Balance

The whole farmin' thing has been in low gear for a little while due to a camping trip last weekend. I think about the farm quite a bit when I'm not there but not in an anxious way. It's actually working out like I wanted it to; working like the turtle instead of the hare. We're not likely to make a lot of cash at this venture, at least not at the start so best to not stress about it and start working too hard.

Just the same, yesterday P and I loaded up the car with a bunch of plant starts and seed and worked a few hours in the afternoon; me setting up irrigation and soil-prepping beds and P setting out broccoli, pak choi, cauliflower and other starts.

While on the road for the camping trip, we passed by a Buckerfields in Parksville and picked up two half rotten sacks of yukon gold seed potatoes at a very steep discount. On Monday, L and I went to the farm where I began by power-harrowing the bed to kill the rejuvenating orchard grass and to expose a bunch more stones (not that the potatoes care about stones). Then, once again, I used the rotary plow to dig a 6" deep trench in the middle of the bed. L and I then dumped out the seed, separated the completely rotten from the slightly rotten and chucked the good ones in the trench around 8" apart. We managed to space them out to fill about a 90' row.

I think it will be important to water them frequently but sparingly. Unlike the irrigation catalog pictures where the dripline leaves perfectly round, evenly-spaced dinner plate-sized wet spots on top of the soil, ours leaves irregular shaped coffee mug-sized wet spots. The irregularily is a function of not having perfectly a flat or plumb bed; the small size presumably due the particularly sandy soil we have. I imagine the water dripping not exactly straight down but at such a small angle with vertical that we'll have to be careful how we plant things so as not to starve them of moisture. The potatoes should be fine since each seed starts out about 6" below the surface and therefore has a very good chance of getting hit by one or the other of the 8"-centred drips tapering down around it. But, even though the potatoes will see water, it will be a fleeting sight since the water is basically being flushed through. A more clayey soil would work like a sponge to soak up and hold the water so that a good watering once every few days would suffice. We may want to water more than once a day.

Today was very rockocentric. I had meant to plant some bush beans (canellini, red kidney, edamame and garbanzo) but there were just too many stones to remove. Again, the beans wouldn't care but I feel as though I should get as many stones as I can out of the soil while I have the mental energy to do so. The only bed where it's critical to remove them is the carrot bed (and turnips if we do them). P and I spent a considerable amount of time removing stones from our friends' carrot bed and, still, you can tell where the Nelsons have had to curl around obstacles. They're still crunchy and sweet and they're striaght enough to be marketable but they would be better if they were all perfectly straight. Today, after removing all the obvious stones on top or just below the surface, I power harrowed the bed yet again. It was as though we had never pulled any stones out! You could set the rotating tines of the harrow jump on top of almost unbelievably large stones only a few inches below the surface. I guess I picked about a whole ton of stones today.

The Fence

What an exciting day. The T-posts finally arrived at Slegg so I picked up those and a few rolls of plastic fencing as my first order of business today. We started banging away shortly after 10am. Despite the soil being full of stones, the T-posts went in pretty easily. A few got sidetracked and had to be bent back to make them plumb. I built a wide gate out of 2"X2" that I'm not particularly proud of; well, not until I finish reinforcing it so it doesn't wobble. It's hung on a T-post supported by another T-post 10' away. It's ok for the short term but it too is kinda hokey. I was planning to build a tomato trellis using T-posts but now I'm wondering whether they will be strong enough.

The 7' black plastic polypropylene fence went up really quickly and easily but whether it actually keeps deer out is the question. At 7', deer can jump over or through it but probably won't unless they're spooked. This is more likely to happen if we leave the gate open and then try to get it out too aggressively. High tensile page wire would have been the preferred option except that we don't know how long we'll be on this land. If we get kicked off or leave voluntarily, we'll be able to take everything down even easier than it went up. Page wire would have been more costly up front, more time and harder to take down and re-use.


While I was finishing up the fence, P planted our 40 tomato starts, about half of which came from Haliburton (thanks Marty, Elmarie and Dale). They're all completely mixed up so when a tomato appears ripe, we will pick it and see how it tastes. We also planted a bunch of campari tomatoes that I started from seed which are probably my favourite supermarket frankenhybrid. I read on the internet (so I assume it's true) that, despite it being a crazy trademarked license-only hybrid, it will produce fruit much like its parent fruit. We'll see.

Next on deck: squash. The starts we got from Hali have tons of flowers and even some fruit but are starting to seriously wilt in their 3" pots. I may delay the tomato trellis until after the squash are in.

10 on Planning

In 1994 I was a budding air traffic control student - or DRIFT* - at the Transport Canada Training Institute in Cornwall, Ontario. In 6 weeks, you were brought from a person who could name only three manufacturers of aircraft, in my case Boeing, Airbus and Cessna, to a person who could "control" a bunch of simulated aircraft at the surprisingly busy fictitious "March" Airport which was always cloudy and needing IFR control. To separate the wheat from the chaff, a series of 4 evaluations or "E-vals" were used. To pass an eval, you had to make sure you didn't have too many "sep losses" or losses of a minimum measure of separation (altitude, distance, time). But you could also lose a lot of points by simply not planning for an expeditious and orderly flow of traffic. If this wasn't included, a student could conceivably restrict all airplanes from entering the airspace and refuse departure clearance from flights wanting to depart the airport; safe, yes but you can already hear the phone ringing with irate dispatchers. You got -10 points for a sep loss and up to -10 points for each instance of lack of planning. At the time, whenever we goofed outside of class due to a failure to predict some consequence, we would say "10 on planning".

And so it is that I have given myself a 10 on planning. I am waiting for 10' steel T-posts which I will use to construct a deer fence and tomato trellis. I had planned to use 10' lengths of electrical metal tubing in an electric fence setup but the plastic insulators I bought were too small to fit on the tubes. Bigger insulators were a lot more expensive and would have to be ordered in from the US. As well, everybody I talked to figured T-post and plastic mesh would be better than electric. The local guys, Slegg Lumber, are great because their prices are the same as their Vancouver Island locations and their T-posts were a lot cheaper than anyone else on Salt Spring or Saanich. But they only had 7 in stock. The rest were supposed to come Wednesday but they didn't and now I'm looking at Monday at the earliest. There wouldn't be any huge rush to put in the fence except that we've got a bunch of tomato and squash plants in 3" pots that are beginning to set fruit. It's time to let them spread their roots. Had I prototyped the electric fence option a little earlier, I would have come to Plan B earlier and I wouldn't be fretting about this.

Lesson learned?

Maybe.



* Dirty Rotten Insignificant F*&king Trainee, used by licensed controllers in referring to future colleagues ... or to future disgruntled wash-outs

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Progress is a process, I profess. And the process of removing stones is yielding progress, slowly but surely. Mind you, at 10:30 yesterday morning, I wasn't feeling quite so positive. Fortunately, my 3-slice PBJ sandwich with a litre of milk at 11 made a big difference in energy, both mental and physical.

My work pattern has been to work from around 8:30 in the morning until noon and then to return in the afternoon or evening. June has continued where May left off - cool with showers - so working in the afternoon is reasonably easy. But, assuming we eventually get summer weather, I plan to not be outside, at least not in the sun, during the afternoon. Mornings and evenings seem to agree with me.

Back to the stones. I have been reluctant to run my BCS rototiller through the soil and risk breaking tines (or worse) because of the stones. But after today's 5 or 6 hours of hand removal, I decided to take a chance. On the shallowest setting of the tiller, I carved out a rough perimeter within the west plot. Although there was a lot of noise at times, I didn't feel a lot of nastiness under the housing and the result was what seemed to be a dense sprinkling of medium-sized stones left standing on top. Collecting these will be relatively easy compared to having to dig for them. I figure two complete passes with the tiller with a pickup between and at the end will leave the beds in pretty good shape.

It might seem as though removing stones shouldn't be a high priority however my experience last year was that you simply have to deal with them eventually anyway; may as well deal with them without a crop in the way. Plus, when you're in the weeding, harvesting or irrigating zone, it's tough mentally to get into the rock-removal zone. The stone you expose while hoeing just ends up sitting there for days or weeks because it seems too much of a hassle to remove. And then you end up seeing it (and others) day in and day out.

Having nearly rock-free soil though is important in order to use all the fancy efficiency tools I have bought from Johnny's. The stirrup of the Swiss-made wheel hoe will not last as long or be as effective if it's constantly dredging up new stones. The precision seeder will not drop or bury seeds very well if there are stones (or other soil obstacles). Even the greens harvester might be harder to use if stones are sticking up above an otherwise perfectly flat bed. All this efficiency takes a capital investment of time which, theoretically, pays off forever more.

Finally, there is yet another reason for this time-consuming process. It has only been about 12 days since the soil was turned over. All of our stone and clod removal disrupts the root systems of the old orchard and reed canary grass from re-establishing themselves. Not that they won't anyway but it should be less. There are probably also trillions of seeds from those grasses that will now find ideal conditions to grow in. But we should be able to keep on top of that better if we aren't also dealing with lots of existing root balls.

There. I'm convinced. Time to get back to rocking.

Eating an Elephant

I have always disliked the riddle that rhetorically asks how one would eat an elephant. Because, really, who wants to eat elephant in the first place? Besides its marginal flavour and texture, wouldn't you feel bad about doing that in the first place? But, besides that, who has a freezer big enough to hold 3 tons of meat? And "one piece at a time"? Really? This answer is unlikely to motivate the lazy.

In the same way, I despise the riddle I just made up that asks how one would de-rock a half acre of land on Salt Spring Island. One rock at a time may eventually get the job done but at what cost? A lost season of growing? A slipped disk? Sanity? During the process of removing over 3 tons of rocks - so far! -, you have ample opportunity to consider the question.

The engineer part of me calculates that if there are 4 million stones larger than a golf ball to pick up and we pick up 4 thousand stones per day, then there is a 1000% chance that there will be volcanic eruption that will spew fresh stones before we can get the last of the existing stock off. (Engineering assumption: we are immortal).

The accountant part of me thinks that it would be worthwhile to get a rock picking machine in to do the work. But, Andy, the rock-rake, rockpicker-equipped guy on the island said he couldn't really help (plot too small for his picker, rake too coarse to help much plus it would bury lots for the future).

The grunt part of me doesn't think about it that much at all. Thus the job is nearly half done ... on the west plot.


________


I picked up a couple of free sacks of seed potatoes from Integrity a couple of weeks ago that I hoped to plant. They were on their last eyes at the time but they were thoroughly rotten when I opened the bag up on Friday to plant them. But the fingerlings from Haliburton were still ok so I planted 80 feet of them. Here's hoping.

I also rejuvenated the tomatoes we got from Hali. Even in 6" pots they quickly dry out unless we water them every day. Which is difficult because I put them on top of the equipment shack to thwart the deer. It looks like it might be several more days until we can set them out so I mixed up a rich batch of kelp water in a pail and held each pot under water while I trimmed the low branches and the suckers. We also brought them home and put them on the balcony so we can look after them better.

Having a farm that is not in the back yard is challenging, just as it was last year at Hali. However, this year the renters, who are so kindly letting us use their backyard, are returning to their home province for the summer so we will be subletting the house for July and August. That will be VERY convenient.

Day Four and Day 50

We enjoyed a fossil fuel fiesta today as Ron's 50HP Massey Ferguson rotovated the bejeesus out of a half acre of gravelly soil. The odd person probably knows how long it would have taken to scythe all the orchard grass and use a team of oxen to plow that much ground but suffice it to say that it would have taken quite a while and, by the way, those oxen would have needed a fair bit of acreage for their solar-based fuel. All to say that this transition to a lower energy lifestyle burns a lot of gas. So, muchas gracias to all you long dead dinosaurs who were converted to entropy today. Your sacrifice did not go unnoticed.







Unlike the sacrifices of some recent dinosaurs who, in the last 75 or so years, have taken it upon themselves to feed the backyard soil with batteries, plastic, glass, styrofoam, steel, golf balls, leather ... junk shots only BP could love, on Day 50 of the current poster-child disaster of our waning industrialization.






Many thanks go out to our friend and soon-to-be next door neighbour Paul who lent a hand picking stones after every pass of the rotovator and who drove the BCS in dump cart mode with poise and determination. Between the 4 of us (Pauline and Mary, too), our rock pile equates to 500lb per year of post-secondary education. Being such smartypantses, we're shooting for 600.

BTW, highlight of the day? Riding down Rainbow Road to Windsor Plywood with the BCS/dump cart. (Not shown: slack jaw, corn cob pipe, drawl)

We Rock!

Today we had the owner's brother out with his real tractor to break ground, just like people have been doing for hundreds of years, except for the fossil fuel-burning diesel engine. The brother was quite concerned about all the stones but it was pretty much what we were expecting. Every other chunk of land we've gotten down and dirty on has had everything from gravel to 100 lb boulders. We spent about 2 hours today picking them out and moving them to a single pile, which we hope will harbour slug-eating snakes.


We've come a long way from our fancy-shmancy university-attendin', button-pushin', color-wheel flippin', email-sendin' days. Well, ok, we're still in our email-sendin' days. But today was just hard grunty work unlike what we've become used to. And there's more to do tomorrow! And, I'm guessing, every day after that. But for now we've begun building a monument to commemorate this new lifestyle.

The Birth of a Small Farm

It's as official as it gets. We have started to farm. The grass has been cut, the seeds received, the farm name has been picked and the family is excited. Let's remember this when the weeds are out of control, the deer are munching on the pak choi and the chickens have become raccoon food.

It seems like we've been waiting for this moment for a looong time and, now that it's here, you'd think we'd be completely ready. And maybe we are, but suddenly it doesn't feel like it.

The land is located less than a kilometre from the heart of Ganges on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. The property is owned by a third generation Salt Springer. He is renting it to friends of ours who have been nice enough to let us use the large back yard for growing food. In all, we will probably break ground on around a half acre.



The topography slopes down from the house to the headwaters of three small creeks which sounds like it would be too wet to farm but it's not. In fact, we're told that in a couple of weeks the ground there will be dry enough to till. The slope in places could make it tricky to work so we may have inconsistent bed spacing but, at this point, I'm more concerned about rocks. Just about every farm we've been to on the west coast has been quite stony which can be a challenge to work with the walk-behind tractor we own.

We met the owner today who seems really happy that the soil is being worked. He inherited the property when his parents died several years ago. Yesterday, with my BCS 853 walking tractor and 26" flail mower, I took about 4 hours to cut the 6' tall orchard and reed-canary grass. We will be meeting his brother tomorrow who will probably be breaking the ground for us with his 4 wheel tractor and a suitable implement.



After meeting the owner today, we went to the post office and picked up our seed order which came in the nick of time. After dinner, we seeded a few hundred soil blocks. Our plan is to see what we can grow during the summer given that we will be fighting with our own inexperience and all the grasses that have flourished on the land for many years. Hopefully in a couple of months we will have weakened the grass enough that the crops for our winter harvest will thrive for that is the point; to provide food during the time of year when there is little to be found locally.