August Long

Suddenly, half of the summer is behind us. Whoops, let me try that again. We still have half a summer to enjoy!! Either way, time seems to have gone particularly quickly recently. Hardly a dull moment since we broke soil two months ago. It's as though we had been hit by a farm.

In addition to the vegetative fixtures of radishes and green onions, we have also put our small plums and some of Dragonfly Farm's (Paul and Christina) oregano on the stand. We have one yellow tomato that is probably ripe now but should be picked with both partners present (and perhaps a photographer). The first tomato is special for some reason. Maybe it's the long wait until the fruit appears (some people seed their tomato starts in early February). Maybe it's because I like to eat them so much. And, now, to sell them. We couldn't possibly sell the first one though.

Our first week of farm stand sales has been quite successful although neither of us really knew what to expect. We do know that the money spent for the stand has now been recouped (you know, without counting any input costs or labour or anything, just gross sales). We've met lots of customers and begun the process of understanding what they want. Pauline's plant start sales have been robust and I think we will sell out before long, leaving quite a bit of cash on the table. But that's ok. Assuming we're still here in the spring, I think we'll be able to ramp up spring starts accordingly.

We harvested probably 7 or 8 gallons of small plums on this property and Dragonfly's and we've been making tons of jam for the stand. Value-added products are apparently what you have to do to make money in farming but, in our case, it was to provide farm stand filler as much as it was to be a profit centre.

Another popular product is the no-knead bread I bake. Last year Dayle at Haliburton said that farm stands with baking tended to sell more produce than those without. So last year I baked a lot of bread for their stand. I don't know if it sold more produce but it sure sold a lot of bread.

This week we placed our first sell offer through Growing Up Organic which is basically a middle-man between produce growers and buyers on the island. We offered to sell 5 lbs each of radishes, Hakurei turnips and oregano. Apparently there's not much demand for radishes at the moment but I'm hoping to offload some turnips ... er, that is if they're ready. On Monday, we find out what, if anything, the buyers want us to harvest for them on Tuesday. On Thursday, we submit a new offer for the following week.

In other news: our homespun sandwich board advertising our farm stand products was a victim of a hit and run this afternoon. I actually heard the crunch while lounging in my Lafuma (yes, I know I'm not a real farmer yet), when I heard something like the sound of a car crash but oddly different. Some yelling, then acceleration. When I got to the end of the driveway, there was a truck 500m one way and a car the same distance the other way. No witnesses. I assume it was a hit ordered by Indigo Farm. And you seemed so nice, Kim.

:-)

Walk the plank

The kids play a game at Cusheon Lake that involves some combination of verbal and physical encouragement to get each other to jump off the dock and into the water. Yesterday Laura reminded me of my own childhood trepidation of diving into cool and turbid water. Of course the weather has been nothing but sunny and mid 25C for the last who-knows-how-long so the temperature takes about 2 seconds - for a person with body fat - to adjust to. As for the malevolent creatures who lurk just below the surface, I guess you eventually just assume that the return outweighs the risk.

The lake game reminds me of our little farm venture in that, until you put the product out there for sale, it's mostly theoretical. When Pauline told local gardening guru Linda Gilkeson about our operation and particularly the plant starts, I don't think she could have foreseen what happened next. Linda sends out a weekly gardening email to about a 1000 people and on the last one she mentioned that we had transplants for sale on our farm stand. So while Pauline and I were standing at the edge of the dock discussing the pros and cons of jumping in, behind us Linda leaned forward and shoved, shouting "Water's great!" as we fell forward into the depths.

One of the problems holding us back had been the lack of a farm stand. We had been agonizing about what to build, how much to spend and what to do if we had to move it, either to a different place on the property or off the property altogether.

Solution: carpenter-friend Ron Schroeder who, in record time, managed to build a very skookum cedar farm stand using local lumber. He was also able to use some of the enormous bolts, nuts and timber washers that we collected at a recent garage sale. Ron built it in about 6 main pieces; we put most of it together in an hour and can take it all apart, even the less-skookum metal roof Dad and I scrounged from the property in less than that.



In any case, by Friday at 6pm, we had a great looking stand ready for use the next morning. Then came another twist. We had noticed a number of vehicles including big trucks driving into the pool property across the street. By the time our stand was up, so were a number of outdoor tents and other temporary structures on the pool's outdoor grass field. Someone leaving the pool property later shouted over to us about our great timing; 500 people would be attendance at a weekend swim meet.

Seeing this as an opportunity to make our opening a grander one, we spent the remainder of the evening and much of Saturday morning baking; instead of 8 loaves of bread, I baked 16. Mom baked a few more of her sweet treats. Plus we decided to brew some coffee (although we had to scramble after discovering that the coffee maker was suddenly dead). The reason for all the baking was to fill out an otherwise sparse farm stand since showing a plentiful selection is one of the inviolable rules of having a farm stand. Other than the baking and plant starts, all we had were a few small heads of lettuce, bunches of green onions and radishes.

Our first customers Saturday morning were next door friends Paul and Christina. The pool people mostly stayed at the pool since we later learned that they had their own food fundraiser. At the end of the day, we think we sold about $200 worth of stuff although we can't seem to figure out a 25% inventory discrepancy (i.e. the cash we ended up with was more than the inventory we sold). We also sold two of our silver sebright chickens (a brother and sister) to someone from Mayne Island. Our flock is down to a more comfortable 9 birds; 8 hens and a remaining sebright rooster to mate with our sebright hen (who is NOT related).

All in all it was a decent first day. Not great but not bad. In the next couple of weeks we will be able to slowly transition from less baking to more produce as the vegetables mature. Our radishes are basically ready to harvest (in fact, we will be trying to sell them through Growing Up Organics next week since there will be so many). Fingerling potatoes shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks. Tomatoes, squash, lettuce, spinach another week after that. In a month, we should be firing on all cylinders.

An interesting achievement would be to make $2500 in veggie sales by the end of October since the property owner could then apply for farm status and be eligible for a property tax decrease and there may be benefits for us as well. Time will tell.

Time to really jump in the lake...

When chickens become chicken

From roost to roast, in 24 hours. Thank you, Spider and Ginger.

You were the perfect gentlemen on the way to Colin and Sofya's place in the south end (their O'Brian deserved his fate, relatively speaking, what with his non-stop aggressive mating). Not an impatient squawk or fight in the small cage; just a cockadoodledoo or two, the reason it had to come to this. Perhaps you believed me when I told you we were going to the fall fair early, that you needed to be hung upside down to calm you down before judging.

You didn't feel the razor-sharp Henkel opening your jugular or, if you did, you didn't seem to mind. Your eyes slowly opened and closed as though you were trying to understand something, while the life drained from you. Only the last beats of your heart and the involuntary flapping of your irridescent black and green wings - after you had lost consciousness - were reminders of your previous vitality.

March 1, 2010 -- July 19, 2010. RIP. Handsome in life and tasty on the plate.

The Real Reason the Chicken Crossed the Road

Although this blog feels like Rod’s baby, I felt compelled to write this morning.

I used to love Sunday mornings…taking the time to truly wake up, sipping coffee in bed, rereading the page in my book that I fell asleep to the night before. All while our daughters are sleeping-in…finally! That was until we got roosters. In our journey to sustainability, learning the basics of homesteading and discovering the true source of our food, we have realized that until we own our own acreage, culling chickens is inevitable.

It was just over a year ago that the farmers at Haliburton Farm asked us if we were interested in raising 28 chicks for them. We were excited, knowing it was something we wanted to do for ourselves someday. When we moved to Salt Spring Island, we took two of the hens with us. In fact, Rod built the “Mini Cooper” from recycled materials within a week of moving here.






One of the greatest joys was collecting fresh eggs from our loyal layers. Hannah, 12 at the time, came to enjoy frying them up within minutes of being laid. It would be difficult to imagine not only buying eggs, but cracking an egg with a dull yellow centre. The flavour of free-range chicken eggs is unbeatable.

The girls absolutely fell in love with chickens and we realized what great pets they are. Being part of the Poultry Club not only gave us access to people who knew how to raise chickens lovingly, but we could purchase breeds that most people don’t even know are chickens, like Nunavut, our White Silkie hen. Nunavut is so gentle and tame, that we’ve actually tucked her into our sweater and taken her for a hike to the beach!



Due to our mild winter, hens all over the island went broody sooner than they normally do. For the Valentine’s Day weekend, we borrowed a bantam rooster from a neighbour (we had to create romance somewhere!). He had some success with Ginger, our Rhode Island Red hen. It was a quick romance, for we had to return Joey to his own flock.

Before Ginger was killed by a hawk several days later, she provided us with four fertilized eggs. We placed them under Nunavut, a devoted foster mom, and watched the development of the egg with an egg candler. It was a fantastic experience for us all. Right on schedule (21 days later), we heard peeping and watched the cracking begin.

We squealed with excitement when a little black head appeared from under all that white fluff.



On the second day, Hannah decided to help one chick out of its shell. We had a discussion about nature and whether we should be helping a weak chick. She argued that we do everything we can to save a human baby so without a reasonable argument from me, while lying on her back with the egg on her chest, she proceeded to take away a little bit of shell near its feet. Within minutes, Ginger plopped out onto her black sweatshirt.


Then each subsequent day, for three days, three more chicks hatched, all reddish brown in colour.

Months later (just enough time to forget how much work chicks are), we were offered three Silver Sebright chicks when they were three weeks old. We now know there are two roosters and a hen. Because we have a Silver Sebright hen from another breeder, we’re going to keep one of the roosters for breeding purposes and sell the other two.

We went from two chickens to thirteen within a year and half and the mini cooper is now full. We have a friend who also has roosters and is ready to learn to kill them too. Spider and Ginger, the one who was born on Hannah’s chest, will become soup this week.

And next Sunday morning, I will lie in bed, read and not worry about the cursing neighbours.

Now go and enjoy your favourite Chicken Soup Recipe (I like www.AllRecipes.com). And in the meantime, The Real Reason the Chicken Crossed the Road (thanks to Harry Burton; click on it to enlarge image).

Pauline

There's nothing like burlap on a hot day

Being the organic social butterfly that she is, Pauline recently learned of a new gardening technique that I love. It involves using burlap sacks to germinate seeds.

Saturated with water and laid on soil, they will keep the top of any bed underneath them comfortably moist for a lot longer than bare dark soil, especially on sunny days. Not only does this preserve precious water and avoid its high cost ($6/cubic meter, I'm told), but you are less likely to lead a seed to think it has the right conditions for germination only to go away for the day while it bakes to death. The moist sacks also keep the soil much cooler which is to their liking.

The reason why this technique is so important to us right at the moment is two-fold. First, we are trying to germinate a lot of cool weather crops in very warm sunny conditions. Second, we are trying to do so with Johnny's aforementioned precision seeder which is finicky about the cleanliness of beds. Small stones, roots, even soil that is a little too powdery make furrowing the seed really difficult. If the seeds could be easily buried by a half an inch of soil like the seeder would like to do if it had Eliot Coleman's always-perfectly-moist loamy soil, then the burlap sack technique would still be beneficial but not critical. In our case, although we are fortunate to use the seeder at all, it requires us to set it up to not dig furrows at all but to drop the seeds on top with no furrow.

For the radishes a couple of weeks ago, I sprinkled Special Blend potting mix or plain soil on top of the dropped seed (soil's cheaper and works as well but takes a bit longer to apply) to act in lieu of placing the seed in the intended furrow. That was so two weeks ago. Instead of a soil cover, we now soak coffee sacks in water and then gently place them on the just-seeded beds. Even in hot weather, we can get by watering once per day although we do water lightly at least twice just to be sure.

The carrots started coming up sparsely at 5 days and, in great numbers, at about 8 days. Hakurei turnips, spinach, beets, kale etc germinated in a day or two. I start taking the sacks off once I start seeing a little green or when I feel as though leaving them on would start to impede their growth. I have recently read that someone has successfully ripped out weeds that have grown through the burlap but I'm finding that, except for the grass, we hardly have any weeds. And the grass just laughs at any attempt to weed it without digging down to its roots.

The sacks vary a little in size but are all close enough to bed width of 30" that I use them all with no modifications. When they've done their job on a bed, I'll let them dry out before folding them up and stacking them somewhere.

We were about to put them away this morning and then realized that they would probably work just as well on the numerous plant trays Pauline has started for her new plant start product line (which I hope she will write at some point). Happily, three standard trays laid side to side get covered almost perfectly by one sack.

This technique really isn't a "farm"-scale option but I still think it's quite clever and, if nothing else, really demonstrates the degree to which moisture is important in germination. The precision seeder is appropriate for the small scale farm (i.e. a scale bigger than the large garden we're currently growing on) as far as I can tell but I'll either have to figure out how to make it furrow without getting stuck, or continue using coffee sacks for germination.

Before the roasting operation of Salt Spring Coffee moves to the mainland in a few months, Salt Springers have access to free burlap coffee sacks, used only once. From (a now better-paid organic grower) Juan Valdez to your soil, for the price of a trip to the RoCo (Roasting Company aka SS Coffee).

Help has arrived

When visiting other farm blogs, I sometimes wondered how someone could (presumably) work all day on the land and then still have energy to write about it. The question remains unanswered for me.

Not that we've been working on the farm all day. My parents are visiting the island for the summer and my dad seems to be enjoying helping us grow food as he did in his childhood (instead of the horse-plowing and tyrannical father he's got machine-plowing and tyrannical son). Working 8 hours a day would be a big day for us; we tend to take afternoons off or at least work them in the shade.

For the last week and a half, the weather's been great, maybe even too hot a few days for the plants but great for swimming. Cusheon Lake is surprisingly warm and the kids have really enjoyed being goofy there, especially after their hike-heavy days in camp. Large family meals, sometimes with extra guests, often consume the evening and some of the afternoon. It's not my intention to sound like I'm complaining; just explaining why this post is a long time coming.

Since the last post, we have spent an unbelievable amount of time preparing a clean double-bed for carrots and another double bed for salad greens, spinach, turnips and beet greens. We have hilled the fingerling potatoes, layed more mulch for the squash, installed reemay and dripline on the brassica beds, prepared Varijet irrigation for the salad greens beds, recovered from a windstorm, designed a market stand, prototyped some prepared foods for the stand, collected a couple of laundry sinks and done a little bit of landscaping and a couple of minor kitchen renovations. P has embarked on what we think will be an excellent product line; winter plant starts. She and my mom went nuts on seeding small pots a couple days ago.

The row crops are generally growing well although the pac choi is bolting and getting eaten (the reemay was too late getting on and, now, increasing the heating underneath for a crop that would prefer cooler conditions). All the potatoes look good, the tomatoes have no blight in a blight-heavy year and the carrots, using a germination technique that local gardening guru Linda Gilkeson recommended, are coming up nicely. I have much more to say on all of this but, for now, I will leave it at that.

One man’s junk

P will rue this day for quite a while. She helpfully informed me this morning that a guy up the road was liquidating his tools and hardware. At first I didn’t want to go because I was motivated to get started on covering the brassicas with floating row cover. But I knew that sometimes you can get really useful things for next to nothing. So we went.

Again, it was P’s eagle eye that spotted the opened but nearly full boxes of nails and screws for $2 or $5. And then the boxes of large and really, really large bolts, washers and nuts, one box weighing 113 lbs. And then the boxes and pails of joist hangers and the like. For $60, we got so much stuff that the “farm truck” suspension was fully … suspended and P had to walk home. But before she left, she enquired about any tables for sale. Just one, it turned out. For another $5, a stainless steel table, perfect for potting. Delivery included.



Yesterday, we prepped the second half of a double bed, the first half already planted out in lettuce and brassica transplants. Then I used the handy-dandy uber-expensive Johnny’s precision seeder to seed 12 closely spaced rows of 3 kinds of radishes. The seeder is designed to dig a narrow furrow for each of the 6 hoppers. But, unless the bed is extremely clean i.e. NO gravel, sticks, root balls, it will get hung up and fail to seed. The workaround for this is to bring the furrow-digging shovels to above-ground. Doing this allows the seeder to progress smoothly over the bed and to drop the seed on the surface of the bed.

The problem then is how to keep the seed from drying out. For half of the planting, I sprinkled “Special Blend” organic potting mix on top. For the other half, I simply shovelled loose soil on top. Then I got out a garden hose and a wand sprayer and wetted the whole planting. I wetted it a few times in the following several hours since it quickly ran off the slight slope, especially at first. Towards the end of the work day, the water was soaking in nicely. I'll be interested to see which covering works best.

After the radishes, we started setting out the bunching onions. You may recall our Day one of this venture in which we seeded a bunch of soil blocks. For bunching onions, P prefers not having individual blocks but rather one whole tray in which seed is broadcast evenly and densely. Onion seed is tiny so separating individual seeds would have been time consuming. After 4 weeks of growth, the onions were about 4 inches tall and there were probably 500 in the tray (this would have required about 15 trays had we used 2”X2” blocks).

To set them out, we first soaked the powdery dry soil with water and made sure the soil in the tray was also moist. Then we dug shallow bed-width furrows every 2 inches. We grabbed a handful of onions with their roots and soil and gently separated each onion from the others in the bunch, layed its thin roots in the furrow and pressed a bit of soil around each onion stalk to try to make it stand up. We planted each furrow to a 2 or 3” spacing so the overall area of bunching onions is still fairly compact; 30” by perhaps 10 feet.

If all goes well, we’ll harvest radishes, bunching onions and salad greens all at the same time in about 3 weeks. At that time, our next succession of salad greens plant starts should be ready for transplant into the same bed. Since we also have broccoli, cauliflower and cabbages in this bed, we’ve had to install a row cover to protect the lot from the cabbage moth, one of which P spotted yesterday and sent away with a stern rebuke.

A technique that’s all the rage in the Johnny’s world is to use 10' lengths of electrical metal tubing (EMT) bent into a semi-circle to make a 6' wide by 3' high ribs. Spaced at 4' between ribs and covered with spun bond fabric (Reemay), crops can be kept a little warmer at night and not too hot during the day plus airborne pests can be kept out (seed growers also use it to keep certain crops isolated from wind-blown pollen and pollinators in order to avoid genetic crossing). I also plan to use EMT with a polyethylene cover to keep our low-growing bed of melons, squash, peppers and basil hot in the summer and fall. For the winter harvest, I'll use the EMT with poly for keeping salad greens growing.

Using a semi-circle of plywood as a jig, I bent 20 lengths of EMT for the brassica beds. It's hard to shove in the ends of the EMT into soil, particularly soil that's so stony, so I first used a thick length of rebar and a hammer to make 6" deep pilot holes. Once the ribs were up, I dug a narrow trench 3" deep just outside each side of the ribs. Then I spooled off 80' of reemay along one side of the ribs and began burying one edge of it in the trench before filling with soil and compacting with foot pressure. I did about 10' on each side before crossing over to the other side to bury that side's edge. The ends got the same treatment.

The 6' width of the ribs cover 2 - 30" wide beds plus the 12" footpath between them. One thing I forgot to do was lay down drip line on the second bed. Now I'll either have to commandeer a small maneuverable child to run the drip line inside the tunnel or untrench the reemay on one side.

On wheat

It's Canada Day today and, to celebrate, a very light rain fell in the morning. I was grateful for that because I wasn't feeling great and didn't feel like hauling (yet more) stones. The weather somehow justified staying indoors. In addition, the harvest wheat I planted a week ago started to germinate and I wondered whether I would have to figure out a way to irrigate it. Problem solved, for now.

Why did we plant wheat? First, because it was the only cover crop seed that we had at the farm. We bought it at Top Shelf in Duncan on a whim. Second, because it will look nice in the fall when M and kids return from Ontario. Third, the leftover seed from the 25kg sack can been used as chicken feed and for human food.

We did not plant it because we thought it would make a good cash crop or promote food security to any significant degree*. Others on the island think there's money to be had and are currently growing it. I don't begrudge anyone from growing wheat here but I would recommend that anyone who considers the prospect first sharpen their pencils. Once our own wheat heads up but before the seed gets too viable, I plan to under sow some winter pea and then crimp the wheat down to kill it.

The new grain partnership I'm aware of on this island has three members who have bought a used combine. Say what you will about using fossil fuels in farming but unless you are a gifted scyther with a lot of energy in September - right after the wheat is ripe and just before the rains come - you pretty much need some mechanization to produce the harvest before it rots. In the case of the partnership, the combined acreage should be large enough that, provided the crop is clean enough and of good quality ... and considering that it will be organic, they will be able to realize a decent profit. Everyone else has their work cut out for them.

As a volunteer on an organic farm a couple of years ago, I was handed a pair of scissors and a wicker basket and told to cut wheat heads off of the small stand they had planted. It wasn't physically hard work but I had a difficult time with it mentally when I calculated that a combine could have likely done the job of our 10 person-hours in about 3 seconds. There really is no competing with a Great Plains grain farmer. Having said that, Foxglove Farm is offering a small scale grain growing workshop this summer and perhaps there really is a way to make money in grains. In the past I have considered purchasing a sickle bar mower attachment for the BCS; there might be an economic payback using that scale of equipment.

It seems to be accepted wisdom these days that it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of food. I won't dispute that only because it is meant as a North American average and, as such, it may motivate some people to grow their own food or to buy food locally. But the number itself is subject to all sorts of assumptions such as regional and seasonal variation. I highly doubt an organic farmer in California consumes 10 calories of fuel for every calorie she consumes. If she were, then the weather observer stationed in Yellowknife would probably be consuming 1000.

In reality, the 10:1 figure, as useful as it is in soundbite form, should be analyzed by the individual in order that growers, in particular, don't start making uneconomic crop planning decisions. After all, growing food beyond basic sustenance is a business like most others and is subject to all sorts of economic forces like supply and demand. In addition, it is subject to natural conditions like climate and soil. There may be a large demand for pineapples on Salt Spring but there is no economical way to grow them here.

Some distinction needs to be made in the form of food calorie being produced. Conventionally grown wheat on the prairies undoubtedly uses copious fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides but, per calorie, I suspect it would be much lower than conventionally grown lettuce mix in California simply because the calorie density of wheat is so much higher than that of lettuce. Most fruits and vegetables are 90%+ water whereas dried wheat is ideally 14% moisture. Furthermore, because lettuce is so perishable, it needs to be moved quickly - often by inefficient air transport - to its distant markets. Grain, on the other hand, is shipped for much of its distance via slow but cheap rail or water and shows up at market in almost perfect shape.

The ultimate proof of this phenomenon is seen in the grocery store. Every two or three months the local stores discount a 10kg sack of flour to $5. For comparison, I'll guess a 1 lb head of romaine goes on sale for $1 from time to time. At those rates, the lettuce is 100 times more expensive per calorie than the wheat. Without doing the math, I'll guess that any combination of organic and locally grown prices for those crops will follow the same basic relationship. And even if I'm out by a factor of 10, can there be any doubt as to why it makes more sense to grow salad greens here than wheat, at least for the time being? As oil - and Californian water! - gets less affordable, the equation should shift even more decidedly in the direction of growing salad greens and other water-dense crops locally. Shipping water is silly.

The problem then is how to produce water-heavy produce like salad greens during the winter when most people have put their gardens to bed. I believe it is the winter when we in Canada eat the most of our yearly fossil fuels. In future posts I hope to explain the techniques Eliot Coleman has popularized for the medium-scale organic farm as I put them into practise this summer and fall for the winter harvest.


* I reserve the right to completely change my mind on this.