ultimately untrue for any farm that isn't of a large and corporate scale. If Canada's overall food system is to have any long-term resilience and sustainability, it needs to include all different scales of agriculture, and arguably, far many more small and mid-size farms. If the rate of farmer retirement continues to outpace the rate of farmer replacement (described by the moderator on Wednesday in Ontario/Canada? as 4000 leaving and 1000 replacing each year), then who's going to grow the food we need to eat in the future? The capital costs for starting a farm can be quite high, and the learning curve once you're there is pretty steep. If farmers can't be profitable because they only get back less than 10% of the retail value of the goods they've produced, then who the hell wants to get into farming? But I digress...

The candidate I was absolutely the least impressed with at the debate was the Conservative incumbent, Larry Miller. From all my blog postings, I'm sure it's fairly clear that I'm far from being a Conservative, small or big 'C', but this man was so insulting in so many ways that I can't see how anyone could vote for him. His trademark phrase is that he's a 'straight-shooter', which perhaps appeals to this region because the demographics are older and most folks don't want to hear a bill of goods? I don't want to be insulting to the voters in my region, as everyone I've met has been pretty wonderful so far, but really...why do you vote for Larry Miller??? One of his responses that sticks out in my mind from the debate, was when he erroneously interpreted something said by Emma (Green Party), to which his response was (paraphrased slightly, but not far from being quoted word for word) "...they want to tell you how many acres you can farm...the last time that happened was in Russia, and it was Communism...". I was so bowled over by the ignorance and misinformation of that comment that I was just in shock for the next few moments. But beyond that response, and others that really annoyed me, his overall message was that government just couldn't (wouldnt'!) do anything to change the way Canadian agriculture currently works (doesn't). And if you take a look at the Conservative party platform on agriculture, you'll see that it's more of the status quo, focusing on export markets, agricultural innovation (read: more expensive machines, chemical inputs and GM products) and more fields growing fuel, than food crops, if that's what's actually profitable to farmers (...only because of subsidies!). If you think having a meat heavy diet is a hugely inefficient use of land resources, then take a look at the input/output numbers for fuel cropping (I shudder).

The NDP candidate for my region is Karen Gventer, who was also at the debate, though I don't have much to say one way or another about her performance there. The NDP food policy platform itself is certainly one with a lot of content that I agree with.

The Liberals, NDP and Greens all have food policies that I can live with (for a really simple synopsis, go to: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/something-to-chew-on-a-party-by-party-breakdown-of-food-policy/article1979351/). Though none of them are comprehensive enough (all 3 could be combined, and then some), they're certainly a start, which is more than has been on the political agenda for years! I hope that rural communities, traditionally seen as Conservative strongholds, stop thinking that Conservative policies help agriculture and consider alternatives. If the polls are to be believed, the Conservatives are the front runner for my district, with the Green Party in second. If you don't want the Conservatives to win this seat again, maybe we could push the Greens to the fore, and an actual seat in Parliament. Anything other than the Conservatives and Miller again!

There was one interesting thing at the debate that I'll conclude with. Barney, a local man known for his sandwich board protests, was also at the debate with flyers on why we should purposely spoil our ballot at this election to send a message that our democracy is a sham and that our current slate of parties to vote for is no real choice at all. Given the lacklustre performance of the various opposition parties over the course of Harper's overly powerful time in office, I don't necessarily disagree with Barney ;P Whatever anyone chooses to do with their time at the ballot box, I just hope everyone goes to do something and sends a message that we want to participate in our democracy (no matter how flawed) and not be apathetic bystanders.

Cheesemaker for a Day!

2011-04-19T13:14:00.000-04:00

Last week, Jeremy and I attended an amazing cheese workshop at Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Co. (www.fifthtown.ca) in Prince Edward County. It was a whole day workshop, the majority of the time spent in scrubs, hairnets, rubber boots and with hands/arms sanitized to the elbow. Fifth Town had received their largest shipment of milk to date the night before, and when we arrived, the milk (flash pasteurized on site) was filling up the vats where they would be turned into cheese curds.

The milk of the day was goat (they also make cheese from sheep and cow's milk) and it was collected from two goat farms within a 100 km radius of Fifth Town the day before. The plan was to turn about 1800L of the goat's milk into Cape Vessey (a firm cheese with washed rind), and the rest into Nettles Gone Wild (a soft surface ripened cheese).

While we breakfasted on bagels with a sampling of their various chevre cheeses in the cheese store, we watched Fifth Town's cheesemakers add rennet and culture to the warmed milk. After we had eaten and gotten all suited up, we were allowed to enter the cheese plant. We scrubbed our arms and hands and then sanitized them by dipping in iodine solution. We then helped get the cheese moulds ready to receive the curds. We also packaged up quark (a German cheese somewhere between yogurt and cream cheese) and got to taste it. So delicious! I can imagine it making a very decadent cheese cake.

Jeremy and I also got to help the plant's staff take swabs of various parts of the facility to send to the lab to make sure no unsafe bacteria had contaminated the plant. This was when we first set foot in the cheese cave which greeted us with the pungent smell of cheese molds. It was actually quite a heady smell which definitely made me want to eat some cheese! Amazing to think that as a kid, I couldn't stand the taste or smell of blue cheese, or any 'stinky' cheese ;P

Once the curds were set, we got to help cut it. The consistency was like silken tofu and the curd would break with a touch of the finger. At this stage, the size of the cut curds is important for what kind of cheese you want to make, with a smaller curd yielding a harder cheese (less moist) after aging. After the initial curd cutting was done, we stirred them in the giant vats with a large paddle as they were heated again to further solidify the curds.

Now came the wet part, packing the curds into the moulds. We would take a 'hat', a nylon mesh basket and run it through the vat, filling it with curds and draining off the whey. The hat would go in the mould where we would squeeze the mound of curds to press out some of the whey, and perhaps add some more curds to make sure the mould was nice and full. Then the caps (which press on the curds) were added.

By the time we had finished emptying the first vat of curds and put them all into moulds, it was already time to flip the first moulds that were filled! This involved flipping the moulds onto their caps, removing the mould and hat and then dropping the flipped cheese back into the hat/mould without having it break apart. I was quite nervous flipping my first cheese but soon got the hang of it. I was amazed by how much the curds had stuck to each other with so little pressure and time. These cheeses would be flipped 2-4 more times before they would be ready for brining and then aging for about 3 months. That day, our workshop helped to make over 120 Cape Vesey cheeses, and also 3 trays of Nettles Gone Wild.

After clearing all the cheese vats of curds, we got to sit down to a late lunch prepared by Fifth Town's in-house sommelier and chef. We had a mixed green salad with a dressing made with the rind of a hard cheese, crostini with cheese on top, lamb shepherd's pie (with cheese in the mashed potatoes), little shortbread cookies made with cheese and vanilla pana cotta. After our meal, we had a wine (all from Prince Edward County) and cheese (all Fifth Town's, of course!) tasting where we educated our palates on the best pairings. So much cheese for lunch! I was definitely in heaven :)

When we had cleaned up from lunch, we re-sanitized ourselves and helped with the 3rd turning of the Cape Vessey cheeses. Then we went into the cheese caves to learn about the ripening process, and to pick the cheese rounds we'd be taking home with us. I picked a brushed rind hard cheese called Fellowship that had been made back in November and is almost ready to eat. It's made of sheep and goat's milk and is currently finishing its ripening in my summer kitchen/basement. I check on it almost daily, but really only need to brush the mold around and turn it once a week or so until I'm ready to cut it open. I plan to eat it for my birthday with a strong red wine. With help of course...it is a 5 lb cheese round! If you're in my area the Canada Day long weekend, stop in for some cheese and wine :D

Washed rind cheese cave. Rack of Cape Vessey.

Jeremy standing in the brushed rind cheese cave.

The best thing about taking this cheese workshop was getting a real feel for the different stages of the cheesemaking process. Reading about it is one thing, but knowing how things should smell and feel at the different stages of the process gives me the practical knowledge to get started making my own cheese! On a much smaller scale of course. Perhaps there will be some Black Sheep Farm cheese to serve along with Fifth Town's Fellowship for my birthday :)

The problem with GMOs

2011-03-23T18:52:00.001-04:00

Lately, genetically modified organisms (GMO), terminator, hybrid and heirloom seeds and patent rights have become more important for producers and consumers to understand. A number of GMOs are already in our food chain, and many more are awaiting their approval to be grown in Canada. Recently, I attended a protest against the University of Guelph's EnviroPig(TM), a GM animal, which they want to put into production on farms. Its claim to utility is much reduced phosphorus in its excretions (currently an environmental problem at large hog operations).

So what's the fuss all about? Why is genetic modification so controversial? What's at stake?

This is my stab at these issues, not on a super scientific level (you can all look up scientific papers on-line if you want the nitty gritty details) but from my perspective as an organic farmer whose goal is sustainable agriculture. I'm also going to stick with discussing plants, not transgenic animals or gene therapy, etc., which are all the results of recombinant DNA technology.

On a very basic level, farmers growing vegetables or field crops (grain/oil seed/soy/etc.) have the option of buying hybrid, GM or open (or self)-pollinating (OP) seeds. Of these three kinds, they can only save seed from OP crops as they're the only ones that breed true (given the right circumstances) and aren't patented (like GM and some hybrid seeds).

An F1 hybrid is the progeny of two homozygous parents. If you remember your high school or 1st year university biology, homozygous means that the two alleles for a given trait (like seed colour) are the same. This ensures that the F1 seed that results is very uniform genetically, reliably expressing the dominant parent characteristics for which it was bred. Producing stable F1 hybrid seed requires very controlled pollination, usually by hand, to make sure that each parent breeds with the other and not with its own kind. F1 hybrids grown and allowed to go to seed produce F2 seed, whose genetics would be a mix of the original parents and the F1 seed, which makes it very unreliable for reproducing F1 genetics. It is possible to stabilize a hybrid by breeding it over many generations until you've stabilized the original F1, essentially making it 90%+ homozygous. Some F1 hybrids are actually sterile (like a mule), which means no seed can be harvested from that crop.

Genetically modified seed has been created in a lab using recombinant DNA technology. It usually involves the insertion or deletion of a gene sequence. Insertions via bacterial or viral vectors are usually from a different species entirely (not plant at all). The first approvals for GM crops in Canada were in the 1990s. The first commercial cultivation of GM plants was in 1996. Currently, most of Canada's canola, corn and soybean crops are GM varieties. These varieties could have resistance to commercial herbicides (so they will survive herbicide application), be able to produce their own pesticidal proteins, or do both. The majority of these genetics have been developed (or bought) by Monsanto, and supposedly, their earliest patents start expiring in 2014. Globally, the highest percentage of GM crops grown are of corn, soy, cotton, canola & potatoes.

Open (or self) pollinating varieties, of which heirlooms would be a subset, set seed through sexual reproduction, aided by pollinators, such as insects, animals, the wind, etc. Some varieties are also self-pollinating. You can save genetically stable seed from many of these varieties, provided that you practice good seed saving techniques, such as isolation distances, buffer zones, removing genetically inferior plants before pollination, etc. to ensure that you're breeding true and for the hardiest plants. This type of sexual reproduction ensures genetic diversity and the production of plant varieties uniquely suited to the environment in which they're grown. Heirloom seeds are usually older varieties (50+ years old) which have mainly been preserved through the work of home gardeners for generations. Luckily for smaller vegetable producers like me, there are many heirloom varieties available commercially these days.

The pros to F1 hybrid seeds are their genetic reliability in terms of the traits that they express, as they usually produce more uniform fruit than OP/Heirloom varieties. That said, if the conditions aren't ideal in terms of moisture, heat units, etc., they won't do any better than other plants. The cons are that you can't save any seed from them and they cost more from seed companies than OP varieties (after all, they do require more effort to produce). Some would argue that they're less tasty or nutritious than OP varieties, probably because they've been bred more for size and shape (for mass production) than flavour.

As an organic farmer, I can't see any of pros to GM seeds. Since I don't use any herbicides, resistance to it isn't of any use to me. And I shudder at the thought that a plant is producing pesticides itself that could be killing a broad spectrum of insects that touch them, thereby destroying biodiversity of the insect population. Organic farming is about having healthy soils and resilient, biodiverse ecosystems. But for me, the biggest con of GM seeds, is letting their genetics loose in the environment, potentially contaminating plant gene pools beyond our ability to remediate. The arguments for how that can be prevented include terminator seeds (so that the plants can't reproduce at all) and large buffer zones. Terminator seeds scare me because nature always finds a way to sexually reproduce, which means the terminator gene could actually make its way into non-GM varieties and cause the genocide of those varieties. Large buffer zones are both unpredictable (high winds, far roaming insects and animals) and impractical (how much land would need to be used for buffering?). Also GM seeds generally cost a lot, and must be grown with specific chemical and water inputs, all large costs.

Open pollinated varieties have the benefit of being relatively easy to cultivate for seed and in many cases, of having been around for a very long time. Their plants and fruit have been eaten by generations without negative side effects. One of the reasons why GM organisms raise alarm bells for me, is that the technology is not that old and its products have only had a limited time to be tested for adverse effects. Consider that DNA recombinant technology was first practiced in the early 1970s and the first GM crops for commercial production were in 1996. That's only 15 years of limited, though hugely growing, production of GM foods. There have been studies that show that GM varieties of soy are much more allergenic than non-GM varieties, and there are worries that GM foods can contribute to antibiotic resistance. How many more children these days have allergies and sensitivities that weren't around when you were growing up? There may be few whole GM foods available for consumption, but they are definitely used in highly processed foods, like vegetable oils and breakfast cereals. New plant varieties are created all the time in nature, but GM varieties cross species boundaries with their genetics. Outside the lab, plants only sexually reproduce with other plants, not frogs or fish.

Currently, the Liberals are trying to pass a moratorium on allowing GM alfalfa into Canada (after another bill failed to pass). The Liberals, NDP & PQ would all vote in favour of this moratorium until more scientific study can be done, but the Conservatives have stalled a vote, twice now. The Monsantos of the world have many lobbyists and a lot of money to throw at political parties. The concern with GM alfalfa (other than just an overall concern with GMOs!) is that it could contaminate Canada's alfalfa supply, thereby jeopardizing our production of organic livestock or of closing markets to our alfalfa. This is a real risk, as GM flax has already contaminated Canada's flax supply, making it impossible to sell Canadian flax into GM-banning markets. Alfalfa is mainly pollinated by bees, who can fly very far indeed in their search for pollen. It is naive to assume that cross-pollination into non-GM alfalfa fields can be prevented. Organic production doesn't allow for any GM products/inputs at all and most grazing animals are fed alfalfa, either in the field or barn, along with other grains/grasses. Generally, Ontario farmers don't even grow alfalfa as a monocrop, as their alfalfa's usually intercropped with other grasses. A GM-alfalfa crop would be a monocrop that would be sprayed with glyphosate herbicide to get rid of broad-leaf weeds. So the likelihood of farmers even wanting to buy expensive GM-alfalfa seed and its partnered herbicide are low...but there's always someone...and before you know it, there wouldn't be any non-GM alfalfa in Canada.

Overall, I think GMOs are dangerous because there's too much that is unknown about their long-term effects on gene pools, people and the environment, especially weighed against their short-sighted benefits (high yields with expensive inputs).

At Black Sheep Farm this year, I will be growing 37 different vegetable crops, 91 different varieties in total. Of those varieties, 64 are open/self-pollinating, many being heirlooms, and 27 are hybrids. Clearly, I'm not a monocropping kind of farmer ;P I hope that all these different kinds of plants will attract many different insects to my field, so lots of pollination can happen and the insects can be in predator/prey balance. And I don't even really like bugs ;P What I do love is a biodiverse ecosystem. After all, variety is the spice of life!

Vegetable subscriptions now available!

2011-03-07T13:00:00.005-05:00

I'm finally ready to advertise this year's Black Sheep Farm vegetable subscriptions! Thanks to my talented design sister, I now have a lovely brochure with details for this year. I've also created some pages here (see right side bar) with information.

The cost and frequency of the vegetable packages is the same as last year ($40/package, delivered every second week...for a total season's cost of maximum $400). Most of the same vegetables will be grown, with the exception of parsnips and melons, and the addition of sweet corn, edamame, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, fingerling potatoes and sweet potatoes. Of course, there's no guarantee that any of these will succeed, along with the other vegetables on the list (see link in side bar), but I certainly hope they do! I'm also increasing the number of varieties of heirloom tomatoes being grown in the hopes that a larger genetic pool will mean that at least some of the tomatoes will escape blight this year.

As I will be growing 2 acres of vegetables this year (with the help of Jeremy, the farm's first intern!), I need to double subscribership for this year from 40 to 80. So if anyone's interested in a vegetable subscription, please email me at info@justblacksheep.com.

Delivery areas are potentially all around the GTA, depending on where there are clusters of interest (Mississauga, North York, Yonge & Eglinton, Bathurst & St. Clair, etc.), as well as downtown Toronto, where I walk vegetable packages all around the downtown core. I definitely get a workout on my downtown deliveries as I walk the equivalent of 7-10 km to get to my various pick up points throughout the day. So don't be surprised if you see someone dressed in green, brisk walking down University Avenue with a giant cart of vegetables on Wednesdays this year :) My greater GTA deliveries are driven as they can't all be concentrated to within a few kilometre radius...yet! I guess that's something I could aspire to in the future. I've learned all sorts of Toronto driving tricks and short cuts in the past year, thanks to poring over side streets in Google maps. Anything to avoid main thoroughfares, and rush hour in general!

I could save myself some of these delivery logistics if I hadn't decided on a bi-weekly delivery model. But the benefits of having a different delivery group every second week are too valuable to give up. First off...my sanity. Having a different delivery route, one driven, the other mostly walked, every second week gives me variety and also the opportunity to touch base with more people. Second, most of my target market wouldn't be able to finish a full box of vegetables every week given that they eat out occasionally (or often!) and also like to buy some vegetables that I don't grow. So a bi-weekly box gives them farm fresh vegetables, while also allowing them the meal space for other produce and nights out. Third, having a lower subscription price point ($400 for 10 vegetable packages over 20 weeks, versus $800 for 20) makes them somewhat easier to sell.

In terms of vegetable package size, there are enough vegetables in a package for 1-2 people to eat over 2 weeks. Earlier in the season, the packages are lighter, containing mostly greens (salad, beet greens, spinach, bok choy). As the season progresses, they get heavier as summer squash, beans, tomatoes and root crops become harvestable. By the end of the season, it's a good thing I keep increasing upper arm strength, because the addition of winter squash and pumpkins definitely makes the packages much heavier! I dare you all to beat me arm wrestling at the end of October ;P

I'm still debating on whether or not to get a Black Sheep Farm re-useable bag printed for my downtown deliveries. The number that would need to be ordered to make the per bag cost reasonable is quite high, but given that I plan to be growing vegetables for many years, it might be worth it. Both for branding and to cut down on bag losses! I definitely need to get better at getting bags back from people as I went over budget on reuseable shopping bags last year. But then I have a dilemma over what kind of bag to order. I like that the PET bags are made of recycled plastic, but they don't last too long after a few washings. I'd like to get organic cotton canvas bags, but they're quite expensive and aren't made to the same dimensions of the recycled plastic bags I like. If I do decide to get bags made, I definitely have to make that decision soon so that they can be ready in time.

It's kind of crazy how many marketing decisions have to be made on top of figuring out how to grow enough vegetables!

Tax time

2011-02-17T14:56:00.000-05:00

I quite like tax time as I'm one of those strange people who actually really likes to crunch numbers and fill in tax forms. I also paper file my taxes, after all, tax receipts come to me in duplicate or triplicate, they've got to go somewhere!

I'm quite diligent with numbers and record keeping, so all my yearly expenses are spreadsheeted, usually within a week or so of expenditure. But reconciling and properly filing everything at tax time still takes a day or so as I confirm that data has been entered correctly and deposits throughout the year have all been accounted for.

In 2010, the farm grossed just over $17K in vegetable, egg, meat and Christmas wreath sales. Operating business expenses totalled just under $10K and for this year, it's finally worth it for me to claim all my capital cost allowances (CCA) for the year, totalling over $13K. This brings farm income to a net loss of about $5K which, slightly decreased by my off farm income, means I can carry back a loss to a previous tax year. I'm picking 2007 as the furthest year I can carry it back to, also because that's the year in which I made the most money I'll probably ever make in my life ;P I doubt the loss carryback will return too many of my 2007 tax dollars to me, but every dollar back is welcome!

A net farm loss of $5K is about $10K less than Canada's average net farm income (-$15K the last time I looked at stats...may actually have increased to -$20K by now ;P). And that's in my second year of operation, which is essentially still a start up year, which is why I have so much in CCAs to claim! As the years go by, the yearly CCA amount will decrease. I'm hoping that for 2011, I'll have enough net income to start claiming the over $17K I have in moving expenses for 2009. Moving expenses are great because they decrease your net income as opposed to being a tax credit (which aren't much use to me any more ;P). I couldn't believe how much moving expenses could add up to, especially given that the real estate agent's sales commission on my condo is claimeable as a moving expense! And all legal fees for the condo's property sale and farm's purchase! I confirmed on the phone with the CRA today that I can carry forward those expenses indefinitely until I generate enough net income to use it up (Income Tax Act, Subsection 62(1)). I'm pretty sure I'll be able to use it up in 2011 and 2012, which means that I'll actually have enough net income to need to pay taxes in 2013, which would be my 5th year of farming. Strange to think that I aspire to paying income taxes, but to me, having a net income in the taxable range (for 2010, anything over $8943 for Ontario and $10,382 federally) means I'm making it as an organic farmer :D

If you're wondering how the average farmer can survive with a net farm income of -$15K per year...it's because they either have an off farm job, a spouse with an off farm income, or are heavily in debt ;P Essentially, the food we buy at grocery stores is subsidized by farmers themselves. Such a broken system.

Winter work

2011-01-12T13:35:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting at my dining table, looking out the window at the snow falling, writing this blog post as procrastination from putting my tax numbers together for last year ;P I'm hoping to measure out my lower field soon with the help of Mark who's visiting the farm this week. It will be good to get some winter snow walking exercise after the excessive eating of the holiday season! In a two week period I participated in eating turducken, roast duck, follow up duck congee, roast chicken, follow up giant pot of chicken soup and a hot pot feast. Tonight, it's time for lamb and goat hock tagine! Last night I had the first test of eating straight to the freezer chard (i.e. not blanched first) and experienced a very numb tongue (a sometime reaction to eating chard, beet greens, etc.). Not sure if the lack of blanching contributed to that. Will try boiling the frozen chard before adding it to anything the next time and see if the tongue numbing still occurs. Straight to freezer kale cooked up beautifully in a pumpkin and black bean stir fry the night before.

People often ask me what I have to do once winter rolls around and I don't have vegetables to tend. I'd like to say nothing and that I'm on vacation for 3 months, but really, winter becomes the season of paper work and planning. Especially this winter since I'll have a new intern coming aboard and we'll be setting up my permanent vegetable field. That means I have to be much better planned than in the past 2 seasons as the permanent vegetable field will have 4 plots that will come in and out of a 3-5 year rotation (period still to be decided) to ensure soil fertility is increased over time. The difficult thing is to choose one way (for now!) out of the thousands of possibilities that are out there. And I have to make the tractor/no tractor decision for the season. I'm still heavily weighted towards no tractor, but then I need a plan in place for keeping down the natural flora of the field leading to the vegetables so that access won't be a problem. Right now my plan is to use sheep and goats in moveable electric fencing so I can march them back and forth across that stretch of field. But I'll have to keep an eye on when the goats get big enough to jump over the fence as it would be disaster for them to get into my vegetable field! Perhaps it would be more prudent to stick to just lambs for this year...

This year will also include work on more permaculture plantings around the farm. I will plant a cedar, silver maple and oak windbreak between the road and my vegetable field. There's also the fruit orchard and separate nut tree area to plan out and hopefully start with at least a few trees this year. A plot for future asparagus, blueberries, raspberries, rhubarb and maybe other perennial fruit shrubs also needs to be started.

This is also the year that I hope to start managing my wood lot which looks to currently be 99% spruce trees (I think that's what they are). I'll be bringing in a forest consultant to plan out cuttings to thin out the tree canopy so that light can get in to the hardwood saplings so that the planted soft wood forest can succeed to a hardwood forest. Not sure I'll live long enough to the see the results of that, but hopefully I have more than 25-30 years left in me!

And then there are all the building projects I have in mind. First off...an outdoor composting toilet and shower. Then I'll no longer have to rent an outhouse (icky chemical toilet) for the yearly farm open house, or any other event that has more than 20 people at the farm. Multi-day camping visitors would then be accomodated as well! I also want to build an outdoor bread oven (yummy, crusty loaves and super duper pizzas!) and solar dehydrator (to dry chanterelles, tomatoes, fruit slices, even make crackers!).

But before all that fun stuff, I'll have to get in a well contractor to raise my well head above ground level and seal off the top so that there's no possibility of contamination by surface water or things falling in. And at the same time, hopefully I can fix/insulate pumps/pipes/pressure bladders/etc.so that I never have to worry about anything freezing in winters to come.

Once all the above is planned, then I can start livestock and pasture planning. But I'll leave that for another post ;P

Post season presentations, workshops and media!

2010-12-10T10:00:00.130-05:00

Back in mid-October, I was interviewed via phone about the farm by Glenn Cheater, writing for the Canadian Farm Business Management Council. We talked about why/how I got into farming and I sent him some pictures from the farm. You can see the results in the article "Farming their own way" in the December 2010 issue of the Canadian Farm Manager newsletter (go to link in blog title).

This year, I was also one of about 15 recipients of a $750 marketing grant from the Grey-Bruce Local Food Project which helped to pay marketing costs (signs, packaging materials, vegetable bins, printing and supplies, etc.). At the end of the season they hosted, along with the Grey Bruce Agriculture and Culinary Association, the Grey Bruce Local Food Summit in Owen Sound. All of us grant recipients spoke in a workshop about our farms/businesses and how our marketing worked out for the year. A big topic discussed by many at the event, was about the problem of efficient and cost-effective distribution of food products from the producers to local buyers (direct or retail). One of the stumbling blocks was that local restaurants/retailers/etc. were not necessarily willing/able to pay the higher prices for local food vs. foreign imports. This was not a shocking piece of news to any producers, but highlights the fact that though it's currently popular in the media for people, retailers and restaurants to want to source local food, they're not necessarily willing to pay the cost of that choice. The fact that our society expects low cost food is depressing, especially as a producer trying to make a living growing food. One day, we'll all have to come to terms with what the true cost of food is and allocate our budgets accordingly. Hopefully local food production can survive until such a time ;P

In November, I also took the Environmental Farm Plan (EFP)workshop, run by the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association (OSCIA) on behalf of OMAFRA, which I found highly educational. Before this workshop, I hadn't truly clued in to how contaminating industrial agricultural methods really are, and how the government is trying to get farmers to 'voluntarily' mitigate that contamination with cost sharing. I'm not sure what legislation there exists, if any, to get farmers to run cleaner operations. Apparently, the Grey Bruce region has a high rate of participation in the EFP, but it's certainly not all farmers. Many river ways still aren't fenced off from cattle (who stand in the river to drink and poop in there as well) and animal yards aren't necessarily roofed to prevent un-treated/directed manure run-off (think Walkerton...). As an organic farmer, many of the environmental risks addressed in the workshop don't apply to me at all so I'm applying with projects to improve my well (apparently, it needs to be completely above ground to be safe from surface water contamination), to plant windbreaks (silver maples, oaks and cedar along the road) and to buy seed for cover cropping. But it was very eye-opening to see how many costs of environmental protection need to be paid for by the farmers themselves. The cost of covering an animal yard to prevent manure run-off from rain/snow is upwards of $30-60K...half of which is paid for by the farmer. Given how little money many industrial farmers are making, I wonder what incentive/cash flow/borrowing is available to these farmers to make these changes to their operation...and the cost to society if they can't afford these changes (again, Walkerton). And for those industrial farmers that are voluntarily cleaning up their operations, it seems to me that our society should acknowledge the heavy costs they pay and how much cleaner operations contribute to improving the environment we all live in. Of course, if all farms in Ontario followed organic principles, that would be the best for all...but I don't live in that much of a fantasy world!

The applicaton process for EFP funding was itself quite crazy. Apparently, when the program was first funded in 1993, it was like pulling teeth to get farmers to participate, but now, it's a race to get your applications in on time to access the government funding (which has decreased over the years). On Nov. 15, I had to go to my workshop leader's house in Mildmay to join the many other farmers from my area in filling out the project application forms that would be mailed via Canada Post that night to get to the OSCIA head office in Guelph. It's quite a sight to arrive at a farm house with a farmer sitting at every available seat at multiple tables/countertops and more waiting on couches for their turn at the writing surfaces. My workshop leader used to drive the application forms in to Guelph to be as far ahead in the queue as possible, but now all the various applications have to arrive by Canada Post to try and level the 'distance to Guelph' playing field. I don't know yet if any of my applications have been approved, but I hope to find out soon so I know if I can go ahead with improvements to my well sooner rather than later!

Prepping the farm for winter

2010-12-09T14:03:00.001-05:00

I can't believe how fast time has flown by since my last vegetable delivery! I had to get lots of stuff done before winter came in earnest (there are a couple feet of snow on the ground at the farm right now).

In November, with the help of Jeremy, my intern for next season, I built spools for winding up irrigation drip tape, got the various bits of irrigation equipment off the field (so fast when you have 2 sets of hands!), did a final glean of the field and processed the laying hens (yes, that means they are now dead and in my freezer, ready to become chicken soup). The last harvest from the field yielded tons of chard and kale, as well as some root vegetables (beets, carrots & parsnips) and cabbage. Most of the chard is now in my freezer and the kale was turned into delicious, crispy chips! My neighbours came over for a field glean feast that night and we thoroughly enjoyed the fruits of our labour :)

For the house, I fire-proofed my basement insulation with a thermal barrier paint...a process which took more than twice as much time and paint than I initially expected :( Not too much fun considering I don't like hanging out in my basement, the paint cost about $100/gallon and it had to be applied by brush. It was like painting a rocky cliff face. But, safety first after all! And now it's done, my insurer is happy too. The eavestroughs on my house were also replaced, so hopefully there will be no repeat of the basement flooding that happened this summer...though eavestroughs won't prevent that in the case of torrential rains, they might mitigate somewhat! At least my new washer is up on a platform so I will have more time to start bailing/pumping the basement if the situation repeats itself!

I've also been stacking wood for the winter, a process only half done so far. But this year I was smarter and covered the wood pile with tarps, so even with the snow that's come down, the wood will be more accessible than last year when I had to chip logs out of ice ;P It is quite lovely to have the wood stove heating the house. The flames are beautiful and the dry heat definitely takes the damp out of the house! The cats love sitting in front of the stove too :)

Which reminds me...I now have cats! I knew I had to choose between cats or mice in the house for the winter, so I went with cats. I adopted a lovely pair from a couple moving to Zurich and am quite happy with my new mousers. I haven't had any mouse droppings around the house since their arrival and I was presented with my first dead mouse while watching a movie one night.

The one thing I didn't get around to doing before the weather got cold, is set up my heat lamp for the well pump. I should probably have prioritized that as I'm currently sitting at home with no water because the temperature dropped below -10C last night so the pump line froze. I completely forgot about it before I left for Toronto to help my sister with the One of a Kind show, and wasn't paying enough attention to temperature to clue in that I needed to get that set up yesterday. Since I just got back to the farm on Tuesday, I guess my mind hadn't quite returned to rural mode yet! Plus, yesterday's all day snow storm meant I wasn't in the mood for wandering around outside running extension cords ;P

Now I'm in a Christmas decorating frame of mind...jump started by making the wreaths for my first set of Christmas wreath deliveries mid-November. I have another set of deliveries in about a week, but the greens will be harder to forage now since there's so much snow on the ground! It will definitely be good exercise to go snow hiking out to gather greens :)

Season's end

2010-10-29T12:16:00.001-04:00

I'm sipping coffee at a table at the Williamsford Pie Company, looking back on the growing season as I write this post. This past Tuesday was my last (19th!) vegetable delivery of the 2010 season and so now I have time to reflect.

I'm truly thankful that I was able to make vegetable deliveries for 19 weeks out of a potential 16-20 week season. I had to buy in winter squash and pie pumpkins from a fellow organic vegetable farmer to make full vegetable packages for the last 4 weeks, but my field still had greens and root vegetables to harvest, so it was worth it to keep going. With all the cold of the past few weeks, my greens all turned super sweet. My mother stir fried some bok choy from the field for dinner one night and I was amazed at how sweet it was. And my salad greens, despite having to survive 2 inches of wet snow on Oct. 21 (crazy early snowfall...but absolutely gorgeous), were deliciously crisp and tasty. I still have chard, kale, spinach, carrots, beets and potentially, napa cabbage and kohlrabi, to harvest for myself until winter finally sets in. I'll invite my neighbours for a field glean in mid-November so we can have a vegetable feast that night.

Some random things I learned this year while in the field:
1. Cabbages really attract earwigs, slugs and other wormy critters. I'm not fond of any of these pests so cabbage harvest (napa, green & purple) wasn't particularly fun. Since all my harvest this year was done solo, no one had to hear my bug related shrieks other than the local wildlife ;P I would always drown the heads in tubs of cold water to try and flush out any remaining bugs, but that's no guarantee of getting them all out of the leaf layers. I hope my clients weren't too freaked out if they found any wormy things in their cabbages. I may resort to the use of diatomaceous earth next year (or finally put 2+ years of collected eggshells to work) to see if that cuts down on the creepy crawlies.
2. My local rabbit/mouse/mole/ground hog population really likes nibbling on the tops of my beets. I guess I can't blame them given how tasty they are...but it breaks my heart each time I discard a beet in the field that's been nibbled by rodents. I wonder if having some cats patrol the farm next year might decrease rodent depredation. Can I get cats to patrol my field specifically? Or maybe it will be time for me to finally get a dog...
3. I need to make more noise in the field or risk being freaked out by wildlife. While weeding or harvesting, I have variously been frightened by the proximity of deer, rabbits, lizards and frogs/toads. Perhaps frightened is too strong a word...startled may be more appropriate. I have no particular objection to the presence of all these animals in my field, and am quite happy to have them around as it speaks to the health of the farm's environment, but I'd rather they stayed a bit further away from me. The deer was the most alarming. I stood up from a crouch, turned to my right, saw a deer close by and yelled in reflex. The deer took off, obviously as startled by me as I was by him/her.
4. Parsnips can grow really, really, really long. This was my first year successfully planting and harvesting parsnips and I was expecting their harvest to be on a par with carrots. Well, after loosening the parsnips with a pitch fork, I would then huff and puff trying to pull up the parsnip, only to have the greens or root itself break off on me. I often had to resort to scrabbling around each parsnip with my fingers, digging down until the majority of the root was uncovered and I could get a good enough grip to pull it out of the soil. I did fall on my backside a few times from the sudden release of the parsnip. And my finger cuticles suffered some damage from all the finger soil scrabbling. I guess the super creamy texture of the parsnips makes it worth it in the end...but I'm still on the fence about that ;P
5. I can finally take heat. I spent this hot, humid summer in the field mostly covered from head to toe, wearing long sleeves, long pants, rubber boots and a hat. This was to avoid having to cover myself with sunscreen and bug spray (their chemical contents make me shudder). I can even sit in saunas now! As long as I'm hydrated and there's a cold swim in a river to look forward to at the end of the day, the heat is bearable. Not pretty, but bearable. My glasses often collected droplets of sweat for me and I would have salt lines on my work clothes when they dried...really attractive ;P

All in all, I'd say my second season was a success. While I only hit my minimum financial targets, I'm not destitute and haven't increased my debt load. I think my vegetable subscribers were happy with their packages this year (which a survey in the next few weeks will hopefully confirm or refute). I ate lots of delicious and tasty vegetables (don't really remember what grocery store bought vegetables taste like anymore) and got lots of exercise in the sun (no vitamin D deficiencies for me!). And some great news...I have an intern for next year!

Jeremy, a fellow Albertan transplant (he's from Grand Prairie), has spent many weeks/months of the past 6 summers out in Grey County and has quite fallen in love with the region and country living. He has been living at my neighbour's for this past summer, working on a building project, and I've gotten to know him and my neighbours quite well this past year. It's been great to find so many kindred spirits in such close proximity.

I really look forward to having some company on the farm next year and to the increased vegetable capacity that means. I'll also be able to work on a lot of projects that require at least two people: building a composting toilet, outdoor shower, bread oven, clearing all the scrap wood out of my barnyard so it will be useable by animals, etc. And I'll be able to raise some sheep and goats for meat next season, so keep some freezer space open next fall if you're interested!

I'll be looking to double my vegetable subscribership to 80 (2 sets of 40, every 2nd week) for 2011 as Jeremy and I will be able to cultivate 2 acres of vegetables. I'll also be experimenting with some vegetables that I've never grown before, like corn, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, edamame and brussel sprouts. I'm getting quite excited just thinking about all the vegetables that will be grown next year! And I'll be on a field that has been in green cover crops for the past 2 seasons, getting prepped for intensive vegetable cultivation. I'm hoping that vegetable production will be more consistent on the new field than on the former hay field that I've been using for the past 2 seasons. It will also be a hugely public field as it is completely visible from the road, so time will need to be spent keeping it pretty :)

But I'm getting ahead of myself...my current field still needs to be put to bed (final crops harvested, irrigation equipment wound up and put away, etc.) and then there are a bunch of house maintenance tasks I need to take care of (seems to be a never ending list). One thing's for sure, I won't be bored any time soon!

In the home stretch

2010-09-26T22:21:00.000-04:00

It's the end of day 1 of 2 for harvest week 15 of 19. The weather has definitely turned from hot summer days to cool fall ones. And though I wish some heat would return so my cool weather greens can get some more growing in, I'm also looking forward to winding down this season. Some light frosts have hit the farm already so I've brought in the bulk of my winter squash crop, which is now in my summer kitchen, along with the pumpkins. There are still some summer squash and various hot crops in the field which I will get tomorrow, along with chard, kale, spring onions and beets. For the last 4 (optimistically) weeks, I'll have carrots, parsnips (just waiting for a good frost to sweeten them up) and beets to bring in. And while a hard frost holds off, there will be bok choy and hopefully some spinach and salad greens to harvest as well.

Season 2 at the farm has definitely been very different from 2009! The weather has been almost the opposite, and the field doesn't look anything like last year. There have been a number of torrential rains at the farm this summer, which makes me extra thankful that I managed to grow dwarf white clover in my pathways this year. Without them to hold the soil in place, I would have had rivers running through the field! Unfortunately, with all the hot and muggy weather we've had, my tomatoes didn't do at all well this year, getting the blight after a particularly steamy week. And my winter squash didn't do well either, for reasons that I can only speculate about. So my two best crops last year were essentially crop failures this year. I'll definitely have to see what I can do to mitigate against a repeat next year!

I also have to reevaluate 'fall' in my head. Last year, September and early October were like the summer that we never got, so this year, when summer came early, the timing of my various plants' production caught me with earlier finishes than I expected.

I have to admit that I've had (and will continue to have) some anxious weeks, worried that I won't have enough produce fill my vegetable subscribers' packages. Until I actually start harvesting and recording inventory, I don't know for sure that I can manage for that week and I hate to consider that I might have to cancel a week's delivery and refund payments. But each week, no matter how sparse the field looks, I turn out to have just enough. I'm reminded of the Israelites wandering in the desert and being provided with manna for food. They could only gather enough to eat for that day (any extras wouldn't keep) and had to trust in God to provide for their needs. For these past and coming few weeks, I feel like I'm in a similar situation. No matter how anxious I feel about my field's production, there always turns out to be just enough. I wish I had enough faith not to feel anxious in the first place, but I'm not quite there yet in my spiritual life. Despite the fact that I went into farming with my eyes wide open about the production, and therefore income, risks I'm taking, part of me definitely yearns for more stability. I'm reminded of missionary stories I heard as a child, about missionaries who didn't know where their next meal would come from, or the money to pay their bills, but God would always provide. I never thought then that I would have to have that same faith in God to provide for me now. It's very humbling.

Commentary on prison farm closings

2010-08-14T16:32:00.000-04:00

The following commentary is by Grant Robertson, whose National Farmers Union (of which I'm a part) commentaries I've been reading for a while now. I agree with him wholly...wake up rural Canada and stop voting Conservative! That said, I haven't yet decided which other party would be the best alternative, but anything would be better than more of Harper's government. Michael Ignatieff of the Liberals actually has a National Food Policy which is a bit of a miracle in itself. And I have heard Jack Layton of the NDP speak about food security and sustainability issues, so I know he at least understands even if rural Canada doesn't seem like a high priority in the NDP's platform (though since we're not officially in election mode yet, I really can't say what any party's platform is right now!).

I cannot wait for the next election to be called...please Canada, let's not be complacent. For our country to actually function as a democracy, we actually have to participate in it. Despite its many deficiencies, I still love Canada and wouldn't choose to live anywhere else. We are so blessed to have all the rights that we have here, but we need to actively make sure those rights are truly available to all Canadians, and not placidly assume that they are actually a reality.

What would actually work in our current apathetic climate to get people to care about issues and have informed opinions? And how do we actually get politicians to listen to us and hold them accountable for representing us? Anyone with any ideas on how we can actively participate in our democracy, especially beyond voting at the polls, should share them with everyone! Considering how much time the average person spends social networking via Facebook, Twitter, and who knows how many other methods that I haven't heard of yet, there must be some way to excite some real political thinking for the next election.

Showing disrespect for rural and small town Canada seems to keep the Harper government busier than a dog at a tree farm

A commentary by;

Grant Robertson

It is now abundantly clear that the Harper government was never committed to working for the best interests of farmers, small business owners, communities and much of rural and small town Canada, and worse, that this government disrespects us and see us as little more than a quaint relic of the past. Those are strong words I know, but how else do you explain the comments from this government around the closing of Canada’s prison farms? Despite almost 50 years of verifiable success of the program the Harper government, in its increasingly strident ideological way, is closing down these farms and planning to spend billions on new super-prisons. These farms have provided practical work experience, but even more importantly they have helped to instil a much missing work ethic in inmates that has made a vast difference in their lives.

We know, in part from Statistics Canada data, that many of the inmates in our prison system grew up in situations where it is unlikely they learned the value of work- work was something to be avoided and for ‘losers’. Many former inmates have come forward to talk about how the prison farm program turned their lives around. One such inmate is John Leeman who says he had never worked a real job when he went into jail but he learned skills while working on a prison farm that allowed him to find meaningful employment when he was released. "There's just tremendous opportunities working on a farm. Not everyone is going to come out a farmer, but the work ethic alone is definitely a step in the right direction." (http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100810/defending-prison-farms-100810/)

A wide range of farm and civil society organizations have opposed the move. But instead of listening, the Harper government just charged ahead with the Minister in charge, Vic Toews, speaking on behalf of the Harper government, and let’s be blunt Conservative MPs in rural and small town ridings across Canada: “My responsibility as public safety minister is to ensure that individuals who are in our facilities receive training that is appropriate, receive skills that are appropriate to the environment they will be returning to. It's not a productive use of the convicts that are incarcerated for a period of time ... Our responsibility is to provide appropriate training and jobs skills so that they can be reintegrated in a wholesome fashion in society at large."
In other words, the Harper government has no faith in the future of farm families in Canada. None. It is all there in black and white. If this government believed in a future for farming, then training people to work directly in the industry or in the many secondary industries attached to food production would be “productive”, “appropriate” or even able to produce “job skills”. What this also shows is that rural and small town Conservative MPs from across Canada, in ridings like my own in Huron-Bruce, have been complete and utter failures and need to be replaced. These MPs promised us, when asking for our votes, that they would go and fight for small town and rural Canada. Instead they have given up on us for anything else but a vote factory. Why a single rural or small town Canadian would still vote for these people is beyond my ability to understand when the record is so clear.

According to the government the prison farms produce about $7.5 million in revenues against $11.6 million in expenses for a loss of some $4.1 million. Well government MPs, welcome to today’s farming reality. Instead of giving up and walking away you should be trying to fix the problems your policies have helped to create. That you won’t, and see training anyone to have agricultural skills as wasteful, is why rural and small town Canadians will need to step up and send you packing in the next election.

Until March of 2010 Grant Robertson was the senior elected official with the National Farmers Union-Ontario. As Ontario Coordinator Robertson was also a National Board Member of the NFU for 5 and half years. As Ontario Coordinator Grant guided the NFU in Ontario through a period of sustained growth and spent those years traveling across many parts of Canada speaking with and listening to farmers, eaters, politicians and business interests. Grant and his family farm near Paisley, Ontario. The author can be contacted at grant@bmts.com

Feelings of discouragement

2010-08-11T13:15:00.000-04:00

I'm feeling really tired and sad today...in fact, crying as I write this post. I guess everyone needs a day like this every once in a while, after all, I can't be optimistic 100% of the time.

What has set this off today? I feel powerless. After reading updates about the latest anti-prison farm closing protests, I'm just so angry about the state of Canada's democracy and how unsupportive our government is about farming, despite their rhetoric, that I almost wonder what the point is of me doing what I'm doing. Peaceful protesters trying to blockade cattle trucks from removing the dairy herd from the Kingston prison farm were treated violently and arrested. And the cattle have been shipped out. The Conservative government is just going to go ahead with their plan to close down the prison farms, no matter public opinion. How does the minority Conservative government have the power to do all these things? Treat mostly peaceful G20 protesters violently? Set up (maybe) temporary police states? Get rid of the long form census? Why can no one stop them? How 'democratic' is our government if Harper can just do whatever the hell he wants?

At any point in my farming life, the government could set up rules about what I can and cannot do on my farm that could put me out of business or even land me in jail. And based on what? Large corporate farm lobbies that don't want any newcomers to succeed in the field, no matter how small? A Conservative belief in economic theory that thinks only large scale and exports are important to an economy? A complete lack of understanding or interest in small scale farming so as to actually set up the right regulations to protect the public good? And if I don't agree with any of these things and actually speak out, I'm going to be hit and arrested? What recourse do I have to our current government? What the hell are the opposition parties good for?

What do I want to do as an organic farmer? I want to produce lots of good and healthy food for as many people to eat as possible, in a way that works with and remediates the environment in which we live, and actually be able to support myself financially while doing this. The last thing I want to do is make anyone sick. Statistically, it's really the large agrifood operations that actually sicken and kill people with their food since everything's processed on an industrial scale. Despite the relative success of my season so far (as compared to last year), sometimes I just feel tired at the amount of work involved in this uphill battle to be a viable farm in an agricultural economy that doesn't seem to understand or care anything about me. But I truly believe deep in my soul that this has to work. Because if it can't work, then we are all well and truly fucked.

The Zen of Hand Weeding

2010-07-31T23:57:00.000-04:00

For most organic farmers, having to hand weed your field (as opposed to flame weeding, wheel hoeing, or hand hoeing) is the most inefficient way to weed, and is the result of not managing to stay on top of the weeds. On average this season, I've probably hand weeded about 2 hours a day, 4-5 days a week, and still have some beds that need some hours of hand weeding put in. I managed to wheel hoe for a couple days back in mid-June, and after that, the weeds have been too big to deal with that way.

Surprisingly, having to spend so much time hand weeding hasn't really bothered me. In fact, I quite enjoy it (so far anyway!). The feel of a weed being pulled up by its roots is so very satisfying...especially when it's a sapling-sized lamb's quarters or pig weed (amaranth) or when I manage to pull up some alfalfa with all its roots intact.

I think part of the reason why I'm not cursing at the weeds is because their very presence in my field this year means I've got soil fertility! Last year's barren field seemed to mock me with the fact that even weeds wouldn't grow there. And now, the kinds of weeds that are present in my fields will help me to diagnose any mineral imbalances. I've just started to read 'Weeds and Why They Grow' by Jay McCaman (I picked up my copy from Everdale today). Just reading the first few pages so far has been fascinating...such as learning that dandelions help remediate soil by bringing calcium back to the soil surface to become available as the dandelion decays. That's just the tip of the iceberg as there is much to learn about weeds and what they can tell me about my land and what it needs and if its fertility is improving with the addition of compost and growing and plowing down of green cover crops. There's just so much to learn from just observing what grows in the soil!

When I hand weed, I am reminded of how I feel while swimming laps. Then I'm concentrated on the feel of my muscles as I stroke through the water, controlling my breathing through each motion and not actually thinking about anything in particular. But my subconscious mind chugs through these moments and presents me with ideas or strings together new thoughts that pop into my conscious mind when I least expect them. Hand weeding acts like a form of meditation or prayer for me...a good opportunity to let my mind wander where it will, undisturbed by too much external stimuli. I'm hoping to extract the great Canadian novel one day, which I'm convinced is lurking in the far corners of my subconscious mind ;P

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth

2010-07-09T14:54:00.001-04:00

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the retirement party for Wayne Roberts, head of the Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC) for the past 10 years. If you read Toronto's NOW magazine, you may recognize him as a weekly columnist and he has also written several books.

Wayne was instrumental in guiding me to a farming network. Back in 2008, when I was trying to decide on how to take the plunge into sustainable agriculture, I went to the Canadian Organic Growers conference in February where Wayne moderated a panel of experts talking about organic food production in Ontario. I did some internet searching, found an email address for him, and cold emailed him, introducing myself and asking if he had time to meet with me. Amazingly, he did. We sat down for an almost 2 hour conversation where we discussed my background and motivations for going into sustainable agriculture. Before this conversation, I didn't know if I would remain in Toronto and try to work for an organization concentrated on food and environment issues, or if I would start actually producing food.Our conversation clarified my position as a future producer of food and I was steered towards Everdale where I spent 5 months learning how to farm. Instead of figuring out this whole farming thing in isolation, I got plugged into a network of organic farmers which helped give me the confidence to take the plunge and start farming on my own.

You can read Wayne's whole retirement speech at his blog: http://wayneroberts.ca/archives/320, but the following section really stuck with me:

"As a person who never embraced formal religion, I surprised myself late one evening in March 2008, when, at 3:00 in the morning after way too many pots of coffee, I came to write my very last overdue paragraph on my dead-dead deadline for The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food. A phrase I had long mocked popped into my head: Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. I used to think this was about pacifying the poor so they would divert their attention to the next world where they would get pie in the sky when they die. But suddenly, its profound radicalism hit me.

At the most direct level, we work to bring the right of food to all and to ensure that it is shared with children, newcomers, the poor and homeless. But beyond that, we work with food because food is not about human power and triumph and glory, but about our humble animal needs that make us vulnerable and dependent on nature and make us vulnerable and interdependent with one another. That is how we humans are made – other than Vitamin D processed in our skin, our large brains leave no space for body parts that manufacture a wide range of nutrients from a few simple wild grasses and tree leaves; we can only get the nutrients we need from a wide range of foods, all of which come from outside ourselves. And, zenlike, that very need and vulnerability have been the source and inner strength of human achievement, culture and sociability. This baseline of our creation is the reason why I believe that the food movement must be militantly joyful and radically meek – not radical chic, but radical meek."

Right now, in the beginning stages of the farm, I'm concentrated on food production and making sure that the farm is a sustainable enterprise, environmentally, personally & economically, but I can't lose sight of why I went into this in the first place...because I love food and feeding people and I love God's creation. The right of food for all isn't something I can devote my resources to right now, so I'm encouraged to see that there are so many people fighting that good fight. Toronto's Board of Health has recently adopted "Cultivating Food Connections: Toward a Healthy and Sustainable Food System for Toronto” – 29 initiatives that promise to create a culture of “food systems thinking” within the municipal bureaucracy, linked to the many players who comprise the urban food supply chain. This is an amazing and radical move as it acknowledges the importance of good food for our public health and pulls food production out of the corner of 'rural affairs' that it's been kept in for years. Urban and rural communities need each other to survive, and need to understand and respect each other a whole lot more.

I'm sure Wayne will continue to fight this good fight in his retirement. And I will continue to follow the progress of the great organizations out there that are concerned with the right for food for all, like the TFPC, FoodShare and The STOP, among others. If you live in the GTA and want to join this fight, check these groups out and see if you can contribute any resources!

Our food system is beyond broken if pricing is dependent on global market pricing

2010-07-07T14:17:00.001-04:00

I read an interesting article today about how financial speculators may have contributed to a spike in world food prices in 2006/2007: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html.

While none of these ideas are particularly new to me, the article brings together many issues in one place that underlines the horrible state that our global food system is in. Export crop pricing, government agricultural subsidies around the world (that really only benefit large agrifood corporations), trading of crops as derivatives in the market. This article mostly addresses that last bit, which I think is the scariest, because do we really want the price of food to be determined by speculation in the stock market??? Of course, we're all complicit in this whether we like it or not, because our bank deposits, pension plans, RRSPs, etc. all have their fingers in stock markets and we as individual investors have no real say, other than the biggest say of all...our demand for increased returns. So let's not demonize these institutions without considering how our own demand for high returns continues to push them to squeeze profits from any product they can find.

And that's really the clincher...if we want to earn interest on our bank deposits (little as it seems) and invest in mutual funds, index funds, etc., then our money is being invested by financial institutions who care little, if at all, for the nature of what's making the money (commodity speculation, derivatives, esoteric instruments, etc.) and only that the returns are worthwhile. Certainly, there are socially responsible investment funds and financial institutions out there (more local credit unions come to mind), but even they hold 'blue chip' and 'safe' stocks like those for the big 5 Canadian banks and other such institutions, which in their turn, profit from morally blind investing. What's the alternative? Back to stuffing the mattress or some other hidey hole with cash? Or maybe gold bars ;P

If I thought government had the power or the competence to regulate some of the sketchier investment schemes out there, I'd be all for increased regulation, but if there's one thing I hope I'm not naive about, it's that money makers will always come up with products that either fool or fly under the radar of government regulation.

Really, the only way these products won't be bought and sold is if we weren't greedy and didn't want to make high returns on our investment dollar. I wonder what a world of minimal savings but high circulation of available cash would look like...wait, I think that's how most farmers live! With the addition of high debt. A large proportion of farmers only make enough cash flow to pay down interest on their debt and can't repay capital until they retire and sell their farm land, which is valued by banks more at their development value than farm productive capacity. This means farmers are leveraged to the hilt based on high land value, but can't actually make enough money from farm products over the years to actually re-own their farmland. Again, the banks win.

Anyway, I certainly don't have the answers to all these issues. The last thing I expect is for humanity to become less greedy. Luckily, I get to spend the majority of my time managing growing plants and bringing great vegetables to people. Maybe after I've finished paying off my debts over the years, I can start saving up to buy some gold ingots to bury somewhere on the farm. Or maybe I'll find a man, get married, have kids and make them support me in my old age ;P That is how things used to run before retirement and RRSPs became the norm!

No longer lacking in tomato plants!

2010-06-21T23:34:00.000-04:00

In a previous post, I wrote about my tomato plants that got sunburned...well they survived the burn and have since been transplanted outside, though they have yet to prove to me that they're going to make it. However...in some of my other beds, I have masses of tomato and ground cherry plants growing! When the sprouts first started showing up, I thought they were actually dandelion sprouts, but now that they're bigger, they look and smell like tomato plants. They're mostly in my spinach and chard beds and paths which are both part of my early season harvest, so I'm going to leave the tomato 'volunteers' to their own devices and see what kind of tomatoes I get! I think they're in the area that had heirloom cherry tomatoes last year (which I didn't plant again this year) but I won't know what I get until they start producing fruit.

Tomorrow morning, I head into the GTA for my first vegetable delivery of the season. I've been so excited to be harvesting these last two days because last year I didn't really get to do any real harvesting until September. I cut, washed, spun and bagged salad greens (a green oak leaf, red romaine and red/green batavian type lettuce), spinach and baby chard (a rainbow mix of many colours). I also harvested all my bok choy because much of it has started to bolt from the heat (no more bok choy until I seed a second bed). I've taken the row cover off my bok choy/daikon radish/turnip bed, which is always more fun than putting it on! The vegetable package this week will also include spring turnips, radishes and garlic scapes. I did harvest the very first of the sugar snap peas, but they're still about a week away from their full production, so not everyone will get them yet. I can't wait to have tons of sugar snap peas to eat!

I hope traffic in and around Toronto tomorrow will be bearable. I'm definitely avoiding any G8/20 areas!

Why Is Organic Food So...Cheap?

2010-06-03T10:40:00.003-04:00

The title is of a good article that talks about food prices which you should definitely read (link in the title if I set things up right). Some of you have probably heard me rant about the prices for food in Canada and how they're too low to possibly be supporting any of the farmers who grow the food. I say some of you, and not all, because I have a hard time expressing my true feelings on this topic and don't want to get into fights with people on an issue that's particularly emotional for me.

The local organic food movement is full of people who work very hard, for little pay, to produce good food for their communities because they believe that the food system needs to change. We try our best to price our produce to be as fair as possible to both our customers and ourselves, but if we were to actually price our labour time at a true living wage (which I've read is around $17/hour) or even minimum wage ($10.34/hour now I think), the food prices would have to be many more times what we charge. As it is, even with our 'low pay' pricing, all of us regularly hear comments about how our produce is too expensive or even unaffordable. One friend of mine says that we have to make sacrifices to be agents of social change, which is indeed noble, but doesn't make the comments any less hurtful to hear. Certainly, I need to develop a thicker skin.

What is unaffordable? According to the latest StatCan numbers for 2008, households spent 10.4% of their income on food (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/091218/dq091218b-eng.htm). This is one of the lowest percentages in the world. Compare that with transportation and housing at 13.6% & 19.9% respectively. Of course, the high cost of housing is another issue to be lamented, especially as it drives up transportation spending since people end up living far from where they work.

How do we, as a 'have' country, justify being so cheap on such a life necessity as food? There are enough articles around these days about the rise in North American obesity rates and how the average diet is quite unhealthy, high in processed foods, and how few people know how to prepare meals from raw ingredients anymore. Some of the consequences for us as a society is higher health care costs, and arguably, kids who don't reach their intellectual potential due to malnutrition or the side effects of the chemicals used to grow non-organic produce. Has there ever been a time with so many kids with attention disorders, food allergies, asthma, obesity, diabetes, etc.? Is it really a better bargain to spend less than $2 on a loaf of white bread made from highly processed ingredients than to pay $6 for a loaf made from locally grown, organic whole wheat or other grain, from an artisanal bakery? And of course, we're not just cheap with food...we're also cheap with clothing and other manufactured goods. None of these cheap products do us any good. I know it's hard to pass up a bargain, but when the pleasure at finding a bargain becomes an expectation that everything should be cheaper, then we are entirely complicit in the exploitation of workers everywhere, all for inferior products. Everyone loses.

Imagine a world where everyone were fairly paid for the work that they do and the products that resulted were of good quality and didn't destroy the world around them in their manufacture. Where honoured professions were ones that nurtured our health and minds, such as farmers, teachers, artists...maybe I'm not so far from being a hippy as I've thought ;P

Tomato plants may be toast :(

2010-05-31T13:56:00.006-04:00

Literally...I think the heat wave we've been having has actually toasted the leaves of my tomato plants. To try to rescue them, I've brought all 450 plants back indoors to hopefully recuperate. I didn't realize that the seedlings were still too small to withstand the heat. If they don't recover from their scorching, I'm going to have to buy tomato plants from other farmers and will have to start a second round of seedlings and hope the summer will be long enough to produce fruit from later tomato plants.

Poor scorched baby tomato plants. They're barely even still green at all! And for those in the know, yes, they are quite stretched, which I don't mind for tomato plants since I'll plant them deep in the field so that the whole stalk will grow roots.

This season is so very opposite of last year's cold and wet summer. The field grasses are already taller now than they were all last summer, and many flowers around the house are already finished blooming even though it's not quite June yet.

I'll just have to see how the vegetables grow this year. I've got drip line irrigation set up so the plants should get enough water in the field even if there are long stretches without rain (today's thunderstorm sprinkling is the first rain since May 22...and that wasn't much precipitation either). Theoretically, I should have a great growing season with all this sun, especially for hot crops. Unlike last year, my spinach, salad greens, and parsnip plantings have all germinated and are growing well, so that's great. Beets and carrots are all showing themselves in the field, and bok choy and cabbages are coming along under their row covers. I'm hoping to harvest spinach and salad greens in the next couple weeks. And as soon as my sugar snap peas start producing tasty pods, I can start my vegetable deliveries into Toronto.

Please pray for good pea production and that my tomato plants recover and keep growing!

Snow in May!

2010-05-09T18:50:00.003-04:00

For the past few weeks, I've been feeling really anxious because of the abnormally high temperatures so far this spring. I see all this gorgeous plant life outside in my flower gardens, woods and fields and feel like I'm horribly behind on my vegetable plantings. I've had to stop myself from moving up my planting schedules, seeding more outside, or starting seedlings too early indoors. And each beautiful, sunny, warm day, I second-guess myself on the decision to hold firm to my original planting schedule.

Well, it snowed here yesterday, enough to actually accumulate on the ground and not be completely melted until after noon today. And overnight temperatures are below zero for the next couple days, so I have direct proof of why it's wiser not to jump the gun, no matter how nice it is outside! All my field plantings (cold hardy) of sugar snap peas, salad mix, radish and spinach are fine even after the snow, though they'll be growing at a slower rate for the next day or two until temperatures go up again.

Indoors, my 500+ tomato seedlings are happy and my brassicas (kale, cabbage & napa cabbage) are germinating well. Soon I'll need to take a road trip to Burkhart's Greenhouse to pick up the flats of leek, onion, hot pepper, pepper & eggplant they started for me back in March. Since I don't currently have a heated greenhouse, I sent my early starting & hot crop seedlings to a heated greenhouse to get started. My summer kitchen isn't warm enough to start hot crop seedlings until April/May when the sun has more time to warm it up and overnight temperatures aren't too low.

Hopefully, yesterday's snow flurries are the last until November!

Officially a farm!

2010-04-28T17:29:00.002-04:00

Today I was finally assigned my Farm Business Registration Number (FBRN)! So in the eyes of government, Black Sheep Farm is now an official farm :D

I had to have my 2009 tax forms completed and send Agricorp my 2009 Statement of Farming Activities showing that the farm had grossed a minimum of $7000 in 2009. I paid my yearly $204.75 fee via a National Farmers Union membership, and I should be getting my 'farm card' in the mail in the next few weeks!

As you may remember from a previous post, I had found the tax filing process rather disappointing on many levels, but I've now reconciled myself to the fact that half of my non-refundable tax credits are useless to me, and am moving on. It's just concrete proof that only those who make a lot of money actually benefit from tax credits, because I certainly benefited greatly from them when I used to make a lot more money than now. People I know who've never made the yearly gross income of your average office worker, are very used to having more non-refundable tax credits than they need.

Some people have commented to me that one of the major tax incentives to being a farmer is reduced property taxes, which is absolutely true. The main reason why I need a FBRN is to maintain my farm's reduced property tax rate (farm tax rate is 25% of the residential tax rate). In the case of my property, less than 50% is taxed at the farm tax rate - my house and one acre of land are taxed at the full residential rate for their MCAP assessed-value (standard for all farm properties). This means that for 2009, I saved $800 or 36%, as compared with having no farm designation.

You may think this is a pretty good deal, but consider that as a person who used to donate around 10% of her gross income to charitable organizations (it took many years of spiritual discipline to get to that point, so it's certainly no easy task), I can tell you that I got a many times more significant tax break from that, and got to support many worthy causes in the process. But given that the average Canadian adult only donates $341 per year (StatsCan for 2004: http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/.3ndic.1t.4r@-eng.jsp?iid=69), clearly 10% of gross income isn't anywhere near the norm. So for all those people out there who think farmers get big tax breaks, think again (and think of the tax break you'd get if you donated more money to your favourite causes).

My farm's property taxes for 40 acres of land with a house, bank barn and various outbuildings, are less than my former condo's were for a year. That said, my condo was worth more as real estate than my farm property, and relied on lots of Toronto's urban infrastructure of plumbing, water, gas lines, community services, road maintenance, etc. The farm itself has its own well, septic and heating systems (which I need to maintain), and many fewer community services and roads than an urban environment.

I guess my point is that the urbanite's holy grail of reduced property tax rates isn't the huge tax savings they think it is ;P There are many more effective ways to reduce taxable income or accumulate tax credits than getting a farm designation. People forget sometimes that their urban property taxes do pay for many services. And of course, the value of real estate in Toronto is many times that of rural properties, which is how selling my 711 square foot condo managed to pay for a 40 acre farm with a 2400 square foot house ;)

2010 produce sales begin!

2010-04-09T14:44:00.004-04:00

This morning, I sent out my 2010 vegetable subscription plan. I'm hoping for 40 subscribers who will receive a large vegetable package every second week from mid-June/early July until October. The deadline for applying is April 30. I will be selecting subscribers based on efficient delivery routes, with the same 20 subscribers receiving vegetables every second week. I hope that from the many households that got to try out my vegetables last year, 40 will be willing to commit to me and the farm for a season. I've got my fingers crossed!

Technically, my first produce sales for this year were for my lamb and goat's meat, which I delivered to the GTA the Monday before Easter. I had very little to sell (only 2 lambs and a goat after all), so the cuts went quickly. I hope everyone who bought roasts are enjoying them. I know I've been quite impressed by their flavour and tenderness when cooking them at home, but then, I've always enjoyed the gamier meats. I made a stew from goat ribs, potatoes and onions that was originally supposed to be a curry, but had such a delicious aroma at just the salt and pepper seasoning stage, that I left it the way it was, which was super tasty!

Looking out my window right now at some heavier than expected snow flurrying, I find it hard to believe that I'll be picking stones from my field and rototilling it over the next week of dry, sunny days. This time last year, I was just getting settled into the farm, doing lots of cleaning, unpacking, and renovating of the large upstairs room. I hadn't even fully decided which field to plant into for that year. Amazing how much can change in one year :)

This year, for better or worse, I'm planning to till my field (either myself with the rototiller, or through a tractor disking by my neighbour) and then sow the majority of it immediately to dutch white clover. I really didn't like how uncovered the field was last year and am hoping that my small seed germination issues will resolve this year since the soil is better prepared than last year. By seeding the clover first, I run the risk of having that overrun future vegetables. But since I won't be planting out the majority of my transplants until mid-June, I'm hoping that I can establish a good cover of clover, keep it mowed, and then just rototill the strips I'll be planting into, a week or so before planting. I'll leave a section of the field clear for the earliest plantings of sugar snap peas and direct seeded salad greens, spinach, radish, etc. I may regret making this decision, but for now, it feels right. I'm sure I'll be second guessing myself horribly as I stand on the field with clover seed and my handheld seed spreader next week.

My lower field, which will be put into vegetable production next year as the current field gets a rest, is looking great as the red clover that was planted with oats and barley last year, is coming back beautifully. Its establishment will keep the field relatively weed free, fix nitrogen into the soil, and provide lots of flowers for bees and other pollinators. Around August, the fully grown red clover will get tilled under, and a winter-kill crop will be planted so that the field will be ready for vegetables next spring.

I'm quite excited by the prospect of a summer hotter than last year's rather frigid temperatures. I will definitely prepare myself to set up irrigation drip lines, but the prediction of early heat means I might actually have harvestable crops before July! I won't get my hopes up too high, but I can't help looking forward to eating that first super sweet sugar snap pea. Aah, crunchy tastiness!

Below, I've listed the various vegetables that I'm hoping for throughout the season. I don't expect them all to be successful, but I can have faith :)

Early summer (June/July)	Mid summer (July/August)
Beet greens	Beans
Black cherries	Beets
Bok choy	Bok choy
Chard	Carrots
Herbs	Chard
Leeks	Herbs
Radishes	Kale
Rhubarb	Kohlrabi
Salad greens	Leeks
Spinach	Lettuce
Spring onions	Onions
Sugar snap peas	Spring onions
Wild raspberry (black caps)	Summer Squash
	Tomatoes
	Turnips

Late summer (August/September)	Fall (September/October)
Beans	Beans
Beets	Beets
Bok choy	Bok choy
Cabbage	Cabbage
Carrots	Carrots
Chard	Chard
Cucumbers	Cucumbers
Eggplants	Eggplants
Herbs	Herbs
Kale	Kale
Kohlrabi	Kohlrabi
Lettuce	Lettuce
Napa cabbage	Melon
Onions	Napa cabbage
Peppers	Onions
Summer Squash	Parsnips
Tomatoes	Peppers
Turnips	Pumpkins
	Spinach
	Summer Squash
	Tomatoes
	Turnips
	Winter squash

Feeling like a misunderstood teenager

2010-03-17T14:42:00.003-04:00

I've been trying to get my 2009 taxes done since about mid-January because I'm eager to get my Farm Business Registration Number (FBRN). You need to prove to Agricorp a minimum of $7000 gross farm income before they'll issue an FBRN. So I went online and downloaded every tax form that I thought might apply to me and started to organize my numbers. Of all the forms I downloaded, the only ones that had not been updated for 2009 yet were the farm business forms (exactly the one I needed to get my FBRN). Of course, I didn't notice the 2008 year until after I had filled everything out. And when I called the Canada Revenue Agency to ask for an updated form, I was told that it was more than a month away from being available and I could be mailed one when they were ready. Well, it's St. Patrick's Day now, and I still haven't received any forms in the mail, though supposedly they're now available on-line. Which means either I wait for the government mailing I requested, or I go somewhere with high speed internet to download them, and then find a printer to print them out with. As a self-employed person, I have until June 15 to file my taxes...but I have to pay any income tax owing by April 30, so the later date seems ridiculous to me. Not to mention that if the government owes me tax money, I want to get that back as soon as possible! Plus, I'm getting into outdoor farm mode so my personal window for getting my tax paperwork done is rapidly closing.

Going through the exercise of filling out (the wrong year's) farm tax form has been highly frustrating for me, as reading the definition of each line just emphasized how much the government doesn't understand, or seem to care about, small scale, high value, farming. Have you ever actually read any of the tax guides from cover to cover? Well, I've essentially done that with both the farm business and regular business tax guides. And I can't figure out how the government 'helps farmers'. Granted, intellectually, I don't believe that the government even notices me in the least, but subconsciously, I have the mistaken expectation that the government helps farmers. In fact, judging by how many people have asked me if I've been getting any government grants, many Canadians assume that the government doles out money to farmers like candy. Somewhere in my almost 35 years of being born and raised a Canadian, I've been indoctrinated with that idea too. Well, let me clear that up for you...as far as I my experience goes so far, government (at whatever level you'd like) absolutely does not dole out money to small farmers. Large agri-business...well, that's another matter...they have the scale to spend big money, thereby making big money, so they access corporate tax credits. In my case, I can't even benefit from all my non-refundable tax credits. It was supremely frustrating to me to realize that the so called 'Home Renovation Tax Credit' (thanks for nothing Harper) is completely useless to me, because I didn't make enough net income this year to offset it. And, my first year business loss isn't actually large enough to carry back to previous years to claim back any tax dollars from my higher income years, even though I've spent more hard cash into the Canadian economy this year, then probably my entire life combined until now. Sure, I can defer some of my business expenses into future years to use when the farm generates more income, but considering that my personal income will never be in the 6 figure range, I can't imagine I really need to keep snowballing my business expenses into the future. What I want (which seems like a pipe dream), is to claim back previous year tax dollars, since it's the savings from all my years of corporate work that are paying all these farm start up expenses now.

My goal for organic vegetable production is to gross $20,000 in vegetable sales for each acre in production. For this to be possible, I need to manage my land over the long-term for health and fertility so that I can grow high quality vegetables at a good volume, and I need to be efficient in my production and marketing to maximize the prices of my vegetables. I am not growing a supply managed product, or acres of a single crop, or selling to wholesalers. I don't, and in fact, can't, buy crop insurance, or hedge on future prices by selling forward contracts. I have no need for any heavy equipment beyond my rototiller (which is the Ferrari of rototillers... really...BCS is a Ferrari brand). In the long term, the only inputs I'll be bringing onto the farm will be seeds, as I will be addressing any fertility issues with growing green cover crops/manures, as well as applying composted sheep and goat manure from the flock that will eventually be here. Reading the farm tax guide and realizing how much in there doesn't apply to me in the least, because I am not practicing what I term 'industrial' farming, makes me want to lash out like a teenager. It's like the government doesn't consider me to be a farmer at all.

What's better for Ontario's long-term food security? Many small to medium scale farmers where each farm can grow enough food to feed hundreds of families each year? A handful of large corporations who export the monocrops they grow in Canada to the rest of the world? Large food processors who statistically inevitably kill people with their food products because of their large factory scale? Imported food from other countries with lower environmental and human rights standards than our own country, and that has to travel large distances to get to us? Of course not any one of these by themselves is the solution, but it seems to me like Canada has all its food eggs in the basket of just a few large corporations. With so little diversity in the food production arena, a glitch in production for just one of these corporations means Canadians could be without food. And what are these possible glitches? High oil prices? Listeriosis? Salmonella? Contaminated fillers? Hmmm...wonder if those happen that often ;P

I went to a few government workshops this winter, trying to figure out where all the candy money is, if it even exists. I met a lot of struggling industrial farmers in the process and drove by many acres of land used for export grain production or cattle grazing, or in the hands of 'cottagers'. Grain growers make net a few hundred dollars per acre in good years, and cattle have been netting zero or less for a number of years. And these products aren't even really feeding Canadians anyway as they're mostly for export. What would it take to grow vegetables for the local market instead? Manual labour, and lots of it. That most maligned of all forms of labour.

Our society currently values white collar jobs and looks down on manual work. Coming from the white collar world I can absolutely state that I am healthier and happier farming my own land than spending 8 to 10 hours a day at my computer, buying take out food for lunch while shopping with co-workers and drinking a Tim Horton's double double on a regular basis. My intellectual labour all those years went to increase the profit of already rich people. The big raises and bonuses never really went to the average white collar worker, but rather to upper management. And so the divide between top and bottom increases, and all the white collar workers scurrying in the middle income range complain about their jobs, bosses and commutes...but it's all worth it because they make good money that pays for their lifestyles. Can you imagine if our society valued the labour of farming at least at the same level as your average white collar office job? Where farmers didn't have to work an off-farm job to be able to afford to grow the food that white collar workers buy from the grocery store? Maybe the number of small scale farmers would start growing instead of declining at a rate that means there will only be a handful (and by a handful, I'm guessing maybe 500 in all of Ontario, and that might be generous) of small scale farmers left in the next 10 years. Kids...ask your parents if they'd support your move into farming...disgruntled office worker, consider if you'd rather work in a field than in an office if that were economically feasible?

Well, I guess this is my teenage lash out at the government...or society...or at manual labour snobbery...or at large agribusiness. I don't really have much bite in the end ;P But that's ok, because if everything goes to hell in a hand basket one day, I've got food, water and shelter. Hopefully I won't have to defend it against white collar hordes ;P

The road that makes my soul rejoice

2010-01-21T09:00:00.003-05:00

I was driving home from the second day of the Growing Your Farm Profits (GYFP) workshop that I attended in Markdale, and had tears in my eyes from the winter beauty that I was seeing on the Markdale road. This is Grey Road 12 which runs east-west between Highway 10 and Highway 6, and I think driving on it is what partly sold me on buying a farm in this area back in November of 2009.

Those who know me know that I hate driving. At least I do in the GTA. But out in the country, driving is a completely different activity, especially if you're on a road as beautiful as Grey Road 12. It winds around and up and down the hilly escarpment landscape so you're constantly being presented with a new vista of trees, fields and hills, all lit differently by the sun as the road twists and turns. And on this day, all the trees had a thick coating of diamond snow from the previous day's snow storm that perfectly outlined all their branches. The deciduous trees looked especially gorgeous, all flocked with snow, their limbs striking in their clarity. This is why women wear mascara ;P

Every time I drive home to the farm, I feel my soul rejoice. Despite all the responsibilities and costs of owning and caring for this farm (see previous post), I absolutely love being here. I know in my heart that I am where God wants me to be. The landscape reminds me constantly of the beauty and wonder of His creation, in every season. Whenever I start to feel overly burdened by the bills that need paying, or plans that need to be made to ensure bills keep being paid, I just look around me and remember why I'm here. Out here, I am in the midst of life, and the business of life. For me, there can be no higher calling.

A frosty new year

2010-01-20T18:47:00.005-05:00

It's good to be back at the farm after a little jaunt into New York to get my fill of all things metropolitan. I do have much to get caught up on so holidays are definitely over!

First priority for January is heat...how to get it, maintain it and not go bankrupt in the process :( If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that I've had fuel oil woes due to a drip from my oil furnace's burner which resulted in an order from the TSSA to get the ground tested for oil contamination. The hardest thing about that is trying to figure out who to trust, and not to lose my shirt in the process. Since the process requires certified engineers and lab testing, the cost of the oil drip is over $1500. And it turns out that my oil furnace isn't venting to code, and in fact, the structure of my house makes it impossible to vent an oil furnace to code (at least not without poking a hole in my foundation walls, which could result in major structural issues if done improperly). So I have to bite the bullet and replace the house's oil furnace with a propane one (which doesn't require a 25+ foot chimney for venting, like an oil furnace does). And to think I thought I was protecting myself enough when I required the furnace and fuel tank to pass inspection to close the purchase of the property. The chimney might have been installed to code 10-20 years ago, but certainly doesn't pass now...but for some reason the furnace inspector thought the idiosyncrasies of the house itself made it acceptable to route the chimney the way it was done. Unfortunately, the TSSA doesn't agree, and it would cost me too much money to try and get a variance on the chimney to make it ok. And I'm too freaked out by the thought of future fuel oil drips to want to stick with an oil furnace at this point.

Sigh...once you have a house, you realise that expenses are in the thousands from now on. So let's count the costs of heating my house within my first year of ownership: existing oil furnace ($550 for a tank of fuel oil in October and $1500+ due to the fuel drip), new wood stove ($2200 for stove & installation and $540 for wood), new propane furnace ($4500 for the furnace and another $1000 for the propane tanks and fuel). Grand total: $10,290

Granted, I need to count about $7000 of that as capital costs that will repay themselves in energy efficiencies over my lifetime on this property, but it feels a lot like a kick in the teeth right now.

But I also have to consider the positives for the future. Fortunately, I already had an EcoEnergy audit done on the house so I'll be able to access some government grant money for my furnace 'upgrade' to a high efficiency propane burner (which should bring me fuel savings over time). And I'll have gotten that new furnace pretty much at cost since the furnace contractor is trying to make up for passing the previous chimney system. And my real estate agent is also throwing some money into the pot to make things right, so hopefully the whole furnace replacement will only cost me $3000 out of pocket once all's said and done. I don't regret my original decision to buy a wood stove (though its installation is what precipitated all my furnace woes!) because in the future, I should be able to harvest all my winter wood from the wood lot on my land instead of having to buy it in. So with the wood stove doing the bulk of the home heating, I can hopefully get away with buying in less than 1000L of propane each winter.

I have also gotten my basement insulated and am replacing my upstairs windows and making sure both my attics have optimum insulation (all EcoEnergy grant eligible renovations). Again, in the long run, all of this should make this house more energy efficient, and therefore cost less to heat in the winters. Here's to hoping that all these 'efficiencies' are real and actually do pay off over the years! If not, anyone have a potential sugar daddy they can introduce me to? ;P

Merry Christmas from Black Sheep Farm!

2009-12-24T17:14:00.003-05:00

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

Well, I wish the mice wouldn't stir in my house, but unfortunately, my walls are warm and cozy for them, and with the cold outside, even I can't begrudge them shelter. I just don't want to find one curled up beside my head on my pillow one morning ;P The new year will bring a kitten into the house, which should hopefully keep the mice at bay!

I hope everyone has lots of good food to eat with family and friends this holiday. My family will be having leg of lamb, roast chicken and other tasty things for dinner. There will also be ginger snaps, shortbread, and pumpkin bread pudding to satisfy our sweet tooths.

May this Christmas be full of peace and joy for you and your family. God bless!

Winter Wonderland

2009-12-23T13:32:00.005-05:00

Unlike most people, I actually love winter. Maybe it's because I grew up in Alberta, or because I just don't like being too hot, but there's a crisp cleanness to winter that I love. Before I took up farming, I was likely to spend more time outdoors in the winter than any other season! Ice skating, snowshoeing & cross-country skiing are great things to do outside in the winter, and keep you warm in the process :)

After helping my sister at the One of a Kind show in Toronto, I came back to a farm already covered in a light layer of snow. That soon turned into a much deeper cover after the first big winter storm hit. The following pictures are taken from my living room windows where I was snug as a bug during the couple days of storm.

Wintry whiteness...great to watch from inside, not good for driving! Whiteouts and slippery road conditions shut down some of the roads in my area...a common occurrence in the winters out here.

The minivan, covered with about a foot of snow during the storm. I cleared it off afterwards with my snow shovel. There really isn't a snow brush big enough to do the job with this much snow!

I'm not sure if the locals are trying to scare me or not, but I've been told that I need to be prepared to be snowed in for up to 5 days. Well, I think I'm prepared. I've got a wood stove, plenty of wood, emergency drinking water, candles, food, and lots of reading material. I somehow doubt I'll be stuck for more than a couple days as the road I'm on is fairly major and gets cleared quite soon after a storm. But I guess I'll just have to see what this winter brings!

For now, I'm enjoying the lovely winter wonderland that my farm has become. I've decorated for Christmas, including my very first real Christmas tree, and I'm expecting my family for dinner on the 26th. Hopefully the weather will cooperate and the roads will be clear for them all to come up. Over the next few days, I'll be baking up a storm so there will be plenty of treats for us all to eat!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Black Sheep Farm publicity

2009-11-30T23:50:00.008-05:00

Ok, for those of you who know me well, you know I'm somewhat averse to publicity and attention. Just having this blog is a venture into the public sphere that I was somewhat leery of at first. When I started it, I only allowed permissioned people to have access, but I got over myself soon enough to realize that the sheer volume of information on the Internet would ensure privacy. Only people who knew and cared about me would ever really end up looking at my blog because I would have given them the link. And anyone else who stumbled on it in the course of web searches are likely kindred spirits anyway ;P

But then the documentary filming started, I handed out lots of business cards over the course of the season, gave interviews to various people writing books and articles about food and agriculture, and started selling produce. Publicity is something that the farm needs, and is also good for sustainable agriculture. The more people become aware of the various issues surrounding food production, the more educated they will become about the true cost of food and hopefully make more thoughtful food purchasing choices.

And now, Black Sheep Farm is one of the featured farms in the 2010 New Farmer calendar produced by Everdale's Farmers Growing Farmers (FGF) program. I work part-time for the program, which included designing and producing the calendar. So I got to exercise some creativity :) If you're interested in buying a copy to support Everdale and FGF...and also to have a 2010 calendar which features new farmers who've taken the FGF program, including Black Sheep Farm!...go to: www.everdale.org/node/292
The calendar is 5.5" x 8.5" and costs $12. It's a great gift for anyone on your list who cares about food and farming :)

I have also ventured into the world of Facebook. Not really directly, but rather through my sister who is setting up some sort of Black Sheep Farm fan page for me. The link to that is now in the sidebar of this blog. Apparently I need 100 people to become Black Sheep Farm fans to be able to get 'Black Sheep Farm' as the Facebook URL...or something like that. Clearly, I don't get what's involved, but my sister has kindly taken on the task of managing the Facebook stuff.

Oh, and good news on the farm Internet front - I'm off dial up! The Bell 3G stick works at the farm! So hopefully I'll be better about writing blog posts and uploading pictures since my internet access speed is faster than 28.8 kbps :D

Home ownership is a lot of work!

2009-11-24T18:36:00.002-05:00

All you home owners out there are of course nodding your heads at the title of this post, and I certainly didn't become a home owner blind to all the maintenance that a house requires, and a century home at that! Not to mention outbuildings and equipment...people ask me what I'm doing with my spare time now that the growing season is over, and all I can say is that I don't really feel like I have much spare time.

In terms of home and building maintenance, since moving to the farm, I've gotten the farm house roof replaced, dry walled and insulated part of an upstairs room, and painted half the upstairs. More recently, I had the uncovered portion of the barn filled in with a cement floor and a new beam installed in the lower level to carry the weight of the cement floor and stabilize the structure. My hope is to one day have a barn terrace cafe on that cement floor as the view of the rolling countryside is amazing from there.

I've bought a wood stove for the house so I won't just be burning fuel oil, aka 'money', over the winter to heat the house. I had an Eco-Energy audit done for the house and am now just waiting for the new windows for the upstairs of the house to be installed, and to have the basement insulated. I will also be crawling into the attic to lay down more insulation. All these things are planned improvements for long-term improvements in energy efficiency.

Of course, there had to be a sucker punch in all this building stuff. I couldn't possibly have bought a place that wouldn't have a surprise for me to deal with :( My oil furnace started dripping fuel oil from the burner at some point. I have no idea when it started, only this October, back in April, or even before I took possession of the house. It made a wet spot on the basement floor that I just thought was another water related wet spot. And since I generally avoided spending any time in the basement, I never really noticed that it never dried out. Well, it wasn't water, and technically, is considered an oil spill. Great...the organic vegetable farmer has an 'oil spill' in her basement according to the TSSA (who I had no idea existed until they inspected the oil spot and issued me a test order). Anyway, the furnace has now been repaired, so the dripping has stopped, but now I have to figure out how contaminated the floor is and what clean up is involved and what that might cost. All mysteries to me, and it seems like experts on this are few and far between. Sigh...this wasn't something that I wanted to have to deal with as I got ready to be in Toronto to help my sister with her booth at the One of a Kind show. But happen it did, and I've done what I can for now and will just have to see what next steps to take after I get back to the farm after the show.

There are cosmetic changes that I'd like to make to the kitchen and downstairs toilet room (since that's all it is without a sink installed yet!), but those are definitely not a priority. I guess I'll have to see how much money (or more accurately, debt) I'm willing to spend after all the crucial stuff is taken care of. My housemate has also moved back to Kitchener-Waterloo so when I get back to the farm, I'll be doing post move-out cleaning, and rearranging all my stuff to fill the space. I'll also be bringing furniture back to the farm with me from friends and family, so all that will need to be arranged to make my home comfortable. If any of you have furniture you want to get rid of, let me know! I don't guarantee I'll take it, but I could definitely use some more items!

Well, that's it for home maintenance for now...my next couple weeks will be occupied with helping my sister at the Toronto Christmas One of a Kind show. If you're at the show, come visit me at the 'House of Hsueh' booth in the Rising Stars section and support a struggling artisan :)

The end of the line for the animals

2009-10-28T16:32:00.004-04:00

This morning, I brought Monty and the lambs to the butcher's. I feel both sad and relieved that they're now gone. I'm sad because they were really cute and affectionate with me and I'll miss them as they were more like pets than was wise for me this season. I'm relieved that they survived on my farm to this point (the 2 littlest goats, 2 bantam hens and one of the layers did not), and I no longer need to worry about keeping them healthy and safe from predators. I can also now leave the farm for more than a day without having to get someone to stay over and take care of them in my absence.

They were much more socialized to me than normal because I chose to stake them out on leashes at various locations around the house and outbuildings each day to get their fill while also acting as lawn mowers for me. They did a great job of eating up weeds and clearing brush. Each morning, I would pick a new spot, pound the iron stake into the ground, then walk them on leashes from their yard and shelter to their grazing plot. I would check on them periodically throughout the day to untangle them from each other and random vegetation (tall weeds, tree stumps, etc.) and make sure they hadn't knocked over their water. On really rainy days, I would keep them in their yard, supplemented with hay, but by the end of the season, Monty was big enough to just jump the electric fence, and sometimes take it down to bring the lambs out too. By the last few weeks, I would only leash the lambs and leave Monty free to roam, as the lambs acted as a leash for him since he wouldn't stray too far from them.

While I did enjoy having animals on the farm this first season, the process I chose was highly inefficient, and was only manageable for me this year because I barely had to weed my vegetable plot. I spent too much time socializing with animals destined to be meat. When I raise meat animals again in the future, I will get more, and set up proper electric fencing and automatic watering for them so that I won't have to untangle leashes each day. Instead of socializing with me, they'll have a larger herd to hang out with while they browse and graze and be less likely to follow me around like dogs.

Even though my first year with animals was highly inefficient for daily labour, I'm happy for the experience in teaching me what not to do in the future, and especially for giving me first hand experience with animal care, at a low capital cost. I know that I will be fine with handling both goats and sheep in the future, and look forward to having a flock one day where the ewes are milked and stay with me from season to season. Though raising animals is more emotionally taxing than growing vegetables, I definitely enjoy having them on the farm, and I feel much better eating their meat, knowing that they had a good life on my farm.

Monty, the first day he arrived on the farm. He definitely grew a lot since then!

The lambs, a few months back.

Me with Monty and the lambs, at dawn by the vegetable field about 2 weeks ago.

As for the chickens, I processed them all on the farm since they were quite old and not very meaty. I think I've gotten quite good at plucking them. They're all in my freezer waiting to become soup stock. Now I just have the bantam rooster and one bantam hen left which I'll be bringing to Everdale to overwinter. They're much too small to bother eating and I don't want to come back to the farm after being away for a week in the winter to find their frozen bodies. Since Everdale's willing to let them stay with their overwintering hens, they have a new home.

So that's my first season with animals...bittersweet, but that's the cost of being an omnivore. If I couldn't handle it, I would become a vegetarian.

Reflections on my first season of vegetables

2009-10-23T14:47:00.004-04:00

I'm currently sitting in a Starbucks in Toronto's financial district, watching the rain come down, and wondering at the slower than expected speed of free wireless internet here. Maybe my frustrations with the speed of my dial-up connection at the farm have made my high-speed wireless expectations unrealistically high, and so anything other than instantaneous internet responses are a disappointment. I guess I could just blame the weather too. At the farm, when it rains a lot, my dial up speed has gone down to 14.6 kbps at times, which doesn't speak well for the integrity of the Bell line coming to my house. My latest update from the local wireless high-speed internet provider is that they're delayed in accessing provincial funding to put up more wireless towers in my area, so I'm looking at 2010 before any chance of improving my access. Surprise, surprise, promised provincial funding hasn't been released yet to get the work done. But this is not supposed to be a post about internet access (which is, surprisingly, a more important issue to me than I ever expected it to be!), but about this past season of vegetables.

Is it possible to label this first year as both a disappointment and a miracle? It was a disappointment in that I didn't have any truly saleable volume of vegetables until September (instead of June as I had planned for) and spent much of the summer praying each day that my vegetables would just grow! But it was a miracle in that by September, I actually had bountiful production from my field, and have managed to eke out close to $7000 gross (farm designation minimum) in vegetable sales to this point from, realistically, about 1/2 an acre of productive plants.

While my spinach, lettuces, sugar snap peas, pumpkins, kale, kohlrabi, cabbage, cucumber, radish, parsnips, ground cherries, tomatillos, eggplant, dill and fennel were pretty much utter failures, I am one of the few farmers in Ontario that actually had healthy tomato plants in the field until the end of the season. My pepper and hot pepper plants produced a good quantity of fruit (though time ran out for most of them to get to full size or ripeness), the summer squash produced plentiful and tasty squashes, and my Asian greens were a wonder in production and quality. The beets were my earliest and most plentiful staple vegetable, and chard turned out to be a great late season crop of greens for my deliveries. And my final big surprise...my last carrot planting, seeded as a complete gamble on July 22 (yes, very late) given the lack of germination in previous plantings, yielded the tastiest and prettiest carrots ever. In fact, I sold 20 lbs of them to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) this week, where one of the chefs commented on how good they are. So, though this first season of vegetable growing has been hugely frustrating to me, it's certainly ended with a happy bang :)

One of my happy marketing successes this season has been selling my vegetables to the AGO for use in their restaurant and cafeteria. I've had a membership at the AGO for years, and am super happy and impressed with the redesign/expansion of the gallery. Their restaurants have a policy of trying to source produce from local farmers, so I wanted to sell to them, both as a local producer, and a fan of the AGO itself. When my condo finally sold earlier this year, I knew I wanted to celebrate with my family at FRANK, so when the sale closed at the end of July, that's where we went. I made my reservation on-line and left a note about the reason for the celebration, and also asking to meet the executive chef to talk about produce. I didn't get to meet the executive chef at my celebratory dinner (which was excellent!) as she was on vacation at the time, but I did get her business card and sent her an email. I didn't hear anything back from her and didn't push the contact since I was still waiting for my vegetables to actually grow. On my first delivery into Toronto at the beginning of September, I stopped by the AGO cafeteria for a snack (their pastry chef makes excellent treats!) and asked the cashier if the executive chef was in and would be available to chat with me about heirloom tomatoes. Surprisingly, she did come down to meet me, and the next week, I brought her an order of Bloody Butcher tomatoes. Since then, I've sold them more heirloom tomatoes (Black Krim and Bloody Butcher), and on today's final delivery, an assortment of root vegetables: Purple Haze and Rainbow carrots, Chiogga Guardsmark and Cylindra beets, and Milan turnips. While none of these orders were particularly large and who knows what will happen for next year, I was excited each time I pulled into the AGO loading dock and walked a package of vegetables to the kitchen. My favourite art gallery served my vegetables to FRANK patrons this season :)

To all those who bought vegetables from me this season...thank you so much! I hope you enjoyed every bite and have discovered or rediscovered a favourite vegetable. I will be inviting you to a survey some time in November/December to help me plan how my vegetable packages will work for next season. As I put my field to bed in the next few weeks, I will be doing all I can to improve its fertility for next year so that hopefully I'll have good vegetable production starting in June instead of September. Of course, the weather will have to cooperate too, so I'll just have to see what happens (what is the new weather norm in this era of climate change anyway?). Hopefully this winter I will be building a portable greenhouse or two for season extension next year and to mitigate against another cool summer.

Vegetable deliveries to the GTA

2009-10-19T09:45:00.005-04:00

The past weeks have been super busy for me with deliveries of vegetable packages into the GTA. I wasn't sure how well things would work out at first...would I be ok with driving into Toronto once a week...would drop offs work out well...essentially, would it be worth it to sell my vegetables into Toronto? Now that I've mostly finished my deliveries for the season, I know that the answer to all of those questions are resounding 'Yes'es!

The response from my friends, family and all their friends, family and co-workers was incredibly supportive. My first delivery, I only had enough produce for about 17 packages, but by the end of the season, I had enough to deliver to 35+ households! I would take people's orders via email and arrange drop off points and times in Mississauga and Toronto. And since I had such a positive response to my initial email about deliveries, I couldn't even repeat deliveries to people until my 3rd week of deliveries. Having all the packages pre-ordered each week also made harvest super efficient, as I could make sure not to over harvest those crops that could stay in the field, and I had an outlet for those crops that absolutely had to come off the field for that given week. I'll need to tweak the process a bit for next year, but this was a really great way for me to test out the waters of delivering into the GTA.

One of the best benefits of making all these deliveries was reconnecting with lots of people and having a chance to meet more people who are interested in supporting local farmers and eating organic vegetables. I really look forward to maintaining and strengthening that connection next season, as it's one of the reasons why I wanted to get into sustainable agriculture in the first place...to be a part of connecting people to the source of their food and helping to bridge the urban/rural divide.

Now, I'm just waiting for my pumpkins to turn orange, so I can make one last vegetable delivery into Toronto before the winter. I will be taking all my root vegetables off the field this week in preparation for that. I've also been preserving a lot of food over the last few weeks, freezing beans and summer squash, pickling beans, turnips and beets, and canning tomatoes and winter squashes. Hopefully, I won't need to buy much produce over the winter!

Once the field is clear, I will spread 1-2 tonnes of compost on the vegetable field to increase its fertility for next year. Hopefully I can get that done before the ground freezes!

Bins of Milan turnips...purple, white, crisp and crunchy!

A selection of the tomatoes from the farm...Black Krim is the best for colour, texture and taste, and Sun Sugar cherry tomatoes are a sweet explosion of tomato flavour!

Tasty summer squashes, Early Yellow Crookneck, Black Beauty and Flying Saucer, a great favourite for its shape!

My summer kitchen full of winter squash, tomatoes, hot peppers, peppers, turnips and summer squash before it all got packed up for deliveries.

My biggest harvest so far!

2009-08-17T08:00:00.002-04:00

I haven't been writing all that much about the vegetable field so far this season...because it has definitely not been growing as I would have liked. The field is severely lacking in organic matter, which is no real surprise since all that's been happening on this land for years has been the harvesting of hay, which is the constant removal of organic matter, with nothing done to replenish it. Between the lack of field fertility, and the worst weather for growing vegetables that we've had in years, I really shouldn't be so disappointed that all my crops haven't produced. But I guess I was hoping for some beginner's luck, and maybe a miracle or two ;P

My first plantings of spring mix and spinach have barely grown at all. And with the failure of these crops after a couple attempts, I decided it wasn't worth it to continue with my planned succession plantings because the soil clearly didn't have enough fertility to grow lettuces and spinach at anything like a normal rate. My first planting of beans was completely eaten up by an insect, likely the Japanese beetle, and my beets have taken a while to really get going. My first planting of carrots barely germinated, and the parsnips didn't germinate at all. Essentially, most of what I direct seeded into the field didn't germinate or grow as expected. So I've really been playing the waiting game this summer, hoping that my transplants of tomatoes, hot peppers, peppers, eggplants, zucchinis and winter squashes would start producing. And now that we're into mid-August, the vegetable field is finally showing signs of popping!

There are now some Cylindra beets of a harvestable size, and Kirk has managed to find some spinach to harvest from my second planting that is actually big enough to eat, and hasn't bolted yet. My zucchinis are starting to produce (go Sunburst patty pans!), and my pak choy is getting big enough to start harvesting.

For the past 14 weeks that I've been diligently going to the Keady market every Tuesday, I've been selling my Amish neighbour's baking, sometimes my baking (mostly vegan brownies, just to be different in a market full of butter tarts ;P), hostas from the farm, my extra tomato, hot pepper, pepper & eggplant transplants, vine wreaths that Robb made, and my sister's clutches. Twice, I had garlic scapes to sell from garlic that has been growing back in a patch of the flower garden for probably the last 5 years (which I've now harvested and is curing in the barn), twice I had sugar snap peas, one week I sold baby beet greens (part of the beet thinning process), and last week, I sold spinach.

This Tuesday, for once, I'll not only have farm produce, but more than just one vegetable! I will have Cylindra beet bunches (long and narrow beets, unlike the standard beet that others sell at the market), spinach, pak choy, patty pan yellow squashes and green zucchini! I'm so excited to be actually harvesting more than one vegetable from the field :D

And I can't wait until the tomatoes are ripe enough to pick. I have almost 400 tomato plants in the field, 15 different, mostly heirloom, varieties, and the plants look amazing in the field, full of ripening fruit. I almost feel afraid to write about their potential, in case I jinx the crop! So I'm definitely knocking on wood right now...even though I really shouldn't be a superstitious person ;P Once the tomatoes start coming in strong, I'm planning a trip in to Toronto so I can sell to friends and family. So watch for the email announcing what I'll have available soon!

The one blessing that I have to take from the lack of field fertility this year, is that I really haven't had to do much weeding. In fact, this past week is the first week that I did any significant weeding at all since there's been almost no weed pressure at all in the field. I've been much more concerned about keeping the plants in the field alive than in removing any unwanted ones! But if all goes well in years to come, this will be the first and last year where weeding is at the bottom of my farming chores ;P

I've also had the 'luxury' of easing myself into harvest mode and not having to set up any significant wash station since there hasn't been enough to harvest to need much more than some bins and a hose. My basement has proven to be a cold enough place to keep harvested greens fresh for over a week so I haven't had to invest in a fridge or other cooling system. My neighbour, Mike, at the Keady market, is a fruit and veg vendor who trucks in produce from the Ontario Food Terminal, and he throws out tons of plastic berry pint/half-pint trays and stacking cardboard boxes each week. So I've picked up enough supplies from him to reuse for harvesting and packaging that I don't need to buy any more. My packaging purchases so far have amounted to paper bags to hold greens.

And of course, I can't forget that I'm eating vegetables off my field too. While there may not have been enough sugar snap pea production to sell much at market, I definitely got to eat a lot (and they're both hard to come by and expensive even in big box grocery stores!), and I've frozen a few pounds for the winter. I've also been eating lots of beet greens, some chard, and spinach, and generally, don't need to buy many vegetables.

The season's not over yet, and I'm a bit worried about what other curveballs the weather may throw my way. But with the bit of heat we've been having lately, I hope that the vegetable field is finally on its way to producing great vegetables to eat!

From left, under row cover, various Asian greens & turnips, a row of zucchini squashes & pumpkins, 3 rows of winter squashes, a row & a half of eggplant, then peppers, hot peppers, and the start of eight rows of tomatoes.

The 8 rows of tomatoes, tomatillos & groundcherries. I managed to scrounged up enough staking materials to stake 3 rows of tomatoes, and need to make/buy stakes to get another 4 staked so that the tomatoes can stay high and dry to ripen perfectly in the sun!

The ground hugging plant on the left is groundcherries, the next row to the right is the first planting of beets which are finally getting to be of harvestable size, and finally, the first planting of beans, which were completely eaten by a bug, but have actually grown back and are starting to flower. To the right where things start looking really weedy, is the lost parsnip bed, and the other lettuce, spinach & carrot beds that didn't germinate or grow well. They're not a complete loss though as I have gotten 2 bins of spinach off the field, and the chard from the spring mix has enough leaves to provide me with some salad greens to eat!

In a future blog, I'll write about my plans for long term field fertility. If there's anything this year has hit me over the head with, it's that soil prep is the absolute key to successful organic vegetable production, and it's a process that will take some years of work and care to get working at all. While I knew this factually before moving to the farm, experientially, I had only been on farms that have been in production for years and have the cycles in place to build great soil, and a it's a completely new reality for me to be on land that hasn't been farmed organically and needs to be rehabilitated until it can have great soil again.

Monty, the rock star goat

2009-08-16T15:31:00.004-04:00

Monty is like a stereotypical rock star. He's demanding, pissy and randy. He's picky about his food, always wanting what's just out of reach, even if it's the same as what's in front of him, and is very vocal when he's in any sort of trouble, usually when he has shortened his leash because he's walked around the same tree many times. He exudes attitude.

He's also a very handsome goat, with lovely colouring on his front legs, a tuft of white and black hair in front of his horns, a bristly mohawk along his spine, and a little goatee under his chin. He's quite solid muscle and seems fairly athletic, jumping around on large rocks and standing straight up on his hind legs to reach leaves on branches of trees to eat. When he's chilling in the shade while chewing his cud, he's quite endearing.

However, he's not nearly so cute when he's feeling buckish. Then he chases the lambs for some action, which they manage to escape by scampering away from him. I've chosen not to castrate any of them since they won't live long enough to become a real nuisance (or so I think) since they'll be sent for slaughter in November. Mostly, I think it might be a bad habit for me to consider castrating any males that start to get annoying ;P

I am debating taking a rasp to file down the tips of Monty's horns so they'll be less sharp and won't accidentally hurt the other animals, or me! I've already got a knee cap contusion from when he shook his head near me the other day. His horns aren't just pointy on the ends, they're also more triangular than rounded, which makes for lots of sharp edges!

Since I've only got male ruminants this year, being raised for meat, I wonder how different the animal raising experience will be when the herd is mostly female, with any male lambs or kids born that season castrated via elastator soon after birth. Right now, Monty and the lambs are quite social with me and allow me to walk them all around the farm on leashes to bring them to fresh grazing each day. From my limited experience, male lambs seem to be more friendly and less skittish than the females, so in the future, I probably shouldn't expect such dog-like behaviour!

Saying good bye to the condo

2009-07-31T10:57:00.002-04:00

Barring any last minute developments, my condo will be officially someone else's at 6 pm today. Alan and Bettina helped me with late night minivan loading last night, with us racing to beat the end of the ColdPlay concert at SkyDome to avoid the traffic jams of all those fans leaving the concert. I drove my queen-sized bed to Bettina's as a queen-sized box spring doesn't fit up the stairs of my house at the farm, so I'm sticking with a double from now on! We tied the box spring to the top of the van...something I've always been reluctant to do, but we secured it really well and I drove it to my sister's without incident. I also sent her my box planters that have been on my condo balcony for about 6 years. Unfortunately, the globe cedars that have survived my sporadic watering for those years didn't make it through my absence of the past few months. Surprisingly, one of the Arctic strawberry plants did, so perhaps I can bring that out to the farm.

After unloading at Bettina's, Alan helped me load my couch and tv into the van. Hopefully that's the last of after midnight furniture moving for me this year! So last night was my last night sleeping in my condo, on the floor in my room, just like my very first night there when I took possession in February 2003. And of course, since I'm in the city and trying to do too many things in too little time, I didn't end up going to sleep until 4:30 am. Now I just need to pack up all the odds and ends I still have left at the condo. And I'm planning for one last swim in the pool before I head back to the farm on Sunday.

So here's a virtual toast to the last of super late nights at my condo, bathed in the exterior lights of the SkyDome. It's never dark in the condo ;)

Finally, Sugar Snap Peas!

2009-07-18T16:07:00.002-04:00

Finally, after weeks and weeks of waiting, I actually have harvestable amounts of sugar snap peas! I germinated my first planting of seeds on May 1...planted painstakingly as little sprouts on May 4 (hey, it was the first thing I planted on my farm so doing things the inefficient way seemed justified ;P). Since this summer has been so cold, it probably took those peas 3-4 weeks longer to produce fruit than would be normal. That said, who knows what normal really is, and their planting location (periphery of the horse corral) isn't exactly ideal prepared ground. It's interesting how each different segment of the horse corral (each about 6-8 feet long) is so varied in fertility. By far, the most productive bits are right by the entrance to the horse corral where the pea pods produced are actually 3+ inches long, while in the less fertile segments, the vines themselves look yellow and stunted, and the pea pods are only about an inch long, with maybe 1-3 peas inside.

I harvest about 1.5 to 2 lbs of peas off the first planting every 2 days or so. Not exactly heavy production, but they sure are tasty! This past market, I actually sold 6 scant pints of peas :) I think the last one was left over (which I ate) because no one ever seems to want to take the last of anything, and I wasn't about to discount it when I knew it could be part of my dinner!

The market table, with 4 scant pints of sugar snap peas on display!

Sugar snap peas only last about 3-5 days in the fridge, so all my harvests between now and next market are destined for my stomach or the freezer. The great thing about multiple plantings, is that as the first planting matures and gets completely harvested, the 2nd and 3rd plantings will come into production. And since it's such a cold summer so far, I'll have sugar snap peas to eat much later into the summer than normal.

When I head in to Toronto at the end of the month, I'll be sure to bring some with me. There's a certain Peanut expecting a mini-'Nut who should have a taste of her nickname-sake!

Monty and the lambs as lawn mowers

2009-07-16T11:57:00.002-04:00

I know the picture isn't great, but it's the view from my office window today. I've been grazing my goat and lambs on leashes for a few days each week and am moving them about my back yard. You can't really see Monty in this picture because he's above and to the right of the lambs, sitting in the garden bed with just his head peaking out of the vegetation. I like having them in the back yard while I'm working on the computer, as they give me something interesting to watch while I'm waiting for anything internet related to load, and because I can keep an eye on when they get themselves tangled up and need me to untangle their leashes. Right now, they're taking a noon-time break, chewing their cud in the shade.

The animals have all been really amusing lately. Often, when I let them out of their shelter in the morning I see the chickens sitting or standing on the lambs or goat, and lately, I think one of the chickens actually chooses to sleep nestled with the lambs rather than roosting with her fellow hens on their perch. The other day, one of the hens caught herself a toad in the garden and was having a fun time keeping it away from the other hens, and also trying to figure out how to eat it herself. She certainly looked athletic running around the yard with the toad hanging from her beak! I certainly feel no qualms about eating eggs every day for breakfast since I see how much foraging my chickens do. The yolks of all their eggs are a wonderfully bright orange from their varied diet. I give them some layer feed first thing in the morning while keeping them in their shelter...in vain hopes of having them all lay their eggs inside rather than outside where I have to search for them! But I think I know where their outside laying nests are now. They seem to like making little nests for themselves among the daylilies. For the first time, I'm actually going to put out a sign that eggs are for sale as I do have 3 dozen collected over the past few days that I can sell.

Well, the lambs have gotten up from their grazing rest, so I guess I need to get back to my Farmers Growing Farmers work! One of the lambs has climbed up onto a tree stump now and looks like he may get tangled up in the plants soon. If anyone's feeling stressed these days, come visit me at the farm...an afternoon spent watching grazing antics is very relaxing!

My first volunteer!

2009-07-11T09:00:00.005-04:00

The day after the farm warming, my first farm volunteer, Minh, arrived for a 10 day stay. She's working on a research project that requires interviewing new farmers, so in exchange for being interviewed and seeing how the farm works, she helps out!

She helped me with mulching the tomato plants, rock picking in the field (now the entire field is ready for rototilling!), planting out all the winter and summer squash, and setting up pest cover for my direct seedings of Asian greens and cucumbers. My cucumber seedlings never really germinated in their soil blocks, so I'm going to see how this direct seeding goes. I'm not sure if the soil blocks were too fertile for the seeds to germinate, or if a pest ate the shoots just as they were coming up. The pest cover should take care of the pests, and planting directly into the field which hasn't had any compost added (unlike the soil blocks) should hopefully germinate the seeds. I should know in about a week if the effort of putting up row cover is worth it.

Minh also took lots of pictures while at the farm, which was really great as I never seem to get around to doing that.

The freshly straw mulched tomato plants on a foggy and wet day.

Me, rototilling the next stretch of field to be used for planting.

Watering newly planted winter squash.

Minh even persuaded me to get dressed up and take some 'portrait' shots which turned out surprisingly well.

On top of the part of the barn that I want to fix into a barn top terrace since there's such an amazing view of the countryside from there.

Minh told me to jump, so I did... I didn't know I could get that far off the ground!

My first farm volunteer experience was definitely a good one. She's moved on to the next farm on her list now (she's visiting around 10 farms over the course of the summer) and I'm sure will be a great help there too.

Animal updates

2009-07-10T09:00:00.001-04:00

A week or so before the farm warming, I brought home my last set of animals for the farm, two 3-month old Dorset lambs from a farmer friend of my farmer friend. These are also male culls. Their mothers turned out to have no mothering instinct and rejected them at birth, so they're bottle fed lambs. They've had their selenium shots (yay! no white muscle disease!) and are really healthy and friendly animals. After a few days to settle in with the rest of the crew (4 bantam chickens, 9 Rhode Island Red hens & 2 goats), they fit in very well and are doing a good job of grazing down brushy areas along with the bigger goat, Monty. The littlest goat, Merlin also took well to them as they are more his size and weren't inclined to bully him.

Some bad news...Merlin died the morning of my birthday. I found him at 5:30 am as I was letting the animals out of their shed before I went to the Keady Market for the day. I definitely shed some tears over the little guy as I had gotten quite attached to him since he required so much babying due to his weakness compared to the other animals. He was a really picky eater, so I always kept him on pasture that he preferred, which seemed to be young dandelions and other tender plants. Otherwise, he just wouldn't eat, but would stand there, bleating. In general, he always moved like an old man (I never saw him move faster than a slow walk). He had little black lightning markings on his front legs, and really cute ears that folded at the ends. He seemed to really like having people around as he'd always start bleating if a person wasn't in sight.

This is the latest picture I have of Merlin, taken by Doret 4 days before he died. If anyone has pictures of him from the farm warming, I'd appreciate a copy.

I really wish he could have made it through his early weaning, but I think he never stood a chance of growing to adulthood. I'm just glad that his final days were out on pasture and not enclosed in a dark stall. I also hope that Monty, who still has the same cough he arrived with, has a stronger heart than his companions did. He's certainly been growing bigger, which is a good sign. Merlin had lost his starved look from grazing but never seemed to start really growing.

Having animals on the farm definitely brings up the emotional level of farming. Even though all the animals on the farm will be slaughtered for meat in November, I really want them to have a good life on pasture over the summer. I don't worry quite as much about my plants as I do the animals. I hope my remaining 3 ruminants stay healthy and growing. I move them around on leashes each day so they have fresh areas to browse and graze. That does require checking on them every hour or so as they can get quite tangled up with each other!

Monty and one of the lambs are sitting in the shade of the tree while the other lamb continues to graze.

The chickens all seem to be doing well, though I definitely understand where the tradition of egg hunts came from now. The hens did initially lay their eggs in the laying boxes that Robb built, but for whatever reason, now prefer doing so in various spots outside. I think some modifications will need to be made to get them to lay back in the boxes again as I'd rather not have to egg search each day. That said, it's pretty cool to come upon a pile of eggs in a patch of tall grass! The hens are definitely free ranging now that they're comfortable with the farm property. I often have one follow me all the way to the house!

One of the bantam hens has started to lay little white eggs. I'm a bit disappointed that they aren't blue or green, but they're still super cute!

Bantam chicken eggs, up close

Eggs, further out so you can see their size compared to other things.

Even with the added stress that animals bring to a farm, I'm still glad I have them all. The eggs I get to eat are wonderfully delicious with huge, bright orange yolks. You do have to watch your step around the farm though as you're liable to have a chicken underfoot ;P And the ruminants are doing a great job of clearing weeds, which they definitely prefer to eat over grass. If I rotate them well, they should do my lawn mowing for me, as well as getting all sorts of good things to eat! Having all the animals here means someone always needs to be at the farm, to let the animals out of their shelter in the morning, put them back in at night (to keep them safe from predators), and make sure they have enough water, or haven't gotten too tangled up when they're grazing on long leashes. Hopefully I can find farm sitters for whenever I may need to be away for a few days.

Farm Warming

2009-07-09T15:25:00.003-04:00

The day of the Farm Warming dawned very wet. But the weather up here changes very quickly and by lunch time, the sun was out and the weather was perfect for an outdoor party!

People started arriving before 1 pm and kept coming and going for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I rented 2 portable restrooms for the event as I knew my septic tank wouldn't be able to handle 100+ people. My Amish neighbour Marianne baked all the mini butter tarts and pies the day before, and I had helpers that Saturday to help prep vegetables for appetizers. We blanched 10 lbs of local asparagus (around 200 stems!), sliced up prosciutto from one of the meat vendors at the Keady market, diced up feta cheese, minced chives and green onions and grated cheddar cheese. Then, after the Saturday day visitors/helpers left, I started my 5 double rolling batches of honey oatmeal bread. Luckily for me, each batch only requires about 2 hours of rising in total, so I did take the last set of loaves out of the oven by 10 pm. While all this food prep was going on indoors, Robb dressed all the tables in the barn and the drive shed so they'd be ready for the next day.

A basket of biodegradable cups for drinks.

On Sunday, all the appetizers were assembled. I prepared 5 appetizers, a cucumber, feta & grape tomato skewer/stack, asparagus with spicy prosciutto, homemade honey oatmeal bread with honey butter and an assortment of Ontario cheeses, mini butter tarts from my neighbour, and mini cheddar and chive scones.

Cucumber, feta & grape tomato skewers on a tray of hosta leaves

I saved baking the cheddar and chive scones for Sunday as they taste best the day they're baked. Some people arrived in the midst of the baking, so they got to get scones straight from the oven!

Cheddar & chive mini scones

I led guests on a tour of the barn, drive shed, animal yard and vegetable plot.

Tour in front of the 3/4 acre vegetable field, at the time, planted with carrots, parsnips, beats, beans, salad mix, spinach, tomatoes, hot peppers, peppers & eggplant.

The front of a tomato row, starting with the heirloom variety 'Black Krim'.

The tour ended with the house as I especially wanted people to see the newly renovated guest suite, so they knew they'd have a comfortable stay on future visits!

The newly renovated guest room...yes, it's the same room as in previous posts where I was insulating and drywalling.

Around 3:30ish (I think...I didn't really keep track of time that day), we all gathered in the barn for the informal farm blessing. Jen and Victoria from my Mississauga church, MCBC, led us in singing 3 songs in our Chinese baptist church tradition, and then I read 'Two Tramps in Mud Time' by Robert Frost. In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have read the whole poem as it's not that short. The clincher is the last stanza:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed every really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Anyone who's received some sort of handcrafted gift from me over the years probably has that stanza written somewhere on their gift. It's been a favourite ever since I discovered it while reading Madeleine L'Engle books. It pretty much sums up the reason why I started on this farm quest and am continuing on this journey into farming.

Everyone gathered in the barn for the farm blessing.

After the farm blessing, I gave another tour of the farm and a bbq dinner was served, courtesy of Andrew and bbq help from the Barnabas fellowship from MCBC.

Three table top grills on the go with burgers, wieners, ribs and chicken wings!

People relaxing over dinner in the yard between the barn and the drive shed.

Amish pies for dessert!

The weather held for the entire event, and we did start a bonfire and roasted marshmallows and made some S'mores. All in all, the day turned out beautifully!

Thank you to all those who came to the farm warming! And a special thanks to all those who helped with prep and throughout the day :) I hope that everyone got a glimpse of what life out here is like and understand a bit better what I'm trying to do here.

Animals now at the farm!

2009-06-11T10:00:00.003-04:00

Last week, animals came to the farm. First, I bought a set of 4 bantam chickens at the Keady livestock auction. For the past couple markets, I had tried bidding on some hen and chick sets and had lost as I wasn't willing to bid past my cut off amount. But last week, I got lucky and managed to win the auction for a bantam rooster and 3 young hens for $5 each. It remains to be seen whether these hens will start laying or how long that will take since I don't actually know how old they are, but the great thing about bantam chickens is that they forage for themselves so they're about as easy care an animal as I could get! When I brought them home, I opened up their box in the chicken yard so they could get used to their new surroundings. Little did I expect them to fly away on me! They're definitely a lot more flight worthy than your average laying breeds! Robb helped me catch the chickens and put them into the animal shed where I left them with some organic layer grain mix and water. My hope was that they would spend some time there and get used to it being their home. I then went on the internet to see how many days I'd have to keep them in there for them to feel like it was home. But after some web surfing, I realized there's no hard and fast rule, so I decided to take the plunge and let them back into the open after just one overnight roost in the animal shed. I figured that I could track them down to wherever else they might roost and bring them back to the shed if they didn't come back on their own. But luck was on my side as they came back to the shed on their own that night to roost, and have been coming back faithfully each night since then :) I hope when I get some regular laying hens to add to the flock that they'll get accustomed to their new home just as easily. I just hope the bantams don't take off when the other hens arrive!

The bantam rooster and 2 of his hens in the animal shed.

The whole flock, just outside the animal shed after I took the plunge and let them out.

A couple days later, I went to an Amish farm around the corner from me and bought their cull billy goat kids from them. As a dairy goat operation, the male kids that are born aren't particularly important to them, so once they're weaned, they're available to whoever is willing to buy them. When I went by to buy the goats, they had an older kid and 2 really little ones available. I knew they weren't the healthiest animals in the world, but since I'm not setting myself up for a goat breeding operation right now, I figured this was a low risk way for me to start caring for animals that will become meat in the fall. I also felt that no matter if they got better or not, at least they'd be in the sun and on pasture on my farm for however long they lived, instead of in stuck in a stall in a barn. The littlest brown goat had all sorts of crustiness around his eyes and nose, which I wiped off with a salt water solution. The little kid didn't try to run away from me while I was doing this, which encouraged me. When I first brought them back, I put them on leads so they could graze in the open...but they soon got themselves hopelessly tangled up with each other, so they were put into the small yard around the animal shed that I keep the chickens in at night. They definitely liked being off leads and browsing around that small yard much better. And the chickens didn't seem to mind them being there. That first night, I made sure they all went into the shed at night so I could close them in and keep them safe from any predators. The goats all piled on top of each other in a corner, and the chickens roosted on a rafter above.

The 2 smallest kids.

The biggest of the kids. According to the farmer's wife, they missed this one when the last batch of billy goat kids were sold. I suspect he spent more time feeding from his mother than the other 2 did.

As the white goat had looked really unsteady since he arrived on the farm, I was concerned that he wouldn't make it through the night. Every time he would get knocked over by one of the other goats, he just couldn't seem to get himself back up again. But by the end of that first day, he seemed to be able to get back up on his own and so I just hoped for the best. He did make it through the first night, and spent the next day in the yard with the other kids and chickens, but continued to look really wobbly and stiff on his legs.

The second morning, I went to let the animals out of the shed and the little white goat was lying on his side, reflexively suckling with his mouth. I went to lift him up to see if he had any strength to stand, but he was clearly too weak. When I put his nose by the water, he didn't try to lap it up at all. I brought him outside to lay in a patch of sunshine and went into the house to warm up some sugar milk for him to see if he would drink that. I was in the house for about 5 minutes and when I came back, he was dead. I suspect he had white muscle disease, a nutrient deficiency from lack of selenium and vitamin E, nutrients which goats should get when foraging on pasture. I think he was already too far gone for 24 hours browsing outside to help him much. Or he may have been too starved from being weaned off milk too early for browsing to provide him with enough nutrition as his stomach may not have been ready yet for non-milk food. Robb and I had tried to feed him some milk and oatmeal a few times that first day, but he wouldn't touch it. And he also wouldn't touch any kibble we tried to feed him, though the bigger goat certainly gobbled it up, and the little brown goat nibbled at it too. I think if I had gone to the Amish farm to buy goats even a day or so later than I did, the little white goat would already have been gone. I'm just glad that at least he had a full day or so to spend browsing on grass in the sun before he died. I still feel worried each morning when I shut the animals into the shed at night that maybe one of them won't make it through the night. It's been almost a week now, so maybe I should stop worrying, but I'm sad that the little white goat didn't make it. I'm just going to have to get used to what all experienced farmers know, when you have livestock, you'll also have dead stock at some point.

The animals definitely all have distinct personalities. The rooster keeps his hens close to him and is quite cautious, but they do wander outside the yard and seem to find me when I'm working at various parts of the yard around the house. Robb has suggested that his name be Solomon. I have no names for the hens yet as I really can't tell them apart. The bigger goat's been named Monty as he seems to be a bit of a troublemaker, which is generally the nature of goats. I named the little brown goat Merlin, partly because Robb had started to call the little white goat Arthur for whatever reason, and also because Merlin has 2 whiskery wattles under his chin. Merlin's a bit of a cry baby as he often bleats at me when I'm around so that I'll pet him. That's probably the result of me washing his face so diligently the first day he arrived. I just have to remember not to pet either of them on the head to discourage butting in the future. So I stick to petting them on their sides and necks.

On Sunday, as they seemed to finally have eaten most of what was in their little yard (yay, no need for me to mow!), I set up the portable electric fencing to enclose a larger area for them outside of the little yard around the animal shed. When they've eaten down most of that area, I'll move the fence to another portion of the yard. There's definitely no lack of rotating forage for them, even just around the house! Once I also have lambs, rotating them around the house yard and into the fields should mean I won't have to do any yard mowing any more :)

Petting the goats each day, I think that they're starting to fill out a bit from when they arrived. They were rather scarily thin when I first got them, so I hope it's not just wishful thinking on my part that they're starting to gain weight. My hope for them is that they have a good summer foraging in the sun and getting fat on pasture.

Keady market

2009-06-10T09:00:00.001-04:00

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've decided to sell regularly at the Keady market, which is just a 10 minute drive north of the farm. Since I don't actually have any organic vegetables to sell yet, I've been selling my neighbour Marianne's baking (pies, bread, tarts and cinnamon buns so far), some of my own baking (tea shortbread and vegan brownies), vine wreaths (made by Robb from vines pulled out of the woodlot) and plants (hostas and Solomon's seal which Robb has been dividing and putting into pots). It's been good to get an idea of how the Keady market works, meet the other vendors, work on my market set up and tell people that I'm growing organic vegetables, so hopefully by the time I do have vegetables to sell, people will know to come to me.

Once we figure out how to get pictures off of Robb's phone, I can show the progression of the market stall. The very first one was with a table made from sawhorses, shutters and some shelving put together from materials found on the farm. With Robb's giant wreath out front and a lot of fresh flowers on the table, I think we were the prettiest stall at the market!

An arrangement of violets with a pretty leaf that was used at my first market day.

The next week, Benita came with me and we had some of her House of Hsueh products to sell too. That week, I had baked Oolong tea shortbread cookies, along with sample sizes, so it was fun to hand those out to people to try. It was a really windy day so we had to hold on to the clothing rack and catch things from blowing off the table. Lots of the vendors with canopies had to take them down as the wind was too strong, and one of them even lost his canopy completely. So now I know what it will be like to deal with a canopy on a really blustery day. I think Benita has a picture of our set up that day, so I'll have to get that from her for this blog.

The picture below is of my 3rd market, but my first one with my new canopy! The week after that, I also had my farm sign up (one of the pictures I need to get off Robb's phone).

My new canopy and all the different products from the farm and my neighbour.

Me at my stall...it's cold early in the morning so I'm really loving my down vest!

Unfortunately, this week's market set up was both sparse and short-lived because the weather was horrid and I didn't think it was worth it to stick out the day there. I didn't end up putting up my canopy as the winds were too strong (I need to put together weights to hold the canopy down on windy days), and the canopy wouldn't have kept me or my products dry anyway, since the rain was coming in sideways. Knowing that the forecast was for rain, and therefore there wouldn't be much market traffic, Marianne didn't bake anything for me to sell this week. I baked a batch of brownies on Monday, this time cut out into circles, and with sample pieces for people to try. After 2.5 hours of standing in a steady drizzle, with the wind starting to pick up, I decided to call it quits since my hands were so cold that I couldn't actually grab change out of my money apron. So now I have a batch of brownies to eat this week...which Gideon is happy about since he really likes them and I gave him a bunch to take home. The market wasn't a complete loss though as another vendor at the market sampled my brownies and is considering carrying them in her ice cream shop. I'll see if anything comes of that!

Hopefully the weather will be better next Tuesday. I'm just hoping that I'll have some vegetable products to bring with me soon!

House roof done...with some horse drama!

2009-06-09T19:59:00.003-04:00

When I first made an offer on this property, I knew that the first major house repair I'd have to invest in was a new roof. So my Amish neighbour Gideon put the word out that I needed a new roof for the house and eventually, Sam showed up with his friend Levi. I decided to go with dark green barn steel, or a tin roof, as Sam calls it. I chose a steel roof because it will last longer than asphalt tiles, and also because it's installed over the existing roof, so there's no need to create a lot of garbage. Instead, strapping is laid on the existing roof to form a framework for the steel to be drilled in to.

House roof after the spruce wood strapping has been nailed into place.

This was Sam's first steel roofing job with him as the lead and I think he underestimated how much time it would take to install. He and Levi certainly worked some really long days to get it done! The day they started the job was also my first day at the Keady market, leaving the farm at 6 am, selling vine wreaths, vegan brownies, and bread and tarts baked by Gideon's wife Marianne. When Robb and I got back from the market around 1 pm, we discovered that Sam and Levi had put their horses into my horse corral.

Of course, this is a logical thing to do...but since I don't have horses, and have no plans to get any, my plans for the horse corral include growing sugar snap peas around the perimeter to take advantage of the fencing as trellis for the climbing vines. In the picture below, you may notice bare earth under some parts of the corral fence. That is where I had planted my first planting of sugar snap peas, which had just started to sprout. When I saw the horses in the corral, I despaired that my first planting was in vain. But luckily, it turned out that the horses hadn't noticed the pea sprouts yet because they were still too small. But Sam and Levi didn't tie the horses up in there after that as they knew that once the horses found them, they'd eat the sweet sprouts right down to the ground!

The picture I took of the horses in the corral...after I determined that they weren't eating my sugar snap pea sprouts!

On another day, while I was away in Toronto with Robb still at the farm, Sam tied his horse up to one of the big tires Robb and I had dragged off the fallen part of the barn. This worked fine until something spooked the horse and sent her running down the lane, dragging that heavy tire. Robb says he never saw someone get off a roof so fast to catch the horse before she ended up on the road!

All in all, I'm quite pleased with my new roof and hope not to have to change it again in my lifetime :) And I hope the weather warms up soon so that the first planting of sugar snap peas...having narrowly escaped being horse fodder...will grow, blossom and fruit! Their growth has been severely delayed by this unseasonally cold weather we've been having. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about the weather, so I'll just have to be patient!

The boon of high speed internet access

2009-05-16T14:48:00.002-04:00

The one thing that I have not been able to get acclimatized to on the farm, is the slow speed of dial-up internet...28.8 kbps. Being in Toronto this weekend with high speed internet everywhere makes me appreciate how much I took fast web browsing for granted. And it highlights how handicapped I feel by the lack of high speed wireless coverage in my area. I was used to doing a lot of product and information research via the internet before coming to the farm, and now, I find it so much more time consuming, that I keep my internet research topics to absolute necessities, and sometimes not even those, which explains why I'm only now picking a rototiller model.

In fact, on the farm, not only is there currently no access to high speed internet, even for a phone line connection, I have to pay an extra $3 per month (rural connectivity fee) just for the 'privilege' of being connected at all, and an extra $5 for long distance access. I do understand that telecommunications companies are not going to build infrastructure in areas without the client base to support those capital investments. But somehow that doesn't help me feel like rural areas aren't being kept at a disadvantage.

There are provincial grants in place for rural regions to increase their high speed coverage areas, but so far, my area hasn't been connected yet. The telecoms implementing the grant also need the funds to be released to them by the province to set up new towers, and not surprisingly, that's not happening quickly. Until then, I just have to teach myself to unclench my jaw any time that I'm waiting for something to load. To give you an idea of how long things take...in my last long blog update that included all those pictures...each individual picture took at least 10 minutes to load. I unpacked a few boxes of books between the upload of each of those pictures!

New Black Sheep Farm logo

2009-05-09T14:27:00.003-04:00

I probably haven't mentioned it before, but the farm's name is 'Black Sheep Farm' and I've finally chosen a logo with much design help from Benita. I've now added it to the blog page, though there may be some more refinements to come. Let me know your thoughts on the logo...what words come to mind when you see it, if there's anything strange or confusing about it, etc.

Farming starts in earnest

2009-05-09T13:09:00.013-04:00

I didn’t realize I missed the whole month of April for this blog as time just seems to be rushing by! Since getting back to the farm after the One of a Kind show in Toronto, I’ve been slowly plodding along with my various tasks and haven’t really been stressing too much over the timing of things. I may regret that…but I also think that I just have to do what needs doing and not stress too much over what’s not done yet, or I’ll just be paralyzed by the long list of things that still need to be done.

Julia came back with me to the farm after the show, and while she was here, helped me with unpacking and organizing around the house, as well as pulling down the interior plaster and lathe walls in one corner of the eventual large guest room. My original thoughts were to pull down all the walls and possibly the ceiling, insulate and put up drywall, but after determining that I wouldn’t end up changing the shape of the room or ceiling at all given the structural studs and beams, I decided to fix just that one corner (where the walls had been in rough shape already) and just paint the rest. It’s amazing to me how much work it was to make those plaster and lathe walls in the first place, and certainly a lot of garbage would have to be dumped if I pulled them and the ceiling all down. It’s also really interesting to see how wide some of the boards on the house are, now that I can see them from removing the interior walls. For long term insulation improvement, I’m better off taking down the siding on the house and insulating the exterior under the siding. Much more efficient and less garbage created!

Inside of exterior walls exposed after removal of inside plaster & lathe walls

Me adding vapour barrier after insulating between wall studs...next step, drywalling

My family came up for Easter dinner and helped do some raking and brush clearing around the yard. The following week, I also pulled up a lot of carpet that had been laid down on the grounds around the house (who carpets the outdoors???) so now the layers of organic material that have been kept from the soil by that carpet layer can finally incorporate back into the ground. There’s still plenty more carpet to pull up around the property. It’s amazing to me that people could have such a hatred of weeds and have chosen to lay down so much carpet to combat them. I also had a set of visitors from my church come up the last weekend of April though it was too rainy outside for them to help me with any yard work. So we watched movies and ate snacks instead :) They did take tons of pictures of the grounds and house so I look forward to seeing those.

Sarah and her documentary crew were up for a few days as well to film the overseeding of the pasture fields and get a general update on what’s been going on at the farm. While they were here, a local farmer also came to visit and examine the possibility of growing grain on some of my fields. He decided against doing so due to the small size of the field (he manages hundreds of acres in the are, growing near-organic grains). I was so distracted by all this company, that I stupidly left a pot of soup on the stove that turned to charcoal and filled the house with smoke. That may have been a blessing in disguise as I think the fumigation helped to clear some of the lingering odor of cat from the house ;P Unfortunately, I destroyed my favourite pot in the process :(

My poor destroyed pot...yes, that is a ham bone in there

Robb moved up to the farm at the end of April, and has been helping a lot with cleaning and organizing the grounds, barn, drive shed and house. We pulled the black plastic and tires off the barn floor where the walls had come down a few years back so that the floor boards, joists and beams in the lower part of the barn can dry out and hopefully stop rotting. I’m going to have to get my Amish contractor to take a look and see what needs to be done to make the lower barn watertight and structurally sound and possibly turn the upper part of the structure into a barn-top terrace. There’s a great view of the farm from there and it would be a wonderful future site for an outdoor café!

My contractor will be starting on re-roofing the house in dark green barn steel this coming Monday. Unfortunately for me, the price of steel went up $0.40/square foot in the past few weeks so the materials for the roof are going to cost $1500 more than originally expected. And when I brought my minivan in for new all-season tires (the previous ones were completely bare), it turned out that I needed new brake calipers (hadn’t been changed since the van was bought in 1997) and pads. Safety first of course, but from a $400 tire change and checkup, it was a bit of a blow to have the final bill come to $900 :( Apparently, the rest of the van’s in great shape though so hopefully no more needs to be spent on maintenance this year (knock on wood!). If only I could live like my Amish neighbours and not use a motorized vehicle at all… My Amish across the road neighbour made a custom free-standing kitchen cabinet for me which now holds the old island countertop from Mark’s parents’ place, so now I have a great surface for baking and cabinets to store my mixer, food processor and other baking supplies. Unfortunately for me, he’s in the process of selling his farm to move to the U.S. I’ll be sad to see such a good neighbour go!

Planting related things that have been done so far…I sent my eggplant, pepper and hot pepper seeds off to be planted and grown in the greenhouse of a farmer down in Lucknow (who’s growing 480 seedlings for me as her pass-on of the Heifer International (www.heifer.org) gift she received as part of the Farmers Growing Farmers program last year). I’ve started all my tomato, leek, tomatillo and ground cherry seedlings with my new soil block making tools. Robb helped me pull up the sod around 50 feet of the horse corral, where I’ve now planted my first planting of sugar snap peas (taking advantage of the existing fencing for trellising!); the remaining hundred feet of circumference will be used for two more pea plantings, and the interior of the circle will hopefully become a permanent herb garden. I’ve had my neighbour in to plough up and cultivate my 1+ acre vegetable field, as well as agreed to have the previously cultivated 5 acres in the lower field put into grains (rye and barley that he will bale green as silage) underseeded with red clover for this year. I’ve also overseeded Dutch white clover (with a hand cranked broadcast seeder) into about 10 acres of hilly hay fields which will be used for animal pasturing in the long term, and have walked the perimeters of the various fields with a fencing expert to plan out long-term animal fencing. I now have a plan for where 3 rotated vegetable plots will be in the years to come, as well as the permanent pasture/hay fields.

Vegetable field after initial ploughing to turn up the sod

For animals, I’ve purchased moveable electric fencing equipment and have visited various sheep and goat farms looking for lambs and kids to bring to the farm to pasture in the next few weeks. I’ve mostly cleared out the bottom of the barn in preparation for housing the sheep and goats overnight, though I will also make a straw bale and plywood shelter for shade and rain in their rotating pastures in case it’s too much of a hassle to get them into the barn each night. I still need to nail up some boards to pen them into a smaller part of the barn instead of having them run amuck in the horse stalls and other areas. Robb has cleaned out a large shed behind the drive shed which will be used for housing laying hens once we’ve repaired theholes in the chicken wire around the shed.

On the marketing front, I’ve visited the Keady market which is a mere 10 minute drive north on Grey Road 3 from me. It’s a giant Tuesday market which grew up around the weekly livestock auction held there and attracts a large crowd of locals and Georgian Bay cottagers. I will be booking a reserved spot at that market, though I have precious little to sell at my booth at this point in time. The market started this past Tuesday, May 5, and runs until September 29. I will see what I can scrounge up to sell (vine wreaths made by Robb, tea shortbread cookies that I’ll bake, some of Benita’s clutches and brooches, etc.) starting this coming Tuesday, May 12. As my seedlings get big enough, I’ll bring the extras to market to sell as well until I have actual vegetables to bring in. I’ve also come up with a logo with Benita’s help and will make signs for both the market and the farm, and eventually a flag to fly from the market booth so that people can find it easily. I still need to pick which Saturday market to go to and am currently inclined to heading out towards Port Elgin because it’s a relatively multi-cultural community that’s grown up there because of the workers at Bruce Power. My local community is very white, so I’m looking forward to seeing some different ethnic groups once a week at least!

What still needs to be done…a further tractor cultivation by my neighbour of the vegetable field before I plant my first direct seeded beds of salad greens, spinach, beets, radish, fennel, kohlrabi, beans, Asian greens, spring onions, carrots, parsnips and annual herbs, hopefully this coming week. I still need to start all my winter and summer squash, pumpkin, cucumber, kale, chard and cabbage seedlings. And I need to stop debating brands and just buy a rototiller and an Earthway seeder. I should have ordered them weeks ago as I will likely be doing my first plantings with just a hoe, rake and hand seeding. I’m sure farmers everywhere would cringe at the inefficiency and I’m a bit mortified myself as Everdale certainly taught me better!

Hopefully I’ll have the new drywall back up in the guest room after tomorrow while my brother-in-law’s here to help me so that I’ll have a great place to host guests in the weeks to come. My farm warming date has been moved to Sunday, June 28, which works better for some of the people that will be helping prepare the food for the event, and is also a better time for people to see the farm as the majority of the vegetable crops will be in the fields and the animals should all be here by then.

Well, this has certainly been a long post, though I’d never be described as a person of few words ;P I’ll try to post more often so they’ll be shorter in the future!

A spring vignette, with hyacinths from the farm

Spring awakenings

2009-03-31T20:07:00.003-04:00

My first month at the farm has flown by in a flurry of moving, cleaning, painting and unpacking. The house was in a dirtier state than I'd feared, with clean up of cat feces in the corners of many rooms, and mouse droppings from all the kitchen cabinets. And then I started getting flea bites on my ankles, so now even without the presence of all those cats (and apparently mice), I've got to try and eliminate fleas...who only seem to want to bite me. Cluster flies also appeared with the warming weather, whose frenzied buzzing emphasizes to me how important it is for me to fix the screens and seals on all the windows! It almost makes me wish for the frozen hibernation of winter ;P

But not all the new life around the farm has been unwelcome to me. There are snowdrops all around the yard and the shoots of bulbs are pushing their way out of the soil. Yellow crocuses have started blooming, and I even found a patch of dwarf butterfly irises!

Dwarf butterfly irises found in a sheltered patch by the cedars to the east of the house

I've also driven around between the farm, Toronto and Waterloo so much that I've likely wracked up more mileage than I would have driven in a year of living and working in Toronto. I think that's been the hardest thing for me to get used to on the farm, not the isolation, bugs or being in a new house, but rather how much time is spent travelling anywhere. I used to be incapable of driving more than an hour a day without feeling like I'm dozing off at the wheel, but now I can actually drive 3-4 hours in a day and not be too tired out by it. It's reassuring to me that I have adapted so much as the distance of the farm from the GTA had really bothered me...but now that I'm capable of driving that distance, I don't feel like I'm as far away. I have made a concession to all this long distance driving in that I've finally broken down and gotten a cell phone. The last thing I'd want is to be unable to access my CAA membership benefits if the minivan has any issues on the road.

While I have been very preoccupied by moving tasks in March, I really do need to get moving on farm tasks. My fields need to be frost seeded so that I can hopefully get a jump on weeds. I also need to find a farmer with a tractor who'd be willing to cultivate my vegetable field for me and set up the beds for planting. And while I have all my vegetable seeds, I don't have any tools yet other than a wheel hoe. A rototiller's at the top of my list of tools, as well as seeders. And I need to get seeding indoors so that I will have peppers, eggplants and tomatoes this year. So much to do!

The house also needs a lot of work on its exterior, from repainting/caulking/screening the windows, to getting the roof replaced. The barn's also in need of some work to prevent any further water damage. The rain of spring has certainly revealed where water comes in! The grounds around the house need a lot of cleanup to reveal the flower beds and clear up all the branch debris from the trees over the winter (all to be saved for arrangements or as fuel for a bonfire). I've definitely got my hands full! For all those of you who may be paying condo fees and complaining about them...consider all the work you don't have to do to maintain the building and grounds and all of a sudden, those monthly fees seem a lot more reasonable!

I'm currently in Toronto for a week to help my sister with her booth at the One of a Kind show in Toronto which runs from April 1-5. If you can make it to the show, you should definitely come visit us in the Rising Stars section at the 'House of Hsueh' booth (J-45). Just walking through the Direct Energy centre today and seeing all the different artisan booths being set up has been exciting as there are so many beautiful things being made by creative minds and hands. I know I won't be able to resist buying some things, but I'm happy to be supporting all these artisans directly. And I hope my sister's products are a hit and that she sells her whole stock!

After the show, I'm back to the farm to get working on all that needs to be done. My goals for April on the farming side are to get my fields taken care of for the season (via cover cropping or by finding a local farmer to grow grain on them), my seedlings started and lining up someone with a tractor to cultivate my vegetable plot for me once the ground is defrosted and dry enough. On the house side, I'm aiming to have everything fixed and spruced up for May 30 when I'm planning to have my farm warming party. Hopefully various people will come visit to help out and/or keep me company!

Bittersweet farm beginnings

2009-03-05T19:41:00.002-05:00

I am now officially moved to the farm. After an extremely stressful week trying to get 2 mortgages finalized to pay for the farm on Feb. 27, everything finally worked out and I took possession that Friday. All I will say about the whole mortgage experience is that this 'recession' sucks, I hate appraisers, and that banks just don't care about getting documents sent to lawyers in a timely fashion. But at the end of the day, all the money got to where it needed to go on time, which is good. Unfortunately, I got less than I wanted and have to pay back more each month than I had planned. Ah, the wonders of 50% loan-to-value ratios and amortization periods that have to be 5 years less than the appraised lifetime of the property :P

The move in weekend was perhaps a bit more chaotic than I would have liked since there were so many people up at the farm. I arrived with my minivan loaded to the gills thanks to the packing abilities of Alan and Jen. Kris followed me as she was filming me signing stuff at the lawyer's office in Markdale before coming to the farm. Sarah, Katherine and Devin arrived soon afterwards to set up their filming equipment (more on this later). Mark and Robb arrived in a rented cube van stuffed with larger pieces of furniture, and then my sister Benita and her husband Will arrived. Our first priority was to unload the cube van as it needed to be driven back to Waterloo that night, so most of us were either unloading or sweeping out areas in which to unload stuff. Robb's aunt, uncle and cousin also arrived and helped to unload the minivan and also to scrub the upstairs bathroom (for which I'm eternally grateful!). And around all this, there were 3 cameras to film the various arrivals and activity.

When I first put my condo on the market, I also made a slightly unusual Craig's list post where I said that whoever bought my condo would also get a season's worth of vegetables from the farm, and directed the reader to this blog. Sarah, a documentary producer, found me through this post and took a look at my blog. We ended up meeting and decided that we'd be a good fit for a documentary about my journey into farming. So that's why Sarah was at the farm with 2 cinematographers. And Kris was also on site to film footage for a 4 minute Everdale documentary. It's definitely a new thing for me to have so many cameras around!

The first night on the farm was celebrated with my bottle of Veuve Clicquot champage, Mark's chili and various South American red wines (courtesy of Sarah). We all ended up bunking down in the living room for the night like a kid's slumber party.

The next day, my sister Bettina and her husband Ken, as well as my mother, joined us at the farm. Saturday was major cleaning day! The previous owner had many cats who had unfortunately sprayed in some corners...and also didn't manage to keep the mice out of the kitchen cabinets. My mother fed us a lunch of homemade steamed pork buns which were super tasty. Simeron and Doran also showed up for a visit. And in the afternoon, Mark and I went for a walk with the documentary team in the woods and fields and got interviewed in a snowy field. I made sure that everyone at the farm had a chance for a break to wander the grounds and see what a beautiful place it is. The weather cooperated with a beautiful sunny, clear day. Eventually, most people left and Robb, Mark and I were left to dinner and our first quiet night on the farm. We were all heading out the next day, me to get another load of furniture from my condo, and Mark to take Robb back to Waterloo.

I returned to the farm on Monday night and spent Tuesday washing the walls in the middle section of the house. Mark returned early afternoon on Wednesday...with some rather bad news for me. After a lot of soul searching, he had to admit to himself that moving to the farm and starting to farm with me this year wasn't right for him. He had been battling this feeling for a number of weeks, which I had noticed subconsciously but didn't want to admit might be a serious concern. I thought it was just cold feet, but instead of feeling better once he got to the farm, he realized that this just wasn't right for him. While this is an upsetting decision for me, I understand his dilemma and wouldn't want him to come out to farm without having his heart in it. So I will be paring back our original farm plan to be manageable by one person instead of two. Right now, I feel rather heavy hearted, but I'm thankful that having Mark around for the farm hunt gave me the confidence and courage to move forward with buying a farm. I am certainly excited for the season to come, and perhaps having to scale back the first year is a more prudent way to start.

I will spend the rest of March completing my move, getting the farm house in order and planning the order and placement of the plantings to come. The past couple of weeks have certainly been an emotional rollercoaster for me. I feel a bit like God's taunting me, with two steps forward and one step back, but I know that in the end, the harder the struggle now, the sweeter success will be. Though I really have no idea how I'll measure success in the end. In a sense, even just getting this far, to being on my new farm property is the culmination of years of dreaming. I just have to continue to have faith that God will keep supporting me as long as I pursue my calling. Admittedly, that's much easier said then truly felt ;P

Farm reconnaissance

2009-01-20T23:52:00.003-05:00

I went up to the farm yesterday with Mark and Robb. This was my third time there (preceded by my initial look and home inspection trip) and Mark's second time. The trip had multiple purposes: take measurements in the house, examine the floors/walls/windows to plan for immediate repairs, meet with my insurance agent, examine the barn and other outbuildings and walk the fields to start planning where vegetables would be planted and animals pastured. It was a good trip as we managed to do all we had planned and came away better able to imagine what farming the land will be like in the spring.

This time, I also got lots of pictures (thanks to Robb's diligent shutter clicking!). I'll just post outside shots for now as the current owner is in the process of packing up. You'll see what a winter wonderland it is up there!

The Farm house

It's in 3 sections, the original house built in 1886 is on the left, followed by the middle chunk which I can't date, and the summer kitchen on the right, which was added in 1967. The future giant guest room is the whole second floor of the middle addition.

The house from another angle

The bank barn, with an old silo

Mark and me kneeling in the snow looking out at the furthest field from the farm house

After quite a bit of trekking through snow that sometimes came up to my waist, we arrived at the edge of the furthest field. I had actually forgotten that this field is part of the property too. Mark is adamant that we tried taking our first soil sample from this field (hit water after about 6 inches and went to choose a different spot), but my memory of that day is so confused with the other properties we looked at, that I'm not clear as to the boundaries of the land. The survey will solve that issue once I get it ;P I'm pretty sure Mark's right though, which means I do have a chunk of woods on the property, which is a definite bonus! It's a bit hard to see in this picture, but the woods are to the right of us.

Mark, me and Robb all bundled up for the cold!

My insurance agent took this picture of us. She got quite lost coming up to the farm as I gave her directions from Toronto, and she decided to come from the direction of Collingwood. She ended up driving to Owen Sound and Meaford, but no one could tell her where Grey Road 3 and Side Road 8 were. GPS couldn't find it because those are really generic road names, so there could be multiple locations, or the mapping company just didn't have enough detail for the more rural areas of Ontario. I'll be sure to get a good map picture of how to get to the farm once I start asking people to visit!

And the most encouraging thing happened today :) My friend Andrew found out that one of his client's grandparents used to own farmland around Chesley (the nearest town to the farm). So I gave Andrew the address of the place which he confirmed with his client used to be his grandparents' farm, along with the 100 acre Amish farm across the road, and probably the 50 acre farm that's t0 the east of the farm. So now that client will be digging up old aerial photos of the properties to send to me, and will probably be able to tell me more details about the land itself, and the history of the house and outbuildings. I'm always astounded by how small a world we really live in!

Considering that I only even came across this farm because I had contacted the agent about the Amish farm across the street, this is just another indication to me that God really led me to the right piece of farm land to buy. It was a much needed sign for me on a day when I was worrying about finances and how I would pay for all the things needed to maintain the house and run a farm. With that and Obama's inauguration today, I'm managing to stay hopeful that things will work out as needed. I'm hopeful that the positive change of Obama becoming president will mean that people will stop being afraid of planning and hoping for their futures based on media recession fear mongering. If we all just sit on our hands waiting for things to get better, they never will. So those of you out there who have been thinking for years about moving out of your parents' house, or stopping renting, come out and buy my condo! If you've been saving up any sort of cash for a down payment over the last few years, this is a great time to buy because mortgage rates are so low.

I will be at the Guelph Organic Conference this weekend, volunteering at the Everdale booth. After that, I'll be spending a few days at Everdale while Mark animal sits, so we can get our farm business plan written and our crop plans made. It may be winter still, but there's a lot of planning that we need to get done before spring. At least we'll have one piece of equipment after this weekend...a Ken Laing wheel hoe! He's delivering it to Mark at the conference. Locally made by a great mentoring farmer. I'm glad we managed to snag one. I'll be sure to post a picture of it once we've picked it up.

The condo is for sale

2009-01-02T20:31:00.011-05:00

After some packing up of my clutter (any one who's been to my place before knows I have a lot of stuff), I was able to take pictures of my place so I could get it listed. I've moved some items to my sister's and my minivan has also become my mobile storage unit. Though by looking at my place, I don't think you'd think anything has been packed up. It's a good thing I'm not moving to the farm until the end of February, because I've got loads of packing to do!

I've listed the condo for sale at $314,900. The technical details are as follows:
- 711 square feet, open plan corner unit, 1 bedroom + den with a 38 square foot balcony
- floor to ceiling windows
- walnut veneer cabinetry in kitchen and bathroom, with granite countertops and foyer floor, ceramic tile in kitchen and bathroom and carpet for the rest
- a glass backsplash in the kitchen (which I installed myself)
- a glass drop chandelier in the dining area, wall-mounted swing arm lamp in the bedroom and 3-spot light in the den

But what has made the condo my home for almost 6 years is more than those details. I first signed on the dotted line for the place in September of 2000, paid installments on it for the next few years and finally moved into it in February 2003. Over the years I:
- bought furniture (my first couch!),
- built furniture (both the shelf unit and corner desk were built in the den where they currently reside),
- moved furniture (though I don't rearrange nearly as often as Alan and Liz do at their place!),
- painted (the last time, just in time for my Christmas open house that year),
- sewed curtains (I've changed my curtains 4 times over the years),
- sewed cushions (I love finding beautiful fabrics),
- installed glass tiles (it's the grouting that can get finicky)
- and vacuumed almost daily

And then there's the entertaining...brunches, lunches, dinners, dessert, my annual Christmas open house (5 hosted here!), small group meetings, trip planning meetings, out of town guests, Battlestar Galactica marathons...711 square feet have fit a lot of people over the years! I'm definitely going to miss that aspect of living here, being so easily reachable by all my friends and family, despite the small size of visitor parking and high security of my building ;P Moving into this condo also changed my daily 2-3 hour driving and TTC commute to a 15 minute one-way walk. In the summers, I could stop at the farmer's market on my way in to work. In the winter, I would skate at the Harbourfront rink every week. And on those rare occasions when I was home alone for a day, this condo has been a homey retreat where many books have been read, movies watched and craft projects made. I'm definitely going to miss my first solo home!

As I was taking pictures for the listing, I realized that they weren't just pictures to try and sell the place, but also to remember what it looked like. So here's some nostalgia.

My bedroom, which was the first room that I painted the second day that I moved in. The paint colour is Violet Stone by Benjamin Moore. The curtains are from IKEA, which I modified. The fabric on canvas above the bed is a Japanese patterned quilting fabric bought from a quilt fabric shop in Linlithgow, Scotland. The swing arm lamp is also from IKEA, though they haven't made it for years and I wish I had bought 2 at the time. It's not the IKEA shade on it though as I definitely didn't like the one it came with.

The living/dining room and kitchen. Open concept living definitely worked for me here! The green patterned curtains in the dining area are the last set that I made. The glass drop chandelier is a combination of a chandelier bought from The Home Depot, and a drum shade Benita got for me from the Umbra sale. The glass tile backsplash shimmers in the light.

The den, with it's corner desk and shelving unit, both built right in the room. The white shelf was built first, attempted without a hammer, which didn't work. I had to run to Tammy's house to borrow her hammer...she and Jackson subsequently gave me a hammer as a gift ;P Before the corner desk, the shelves that are currently in the living room were on the wall opposite to the white shelving unit. That configuration really didn't work, which is why I was quite happy to discover this corner desk unit. One good thing about moving to a farm with a house much bigger than my condo...I don't have to get rid of any of my books!

And finally, the bathroom, all 40 square feet of it :) I debated from day one whether I would add colour to the walls. I thought I'd paint narrow coloured stripes, but in the end, preferred to leave one room all white and creme. It's probably better for its saleability that I decided against the coloured striping!

In about 2 months, I won't be living here any more. I will be starting a new adventure in farming. And as far as my life is concerned, the condo will have fulfilled its destiny. I bought it and paid the mortgage down aggressively over the years as savings and investment towards buying a farm one day. So this condo hasn't just been my home for 6 years, it has also been my vehicle into farming. I've definitely been happy here so I hope that whoever lives here next will enjoy it as much as I have.

The first official viewing of the condo will be tomorrow at noon. I've got a pile of things sitting beside me in the den that I will be taking down to the minivan tonight to get them out of the way. Have to have the condo looking its best for tomorrow!

Farm search complete!

2008-12-22T19:44:00.002-05:00

First off, the best Christmas present I could have gotten this year...I've bought a farm! Technically, it doesn't close until February 27, 2009, but my offer was accepted and now I just have to get my ducks in order so that the money to pay for it is ready by the closing date. It's a 40 acre farm by the town of Chesley, south of Owen Sound and east of Port Elgin. The property has a 2400 square foot farm house first built in 1886, a bank barn, a drive shed, and various other small outbuildings. The house itself is surrounded by mature trees and gardens, though I have yet to see them in all their glory!

I didn't update this blog during the farm search because I didn't want to write about the process while it was happening. It was just too much of an emotional rollercoaster for me to want to get my hopes up too high before I actually managed to secure a place. I knew that if it wasn't in God's timing for me to have my own farm straight away, that it wouldn't happen, and I didn't want to assume that I could be so lucky as to farm my own land in 2009. That said...I really wanted to find a place so I could farm my own land in 2009. It takes years to set up the right growing cycles for a farm and I just want to get started. And if I got a farm now, I was guaranteed to have a farm business partner for at least the first year, Mark, which would make the whole farm startup that much easier because I wouldn't be doing so completely on my own but would have a trusted friend by my side. In my lower moments, I tried to cheer myself up by considering farm manager jobs that I could take next year instead. But that didn't really cheer me up so I knew that if I didn't get a property, I would be very depressed over Christmas. But no need to consider that 'what if' any more because I got the farm I wanted and I'm going to have the best Christmas ever!

Rewinding back to the start of the farm search process...while I was still at Everdale, I looked at a lot of Multiple Listing Service (MLS) farms to get a feel for what was out there and what the pricing was like. I did go to visit a couple properties, one close to Everdale and another one north-east of Barrie. The property close to Everdale was definitely far outside the realm of affordability, at $10,000+ per acre, which is how any property within an hour of Toronto was priced. The property north-east of Barrie had promise because it was 200 acres of land with 2 houses on it, as well as various outbuildings. I was quite excited to go and see it because on paper it seemed just right, but it turned out to be a really disappointing trip. I felt no uplifting of spirits when I looked at the land and of the 2 houses, the bungalow was basic, but liveable, while the 19th century farm house needed a lot of work. Even given the low price (around $1000/acre), I would be spending too much time and money making the buildings and property liveable to me, instead of farming. Not that I've had much experience or success in the dating game, but it felt like I had set up a date with a guy that looked really compatible on paper, only to have absolutely no chemistry with him on a face to face meeting. I certainly didn't expect that having chemistry with a property would factor so strongly into my search!

A week or so later, I spent a day with an agent who brought me to 3 farms around Durham (west) region. One of them had beautiful land, but a house in about the worst condition that I have ever seen without actually being condemned. It was a fascinating place in that the owner was clearly an eccentric collector and had a lot of items that would have been interesting to explore. The second place was a horse boarding farm with a beautifully kept house and outbuildings, but the land itself lacked fertility. The third place was right on a busy road and the house reeked of cigarette smoke. So none of these properties were suitable.

After I returned to Toronto from Everdale, I started to seriously scout out properties on MLS and booked 2 days of showings all around south Grey Bruce to see 10 different properties from almost as many agents. The first day was really positive as each property looked promising and I could see myself farming on them. I was really happy that I could feel positive about these places because my last few experiences had left me worried that I wouldn't see anything that I could like. The second day was a bit more hit and miss, with one mixup on location so that I missed one appointment. At the end of the 2 days, I was definitely tired. And soon after that, the snow hit, so I knew that if I were to be farming my own land in 2009, it would have to be one of the properties I had looked at.

Mark was with me for all these farm property visits and at each place, we performed the John Slack Dutch auger 10% hydrochloric acid soil test. All the agents were quite fascinated by this as it's certainly not something they would have seen before. Essentially, we were testing for free carbonates in the parent material of the soil, as well as looking at the soil layers for texture which would indicate microbial activity (something to be encouraged in organic farming!). On most of the properties, we had to pull up almost 4 feet of soil, which meant we were often hitting water since it's been such a wet summer. Of the properties tested, only a handful didn't 'fizz' (reaction between the acid solution and calcium carbonate) and would therefore not be worth trying to farm since the land was missing the basic mineralogical components for good fertility. I think many of the agents were quite surprised that I would be the one digging the hole (Mark and I did take turns), though honestly, most probably weren't expecting a short, Asian woman to be so seriously looking at farmland!

At the end of the 2 days and 10 properties, I knew there was only one property that would be a possibility. It was the smallest property we had looked at, with 40 acres, almost all workable, and a price tag that I coud finance without having to find outside investors. After looking at a lot of 100 acre properties, I had a better feeling for the size that I could manage. While the 100 acre properties were the best value with price points between $3000-5000 per acre, they had varied percentages of useable acres and buildings in different states of repair. And given the current and predicted future state of the Canadian economy, I didn't want to have to incur more debt than I had to. So after confirming some details about the 40 acre property, I decided to take the next step of booking a home inspection.

I went with a home inspector with an engineering background who specialized in century homes. I knew that I would be getting a very thorough inspection (it lasted for almost 6 hours!), as well as an education on how to care for a century home. The day of the inspection dawned sunny and clear so the roads were good. I also brought my mother and best friend Julia along to see the farm. And it's very lucky that I did as the early hour meant they were desperate for coffee, so I stopped the car at a gas station in Orangeville so they could get something to drink. When I went to restart the car, it wouldn't start. Just as my mother started to pull out her CAA card for us to call for help, a CAA truck pulled in right beside us. I jumped out of the car to talk to the CAA mechanic so quickly that I don't think he knew what hit him ;P Both Julia and my mom were calling it a miracle, as after he got his coffee, he had us follow him to his shop so he could check on the battery and see if it just needed replacing or if a more serious alternator replacement was needed. Luckily for me, only the battery needed replacing. The mechanic, Eric, had the battery ordered and replaced within an hour and we were back on the road! I'm so glad that we didn't discover the car trouble at 3:30 pm as we tried to leave the farm!

We arrived at the farm to a winter wonderland. There were probably 2+ feet of snow on the property, and on the house's roof! The home inspection itself revealed that the roof of the farm house needed replacement as soon as possible, but that otherwise, the work that needed to be done on the house all involved sealing the building envelope to prevent moisture penetration that would eventually rot the wooden joists for the floors. So I know I'll be doing a lot of sanding, priming, painting, caulking and mortaring come spring. But these are all responsibilities I would have to take on as the owner of a century home anyway, so I'm up to the challenge! Most importantly, the home inspection confirmed that the wiring in the house was all grounded. If it had turned out that the home still had knob and tube wiring, I wouldn't have bothered trying to buy the place as the whole interior would have to be gutted to update the wiring. I suspect that this house remained without electricity until after the knob and tube period was past. It is a heavily Amish area after all! I didn't hire the inspector to look at the barn, but he did walk through it quickly with me and felt that it was in good condition. When I move there, I'll have to get the Amish barn expert in the area to show me where some additional support may need to be put in.

The home inspection gave me a starting point for coming up with an initial offer amount for the farm. Essentially, I subtracted the immediate repair costs of replacing the roof and fixing the barn from the purchase price. After 2 nerve-wracking weeks of back and forth offer and counteroffer, the seller accepted my price and I signed the final papers on December 20th. In the end, I'm paying a bit more than my ideal price, and the seller is selling for a bit less than her ideal price, which means we're probably at just the right price. I'm just super happy that the pricing process is over and I can actually kick myself out of stasis and into farm planning gear! Up until now, I didn't know what 2009 would bring and was just trying to hold myself in neutral so that I wouldn't be too disappointed if I didn't end up with a farm for 2009. And part of me is still in shock right now and worried that something will derail this process before February 27. Any prayers or positive thoughts you could throw my way so that everything proceeds smoothly to closing would be greatly appreciated!

I don't have any pictures I can post yet as I didn't take any exterior shots of the place and I don't want to post pictures of the inside of someone else's home since the seller still lives there. But I will take exterior, wintry shots the next time I'm up there! If you feel so inclined, start planning an Ontario road trip next year and come out to visit me at my new farm :)

Return from Everdale

2008-11-04T23:58:00.002-05:00

Monday was a bittersweet day for me as I left Everdale for the 2008 growing season. I will be in and out to help with the winter root vegetable harvest and also to continue with my farm property search, but I gave up my room in the straw bale and will no longer be spending most of each week there. The last week of 'regular programming' at Everdale included the weekly harvests and pulling in all the irrigation equipment. Now the unwinterized public buildings on site will have to be shut down and eventually only the farm managers will be left for the winter.

We ended our week on Friday at John Slack's farm where he showed us his setup for honey extraction and also how to shear sheep. John has Romney (wool breed) and East Friesian (milk breed) sheep, as well as their crosses, and he and his daughter Natalie sheared 2 of the Romneys as a demonstration for us. Each fleece is probably more than 10 lbs, and I got to bring home the one from the grey/black Romney. So in the next few days, I will be reporting on the fleece washing process! It's going to be quite an undertaking as sheep fleece is far from clean ;P It will also be interesting to see how well I do at sheep shearing in the future as it definitely involves some sheep wrestling!

Saturday was a day spent touring 3 farms with Farmers Growing Farmers (Everdale's farm business planning course that I'm taking with Mark...more details on the course in future posts). We visited John Sutherland's farm where all his outdoor soil fertility comes from mulching with leaves and grass clippings, and his greenhouse mixes include a layer of manure and straw for fertility and heat generation; John Slack's farm (yes, I saw a lot of Slack last week!) where he talked about soil fertility (the fizzy test which I've written about before, which Mark performed at the last farm we looked at...again, more details on the farm property search in future posts) and composting; and John Rowe's farm where he talked about needing to educate the consumer on the difference in flavour and texture of pastured grass-fed beef when compared to that of feedlot corn- and grain-fed beef. Cows, being ruminants, are healthiest if they eat mostly grasses. Corn really disagrees with their stomachs and results in overly acidic pH and meat that's higher in bad fats. The Rowe Farm stores in Toronto's Leslieville and St. Lawrence market carry a hybrid of beef that's grass-fed and then finished for about 6 weeks on grain so that consumers can get used to the taste and texture differences by moving down a continuum. But if you're ready to go for fully grass-fed beef, you can ask the St. Lawrence market location if they've got any fully grass-fed beef in stock. It's best to cook grass-fed beef using slow cooking methods of longer cooking times at lower temperatures, perfect for braising and stewing recipes that are so welcome at this colder time of year!

After all the farm tours, Saturday ended with Everdale's end of season party which included a feast of turkey, ham, pork roast and chicken wings, all meat raised at Everdale! I'm obviously an ardent meat eater...though I think I did eat some roasted cauliflower and salad that night too. Those of us who have spent a significant amount of time living and working at Everdale were presented with keys to Everdale so we can always come back :)

So I'm back in Toronto now and am looking forward to the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair which will be held on the CNE grounds starting Friday, November 7. I will be helping out with both the Everdale and Greater Toronto Area Agricultural Action Committee (GTA AAC) booths. If you've never been to The Royal before, you should check it out! http://www.royalfair.org/

Season's last big events at Everdale - Feast of Fields and Carrot Fest

2008-10-26T13:17:00.016-04:00

Many weeks have gone by since Everdale hosted both Feast of Fields and Carrot Fest, so the details of both events aren't the freshest in my mind, but I've got some pictures to share!

Feast of Fields was a wonderful event for all food and drink lovers, with lots of tasty treats to sample, along with wines and beers. Michael Smith of Chef at Home and Chef at Large on the Food Network was there and I did have a chance to chat with him and his wife, as well as sell them a hat from Everdale's farm store. They came to visit Everdale on the Saturday before the event to get a tour of the farm. I think they quite enjoyed their visit, and Michael Smith liked the bright yellow dress I wore to the event. It was certainly bright enough to light up a rainy start to the day!

Feast of Fields site, nestled in the bowl between the cut flower garden and the Seeds of Diversity maze, before the vendors started arriving for set up

Sunday started off very rainy indeed so everyone was in rain gear for the last bits of set up. I climbed the extension ladder to hammer orange cloth onto the stage for the event, and then directed my team of decorators to add corn stalks, sunflowers and amaranth to the stage supports to decorate it (the blue tarp in the picture below was added by other people...I wouldn't have chosen to put it up!). The night before, I cut orange fabrics into strips to make bows for the hats of Everdale board members and staff, and also made a whole pile of cosmo and amaranth leaf boutonniers. I didn't get involved with any wedding decorating this year, so it was fun to have an event to decorate and improvise using all the things growing on the farm!

Michael Stadtandler of Eigensinn's Farm, speaking on stage at Feast of Fields

Everdale's food table at the event served up a pickled kebab of the vegetables that Mark preserved for the farm. The kebab included a pickled green or yellow bean, radish, beet and garlic scape. All the produce was grown right at Everdale.

Mark, me, Cathy Hansen and her daughter Emily at our shared food table

Some of the food samplings at the event included Cathy's (a neighbouring organic farmer who has an amazing market garden for about 30 CSA members...she taught me how to make onion ropes!) delicious tarlets with caramelized leeks and goat's cheese, topped with cranberries and candied walnuts; a lamb burger with chocolate and coffee, topped with a tasty homemade mayonnaise; pulled pork with some sort of plum topping served on a yorkshire pudding; ice cream from Mapleton's; baguette and roasted veg sandwiches from Ace Bakery; wild rice salad; wild boar ragout on polenta cakes; hemp brownies and cookies; venison pepperettes...and more items that I can't remember right now. On the beverage side, there were many wineries and breweries in attendance, as well as a tea place that had an amazing rooibos chai tea with soy milk. And it's taken a whole summer, but I can finally drinkand appreciate good beer! The light stuff isn't for me though...definitely prefer the more flavourful dark beers!

Me in my Feast of Fields finery, making pickled kebabs at the Everdale food table

Everdale hosted Carrot Fest a couple weekends later and I was in charge of running the bread oven. I had about 40 kids come through my station and they all got to shape and knead a ball of bread dough from a batch that I had prepared and set to rise earlier that morning. I also got the fire started in the bread oven at 8 am that morning, and with the help of others, had it blazing enough that the heat managed to last through most of the baking session that afternoon, though I did have to restart the fire from the coals once to build up more heat for the oven to last until the end. While the bread was baking or cooling, I had the kids make butter by shaking cream up in a spice jar. The kids seemed to enjoy my station and some were repeat customers!

Both Feast of Fields and Carrot Fest required a fair amount of site preparation, Everdale beautification...which generally involves a lot of lawn mowing and weed whacking! Both events were lots of fun, but we were all definitely happy to settle back to farm work after they were over.

And now that I've finally found it, here's a link to an article by Michael Smith in The Globe and Mail about Feast of Fields: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080924.wlchef24/BNStory/lifeFoodWine/

Must Read - Michael Pollan article in the NY Times

2008-10-13T18:15:00.003-04:00

For those who would like a one stop article explaining why the production of food needs to change, this one by Michael Pollan on Oct. 9 in the NY Times is it. You can read it at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

It is a long article and is definitely worth the read! So much of what's in the article resonates with all the reasons why I'm currently at Everdale and am now looking seriously for land so that I can start farming next season. While the demand for organic and locally grown food is on the rise, that doesn't mean that people will start farming that way quickly enough to meet that demand. I'm not so foolish as to believe that I will produce enough food in my first year of farming to make any sort of an impact on the Ontario food economy. But my hope is that in 5 to 10 years, my farm will be producing enough food to support a community. For the sake of Ontario's long-term food security, we'd better hope that there are a lot more people out there like me who actually want to get into sustainable agriculture, despite all the obstacles. And I certainly hope that the various levels of the Canadian government will start to act more on securing Canada's long-term food security. While Pollan's article is written to the next U.S. president, the same message needs to be heard by our next prime minister.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! And remember to participate in democracy at the polls tomorrow!

Long Overdue Update

2008-09-21T23:54:00.005-04:00

Time has flown in the past few weeks and I've been very lax in updating this blog. I will write a separate post about Feast of Fields (Sep. 7) after I've collected some pictures to include, as well as Carrot Fest (Sep. 20).

So what's been going on at Everdale for the last few weeks...lots of harvesting and event prep! Harvesting has become more of a routine over the weeks as we've all become more familiar with the various crops and become more systematic about gathering and cleaning/hydrocooling the crops. Lettuce heads are probably the fastest both to harvest and process. Some people will pick and cut the lettuce heads, leaving them upside down in the beds for others to follow and collect. Before the day gets hot enough to wilt the lettuce (no later than 10 am usually), the lettuce heads are hydrocooled in tubs of cold water, then packed in bins, labelled, and stacked in the walk-in fridge. This allows the heads of lettuce to remain fresh for up to 2 weeks if necessary. But generally, most are sold at markets within days of harvest. At the other end of the labour spectrum, I would consider bean harvesting to be the most time consuming and backbreaking. The beans are handpicked, which requires crouching or bending over the low growing plants and making sure to pull the bean off the plant without breaking it. For me, this usually means that I pick with one hand while I hold onto the plant with the other. Some people can pick with both hands...though I can't figure out how they do it without pulling some of the plants right out of the ground when a bean doesn't want to come off the vine. I've pretty much decided that I won't be planting beans for sale on my own farm because the harvest labour required is so annoying. So don't flinch if the cost of green/yellow beans at the grocery store seems expensive...there's a reason for that cost if they're handpicked!

Last Saturday, I helped with stacking hay bales in the barn. It's really sweaty work and you can get scratched up from the straw, but it's also satisfying to see the bale stacks that reach up to the barn rafters, and which give you access to the swing about halfway up the stacks. After unloading the hay wagons, we had to move them out of the barn, which required controlling runaway hay wagons! Kristin and I actually managed to move an empty hay wagon ourselves, with Kirk steering from the back, and Rosemary throwing down the block whenever the wagon took on too much momentum down the hill. We would stop and start it so that it wouldn't get away from us, but there were some sketchy moments where I was throwing all my weight back to keep it from going too fast and had my planted feet dragged forward through the gravel like in some Indiana Jones movie! I wasn't all that confident that Kristin and I, who probably weigh at most 250 lbs between the two of us, would be able to stop the wagon from careening down the hill, but Kristin was confident that we could do it, so we did. I'm glad she convinced me because it turned out to be a lot of fun!

The last set of lambs were born about 2 weeks ago, finally! Ringo, the stud sheep, obviously took a while getting his job done for the final set of lambs to be born so much later than the others ;P But these are the cutest ones yet as they're twins, one black male and a white female. They're so adorable and tiny compared to all the lambs that were born back in July. It's amazing how quickly sheep grow! The July lambs are pretty close to being as big as their mothers at this point. Cow lamb is still as cute as ever, and the friendliest of the bunch, always coming over to be petted. The newest lambs are really skittish, so I haven't had a chance to pet them yet as I'm not inclined to chase them down in the field.

Other than the harvesting, event prep, and still to be written about events (which took a lot of time and preparation!), I've been stepping up my land search. It may seem ambitious, but I really hope that I can buy some farmland this year so that I can plan for crops next spring. Part of me thinks this will be impossible since land prices are so high, but another part of me is praying for a miracle. I feel that God has blessed me and opened so many doors ever since I left my job in April to pursue my farm dream and can't help but hope that the next step of getting some land is just around the corner. Otherwise, I'm really not sure what I'm going to be doing with myself this winter. It's scary to think that the season is almost over and that the interns and volunteers will be leaving Everdale at the end of October. I feel like the momentum I've gained over the past few months can't just come to an abrupt and crashing halt. So I will hope and pray that the land and the money will come together in some blessed fashion. So if any of you reading this blog are inclined to prayer, please pray that I'll find the right piece of land to steward!

Baking Bread

2008-08-13T20:08:00.004-04:00

My first week back at Everdale after my two weeks back in Toronto was the usual flurry of activity, with two very wet harvest days. But the highlight of the week was working on my 'special project' on Wednesday, our seminar day. There was no field trip planned for this particular week and Wednesday was to be used by the interns for their special projects, but since Kirk and I are volunteers and not interns, we didn't have a special project to work on. So I suggested that we bake bread in the outdoor clay oven.

While I knew I was putting myself in a position of much work, I didn't fully appreciate how much time and effort would be involved! Kirk and I were also quite ambitious, preparing 4 different kinds of rising bread doughs: a 7 grain and honey dough, a foccacia dough, a whole wheat dough, and a naan dough (which we also used to make a pizza and some panzerottis).

Since bread dough requires time to rise, we started by making all our doughs and setting them in a warm spot to rise. Then we had to stoke up the oven. This required chopping up wood for tinder and then starting the fire in the oven, which Mark helped us with since I really have no experience with starting fires. We also had to soak the door of the oven in water. It took probably an hour or two and about 5-6 full logs to heat up the oven enough for baking, as the thermal mass of the bricks/concrete needed to have absorbed enough heat to keep the oven hot once the fire was pushed to the back of the oven as coals for baking.

After lunch, we prepared the first batch of dough to put in the oven. Mark showed us how to push the coals to the back, and a small cast iron pan was put in to heat up and hold water for steam. We made 2 smallish and 1 large loaf out of the 7 grain and honey dough and Mark showed us how to place them in the oven with the bread paddle, along with a splash of water for the steam pan. We then closed up the oven door and hoped for the best. Well, that oven was a lot hotter than any of us expected, so after 15 minutes, the loaves were completely blackened on the outside. So we pulled them out and decided to only put in 1 loaf at a time after that and to severely cut down on our expected baking time.

At the end of the day, we had baked 6 loaves of bread, 4-5 naan, a cheese pizza and 2 cheese panzerottis, and a pan of corn bread. Everything was delicious, including the blackened 7 grain and honey loaves. We just cut them open and people dug out the insides, which were extremely tasty. Kirk took pictures of our results, though he refused to be in any pictures himself. When I'm finally able to stay at Everdale over a Sunday (hopefully in early September), I hope to try my hand at bread baking again!

The true cost of food

2008-08-11T11:30:00.004-04:00

In my weeks away from the farm, I did help out at both of Everdale's Toronto market sites during the week, the Narayever CSA on Thursday and the Brickworks farmer's market on Saturday. It was really interesting to meet the people who have chosen to buy their food directly from farmers and to see the different stages they're at in terms of understanding the real cost of food.

The way that produce is priced at market is based on what consumers are willing to pay, and not necessarily on the full cost of production for that produce. I often felt when selling some of our produce that the prices were too low, yet there were always some customers who would complain about the prices, even though the majority of the Brickworks customers are quite affluent. I would like to calculate the real dollar cost of producing the various vegetables that are sold and see how far that cost is from the prices actually being charged at market. From field preparation, to seed, to transplant, to weeding, to irrigation, to harvest, to cooling and storage, to transportation, and finally, the time spent selling at various markets, there's a lot of labour involved! My gut tells me that $2 for a head of lettuce just doesn't cut it, even if we're harvesting and selling almost 800 heads per week (in addition to many other vegetables). I think that's 800 heads of lettuce from over 1600 planted seeds in the greenhouse, with over 50% loss from poor germination or growing conditions over the 6-8 weeks before the lettuce heads are ready for harvest. And lettuce is a relatively 'profitable' harvest compared to more labour intensive harvests like peas or beans.

Consider that the average Ontario family only spent about 10% of their disposable income on food (http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/famil16d.htm) in 2007. Compare that to 13% spent on transportation. Is it really reasonable for us to spend less on the food that keeps us alive and healthy each day than on commuting? And if you look at the Consumer Price Index, the cost of fruits and vegetables have gone down in 2007 compared with 2002! (http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/famil16d.htm) My assumption is that the reduction in retail cost is for conventionally grown produce, not organic, and has to do with an increase in imports from other countries where labour costs are much lower than in Ontario and environmental and labour laws are less stringent than here. But that retail cost doesn't take into account the environmental cost of having that produce brought in from long distances away. Or the exploitation of farm labourers in developing countries, whose health is also affected by the pesticides that they work around each day. And the low cost of the food we eat also means that being a farmer in Ontario is a far from appealing career path. Essentially, it seems that farmers are farmers out of love or altruism, and often involves holding down another job to support their farming habit/inheritance.

How is this horribly lopsided equation to be balanced? In 2006, only 8.6% of Ontario farmers were under the age of 35 (http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/agrc18g.htm), 48.9% are from 35 to 54, and 42.5% are over 55. There obviously aren't enough new farmers in Ontario to replace the ones that will be retiring or should have already retired. We are in a culture that values decreasing the prices of everything without considering the true costs of doing so. Why should farmers not earn a decent wage for farming? What could persuade the average consumer that they should be spending more of their income on the food that they eat so that local farming can actually be a reasonable career choice? If this imbalance doesn't change, then Ontario's food supply will be at the mercy of other countries and global forces that don't have Ontarians' best interests at heart. I'm certainly not an alarmist in terms of expecting disaster to strike or the world to dissolve into chaos in my lifetime, but the increasing cost of oil and food shortages around the world cannot be ignored.

Because of this imbalance, many of the potential farmers I've met via Everdale's visits to other CRAFT farms (http://www.craftontario.ca/) aren't concerned with producing enough food to feed others, but just to sustain themselves and their families and friends. While this is commendable in and of itself, it doesn't change the fact that there wouldn't be enough local production to feed the majority of Ontarians. Especially organically! Which is what's needed for long-term environmental sustainability. But even if there are a handful of Ontarians who are willing to take the plunge into organic farming in Ontario, access to land becomes an issue. The price of land these days seems to be based on its value for future development, and not so much on what it could produce as a farm, so the cost of the land is many times higher than the income that could be earned from farming it. There are some fairly young programs out there which are starting to connect new farmers to land owners who are willing to have their farmland put into production (property tax breaks for farming, as well as putting provincially owned land into production). I struggle with the idea of putting so much effort into land owned by someone else, who could choose to sell or take back the land after I've spent years improving soil fertility. And there is some perception that taking this route feels like new farmers are 'poor labourers' feeding the rich, rather than intelligent and hardworking entrepreneurs who are working to change the face of farming in Ontario.

I'm blessed in that I feel that I'm answering God's call to go into farming and have built up assets such that I could possibly buy land and put it into production. But I'm in a very different financial position than pretty much everyone that I've met at Everdale or through CRAFT so far. And I have yet to find suitable land at a price that I can afford. I admit to procrastinating on the land hunting front as I find it a bit of a depressing exercise and much prefer right now to continue working at Everdale, learning everything I can about farming. But the end of the growing season is only a few months away, and much as I'd like to think that my active and idyllic life at Everdale can go on forever, I do have to start planning for the future.

My hope is that when I do start producing food, that there will be a community of people who are willing to pay the real price of the food I provide to them, including supporting a reasonable salary for me! Realistically, this will be a group of people who do have the disposable income to pay the higher cost of food, perhaps even willing to pay a bit more so that those with lower incomes can be subsidized to access the same food. It's certainly not a solution to balancing the equation, but it's somewhere that I can start!

Beginning of full on harvest season

2008-07-24T10:42:00.002-04:00

This past week was my 7th at Everdale, and now I'm back in Toronto for 2.5 weeks for my sister's wedding. I have really mixed feelings about being 'home'. On the one hand, I love my comfy condo and my time is certainly filled with activities and meeting up with friends., but on the other, I really miss being at Everdale...being up at the crack of dawn and working hard all day at so many different tasks. So far, this first week I'll be away from the farm, I've completely missed the garlic harvest. By the time I get back, who knows how much bigger cow lamb will be or if he'll remember me enough to come and butt me when I go to see him. And I'll definitely miss the company of all the people at Everdale. This probably isn't a surprise to anyone else, but I'm surprised by how much of an extrovert I've turned out to be ;P

I've also decided now to make this blog 'public'. So for those of you who want to set up RSS feeds, or hate logging in, you won't have any problems keeping up now! I'm counting on the massive volumes of data available on the internet to keep this blog known only to those I know.

So, this past week had a whole lot of harvesting. Lots of big crisp lettuce heads, mixed greens, spinach, chard (beautiful rainbow colours!), kale, radishes, green onions, herbs (coriander, basil, mint), kohlrabi and scapes. Since there's so much harvest to be done, we start really early in the morning before the sun gets too fierce. Then all the harvest is brought into the Hub to be hydro-cooled and stored in the walk-in fridge in preparation for the CSA pickup on Thursday and the farmer's markets on Saturday.

I got to go to my first farmer's market on Saturday. Karen and I headed down to the Oakville market on Kerr St. It's an organic farmer's market and has a good mix of farms. There's also a baker there who makes delicious herb and cheese breads. It was interesting to talk to the customers and learn about them. It was also a striking reminder of how separated the average consumer is from the realities of agriculture. We've been so spoiled by imported foods that we expect every kind of fruit and vegetable to be available year round so there's no understanding of what's actually in season at any given point in time. There were people looking for fruit who were disappointed that there weren't fresh apples and peaches available. And the explanation that right now it's mostly berries (strawberries, beginning of raspberries, etc.) and cherries that are in season in Ontario and fresh apples wouldn't be available until the fall, was met with something akin to disbelief. Any apples or potatoes (not new potatoes, those are actually in season now) for sale right now are from last year's harvest, kept in cold storage, or they're imported from warmer climes. Personally, I'm happy to be eating mostly berries and cherries right now!

I probably won't be posting any new updates until after I've gone back to Everdale in early August...though if I'm diligent with my reading, I may post a comment on whatever agricultural tidbits I glean from my readings. Perhaps there will be a comparison on the rate of knowledge transfer from book learning vs. hands on experience, though really, there's not much comparison there!

Life and Death of livestock

2008-07-13T23:43:00.003-04:00

A warning to those who may be sensitive to the death of animals, skip reading this post if you're squeamish. The quick story is that a sheep diedand I participated in the culling of 2 chickens.

Les, the sheep who had the stillborn lamb, died on Monday this past week. We found her when putting Amber in at night in the evening. Andrew was following Amber in from the field and Amber stopped at Les' body. Mark, James and I arrived as Andrew was going to go get Gavin and Karen. We ended up burying her right beside where she died. She had been continuing to lose weight ever since she gave birth to the lamb, even though she was continuing to graze and we kept feeding her grain. We're not sure exactly why she died, but just hope that her last days were happy. She was certainly friendly, always happy to be petted as I fed her grain. The last time I saw her alive was on Saturday before I returned to Toronto for the weekend.

Lynn had 2 chickens, Marianne and Buffy, that she needed culled because they were not laying, so Mark decided that we should slaughter them on Wednesday as that's the one day each week when we're not usually exhausted from a full day of farm work. My motivation for participating in the culling was to see if I could continue to be a meat eater or should become a vegetarian. I felt that if I wanted to remain a meat eater, I could not divorce myself from the fact that the meat that I eat starts as a living and breathing animal which has to be killed to become meat for my pot. I certainly do not have any dislike of chickens and did not relish the task that was ahead.

We went to Whole Circle farm on Wednesday and when we got back, prepared ourselves for the task. A pot of water was put on to boil and we went to get the first chicken. I managed to get her from under the coop and carried her down the hill to the spot we had chosen. I held the chicken's wings and feet while Mark stretched out the neck and wielded the axe. The body does indeed move around a lot after the head is chopped off. I kept a good grip on her and moved her to a pail to drain. Then we went to get the second chicken, which Andrew killed. We then scalded the bodies in near boiling water and plucked the chickens. It wasn't as hard or long a task as we were expecting. Then Mark and I each removed the entrails from one of the chickens. One really fascinating thing was to see the developing eggs in the chickens. It led Lynn to wonder why they had stopped laying...perhaps they were still laying but eating their own eggs? Whatever the case, the birds were now cleaned and we put them in the fridge to cool overnight. On Thursday night, after a frustrating afternoon of laying irrigation lines, Mark and I quartered the chickens and I made them into chicken stew. The stew was quite tasty (with the addition of stock from chicken Mark had cooked that day in preparation for the farm celebration on Saturday), though the meat from the chickens was quite tough. Slow cooking might help to soften them up...stewing hens really do need to be stewed for a long time!

I had to leave Everdale early this week but before I left just before lunch on Friday, I helped Mark bake some biscotti to sell at the Saturday farm celebration. It's the first time I've baked using a scale to weigh out dry ingredients and I find that I quite like the precision of this method. I'm definitely going to keep my eyes open for a sale on kitchen weigh scales. It was actually rather nerve wracking to make the biscotti as I've never made anything for sale before. But they turned out quite tasty and with the right texture, so I'm happy about that! When I return tomorrow, I'll find out if any of them sold this weekend!

Birthday Bonfire!

2008-07-06T16:01:00.003-04:00

This week started with my birthday, so it had to be a good week! Julia came up for the day with me on Monday and helped us with a relatively light afternoon of seeding in the greenhouse and hand weeding in the one acre pea field. She discovered that pulling weeds can be quite therapeutic :)

Bettina and Ken came up to the farm in the evening and we had flank steak from Rowe Farms, as well as asparagus, zucchini and apples, all cooked up on the bbq. I then gave them all a tour of the farm and then Garrett got the bonfire going so we could roast marshmallows and hot dogs. I served kirs (a Henry of Pelham white with a dash of cassis) and we stood around the fire munching on treats. Bettina and Ken brought up a black forest cake and Andrew baked a rice flour Grand Marnier cake, which ended up being more of a crumble since rice flour doesn't rise or hold together as well as wheat flour. After we were done with the marshmallow and hot dog roasting, Mark proceeded to pull trees out of his stash of burnable wood and add them to the fire until we had a good blaze going and showers of sparks whenever the ends of trees were pushed into the fire. Mark was like a magician, pulling branch after branch out of the tall weeds beside the bonfire. It's amazing how much weeds can hide! All in all, it was a very satisfying birthday bonfire :D

The rest of the week, I was assigned to bring Amber in at night. The difficulty of this task varied from night to night, with alternating nights when she would just come to her stall when I called her, and other points when I had to get a rope around her neck and pull her in, once from all the way out at the end of the pasture. That's when I found her with her calf feeding from her after 9 pm. I gave him about 15 minutes, hoping he would be finished, but he kept on drinking and Amber showed no inclination to stop grazing and come in. By the time I finally decided to put the rope on her and pull her in, with a stop to graze every few steps or so, 40 minutes had passed before I could get her in her stall. And she was rather difficult to milk most mornings as well. This was the week when Simaron and Andrew were training to milk her and they didn't encounter the greatest success, though Simaron did milk almost 5 litres from her (with Gavin) one morning. We'll see how things go this week! I'm scheduled to milk her with Gavin and Mark later in the week. I'm going to try the technique Lynn showed me and hope it works better for me than what I've been doing so far, which is exactly what Gavin and Mark are doing but with a big difference in our comparative hand size and strength.

I learned how to carry chickens on Tuesday night when I helped Karen move some of her layers from the horse barn to the summer animal shelter. When it's dark out, chickens are in a kind of stupor and very easy to pick up. When they're on the ground, you just pick them up around the chest and can tuck them under the arm to carry. When they're roosting on a fence, you just grab both legs and lift. They flap their wings a bit but settle down quickly once you put them down. At the summer shelter, we just took them out of the cage we used to transport them, and perched them back up on a stall fence in the shelter. It's really quite funny how easy they are to handle in the dark, especially considering I can't catch a chicken at all during the day!

Unfortunately, the chicken transporting set off my allergies for the week. It was possibly the horses, or hay, or the chickens themselves, but with farmers all around the county cutting hay that week, it was definitely a tough time for anyone with hay/grass allergies. I'm hoping that once most of the hay is baled, my allergies will settle down. I woke up a few nights from trouble breathing, which really isn't a pleasant way to wake up.

On Wednesday, we all went to John Slack's farm for a seminar on soil. John Slack sells Spanish River Carbonatite and compost. He's essentially a dirt farmer, in addition to a market gardener and raises sheep and some beef. It was fascinating to hear him talk about his soil testing methods and what makes good farm land as he's very passionate and knowledgeable about the subject. I now know a preliminary soil test that only involves a Dutch auger and some 10% hydrochloric acid which should help me in my land search to rule out any land that doesn't already have a good calcium base to the soil. He also has 4 dogs and a collie puppy on the farm so it was really fun to pet them. I may buy raspberries from him for Benita's wedding, if the ones at Everdale aren't ripe enough for me to pick before then...or if I just don't have the time or energy to pick them!

On Thursday, I helped Joseph with some construction on the seed maze and learned from James (who has a carpentry background) how one person can set up and nail in crossbars, as well as how to space and level vertical fence pieces. And on Saturday, I learned how to set up and repair drip irrigation lines in the Aberfoyle field. I love that you have to wear so many different hats in farming! It's constant trouble shooting and problem solving which is a good challenge for the mind at the same time as you're working your body. I'm feeling really fit and haven't been this tanned before in my life. Other than the recent bout of allergies, I feel extremely healthy. I recommend farm work in the open air for anyone who wants to get reenergized :)

Finally, some pictures!

2008-07-03T20:45:00.009-04:00

Meet Jason (born on Friday, June 13)...the first
goat kid born, and the first animal I ever saw being born!

This is cow lamb and his mother. He comes running to be petted!

The planting crew after a really long day of transplanting.
From left, Dave, James, me, Mark, Harris and Gavin.
We stayed in the field until almost 8 pm, and I didn't even
realize how late it was until I noticed the sun was starting to set!

Here I'm planting cukes and zukes in the vegetable
field just below my tent.

This is me using the single wheel hoe, an invaluable
weeding tool! And a great workout too ;P It will be on my
farm warming wish list some time in the years to come!

That's it for now. It's time for me to put Amber in for the night so we can milk her tomorrow morning. Hopefully she's in a better mood tonight than she was yesterday when I had to pull her in on a lead all the way from the far end of the pasture. I was really glad she didn't start to run!

Animal tales

2008-06-29T20:08:00.006-04:00

This week started on a sad note with the still birth of one of the lambs. Les had been losing weight for the last few weeks and we were pretty convinced that her pregnancy had ended. When she went into labour, the first part that emerged was the lamb's ear, so Karen had to search out the two front hooves and try to get the head into position so Les could actually push the lamb out. It involved quite a lot of effort on many of our parts. Dave and Andrew held her on one side and I held her on the other so we could try and lift Les' hips into a better position for her to push the lamb out and for Karen to be able to reach the lamb itself. When Karen finally managed to get the lamb's head into position, I could see its tongue hanging out and knew that it couldn't be alive. Apparently a living lamb will help in its birthing, so it's just good that we managed to help Les get it out. The lamb was female and surprisingly large considering how small Les was during her pregnancy. Les still isn't doing so well, so she's being fed grain and I try to visit her a bit each day. I hope she gets better soon.

On Tuesday, I ended up milking Amber on my own. I was the only one who woke up in time and debated if I should go or not and decided that if I really wanted to be able to milk Amber, I shouldn't wimp out just because I didn't have company. It was a rather unsuccessful milking as I was quite nervous and still need a lot of practice with my milking technique. I think I only managed to milk about 500 ml from her before my hand got tired and I lost my teat to the calf who was suckling from the other side. So I wasn't feeling all that good about my luck with animals when I left the barn.

As I was walking back to the kitchen with the milk pail, I passed Karen and Gavin in the pasture watching the newest lamb that was just born while I was milking Amber. She looks like a thorougbred horse, and is quite as skittish! She's all black with a white blaze on her nose and a white foot. So cute! It was really good to see a new lamb born successfully after what happened with Les the day before.

Earlier in the week, I had managed to grab a few minutes to talk with Gavin about staying at Everdale for the whole season. So now I'll be staying at Everdale until the end of October (with some weeks away in July and August for my sister's wedding) and am a long term volunteer and can join the interns in their seminars and visits to other farms. So my first seminar with them was all day on Wednesday when we did a lot of creative farm dreaming, drawing out what our dream farms would look like and sharing them with the group. It was really interesting to see what everyone's dream farm looked like. We ended the day with a walk around the various farm fields talking about the reasons why different cover crops were planted and the challenges of the various fields.

Thursday, I participated in my first harvest. We harvested garlic scapes, which are the flower stem of the garlic before the flower gets produced. If you want your garlic bulb to grow well, you need to break off the scape so the plant will put its energy into the bulb and not the flower. We also harvested lettuce leaves from the lettuces that had been damaged in the hail storm from a couple weeks back. Since the outer leaves were so damaged from the hail, the lettuces couldn't be harvested whole for sale. Instead, we cut the whole, smaller, inner leaves to include in a spring salad mix. We also harvested the first round of snap peas, which was very sparse since its the next harvest that's more plentiful. I then spent pretty much the rest of the day wheel hoeing, which was definitely a huge workout!

On Friday, Nyna finally had her twins. She had been having difficulties with her pregnancy so Gavin just kept Dave and Mark with him and sent the rest of us spectators away. They successfully helped birth 2 white females, Mark helping with the first one which he named Quiver, and Dave with the second, who has a black spot on one ear, so Dave named her Dot.

At the end of the day, Garrett mentioned that Aly, the goat with the twin kids, wasn't acting herself, so I got out my goat book and went to take a look at her. She was lying down and panting and looked really bloated, so I called Karen over to confirm if she thought Aly might have bloat. Karen identified the stomach which gets bloated and we got Aly up and walking with me massaging her belly to try and get things moving. We definitely heard some gurgling in her belly from the massaging and she perked up and was able to eat the hay we put out for her, so I felt good that I had managed to help her feel better. It can't have been a serious case of bloat for the walking/massaging technique to work, but really, I just wanted to avoid it getting to a serious case where you have to insert a feeding tube to add baking soda or vegetable oil to bring down the gas, or the worst case scenario where you have to puncture a hole in the stomach to let out the excess gas. And it felt really good to be able to try out such a non-invasive treatment and be able to see the animal perk up afterwards from it. And my reward...getting to play with her kids who sucked on my fingers and totally jumped all over me...probably because I smelled like Aly after massaging her so much ;P

Saturday, I got to work in the farm store for most of the day and see how the CSA worked. It was really encouraging to meet so many people who wanted to support local agriculture.

I spoke to Liz later in the weekend who updated me on the Aly situation. Apparently Aly had some sort of infection from the pregnancy/birthing, and when I saw her, had bloat on top of that. She's being treated with medication now so she should get better soon. Her udder has dried up as a result, and the kids are now being bottle fed. I'm just glad that Aly's going to get better now, as another farmer in the area had the same thing happen to her goat, but the goat died before they could start treating her. It's sad that Aly is no longer producing milk, but I'm glad she'll be getting better, and hope that I can help with the bottle feeding of the kids!

This coming week, I'm going to get on the Everdale computers and post some pictures so you can see what it's like at the farm. And for those of you who are local, do come and visit!

Dark and stormy week

2008-06-22T21:55:00.003-04:00

The weather has been unseasonally cold and wet for a while, but this week has been the hardest to deal with. Everyone felt cold and damp much of the time, and I felt hungrier than usual, probably because more calories were being burned to stay warm. Dave and I were working on moving irrigation hoses and kept talking about chocolate bars and not being able to get a snack since we were at the vegetable field which is about a kilometre away from Everdale. Eventually, Andrew went back to get the truck and he brought us back bananas and dried fruit. Bananas are such great fruits for energy. I definitely have no problem with having them imported! My chocolate bar craving from this week prompted me to get my sister to buy me a box of Mr. Big bars from Costco, so I'll be sure to have some on me in the field this next week :)

There was a violent hail storm on Monday afternoon that did some damage to the leafy vegetables, setting them back by about a week or two. We were working outside, unpacking and cleaning beets, and had to run indoors when the storm hit. The hail itself looked like crushed ice and came down with enough force to make standing out in it quite painful. It crushed a lot of the vegetation in the area so that there was a heady fragrance of herbs in the air. Specifically, there was a fresh, pineapple fruity smell in the air, which I suspect came from the wormwood which grows a lot in the area, and is apparently the plant used to make absinthe.

In general, the constantly wet weather has made it harder to get work done on the farm. The tractor can't go on the field when it's too wet, so tractor-tine weeding can't happen, and neither can transplanting. So we did a lot of weeding with hand hoes, and the wheel hoe. When you've got good soil and rotate your crops, the bane of organic farming doesn't seem to be bug pests, but rather, weeds. If you stay on top of weeding until the plants have established themselves, then you ensure healthy plants producing more fruit, and also make harvesting easier. Gavin constantly checks the fields to determine which ones need to be weeded, using which method, and ultimately, has to decide if a row has so little vegetable germination and so much weed growth, that it should just be plowed under and new plantings made. So far this has been done for 2 rows of seeded carrots. Two others are being kept and will be mown at a higher level to see how the carrots grow if weeds are controlled by mowing instead of by removal.

And continuing in the spirit of experimentation which is alive and well at Everdale, we prepared and planted 6 trial plots in different varieties of switch grass. Switch grass is a fuel crop, not for liquid fuels but as solid mass for burning. It apparently has one of the most efficient input to energy output ratios of any planted crop. This set of trial plots will be watched for 3-5 years as switch grass takes a few seasons to really establish itself. The planting process was quite fun as it involved sowing the seed by hand and then having to stomp all over the plots to make sure the seed was well pressed into the ground. This happened on Thursday, the first day that the farm store was open to harvest share members, so a lot of families went by us wondering why we seemed to be dancing all over the plots. One family of girls came and joined us in the stomping fun. It was quite interesting to see the steady stream of harvest share members coming in to the farm to get their produce. These are the kinds of people who care about their food and also the farmers that produce it. Harris and Mark had driven a big truck of produce into Toronto that afternoon too for the CSA (customer supported agriculture) pickup in the Annex.

The week wasn't only about the plants and weather though. Aly had her twin male goats on Monday, and 3 new lambs were born this week. One of them looks like a cow, all black with white spots all over. Lynn got a new set of pigs this week and I'm very thankful that they haven't been testing out their electric fence boundary too much as they squeal very loudly, which would make sleeping difficult since they aren't too far from my tent! At the end of the day, I make my rounds to the various animal pens to see how the babies are doing.

I also worked with some motorized engines this week. I took the electric mower out for a spin to clear up the space around the solar panels for the solar showers (not that there's been enough sun to heat any water with this past week!). And I learned how to pump gasoline from a big tank into a small container in which I mixed about 4 litres of 40:1 two-stroke fuel. Hopefully the whipper snipper will now work, though that remains to be seen. Perhaps someone will have gotten it started while I've been gone as I had to return to Toronto midday on Friday this week.

Coming back into the city this weekend has been a bit of a culture shock. I was at Square One for a dentist appointment on Friday afternoon and walked in the door to a group of mall rats, who generally spook me even when I am in the city all the time. Then I walked through Wal-Mart as my dentist office is located in there (from pre-Wal-Mart days). It was a bit too much suburban mall crowding for me after the relative peace and quiet of Everdale. I spent that evening at Roy Thomson Hall for a TSO concert of Star Trek music, then Saturday afternoon at the Big on Bloor festival helping out with my sister's booth, and finally was at the Petite Fashionista event at a bar called Proof on Sunday afternoon and evening, again helping my sister, where I got my nails painted bright fuschia. I'm sure I'll get comments on my bright nail colour when I get back to the farm on Monday ;P I'm somewhat curious as to how they'll hold up to digging in the dirt!

The lambs and kids are arriving!

2008-06-15T18:25:00.003-04:00

It's been another busy week at Everdale, but it's been especially exciting for me as a kid was born on Friday and twin lambs on Saturday! By the time I go back tomorrow, there may be many more lambs and kids on the farm, though I'm hoping the expectant mothers will hold off until I'm there to watch the birthings.

I saw Cinnamon give birth to her male kid,which was amazing! The kid emerged in the classic position where the 2 front hooves and the nose emerge first from the birth canal. At this point, the kid looked a bit stuck, so Gavin pulled on the legs a bit and helped push the vulva up over the kid's head and then the little guy just slipped right out. I was quite surprised by how big he was as I thought Cinnamon would be having twins. I'm not the best at estimating weight, by I suspect he's around 6-7 pounds. And he was up on his feet within the first 15 minutes or so of being born! It was really great to watch him trying to get up and seeing him look for his mother's udder. Since he was born on Friday the 13th, Garrett named him Jason, but Lynn is more inclined to Nutmeg. We'll just have to see what name sticks! That said, he may have to stay without a name as he will be raised as meat for 6 months. Male goats aren't usually kept since they don't produce milk or more animals, and if not castrated, need to be kept separate from the other animals, which requires more fencing and pasturage. The father of this batch of kids was himself only six months old and was slaughtered soon after the breeding. The meat eaters among us ate some of him earlier in the week as Lynn had roasted a leg and some ribs with rosemary.

Then on Saturday, while the last farm tour of the day was going by, Wink gave birth to twin female lambs in the field. I was laying out lines for planting pole beans in the 1-acre field at the time, but managed to get to see them while they were still in the field, and helped Gavin carry them into the barn. I kept putting the lamb under Wink's nose so she would know where it was and follow us back to the barn. They kept bleating at each other as we walked down the hill. In the pen, Mark got to trim their umbilical cords and dip them into iodine. They're absolutely adorable and have been named Darling Shannon and Sunshine, though it will definitely be hard to tell them apart! One of them (I think Darling Shannon) was already starting to do the 4-footed hop that I love watching lambs do. They're both so much more leggy than I imagined! I think they're about 4-5 pounds each. The one I carried (I think it was Sunshine) certainly weighed less than a small bag of flour.

Really, the arrival of the kid and twin lambs eclipses so much else of the week, though many other things did go on. We did a lot more seeding in the greenhouse as there's a weekly schedule of new plants to start for weekly harvesting of salad greens for market. We also did a lot of weeding using a variety of methods: tractor mounted S-tines, hand hoeing, wheel hoeing, and flame weeding. Yes, flame weeding. This is done with a flame thrower of sorts and is used on fields that have been direct seeded where the germination is still underground. The flame burns up any weeds that have started to grow on top of the soil. On Thursday, we worked a super long day, not finishing until around 8 pm. We planted hundreds, actually, probably thousands, of vegetables that day! Mostly celery and celeriac, as well as the weekly salad greens transplants and some flowers for cutting.

Given how much work goes into planting vegetables: starting seedlings in the greenhouse, planting transplants in the field, weeding and then harvest, I cannot comprehend how we buy vegetables so cheaply in stores. Consider the celery that was planted this week. They take almost the whole season to grow, and quite a few weeks in the greenhouse beforehand, 3-6 hours of planting by a crew of 3-6 people and a tractor, weeding throughout the summer, and finally harvest. And we manage to buy non-organic celery for $0.99 at the grocery store? The math just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. If all the celery gets harvested (I'm estimating 800 plants) and is maybe sold for $2-3 each (my guesstimate of premium pricing since they're organic and sold at farmer's markets directly to consumers), then you're looking at a retail intake of $1600-2400. From seed to vegetable, they take 130-140 days to grow, and it still remains to be seen how many times we'll need to weed them before harvest. And garlic has an even longer growing time, with planting in the previous fall and no harvest for more than 6 months in the climate of Hillsburgh. Each plant gives you one garlic bulb. The last time I bought non-organic garlic, I think I got 3 bulbs for $0.99. Again, how does this math work out?

Apparently, in industrial farming where a farmer wholesales his/her produce, the farmer only gets $0.02 on the dollar for each vegetable that is finally sold in a retail store. I cannot imagine putting all this time and effort into organic celery just to get back $0.02 for each celery stalk. And even assuming that it costs much less to plant and maintain with industrial methods (machine planting and lots of pesticides), I still can't comprehend how any farmer even pays for equipment and inputs (seeds and pesticides) at $0.02 on the dollar.

I also helped with moving hay from a rented barn on the Berry farm (apparently a RIM employee) and had some asthma issues. Stupid me, I didn't put the mask on until I was already feeling affected, and had left my Ventolin discus back on the farm. But I stayed calm and kept my breathing under control until we had filled up the van and drove back. I begged off working on the next hay load after that though and went to unpack and wash overwintered beets instead. I'm not sure if my reaction was to the hay or just all the dust stirred up from throwing pitchforks of hay into the back of the cube truck. I'm just glad I didn't have Gwen's job of standing in the cube and packing the hay in. She did wear an industrial respirator for the job, but it was definitely hot and dark in there!

On Wednesday, while the interns were off the farm for the day on one of their CRAFT field trips (interns have seminars on the farm and on other farms), I helped lead a school group from Oakville of 60 kindergarten kids. I was in charge of showing them how to card fleece and then roll the fibers into a lumpy piece of yarn, which I then encouraged them to use as a temporary mustache that they could store in their pockets. I was surprised by how many of the kids chose the mustache route over tying their pieces into bracelets! I was also in charge of passing out chicks for them to hold and pet, which was super nerveracking. I had them sitting in circles of 20 kids with moms (not a dad in the group!) and teachers helping out, but the chicks by this point were over a week old and starting to move around a lot more and trying to flap away, so they kept shocking the kids so they'd stand up and drop the chick. I was so worried that a chick would die from all the trauma! But they survived and I put them all back, living, with the other chicks. After the school group left, I spent the rest of the afternoon weeding the flower gardens (native plants in the beds by the community building, and cutting flowers in the big wheel on the hill) which was a good relaxer after dealing with all the kids! I cannot imagine being a kindergarten teacher.

After the interns got back on Wednesday, we took a field trip in the evening out to Val's farm where we saw her new kids and goats, her really big cow (but with smaller horns than Amber, the milk cow at Everdale) and female calf, and big work horses. The triplet kids were very cute and soft to pet. I also saw how they had set up their pasturing system in a wheel with the animal housing at the centre and different pie wedges radiating out so that pasturing could be easily rotated by moving fence gates. Then we went to to look at the vegetable garden and helped clear part of an unplanted field of its very stubborn alfalfa plants. It's super satisfying to grab hold of one of those huge alfalfa roots and manage to pull out the whole thing in one piece. Those roots grow down many feet! We were given some Cocoa Camino chocolate as a thank you which we all ate with our dirt covered hands on the ride back to Everdale.

My standard for cleanliness is definitely very different while I'm on the farm. Because I was attacked so much by mosquitoes my first week, I decided not to wash my hair with shampoo while I was on the farm but just to use water. My first shower of this week ended up being a freezing affair as Gwen was climbed up on the water tank trying to readjust the inputs. I had foolishly already soaped my face before we were guaranteed warm water, so had to finish the showering process in the cold water. Afterwards, my hair still smelled like shampoo, which just goes to show how much residue is left in your hair by hair products!

On Friday evening, Ben from the Home Alive! straw bale house starting running a weekend workshop on how to build a straw bale house. We got to tour his house along with the workshop participants, and didn't have to do any cooking and kitchen cleaning for the rest of the weekend since we just ate with the workshop group. On Saturday morning, as I was eating my porridge, Ben walks in with his wife Jennifer who I hadn't met yet. And this being a much smaller world than I ever expect, it turns out that Jennifer was in Arts & Science with me at Mac. We're going to catch up one night over coffee. Strange to think that we've essentially been living on the same farm for the past 2 weeks! I've been in to mulch the house's permaculture garden at least twice since I've been at Everdale too.

And I almost forgot, but this is the week where I've tried my hand at milking Amber. I can't remember if Gavin gave us the first lesson last week or this week, but I went once with a larger group of interns who were interested in learning and had a chance to milk a few strokes, and then on Saturday morning, I went in with Mark and we milked Amber. I probably milked about half a cup's worth and Mark milked another litre and a half. I definitely need to practice more and will be getting up at about 5:30 most mornings so I can join the milking at 6 am. I suspect Mark and I will be the dedicated milkers as the other interns haven't shown as much interest, though perhaps Dave may join us as well. While we're milking, we always have to watch for Amber shuffling around and potentially knocking over or mucking up the milk pail, or swinging her head around too much. We must be wary of her rather large horns! Hopefully she'll get used to us soon and we won't have to distract her so much with grain while milking.

I think that's it for this past week...writing up these posts, it always amazes me how many different activities end up happening each week. I feel like I've learned so much even in just 2 weeks and will be talking to Gavin this next week about the possibility of me staying with them for the rest of the season, right into October, with some weeks taken off here and there. There's just so much more to do and learn. Lynn has agreed that I can help her with the goat milking and subsequent cheese making, and at some point I'll be helping Karen with the sheep milking once all the lambs are born and we can start milking some of the ewes. I'd also like to help Mark with the creation of 'value added' products, like preserved fruits/vegetables, soaps, etc., made from the farm's produce. Dave has been really funny as he's decided that his 'value added' product will be swags of rye, which do indeed look really good. I'll probably make myself a rye wreath to put up for Christmas. Let me know if you'd like to order one as your Christmas wreath and I'll see what I can do for you!

Journey's start

2008-06-08T23:02:00.004-04:00

I have survived my first week of farming at Everdale! It's been a really wonderful first week that has confirmed to me that I made the right choice in coming out here. This week I worked on seeding in the greenhouse, planting in the fields, setting up pea trellises, hand weeding sweet peas, compost digging, mulching and bringing the cow in at night. I've held baby chicks and turkeys in my hand (I like rubbing their fuzzy heads under my chin), learned how to pick up and hold a chicken and visited with the pregnant goats and sheep, milk cow and work horses. I can't wait until the lambs and kids are born in the next few weeks!

I also have more mosquito bites than I can count, am more sunburned than I'd like, and have been getting a real workout going up and down hills and spending a lot of time in a crouch. But because there's so much work to be done each day, my muscles haven't had a chance to get stiff and sore and I feel extremely healthy and energetic after the week of labouring outside. I have also gotten used to sleeping in a tent, using composting toilets and solar showers and am quite enjoying it all!

I set up my tent at the top of a ridge where I can see the whole farm laid out before me. So far, my tent has stayed relatively water tight, even through nightly rains and many thunderstorms. By Friday night, I was sleeping through the night, and now am a bit worried about sleeping in past breakfast! I need to buy myself a windup alarm clock, though I do think my internal clock has now been set for 6 am wake ups. I've shifted my sleep schedule from my city schedule of 2 am to 8:30 am, to 10 pm to 6:00 am. So really, I'm getting more sleep now...or at least I will once I start sleeping through the night.

Life at the farm is quite structured, with everyone gathering for breakfast at 6:45 am, a staff meeting to assign tasks for the day at 7:30 am, lunch around noon, and a finish time of around 5:30 pm. Different people are assigned to make breakfast and lunch each day, and 2 others are scheduled for after lunch clean up. Dinners are a bit haphazard, usually involving lunch leftovers, and a lot of tortilla chips and salsa. I've never seen a group of people go through so many tortilla chips and salsa before! I will be added to the cooking schedule next week, so I'll have to start thinking what I'll cook for everyone. Meals have been vegetarian and very different from what I'm used to, but everything has been really tasty and very healthy, so I'm definitely not hungry and have lots of energy for the work each day.

Farm tasks run the gamut from grounds maintenance to planting to tour group leading. Until school ends for the summer, there seem to be 2-3 school groups coming in each week, and this past Saturday was the opening weekend for tours and the farm store this summer. A large part of Everdale's mandate is to educate, which is why a lot of time and effort is spent on school groups and providing tours to the public for both the farm and the straw bale house.

I had my first visitors to Everdale this Saturday as Dy and Bob came down to see me and take a tour of the place. And since the world is always surprising me by how small it is, it turned out that I recognized another person who was visiting the farm, who turned out to be Nicole from Mackenzie Financial where I worked for 4 years when I first graduated from McMaster. It was really nice to have visitors my first week and hopefully Dy will encourage other DBRSers to come out and see me!

One of the things I was a bit worried about when coming out to the farm was getting adjusted to communal living. After all, I have been living on my own in Toronto for over 5 years now. I'm actually quite surprised by how easily I've adjusted to spending so much time with Everdale's staff and interns. There are 6 farm interns who were picked out of a pool of about 45 applicants and will be working and learning on the farm from April to October. They're a varied group of personalities with really different backgrounds, but all with a love of the environment and the will to learn as much as they can while working hard at Everdale. There are 5 guys: Carl, Dave, Simaron, Mark and Andrew, and one girl: Gwen, who I think is the youngest of the group at 21. Then there's Gavin (the farm manager), Karen and Lynn, who are some of the original founders of the farming operation. Also living at Everdale are Garrett (working on the launch of a biodiesel co-op) and Harris (assists Gavin), who have set up some great prospector tents that seem huge and luxurious compared to my little 4-person dome tent! Joseph, who works for Seeds of Diversity, is also there occasionally and is working on building a Seed Maze. Ben who builds straw bale houses, lives in the straw bale house on-site that was first built as a demonstration building at a housing expo in Toronto. Everyone is really fun to talk to and there's so much to learn from each of them. I really look forward to getting to know them all a lot better in the next few weeks!

As a rather sad close to this post...my family had to put down our dog Jasmine on Saturday. She turned 14 at the beginning of May and a bone tumour started growing on her head about 2 months ago. I'm sad that cancer got her in the end and she couldn't just die of old age in her sleep. When I do finally find the place that will be my farm, I will plant lilac bushes for both Beauty (who died last fall) and Jasmine.