It rains here. A lot.

I took a bunch of videos recently while on the farm, explaining in eye-watering detail all of my innermost thoughts on such topics as drainage and chickens. To add gravitas, I hired Professor John Nerdelbaum Frink, Jr. to do the voice-over. Enjoy.

A New Home

The chicken coop and pen are nearly done. The first couple of pictures above are self-explanatory; the third shows a number of fishing lines that we strung up over top the pen area to psychologically thwart raptors from eating chicken for dinner.

I began installing interior and perimeter fencing yesterday. The perimeter will be 2 courses of 4' stucco wire for 8' total height. It's cheaper than official 7.5' high tensile deer barrier and a lot easier to work with. Unlike my experience with polyethylene, deer won't push through underneath. To keep the chickens from entering the row crop area, I redeployed some of the 7.5' poly fencing that I previously bought. I'm also using it to break the chicken area into 2 or 3 large pens, to enable rotational grazing. Chickens will go underneath this fencing, too, unless a foot or so of it is bent 90 degrees at the bottom along the ground and weight placed upon it. This apparently will work for deer as well especially after grass has grown through the holes. Stucco wire and plastic end up being the same price per foot but the plastic fence will be a lot shorter since it starts out being 6" narrower and it loses a foot at the bottom, leaving only 6.5' of height which I feel is too tempting for a deer.

My head threatens to explode when I think about all the possible permutations of fence configurations that might be nice to have next summer. But they all entail visualizing where human, chicken and vehicle movement will be and how many and how wide gates have to be. Right now we have a grand total of one 5' gate. I plan to install another gate that width right next to it to allow the passage of a truck. Of course, that will mean more dual gates like that if the truck is to pass to other sections of the farm such as the portion way down below where the greenhouses will be going.

For now, I'll concentrate on only the portions that need to be done to contain the chickens and to exclude the deer from the veggies. After our winter vacation, I'll begin building our first greenhouse. Then I'll complete the required perimeter fencing before reconsidering other interior chicken pen configurations. In this calculus, we'll have to determine where our wash area will be. We might be able to fit it into the garage with some careful space management or, for the price, it might be wise to erect another of those garages since the first one hasn't blown away even though we've have some substantial winds.

But, for tomorrow, I might have a fairly large order of salad greens to harvest since, apparently, we're the only ones on the island who have any.

On building codes

First, the weather. We got another dump of snow yesterday which I was able to remove around noon. More snow came later yesterday but not enough to cause a problem. And, at 8C, we're in full natural melt mode now so we'll be ok for at least a week.

And now to the regularly scheduled rant.

It seems to be a popular past time in every place I've lived to build or re-build stuff with no government oversight ... or its inherent cost. My landlord seems to be an exception to the rule where he actively involves the building inspectors for every facet of his new and reno projects. He says that the inspectors take lots of time on multiple trips to make sure everything is done according to current standards. If he ever sells his property, he'll have lots of paperwork proving his diligence and, for that, he'll likely be rewarded financially in excess of his expenses.

For the construction of small outbuildings, most people figure that nothing bad could happen so why bother? Examples of these abound on the property used by our farm. I sometimes imagine Mike Holmes showing up and, hours later, presiding over the torn-down ruins of virtually everything on the property. A tractor shack sheathed with rain-soaked particle board (who knew it rained in a rain forest?); a bike shack whose bottom 4' is comically overbuilt but whose poorly-home-built-extruck-cap roof was greatly strengthened recently by a double ply of 6 mil polyethylene; and, of course, a kids' playhouse cum chicken coop which seemed to have been well-built ... until the appropriate lumber ran out and the builder had to make do with 1X4.

The visible parts inside the structure are a combination of decent construction and sketchiness. Some 1X4 at the ends but mostly 2X4. Or so I thought. Yesterday I decided to pull off an interior sheet of 1/8" wood panelling so I could use the extra 3.5" stud space to recess some nesting boxes (the nesting boxes were originally ... nesting boxes in the chicken coop cum tractor shack, before I hung them on a wall for use as small-object storage). The "space" part of stud space better describes what I found behind the panelling. A couple of mouse nests, miscellaneous dirt and wood chips and 3 sticks of 1X4, randomly spaced and oriented. I would be embarrassed to show that too. The visible open wall above and on either side of the panelling is 2X4 but the portion inside the wall, not so much.

My 10 minute job hanging the nesting boxes turned into more than an hour as I had to scrounge for 2X4's all the while working in the very confined quarters of the chicken coop. I'm guessing that the other lower side wall, which is covered end to end with panelling, is of similar construction. The question is weather I want to deconstruct the perches I built onto that panelling and then rebuild that wall, too. After all, the playhouse, despite its dubious structure, has held up for many years of wind-, snow- and kid-load. It's much sturdier now than before even if not uniformly so. I think I'll leave it as is, at least for now.

Best not to think about the house...

W...T...F...?!

About half of our backyard flock is experiencing its first snow today but the veterans weren't too keen on getting out of the coop either and had to be coerced out. It seems like there has been about a foot of snow which, in a single snowfall, seems to have surpassed all the snow I remember us getting last year in Vesuvius. Of course, I saw and had to deal with a bit more snow up on Mt Maxwell last year when I was the snow-shoveller on call at Foxglove Farm, so as to protect their greenhouses from collapsing.

Speaking of collapsing structures, I recently assembled one of Crappy Tire's garages-in-a-box, which pretty much warns you that it should not be used outside, for fear of it collapsing, blowing away or otherwise dying due to normal weather. In other words, it's great if you want your car to be covered...inside a real garage.

I doubt we could the get the car up our driveway this morning, let alone make it to the farm, without getting stuck dozens of times. I called Mary and Blair as early as I dared and learned that they were already taking care of the farm, including the garage. From their description, it was moments from collapsing but they managed to clear the snow before calamity could strike. Phew.

The low tunnels were fine but parts of the plastic deer fence had ripped off their T-posts because of the snow load. Also, some branches from a huge maple tree apparently came down on a portion of the fence underneath. At this point, I'm not concerned about deer. The value of the crop that's not underneath the low tunnel is minimal and might not survive the elements anyway. Plus I'll be reconfiguring the fence with our expansion so it might actually save me some time.

In other news, I've been working on converting the playhouse, where we used to keep all of our farm tools and supplies, into a chicken coop in anticipation of moving our existing flock there and then adding to it. Mary noticed a few scrap pre-hung doors across the street from an ongoing reno which I got permission to take. There are now doors on either end of the coop. I ripped off lots of the existing single-ply sheeting (which makes for great kindling) and replaced it with 5/8" plywood that was itself salvaged from inside the playhouse and from a structure on the other side of the property that was used as a bike shed. I used hardware cloth and poly film to fill in an old window that was used as wall-filler on one side. In the summer, the poly will come down for better ventilation. I also cut out the top couple of feet of each end's gable to promote ventilation of the inevitable ammonia that will develop inside the coop over the winter.

The playhouse structure itself was a little sketchy, like most outbuildings on the property. The floor and side walls looked fine but the ends were weak, having been built of 1X4. The rafters were 2X4 with no collar ties, just a thin reinforcement plywood triangle at the peak of a couple of them. There was a play loft about 5' off the floor that I removed, salvaging its 2X6's and plywood (and my head, from further bonking). I moved those 2X6's up to the bottom of the rafters and screwed the plywood to one of the exterior sides. I also screwed reinforcement plates to the top of each set of sketchy rafters and installed horizontal cross members above each door to reduce the sway. All in all, I'm much more comfortable putting livestock in there now than before.

All that's left is putting harware cloth on the open ends of the gable tops, plugging other rat-size holes and constructing perches. Some 1 3/4" dowel I saved from a couple years ago might help with that although it would also be cool to use some deadfallen arbutus branches or similar. So far, it's cost $32 for 12' of hardware cloth and I don't expect the rest to cost much more. Perhaps a good rodent-proof feed pail. And, of course, some extra fencing for their pen. Still, very economical, if a little more time-consuming than I thought.



Now, to build a snowman...

Salad days

My salad days,
When I was green in judgment...

I've heard second hand that local growers believe direct-seeding salad in September is foolish. In my defence, I just try stuff that Eliot Coleman tries, adjusting somewhat to the fact that Maine is ~5 degrees latitude south of ours. I try to get local opinions when I can but usually I can't. But sometimes ignorance can be bliss.


Such bliss comes in the form of my low-tunnel salad green experiment which is vastly exceeding my limited expectations although partly because of luck. Pauline and I prepared the bed on a very busy Saturday afternoon in September, the 11th. We worked a little overtime that day because the forecast called for rain starting that evening which would be good for germination and bad for any subsequent attempt at seeding. The rain came and, after a couple days of soggyness, I put the hoops out and covered it with poly, which harnessed the limited sunlight to create extra warmth.

The first picture was taken on October 10th, a month after seeding; the second, on the 27th. Despite record September rains and typical rainy October weather, there's apparently been enough light to create a bit of a problem; too much growth. My plan was to harvest about 1200 heads of romaine sometime in February. But the seeder obviously dropped way more seed than one every 4". There are so many plants that they now threaten to start rotting since there's virtually no air flow between plants.

Solution: thin the plants to 4" apart (for now, later I see it will have to be more like 8" or 12"). I pull out the plants I don't want to keep, then cut off their roots, keeping just the succulent leaves. Then I call it salad mix and sell it to people and the health food store for $9/lb.

This post was meant to go out at least a week ago so here's an update. The thinning is pretty much complete which is good because Natureworks is having a hard time selling it. People at this time seem to be more interested in braising mixes and head-lettuce. With the constant daily loss of light, I doubt we will be able to harvest heads from these beds this calendar year but it could be a little earlier than my initial guess of late February.

We have another double bed with a low tunnel into which we transplanted all the lettuce and brassica plant starts that got too big to sell in the fall. They look great - and big - so I'm thinking we might start taking those off any time now.

Things are supposed to be winding down this time of year but we at Chorus Frog Farm are going bananas. First, since our 'thing' is the winter harvest, we have almost as much produce now to sell as we did in the middle of summer; which isn't all that much, granted. Still, our Tuesdays, in particular, are very busy.

Second, the tenants renting the property on which our farm sits, are probably going to be staying in the house for longer than they thought. Trying to make the best of it, they are making some aesthetic and functional improvements to the property and house that they hope will make living there more enjoyable. Because we are now embarking on the greenhouse project on the west side of the property, we all realized that there's no point in us continuing efforts on the south plot that currently only has some salad heads and the garlic so, after harvest, the land will revert to something other than row crops and the tenants will regain their uninterrupted southerly vista.

The tractor shack, however, is on the east side of the property. Once the greenhouse is built, not only will the tractor shack be even further away on average but it's not getting any prettier or studier. Hopefully this week I'll be able to construct one of those sketchy garages-in-a-box to house the tractor and other farm stuff in a location much closer to where it will be needed.

Third, we need to extend fence lines to incorporate the greenhouse. And while we were thinking about how to do that, we thought; why not use just a little more fence to enclose an area big enough to enable a small chicken operation? There's a shady 40' X 120' swath of grass in the northwest corner of the property that 25-50 birds would love to scratch in. Mary and Blair are both vets and animal lovers and have even offered to do some of the work (just letting the chickens in and out of the coop would be an amazing bonus to us). Then, we can offer eggs on the stand which would be a huge bonus to our clients.

Speaking of marketing, Pauline suggested we set up a table at February's Seedy Saturday (that would get her off the hook for organizing it, as she did last year). When I said I doubted we'd have very much produce to sell, it got me thinking about selling CSA memberships. And that led to a whole torrent of ideas that morning which I will write about in the weeks ahead. Nevertheless, the ideas will take some effort to plan and fulfil although they're good winter activities.

Fifth, Pauline's working at the SSI Conservancy 20 hours per week for the winter. Plus she volunteers at the Salt Spring Seed Sanctuary. And does contract work for a real estate agent. Her marketing work for Foxglove Farm will end soon.

I am the recently-appointed treasurer for the Centre School PAC and that has proven to be more work than I thought it would be. Now that I've got the system mostly figured out, the ongoing commitment should be reasonable. Famous last words.

And, finally, an update on the plowing for the greenhouse. The weather was sunny on the day of and the day after plowing but the soil was quite wet, too wet for safe plowing and for the health of the soil. Ron got stuck for a moment in one section. Two days later he was back to check it out but realized it hadn't dried out enough(hard to do when it's 90% humidity). So, last Thursday at 2pm with the 7-day forecast nothing but some form of precipitation, I started making calls for someone with a 4X4 tractor (which I though Ron had, whoops).

Seeing little chance of someone coming immediately, I got out the BCS with rototiller and started going at it. What a work out. The plowing had left furrows up to 18" deep that the BCS wanted to get sucked in to. Mostly, the rototiller-half kept the unit floating on top but it was still a major wrestling operation to get through the muck, especially after it had packed 75lbs of soil and stones between the tines and the housing. In any case, it did a very reasonable job and, in about an hour, most of the area was reasonably flat with little grass showing. I then rolled out a 24'X120' piece of poly in the middle of the tilled area to hopefully keep the rains from soaking the soil beneath it. If we get a few days of sun, I'll slide it over to allow drying from above. Otherwise, it will probably stay on until the greenhouse is up.

A Window of Opportunity

The exciting conclusion to last week's cliffhanger is...

...but first a general update on some stuff.

The Tuesday market went rogue last week. October 5th was the last Market in the Meadow of the season but, it turns out, farmers still have an awful lot of food to sell. What to do? Last Tuesday, a half-dozen farmers set up illegally on Ministry of Transport highway property to sell their produce. In reality, they set up on the sidewalk adjacent to a busy street or on the street itself near the busiest intersection on the island, right in downtown Ganges. The by-law enforcement dude came first but was rebuffed since the farmers weren't on municipal property.

But someone must have complained to the Mounties since they showed up and shut everything down in the early afternoon. Pauline and I had stopped by in the morning to show support but didn't set up a table since most of our revenue, bread baking, would have been at risk of being wasted if the market was shut down early. In any case, the farmers group has since gotten a special 2-Tuesday permit to set up starting tomorrow. In the mean time, all the important government-types apparently want the market to continue so they're working on making it permanent. Here's the front page article in the Driftwood. The town photographer loves Pauline so, naturally, she's in the photo. And he managed to not completely edit me out either.

And, now, to the news. We will be breaking ground tomorrow on a new plot that we'll be using for our new 25' X ~130' high tunnel (greenhouse). Two weeks ago, Ron, the tractor guy, finally made it out to cut the grass (which we've been raking up and using for mulch) and we were really able to see what the land looked like. Pauline's been pining for a greenhouse for next spring's sowing of plant starts so when she looked down into the valley, she pointed, "There". Like the obedient man-slave that I am, I immediately raked, tilled and plowed a portion, just to see what the ground was like. Turns out, not too bad. A little wet in places due to all the September rain but quite usable.


There's an awful lot of marsh grass root balls and, like tree roots and large stones, it makes using walk-behind tractor implements a very tiring, joint-separating adventure, one better suited to a 70HP 4WD tractor. Today I marked out the proposed footprint of the high tunnel. Ron, his brother (and the property owner) Don and neighbor and friend Paul stopped by at lunch to discuss every aspect of this project. Tomorrow, Ron will be back to do the plowing. There didn't seem to be as many stones in the test area I broke open but I've thought that before and been disappointed so I'll assume that there are just as many. Happily, we'll be chucking them along the nearby fence line rather than loading them up to take to a central location. Then, on Thursday, Ron will be back with the rotovator to break the soil up better.

And then Friday, rain, and who knows for how long. This past summer we probably would have had to wait until July to plow this area due to the rain that lasted into late May so getting this done now is a very good thing. Mind you, I'll have to install some drainage so the ground doesn't stay sopping wet all winter. And I've never really done drainage before.

One more first, among many recently.

Are we having fun yet?

According to my last post, I'm supposed to talk about crop profitability for carrots. Well I changed my mind. Sorry to disappoint.

Tuesday was Growing Up Organic produce pickup day. While Laurent, the produce middle man, was at the farm to pick up our stuff, he gave me an anti-pep talk, lamenting how the handful of growers on the island more than satisfied the limited demand for local organic produce. It's at least the third time he and I have had this particular conversation but each time I'm left with more of crisis of confidence than the last time. There's no money doing this stuff on the scale we're doing it on. And if you do mass produce something, you'll have to export it from the island, and/or sell it for almost nothing. Locals can't or won't pay the true cost of food. Et cetera.

While he's doing his spiel, I vow to him that I won't get bummed. He replies that he's not trying to discourage me, just stating the facts as he sees them. Then I tell him that he's just like me; always the devil's advocate. And then I vow privately to be a little less like us next time I'm in his position.

In between his visits, Pauline and I go on our merry way, spending an average of about 6 hours a day doing farm stuff. Sometimes we stop and ask ourselves why we're hand-weeding a lost-cause spinach bed or removing yet another ton of stones from a bed that already had ALL of its stones removed.

But usually the answer comes from a natural character; a gaggle of geese doing a low pass enroute the grassland next door, Paul and Christina's sheep baa-ing in the distance, an actual pacific chorus frog sitting on a dock leaf (and a garter snake sliding through the tall grass toward him) or a bank of low cloud hanging over the valley to the west. Priceless gifts that cost nothing but our time.

Other times the answer comes from the news. A story about another food shortage or contamination scare, a story about the risks of a sedentary lifestyle or a story about world finance, peak oil or climate change.

Then I remember that we didn't start this thinking we'd get rich. But several times throughout the summer we've looked at each other after a Tuesday market or after a good market stand day and say you know, we could actually make a living doing this. And then that must subconsciously lead to Look at us! We're making a living!, which then sticks in my head.

Until reality clunks up the driveway in his GMC.

* * *

I'm guessing that my carrot profitability analysis (when I get to it) will be less than encouraging. In the mean time, I've swung back over from the I'm-working-for-50c/hour mindset to the I've-got-a cool-inexpensive-hobby-that-I-really-like mindset. Plus we eat better than ever and someday all of this might be worth more than it does right now.

And, in the last few days, new possibilities have revealed themselves to us, possibilities that I'll write about next time. Probably.

The carrots will just have to wait.

A bird in the hand

I loathe carrots. What a terrible thing to say, you say? Indeed. But you didn't just go through 100+ lbs of mostly small carrots, separating those that were free of insect damage and still big enough to sell from those that weren't.

Why so many all at once? A combination of things, really. The carrots, although sweeter due to recent cold temperatures, were really starting to get damaged from wire worm and carrot root maggot (yum). It's one thing to throw out a small carrot too riddled with holes to sell but quite another to see a large one with the same problem. Best to sell what we could before they all got damaged.

The carrots seemed to be doing pretty well a few weeks ago; small but relatively undamaged. But our September got Saskatchewaned with probably one third more rain than the previous record. Maybe the rainfall (or lack of sun) promoted the pests. The low tunnel over the carrots was covered in reemay, which lets in rain and some air (but keeps out insects like the carrot rust fly) and is usually a good thing. After we got so much rain in the first two weeks of September, I replaced the reemay with polyethylene. But poly doesn't breathe and I noticed that the carrot foliage was starting to rot in places. A contributing factor to that was that the foliage was drooping over on its side. And the reason for that, I assume, was how close I planted them.

Way back in mid-July I started playing with my fancy precision seeder and, while I knew too dense would be a problem for some things, I remembered that Ray from Haliburton planted his carrots very close together so I did the same. Now I see some key differences. First, Ray used a lot of composted horse manure in his beds; all his stuff grew fast and strong and would be a worthy foe for any insect. Second, his carrots were in a high tunnel (poor man's greenhouse) with significantly more air flow, even with doors closed sometimes. Third, I don't think he planted them at max density; I probably planted twice as many just by using the inside sheaves on the seeder instead of the middles. Finally, I was probably remembering his early carrots, not the winter ones. A bed of carrots with copious foliage in the relative dry of summer would be much less susceptible to the cool, humid rotting conditions we experienced in September this year (but October in any other year).

While in Natureworks on Tuesday, I noticed that they had a fellow farmer's bulk carrots for sale. I spoke with produce guy Aaron and co-owner Craig about my carrot situation and they agreed to take them off my hands. Coincidentally, our bunched carrots were already in their display case but the bunching process, I thought, was uneconomical. It turns out that a lot of people simply prefer to have tops with their carrots even though the tops always get thrown out (to the compost pile in the best case) after they have sucked a little more nutrition, water and flavour from the edible root. But preserving the tops was very time consuming in our beds because the tops, which were far too dense, got tangled up amongst each other; pulling one carrot out often meant stripping some of that foliage off. It just seemed like it was way too labour-intensive to be profitable. If instead we could lift the whole bed of carrots at once, we would be more efficient, even considering that the resulting product yielded less money per pound and fewer pounds. We could have continued to sell carrots with greens 25 or 30 lbs per week but only by leaving them in the ground until they were needed, all the while a higher and higher percentage becoming unsellable. Or we could lift the whole works, get what we could, and more on.

While I had the lawnmower out on Wednesday, tidying up before the grass got too long and the rains too frequent, I made 4 passes over the 6' width of the double carrot beds. Just like that, most of the foliage was cut down to mulch. After raking it away to the compost pile, I got out the walk-behind tractor and attached the root digger implement. The root digger gets dragged behind the tractor and digs in underneath the carrots (or potatoes, beets etc) and lifts the soil up behind it, where a fan of tines lets the soil pass through before dropping the crop on top. In theory.

In practice, the soil was a little too moist so it didn't drop through the tines very well so that carrots got lifted but then mostly hidden. Because the bed-width was 30” and the root digger about 15”, some of the carrots on the outside edge got sliced. And the tractor is hard to keep in a straight line on uneven terrain so there were sections that were well-lifted and sections that weren't lifted at all. I made several passes and then went through on my hands and knees (with truant Hannah) and picked out carrots and, surprise, yet more stones. Then, with the soil nice and loose, I got out a digging fork and gently probed for more. And more. And more. Probably 120 lbs all told.

Then came the tedious sorting job. Then figuring what the hell to do with all the duds. I spent a lot of yesterday using the food processor to cut the larger duds into coins, which I then blanched and froze. I steamed, pureed and froze the very small carrots and the off cuts. I still have 20+ lbs to do. I've offered puree and coins to one of the parents at Laura’s school, for use in the soup hot lunch. Here's hoping. Maybe the local soup kitchen can take them unprocessed. I'll have to check.

Today I delivered 69 lbs of pretty decent smallish carrots with no tops. Craig will probably sell them for $3/lb; I'm hoping to get $1.75.

For next year, I will:

1. Seed them less dense. For the spring planting, I'll seed at less than half of the previous density by going 2.5” spacing in-row and 2.25” between rows. For the summer planting, I'll probably go 2.5” in-row and 4.5” between rows.

2. Plant the winter carrots no later than the end of June. It was mid-July when I planted them this year. As a result, there wasn't enough time for them to reach their full length. It couldn't be helped this year but next year will be different.

3. Be prepared to install a polyethylene cover before the fall rains come, even if they start coming in late summer.

4. Make sure the bed has a lot of nutrition. I suspect our first crop wasn't getting all the nitrogen it wanted. I assumed a grass field left undisturbed for so long would feed any crop well. I guess not, at least not at the density I had them planted at.

5. Instead of 2X30” beds separated by a 12” walkway a la Eliot Coleman, I'll go with a custom “root” layout: 3X15” beds separated by 2X7.5” “wheel-ways”. In this configuration, I hope to be able to straddle the bed with the tractor wheels in the wheel-ways while being able to lift the whole 15” mini-bed with the 15” root digger. I'll also do this with beets and potatoes and perhaps radishes and turnips. The downside is a 25% loss of crop.

6. Harvest root crops by the bed-lift process rather than by individual plants. I'm hoping the relationships we've been developing with our customers will mean that we can increase our sales enough to warrant the regular use of the tractor/root-digger.

Next post I want to go through a financial exercise on the carrot crop, using the profitability worksheet developed by Richard Wiswall whose book I bought earlier this year. I plan to do this with all crops since cutting out the losers and going all-in with the winners is what will make this more enjoyable and financially sustainable.

State of the Farm - Part Two

Continuing with a general update on various farm things:



Turnip greens from planting number 3. I just chucked in seed because I was too lazy to get the seeder out for a mere 8' length of bed. They might be a little dense ;-)


Purple broccoli. Beautiful until you steam it, then still nice but green.



Romaines planted out from plant starts that got too big. I guess that's a big advantage of having a veggie plant start operation; little waste. If we don't sell it to a gardener, hopefully we can sell it to the health food store.


Our next bed of salad greens, planted about 3 weeks ago. Our original 60' bed probably yielded close to $500 in cash and trade in two cuts. The first cut was more lucrative per hour since the weeds hadn't taken control. Towards the end of the second cut, it was becoming quite labour-intensive to separate the weed from the food. We'll know next year to have a closer succession of salad so that we aren't caught without any to sell. Having said that, I'm not sure we could have sold all that much more.


Towards the left, our double bed of carrots under a low tunnel of reemay. The carrots range from 2" to 6". Last week we started selling them at the Tuesday market in bunches of ~10 for $2 and they sold out. We'll probably double our supply for next week. There are only 3 Tuesday markets left this year so we'll be fairly aggressive selling them. There's been a lot of rain recently and much more in the forecast. I've now removed the reemay and will replace it with poly once we've extracted 20-30 more lbs of carrots for the next week or two.


The solar dehydrator which I may dedicate a post to some day is coming in handy for drying some burlap sacks that I was having difficulty drying out in open air (rain). Come spring, it may come in handy for germination although a slight mod will be required.


Just a pretty photo to end the update. While on a market research trip to Thimble Farm in the north end (which is spectacular), we stopped on Sunset Drive to watch a bunch of guys race RC sailboats in this large pond. Laura would love to have one of those. And we wouldn't mind having the farm it's on.

State of the Farm - Part One

It's time to catch this blog up on what's been happening on and around Chorus Frog Farm. Our marketing department finally got her farm stand sign. Our "brand" is certainly getting around as most customers we speak to at the Tuesday Market, for example, know and recognize Hannah's frog logo and its location on "Rainbow Road, across from the pool".


From time to time, we do stop to smell the roses, as we did recently. Behind the farm a couple of hundred feet up Mt Belcher is this primo Kodak Photo Op, just a 10 minute hike from weeding.


They're a little hard to see but there are 3 small mounds of soil in the photo. Beneath them I used the rotary plow while the tractor was held stationary to dig 1 cubic foot holes into which I dump small buckets of kitchen compost from a social housing complex down the street. One of the residents approached us a while back to see whether we wanted their waste nutrients in exchange for them not having to pay tipping fees to get rid of it. We thought that was a great idea. We're not putting it in the regular compost heap so as not to attract any more vermin. The idea of the holes is a variation on trench composting. Instead of worrying about smells, vermin and having to turn icky food scraps until they are broken down enough to spread on beds, you simply throw it in the soil and cover it. Next year or the year after, you plant something on or around it, to suck up those nutrients. At worst, we will have saved the carbon emmissions from having to ship some heavy kitchen waste to Vancouver Island.



Last Saturday we did a bed blitz, turning a 6' wide X 70' long strip of the unused south plot into a double bed with cover. Because we are not putting up a fence around that plot, we have to deal with deer in different ways. One way is to plant things they won't eat such as garlic which we will do next month. Another idea is to put up a low tunnel with a polyethylene cover. There are no gaurantees that the deer or rabbits won't find their way in but it's worth a try. We direct seeded about 1200 winter lettuces in about 5 minutes (I love the precision seeder). Of course, it took both of us several hours to get the bed to the point we'd be able to take only 5 minutes to plant. The other thing we will find out is when direct seeded lettuces sown mid-September will be big enough to harvest. I'll say 3rd week of February. Any other guesses?


Pauline's plant start business is still going pretty strong although it's come time to warn people that starts planted now probably won't produce much food until spring. Pauline figures that starts are well over half of our total sales. I'm looking forward to the spring plant start market. Now that people know where to find starts, we'll be able to tap that market at a greater scale. Tomatoes, peppers, flowers, herbs. The list is only limited by our ability to find places to grow starts. Could be tricky without a real greenhouse.


This beauty is what we use to spin our salad greens after harvest. That is, when we still had salad greens to harvest. We've also discovered that it trips the ground fault breaker when it's been raining. And the effort I took to the open back and bottom hasn't worked. We might be able to move it inside an out-building but I'm not sure even that will fix the problem. No matter; at least until something matures enough to harvest and spin.


Another of Pauline's ideas that I loved was the compost pile germinator which is nothing more than putting seed trays over top a flattened compost bin. When the ambient air temperature is in the single digits, we can count on the seed block soil temperature to still be in the teens. The core of the pile was in excess of 60 Celcius recently but, unless I turn it, the temperature will continue to decrease. At this point, we're just about done starting new plants so, come mid-winter, we'll probably get some additional material, mix everything up and use the anticipated heat increase to combat winter temps, perhaps in conjunction with a small poly roof to keep the rain out and the heat in.


We are fortunate to pick up some real gems from time to time. This extension ladder was given to us by Pauline's good friend Sydney, who is moving. Until we have a need to climb up a tall ladder, we'll use it as more plant start space.


The winter squash are a mixed bag. These look ok and will probably throw off as many fruit as this family needs for its personal consumption. But with the amount of shade we get in the summer at the north end of these rows, sun lovers really suffer. I suspect the western beds on this plot that currently house the tomatoes, fingerlings and squash are much more suited to the salad greens.


The tomatoes have finally been hit with what I suspect is late blight. Despite top pruning and mostly defoliating them a few weeks ago, the fruit just isn't ripening very quickly with all the cloud, rain and low temperatures we've had in September. Next year I'm going to try using low tunnels to cover tomatoes grown on plastic mulch with no trellising. We'll need double the amount of ground space for the same number of plants but hopefully the extra warmth will ultimately give us more fruit per square foot. The trick will be to not bake them in July and August.


It's not obvious but just to the right of the brassicas and the white fabric is a bed of potatoes. The first 25' have been dug out with probably half of them unsellable due to insect damage (wireworm and others). They are yummy though once you've cut off the damaged parts. The remaining 50-60' still have to come out. When the weather permits, I'll attach the root digger plow to the back of the tractor and see whether I can uproot the rest in one pass. The shovel work seems excessive when you have the option of not doing it manually. Two problems: the potato hill is a little too close to the brassicas; there might be some collateral damage. Also, we'll have to then put the potatoes into storage until we can sell or eat them, and yukons aren't really a storage potato. On the other hand, if we leave them in the ground and the fall rains have come early, they may start to rot. Having gooey potatoes in the ground will be a terrible mess that really needs to be cleaned up if we hope not to create a long term problem of potato pests there. In the mean time, I've used some lumber wrap to create a narrow roof over the bed to hopefuly divert the bulk of the preciptation until I can extract them.

More in a few days.

On wheat : Part Two

On wheat (part one)

A couple of posts ago I showed a picture of the "new" combine on the island which we had just observed harvesting wheat. The second partner in the trio of new grain farmers was conducting a public event in conjunction with Transition Salt Spring in which interested folks in the community could buy freshly harvested wheat moments after it was harvested.

While the event was scheduled to take a half hour, it ended up taking more than two hours to harvest the acre and a half field because of long delays due to mechanical problems. I rememeber speaking to Partner #1 in the spring who was optimistic that the old combine they were purchasing would probably work fine since it had been well taken care. But he was also concerned that the high complexity of the machine would make problems difficult to deal with, especially on an island.


After one swath of the field length, a small congregation of farmers and the mechanically inclined collectively scratched heads and furrowed brows until, after some time, hydraulic oil was added. After that, the combine continued its job but with regular stops along the way to coax the crop from the cutters to the auger.


Once the crop was off the field, a trailer was backed up beside the combine and the crop was transferred. Result: a smallish amount of grain mixed with a disappointing amount of chaff. And, when we got home, the distinctive smell of petroleum product in the grain we bought. A couple of days later, the farmer replaced the grain, not wanting to take any chances with a possibly contaminated product. I have since learned that some gizmo on the combine was found to be leaking hydrualic oil and that that may have been the reason for the smell.

So, on the face of it, one could be disappointed with the prospect of growing grain here. I would simply say that the combine itself has a huge bearing on the economics of the crop so if the partnership can restore the machine to a reliable working condiiton that they only need to worry about the weather. In any case, this year apparently wasn't the best for wheat due to rains that didn't stop until June.

As I understand it, the size of the grain plots this year was deliberately small due the test-phase nature of the operation. Lessons were undoubtedly learned and probably won't be repeated. In that sense, Salt Spring took a step toward providing a significant amount of food energy albeit at great fossil fuel cost, probably at more than a 100:1 fuel to food energy ratio.

I really don't know if the strategy they are employing has much of a future in the context of decreasing fossil fuel affordability but I have been studying other methods of grain harvesting and hope to write about when I've got it all figured out.

Yeah, right.

Permanence

In preparing a new batch of soil recently, we have been unearthing a lot more garbage. The whole property is a midden of varying density and depth. Of course, I have repurposed some of the above ground junk into coolers, dryers, shelves etc. but almost all of the buried garbage was at the end of its life when it was flung out the back door decades ago and it hasn’t gotten better with age … though not much worse either.

When I unearth certain pieces like the one pictured, I am stopped in my muddy tracks where I have to pause from collecting stones and just contemplate. The photo shows the top page of a 3 page excerpt of a booklet used by muffler shops to produce replacement exhaust system components using a Worth Bend – o – Matic. The document appears to be from 1977 for use on 1971 Ford Mustangs, Pintos and Comets.

Finding an Explode-O-Matic – er, Pinto - to fix up these days is, happily, a rare event but, if you still had your Bend-O-Matic, you might still be able to use the specs on this scrap to fix up a set of pipes for it, despite the fact that it’s probably been in the ground for 20 years. And that’s the part that troubles me. These little scraps of garbage are just small symbols of the problem. For every excerpt of a Bend-O-Matic booklet, there was a whole booklet for not just Ford’s proud line-up but for all makes. And not just one copy; perhaps tens of thousands for all the muffler shops. And that’s just one component of one product type in one part of the world. There are at least 100,000 Pintos in or on their way to a landfill.

The degree to which we are converting natural resources and energy to junk and entropy makes me long for what I think are simpler days to come, where things are less disposable than they’ve become. But even if we somehow stopped making garbage starting today, we will still be unearthing stuff for millenia to come.

But to make this entry yet longer, I have to comment on the whole practice of burying stuff in the back yard. At first it seems like a terrible thing to do; batteries, plastic and whatever 1980’s Adidas runners were made out of, all slowing leaching their chemical components into the soil. But is it better to collect all these things and deliver them first to an on-island transfer station where it sits for several weeks and then to a Vancouver Island landfill? I say yes but only because the soil our junk is currently buried in can easily be used to grow food and because the landfill has presumably been selected because it can more safely house our trash without it causing much environmental damage except to the exact place it will rest.

On the other hand, if people were forced to house their junk on their own property, they would think twice about bringing new things home. If you personally had to find a place to put AA batteries when they were done, single-use or rechargeable, you might just re-evaluate their use in the first place.

Here on Salt Spring it costs about $5 to dump a large bag of garbage, provided you drive it to the transfer station yourself, or about 10 cents per pound in bulk. I find these rates cheap yet it already seems like dumping – on others’ property or on public land – is a problem. Apparently, one or more island plumbers take old pink and harvest gold toilets up Mount Tuam for free disposal. There, they are shot to pieces by ATV ridin’, gun-totin’ red-necked slack-jawed local yokels. If tipping fees were further raised, we could expect even more of this. Policing the dumping of garbage on an island this size would be almost impossible.

And so I avert my gaze and carry on.

Free labour? Bring it on!

Last weekend a couple of teenage boys ambled up our driveway while we were in the garden and passed me the bill pictured above. Later that evening I called the number and, sure enough, no joke. Human teenagers willing to do hard physical labour for no money. And no catches. I asked.

Recall that we actually have two plots of plowed up soil in the borrowed backyard but that we are only using one right now; the other is just planted in a harvest wheat cover crop. When Ron rototilled that section in June, he complained bitterly about the size and quantity of stones battering his equipment. After we decided to concentrate on the other section, we virtually abandoned the wheat area; we didn't even bother watering it. All summer long, the section - and its abundant stones - festered.

Now the wheat has a flattened look about it. Pastor Andrew plus 3 teens hopped out of a mini-van at 10am sharp and, after we gave them a quick tour of the garden, got right to work in the wheat field. As soon as 4 or 5 pails of stones were filled, I hauled them to the rock pile using the BCS/dump cart. We probably removed 10 loads or over 3 tons of stones. The teens also collected half a large garbage can of garbage and an almost full bin of metal for recycling. They also removed a lot of small blackberry shoots that had sprung up over the summer. Even Laura helped out, gathering dozens of small treasures of glass; bottles, marbles and pieces of old Chinese plates.

Apparently this wasn't the teens' worst job during their 10 day stay on the island although the worst one also involved stones. After digging them out of a stone retaining wall that was built on the wrong side of a property line, they had to haul them up to the top of the property, on a hot day. One imagines the rejoicing when that job was done.

Before they left, Pastor Andrew invited us to an open-house BBQ on the weekend at the church (although we won't be able to make it). Instead, we dropped off a 2 gallon ice cream pail full of salad mix to the church to feed all those tired teens. Thanks again to Philip, Cory, Tessa, Vanessa, Kurtis and Pastor Andrew.

Decisions, decisions

(Sorry, this picture has nothing to do with today's post but it foreshadows an upcoming one).

This whole farm thing happened pretty quickly, once it started. Unlike the typical farm startup - if there is such a thing - we didn't really have much of a crop plan. The plan, if you can call it that, was determined on the fly and was initially based on the plant starts and seed that people gave us. After those crops were in, we put a little more thought into the other crops. Although, why we decided to plant beans - some dried and some fresh - seems like a mystery now.

This year has not been kind to bean growers; beans just started ripening a couple weeks ago (recall that we had a rainy and cool 7-month fall/winter/spring that only let up towards the end of May). Last year we had beans at the beginning of July, if memory serves, and then there were lots and lots. Of course this year we started them much later but, as of a few days ago, they were just thinking about flowering. That and the fact that some of them got eaten by deer forced us to answer a tough question; for them to bean or not to bean.

We have 13 beds whose length vary from 60 to 100 feet. By the time we had planted the potatoes, tomatoes, squash, carrots, brassicas and beans, we only had only 3 short beds left. In them we tested lettuce mix, spinach, kale, chard and arugula. Of those, the lettuce mix and arugula were the only ones we could sell. We were looking to the near future and seeing a poor crop of beans, some of which would have to be left until October to ripen as dried beans, and no good place to put another planting of greens in the mean time. We were also seeing the calendar and thinking that if we didn't find some spare dirt soon, that we'd lose any opportunity to get fall and winter crops growing before light levels prevented growth.

And so it is that a cash crop of beans became a leguminous cover crop. Because beans do such a good job of transferring nitrogen in the air to the soil, our decision was a little easier. Future crops would benefit from the bean sacrifice.

The first step (after making the decision) was to remove the drip tape and its soil staples. Then I gathered all of the creeping bean shoots into the centre of the bed before chopping it into little pieces with the Palladino flail mower*. Next, I used the R2 power harrow to incorporate the mulched bean material into the soil. The harrow is nice because, unlike the rototiller which mixes soil layers vertically and tends to hyperoxygenate the soil, it (more) gently stirs the soil, leaving it in a more natural stratificaiton. Having said that, it still brings up a fair number of stones (our biggest crop, by far) which need to be removed by hand. Once the top few inches are relativelty stone free, the resulting bed is quite flat and firm, toned even.

Such a bed is critical for the finicky precision seeder but the prep work is probably worth it since the actual seeding takes mere minutes and compares extremely favourably with the alternative of planting individual heads of lettuce. And the lettuce mix pays well at $9/lb, compared with $2 per head of lettuce. Pauline, being something of a harvesting machine, can cut about 7 lbs of mix in an hour, using nothing more than scissors.

We use a washing machine to wash and spin the leaves which is a remarkable time saver compared to using a $5 plastic kitchen spinner. You can buy a 5 gallon spinner but it's a few hundred dollars and you still have to do the work. So, thanks to Bryan on Sunset Drive who not only gave away his spare washing machine but delivered it to the farm. I gave him and his daughter bread, jam and salad mix as a token of my appreciation.

Now we just have to hope that it grows tall enough before it goes dormant for the winter and that people will actually buy it when we harvest it. On the one hand, there probably won't be many others growing this crop in for the winter harvest. On the other, it's tough to say how much salad people around here demand over the winter. Guess we'll find out soon enough.




*From Palladino's website: "The commitment that we assume to the customer is to make the brand synonymous with quality Palladino recognized as 'guarantee and seriousness'."

CFF Agronomics 2 - Markets

Having discussed the reduction of farm expenses in CFF Agronomics- Part One, I now feel like spending some time on the ickier topic (IMO) of generating sales. Of course, I have already spoken of the farm stand which continues to get rave reviews and is a consistent smallish source of daily income (which could be significantly higher, percentage wise, if some people would stop stealing, but that is another post for another day).

We now have two other sales outlets; Growing Up Organic and the Market in the Meadow. GUO is an initiative of the local chapter of the Canadian Organic Growers, Island Natural Growers and is basically a middle-man between growers and buyers on Salt Spring. There are something like 20 growers like us and maybe half that number of buyers, which include grocery stores, restaurants and institutions.

On Wednesdays, l'homme au moyen, Laurent, sends out a reminder for the growers to list all the things they have for sale come the following Tuesday's harvest. He then calls all of the buyers to see what they would like to purchase. We find out what to harvest the day or two before. On Tuesday, Laurent drives around to all the farms and picks up our stuff before dropping everything off at the buyers. The prices were all decided upon months ago and are not negotiable. The GUO program takes 10% to partially run the program (it's also funded by COG).

We are really fortunate to have GUO as people seem reluctant to buy our fresh produce off the stand for some reason. The inviolable rule or showing abundance of produce conflicts with the fact that it quickly wilts in summer heat and becomes compost material. So we are quite happy to harvest relatively large quantities of produce from the beds knowing that it will all be purchased in perfect condition.


The other outlet is the Market in the Meadow or the "Tuesday" market in downtown Ganges. While the Saturday market is much larger and attracts tourists from all over, the Tuesday market is smaller, predominantly food products and attracts mainly locals. The pace is more relaxed and yet there is a constant supply of shoppers who have come to get the freshest produce money can buy.

The first Tuesday market we attended two weeks ago was a big success. Pauline had the foresight to scope it out a few times prior to our appearance and realized that no-one was selling either plant starts or bread, our big sellers at the moment. The first week I baked 18 loaves of non-organic bread which sold minutes after I delivered them. I baked them at our summer farmhouse near town so it was only a 2 minute drive. People could smell the piping hot loaves across the "Meadow" and came running over, sometimes reserving loaves from the next batch. They also seemed to have a sweet tooth as the ginger snaps sold out. Pauline sold several plant starts although we've learned that people want more broccoli and cauliflower than we thought and it's too late to start them now.

For yesterday's market I increased bread production to 16 loaves of non-organic and, due to all the requests from the first week, 8 loaves of organic. All of them sold although we needed all of the market time to do it. I suspect we'll keep the baking constant for the next couple of weeks and maybe add our plum jams, provided we get it successfully acid-tested by the health authority.

The buck stops here

We had another ungulate intrusion Sunday night. The foliage on more Yukon golds, this time at the other end, were sampled. Probably more tomato flowers. All of the edamame. And I didn't mention the hot peppers. Completely defoliated. All in all, though, still not catastrophic but I'm not the type to wait for the (otherwise) inevitable.

Dad and I picked up 3 rolls of stucco wire at Windsor on Monday. After raising the existing plastic fence a couple of feet so that it now rises up about the T-posts a foot before flopping down, we cable tied the stucco wire at ground level. Using un-reinforced T-posts means that we couldn't stretch the wire. Given the uneven terrain, it is impossible to turn corners and adjust to changing elevation without some wrinkles, either at the ground or at the top. So, even now, a deer could conceivably push its way underneath the fence (Dad doesn't think so). To err on the side of caution, we used some heavy duty garden stakes to further pin down a few sections that were particularly suspect. And on the worst one I saw, I weaved a 10' length of electrical metal tubing through the bottom holes.

So far so good. Some tracks on the outside of the fence now and no new ones inside. It's too early to declare victory but I have allowed myself some optimism on this one.

Oh deer

As I sit here contemplating the inaction of a medium size mule deer buck just outside our garden (NOT pictured above), I can't help but realize all of the similarities we share:

We are both taking a break after eating a herbaceous meal (his, various grasses, berries and fallen plums; mine, our own salad mix including arugula and turnips).

The species we belong to have overpopulated our respective habitats (in his defence, we killed off the cougars that would have kept his population in check. In our defence, not having killed the cougars may have also kept our own population in check).

We both subscribe to the notion that we are wild animals and, as such, will do whatever is necessary to not only continue living but to propagate our species. Neither of us hold any straw dog beliefs that humans (or deer) can engineer a way for all of the world's species to live in perfect peaceful harmony.

We both set foot in the garden yesterday and ate from its stock of food.

It is this last point that is causing me the most consternation today. Recall that the land we are using to grow feed - er...food - is borrowed. Since we cannot predict with certainty how long we will be able to continue here, certain compromises had to be made; one of which was to erect a steel post and plastic mesh deer 'barrier' instead of the more expensive and time-consuming high tensile page wire. I use the word barrier in single quotes since any deer worth its antlers should be able to walk right through a plastic fence . That they still have not is a testament to the psychology of deer fencing. But the fact remains that one or more deer has been inside our garden enclosure and some action needs to be taken.

So far, my investigation is inconclusive. Beans and potato leaves were munched and, I suspect, some tomato flowers. Probably some greens were sampled but there were no obvious signs (although someone else might think the butcher job I did with the greens harvester on the lettuce mix bed the other day was the work of a malicious doe). There were no piles of scat which suggests the visit was brief. For that, I am insulted.

Recently a farmer friend suggested that deer would soon become a problem as sources of naturally occurring food whither in the seasonal drought (we've had some rain in the last 2 days but, before that, none for about two months). When I told him about our plastic fence, he advised that we install a 4' width of stucco wire a foot off the ground to protect the critical 1-5' level that the deer test with their heads. While I agree that this would probably be a smart thing to do, I believe the deer are probably getting in underneath the plastic fence since there is no evidence of any fence breakage. Less likely is that they are jumping over its 90" height. Not that they couldn't; just that they probably wouldn't unless they were spooked while inside.

The tracks left in the soil suggest a very conscientious fellow; always staying on the narrow animal-track-width pathways between beds. I have heard stories of them trampling the crop that they didn't eat thus doing twice the damage. But not our buck. Even where the squash vines intersect pathways haphazardly, none were squished by his cloven hooves. Perhaps the deer here have evolved to be responsible crop stewards, never taking too much and not doing gratuitous damage. Or not.

So, what to do. Well, on a Sunday, there are no stores open to even purchase fencing wire so that's out. In any case, I doubt leaving a 1' swath along the bottom is wise, since that's where they're likely getting in. I could extend the wire to the bottom but then it would only be 4' high. I could wrap two widths one on top the other to make 8' but then I will have wasted the existing plastic fence (time and materials) and still not have any guarantee of success.

So I think I'll continue to watch this guy in hour two of my ongoing coverage of The Buck Who's Just Sitting There Being Lazy on a Sunday Afternoon.

Apparently we have another thing in common.

CFF Agronomics - Part One

The 3 R's of waste management take on extra signifigance when the consequences of following them affect the bottom line. And when you are employed in a profession which promises to make financial survival a challenge, reducing expenses takes on a new importance.

Out here on the West Coast lumber practically grows on trees, there's so much of it. Yet, for some reason, the lumber yard still charges ungodly sums for it. So whenever something needs to be built, my instinct is to scrounge around to see what is already on the farm property, at our home in Vesuvius or is otherwise free somewhere near.

Our ailing sandwich board (let half of it rest in pieces), is an example of repurposed junk. It had recently resided in the farmhouse's main floor bathroom as faux maple "wood" panelling over the better-looking 150 year old fir boards which, if I am to believe the story I was told, were themselves likely salvaged from ancient rail car floors. Mary and Blair wisely ripped the panelling out and tossed it outside where her boys turned one of the two 4X8 sheets into a ping pong table. The other full sheet was neatly stored by the tractor shack (the tractor shack was a chicken coup in its previous life). A few weeks ago we contemplated cutting the panelling into a countertop for the new kitchen island.

Good thing Mary doesn't have the internet at her Ontario summer cottage else she would be wondering island? in the kitchen? WTF?!. Happily, she and the boys will get to appreciate the results of their two-month while you were out when they return just before school starts.

The island is actually a hacked-down Home Depot DIY work bench Pauline picked up at a Channel Ridge estate sale (I specify Channel Ridge because, had it been any other neighbourhood, it would have been either a home-made workbench or, at best, a cheesy Mastercraft workbench, made out of plastic and good intentions). We ripped off the backsplash thingy and cut down its two 2X6 uprights flush with the table top and then surfaced it with an old 3/4" sheet of plywood lying around the tractor shack. It took me about an hour with my garage sale belt sander to remove its black paint. Our counter height stools fit under its 14" overhang so that we can sit at it.

Forgive me for I have digressed. We decided that the sanded off black plywood looked a lot nicer as a countertop than the panelling so the panelling remained unused until the sandwich board application. After some yahoo (I have to believe it was a tourist) crunched the board Friday, I spent a half hour Saturday morning cutting another piece from the sheet's remainder to replace the one damaged side. The hard shiny finish acts as a whiteboard. Using hardware I already had from yardsales past, the sandwich cost no more than my time. And that is worth practically nothing these days!

Five pallets resided on the north side of the tractor shack when we arrived in May. They are now arranged so as to contain our compost piles for the cost of some screws. I lined them with compostable SSC burlap coffee sacks to keep the compost from spilling out yet allowing it to breathe.

The roof of our market stand came from discarded galvanized roofing lying amongst a Scotch Broom plantation on the property. Almost completely overgrown near the roofing is an enormous coil of 1/2" steel cable. Not that I need another enormous coil of that. Just sayin'.


Again, the gold mine of the tractor shack area recently yielded a couple of steel ladder-like structures that we are now using to bridge a couple of workstands to create plant start stands. The laying boxes for the property's long gone chickens are now hung on a wall in the tractor shack and used as cubbies.

The current project is to reuse a bunch of lumber to make a solar dryer. The lumber for this project was previously used to build a frame for our polyethylene garden cover for our balcony garden in Vesuvius. The lumber's original use (as far as I know) was as framing material used with steel strapping to hold a bundle of drain pipe in Windsor Plywood's backyard. It was the perfect size for the mini chicken coup I built last September. That stuff plus some distressed OSB and a few discontinued asphalt shingles found their way off their property for a small donation to the staff Christmas party.

And one final example. On Friday I learned that when a lot of water drips off a cookie sheet onto an electric oven element, it first creates a fireworks show before the element breaks. Further, I learned that the local hardware store has a surprising assortment of replacement parts for appliances. Fortunately I had forgotten my wallet at home so I was unable to pay its $43 +HST price. Fortunately, because I had a few moments at home to lament the fact that my teachable moment was going to wipe out half of the day's sales and most of its profit. And then I remembered the scrap metal place up the road. Dad and I drove up there, made some enquiries and left 10 minutes later with a free (no tip accepted) replacement element. They agreed to accept my scrap roofing material as payback.

Unless I think of something else to build with it first. In which case, they can have the broken fridge ... or the old concrete truck bumper ... or the big metal box ... or the steel rim ...or...