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My new post entitled Resilience is now hosted here.

Chicken update

We have not suffered a chicken fatality for several weeks. Having said that, about a month ago, Hannah was asking whether we could get more chickens and just as I was about to respond that we should wait just a little longer, something dropped almost straight down through a hole left in the baling twine I strung up across the pen. I shouted and began running up a small hill toward the pen. Suddenly, it leaped straight up and flew away. Hannah thought it was a falcon. I cannot say one way or the other. Anyway, no bird was hurt. Our rooster, who was reasonably new at the time, played some part in that as well. If someone tries to pick up one of the 8 hens, he's all hackles and squawking. Good Noodle.

Recall that our chicken coop is a re-purposed kid playhouse that I have written about in A New House and On Building Codes. For the last couple of months, the farm house tenants, Mary and Blair, have been helping us with the flock by suggesting solutions to some of the problems we'd been having . They also let the flock out in the morning and closed them in at night. Chickens are pretty easy that way; they willfully go out at dawn and in at dusk. All you have to do is put their food in a rodent proof container and close the coop door at night and the converse in the morning.

We leave the water outside through the night except when it's frosty in which case having the water in the coop can sometimes keep it from freezing. As a rule, though, keeping the water in the coop allows the hens to drink at any time (slight advantage) but also allows them much more time to defecate in the same water which is, gulp, a bit gross and a big disadvantage. The water also gets splashed around making an area already prone to winter damp that much wetter.

I once babysat a flock in which both food and water were kept in the coop full time. This basically forces the flock to spend an awful lot of time consuming and walking around in their own excrement. I had to hold my breath in order to go in and collect the eggs, the ammonia was so concentrated. And it showed on the hens. Dull, worn-out-looking, lethargic, missing lots of feathers (which was also the result of having too many mean roosters). Of course, the eggs were certified organic and fetched an attractive price at the health food store; that the SPCA would probably shut down the operation wasn't disclosed on the carton.

Maybe our experience there makes us go a little overboard with our own flock. Our coop is VERY well ventilated. I re-purposed a salvaged steel gate which just happened to be exactly the right width to fit inside the south doorway (I was in my very happy place when installing this gate). This allows us to keep the south wooden door wide open during the day. A sprinkle of lime in their bedding from time to time may also be helping. It also helps that the chickens congregate at the south end and deposit 2/3rds of their droppings there. We move the bulk of it to a compost pile every few days. As a result, there's hardly any smell in the coop.

But I digress. Sometimes Mary and Blair go away and are unable to do chicken duty so we have to do it. Since we live a 7 or 8 minute drive away, it kinda sucks to have to do this, if there's no other reason to drive into town. Solution: automatic chicken coop door opener. Made in Germany (I think), bought online from a UK distributor, this gadget is completely contained in a 6"X6"X3" clear plastic water-resistant box. Inside are batteries (included), a motor and some electronics including a photocell to measure light intensity. A 60cm length of fishing line is extended and retracted out the bottom to respectively lower and raise a door, based on ambient light.



The user has to build the actual door although this could hardly have been easier. Adjacent the north door, I cut a rectangular hole through the exterior .5" plywood sheathing big enough for an average sized rooster to walk through without ducking. Then I made two L-channels, each using two lengths of 1X2 screwed together lengthwise at right angles, which I attached to the sheathing on each vertical side of the hole. Then I cut a rectangular piece of plywood (maximum allowable weight 3kg) a little larger than the hole which slides up and down along the outside of the sheathing, guided by the L-channels. On the top of the door, I pounded in a fence staple which held the end-loop of the fishing line. You can mount the motor box in almost any orientation if you don't mind using pulleys but I chose the simplest; right above the middle of the door. Four screws and you're pretty much done.

Mary and Blair were curious about its operation and were concerned about the chickens getting left outside the first night so they went out around sunset and observed. The chickens, accustomed to entering through the human door, were pecking on it, as if the coop gods would open it for them...which they pretty much did since it was already cold and darkish. Shortly after, the chicken door closed (which takes about a 60 seconds; no cartoonish guillotine action to be seen).

In the few days after installation, they got used to the new door and the ramp that I built for them. With the human door closed, they had to figure out how to get in order to lay their eggs. After a couple of nights they got it. Any future birds we add should be fine as they will take the others' lead.

It got cold here in February with a few nights around -5C. I'm not sure what temperature the chickens are good down to but we started using a heat lamp just in case. We were also not getting many eggs. After we started using the light, production increased. I think we're of two minds about that, though. Hens apparently only have only so many eggs to lay in their lifetime; if you induce them out earlier, they will simply run out earlier in life. In general we prefer to let them live as naturally as possible. As long as it stays above freezing, I think we'll go without using artificial heat/light.

Uh-oh

Update: well that was a dud, fortunately. The poly covers on the LOW tunnels blew off, as expected, but the new transplant tunnel was fine as was the garage-in-a-box. There were some strong gusts here - stuff on our home south-facing balconey got tossed around - but the fact that our farm is on the north slope of Mt.Belcher prevented this south-winded storm from getting us. Some place on NW Vancouver Island got a 170km/h gust, though, so Environment Canada was right to put out those warnings.


I may have two high tunnels to build this spring...

Shopping Spree - Chorus Frog Farm Style

One if the laments I had the misfortune of hearing too many times from a very experienced farmer on the island was that farm supplies were very expensive and hard to find on the island. He cut his agricultural teeth in California where the scale of most things agricultural is enormous and where, naturally, farm supplies are ubiquitous, plentiful and cheap. All I have to compare to Salt Spring prices and selection are other places on Vancouver Island but, even with this small sample size, I can confirm that yes, things really are expensive or non-existent here.

Because a lot of the things I need on the farm cannot be shipped here economically, I make lists of required supplies and wait until a required off-island trip needs to be taken. Since we moved here, our 13-year-old's orthodontics appointments have been that reason, most times. Having braces is a joyous experience for a kid so we don't mind adding to her pleasure with an ortho day filled with ferries, driving and queues. Pauline always tries to get into the act by scheduling a decorating consultation for one of her clients.

The theme of this trip was high tunnel #2 (The Big One) supplies shopping. I needed polyethylene, poly track and galvanized pipe. We also wanted chicken feed, straw bedding, lime and potting mix. This is the anatomy of our trip:

(Prior evening: Pick up Duncan's F150 4X4 extended cab long box.)

6:30am Wake and breakfast


7:00 Go to town to drop off 12 loaves of bread baked evening before to health food store, feed vacationing friends' sheep and cat , and pick up almost empty propane tank from transplant tunnel


7:30 Back at home. Load truck with misc stuff for trip.


7:50 Make sure 10-year-old is almost ready for her ride to school in 15 minutes. Leave for Vesuvius ferry.


8:05 Depart Vesuvius


8:30 Arrive Crofton on Vancouver Island


8:45 In Duncan, BC, exchange Mastercrap 3/8" hammer drill for brand spanking new Mastercrap 3/8" hammer drill (for the second time. I expect to do this two more times before I realize that I should just throw the gall-dang thing out and stop wasting my time. I mean, you get used to the burning smell after a while). Meanwhile, Pauline shops for shoes for her new job and enquires at Rona about the price of their organic potting mix she sees inside a corral in the parking lot. When the bepimpled teen clerk tells her to go back outside to get the UPC, she realizes she would rather spend her money at the ag store we like in Saanich which is only 7 hours down the road)


9:10 Load up on organic chicken feed and hay at the feed store in south Duncan


9:30 Leave Duncan and travel the Malahat Highway to Victoria.


9:50 Pit stop in Mill Bay for gas. Probably the cheapest gas in BC is on a 50 km stretch from Mill Bay to Ladysmith


10:15 Arrive Victoria. At Evergro, load 32'X100' roll of polyethylene (which weighs 94 pounds, BTW), 228' of polylock aluminum extrusion with wiggle wire (more on this in a future post), and 12 bags of lime

10:45 Arrive Victoria Chinatown and find parking on Fisgard for the truck with 3' of aluminum extrusion hanging off the back (finding a spot this big here will NEVER happen again) while the girls buy 200 sheets of nori (we make a lot of sushi rolls)


11:00 Arrive Pier 1 and purchase counter-height stools for our new rental house on Salt Spring (yay, ocean view and room to spare come April 1)


11:20 Depart Victoria


11:40 Arrive Saanich and have 13-year-old's braces tweaked. Two more appointments and they're off. Wait one year and the next 12-year-old can start, cash permitting. I also find watch batteries (on sale!) for a Kill-a-Watt-like device that I'll use on the farm to keep track of how much hydro we're using which Mary and Blair are currently paying for. Meanwhile, Pauline meets her real estate agent/boss and exchanges documents. Pauline has a lot of jobs. Such is the life of a farmer's wife.


12:00 Lunch with good friend Marty from our farm days at Haliburton two years ago. Marty's specialty was plant starts and she made relatively good money doing so. Family commitments are preventing her from continuing this so she generously gave Pauline all of her planting schedules and sales records from the last year which has been a great resource. This is our thank you to her. In the parking lot after lunch, she slips us some salmon filets and ground moose, both harvested by her husband Steve. We slip her a raisin bread.

1:40 Leave Saanich and drive back to Victoria for Pauline's decorating consultation at 2:00. Meanwhile, I go to Staples for a printer ink exchange and then to the plumbing supply store for 210' of 3/4" sched 40 galvanized water pipe which is waaay cheaper than getting it through Windsor. Right in the parking lot, I cut the 21' lengths (no, I have no idea why it's 21' and not 20') into 2- ~8.5' lengths and a ~4.25' length so I can fit them in the truck box better. 10 minutes before I finish cutting, Pauline texts that she is done decorating.

3:15 Pick up Pauline and head back up the peninsula to the cheapest propane filler I know of ($18 for a 20lb BBQ tank compared to $21-24 elsewhere). Then further north to one of our favorite ag suppliers, Integrity Sales, in Saanich. Pick up 6 bales of potting mix, 25 128-cell plug flats, roll of baler twine, and a couple of pounds of crimson clover seed.

4:07 Step on it for 5:00 ferry to the extent that a 20 year old F150 can be persuaded to accelerate with its rear suspension sagging under so much weight. Who knows what the evening traffic will be to Salt Spring on a Friday in mid-February?

4:10 Wait a second! That potting mix we just picked up isn't the organic version!

4:13 Return to Integrity, unload non-organic potting mix, re-load with almost-identically-packaged organic mix while Pauline goes inside to pay the upcharge (that's why it was so cheap!)

4:20 Leave Integrity for the second time, with double the concern for the ferry.

4:35 Arrive Swartz Bay in Lane 34 (usually 31 when it's dead). This might be close.

4:55 Yay! Made it! Next ferry would have been 2 hours later.

5:35 Arrive Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring and drive to friends John and Lara to make sushi dinner and pick up 10-year-old.

10:30 Arrive home. Tired, but satisfied.

The shopping spree actually continued on Salt Spring the next day at Windsor where I picked up 34 20' lengths of 1.25" sched 40 PVC and 90' of 3" PVC sewer pipe for the top purlin. Why Windsor sells this stuff so cheap I cannot say but, hey, I'll take it. Also picked up some lumber.

Two-day total for high tunnel supplies: ~$1600

Other ag supplies plus ferries, gas and lunch: ~$450

I'm sure we'll make that up easily with all of our blue tomato plant starts and produce sales this summer. But seriously, the bulk of the total is capital expense meant to provide a means of income for several years. Many new small businesses have high start up costs and we fit that bill nicely. I do, however, look forward to being mostly built-up on this property and just concentrating on growing stuff and not spending so much cash. Despite these recent purchases for the high tunnels, this year's expenses should be less than last year's which were much lower than '09, when I bought all the tractor stuff. And, presumably, this year's revenue will be much higher than last year's.

Mexicowichan: The Soils of Chorus Frog Farm

Recently Pauline was helping her co-workers at the Salt Spring Island Conservancy clean out some old resourses in their library. They had an extra copy of "Soils of the Gulf Islands of British Columbia: Volume 1 Salt Spring Island" survey done in 1987 so she was allowed to take it.

What a gold mine. The publication itself is comprised of a 4'X6' full color map that depicts all the occurences of about 30 different types of soils on the island. The book describes the island's topography, geology, hydrology etc and then discusses each of the soil types depicted on the map with comments on their suitability for agriculture.

Roads are not drawn particularly well nor are there a lot of other obvious landmarks or street addresses to help the individual pinpoint his or her property. But based on the roads that are shown and some topographic clues, plus my own observations of the soil itself on the property, I'm pretty sure that the two distinct types I have observed on the property are the same two that appear contiguously on the map, in about the same place.

The one we first encountered from last year's initial two plots (one of which was then abandoned), is called Mexicana. From the book: "Mexicana soils are moderately well drained soils that have developed on gravelly sandy loam to gravelly loam morainal deposits overlying deep, compact, unweathered till within 100cm from the surface". I can attest to this description in that, after harvesting many tons of stones last year, there are still many bumper crops remaining. A few weeks ago I tilled up a couple of beds. This is itself evidence of the soil type; few other soil types could be rototilled safely in January after months of rain. The second giveaway is the new crop of stones that came up when I did that.

If this were our land, I would probably plant a nut orchard, a berry patch and an asparagus patch. The fertility is probably decent but the drainage excellent. Not having to work the soil again would be a huge bonus. From the book: "The major limitations for agricultural use are the droughtiness, topography and stoniness. Mexicana soils on slopes not exceeding 15% could be improved with irrigation and stone picking to grow a small range of annual crops. Tree fruits and berries seems to do well on these soils under irrigation".

The other soil type is Cowichan which, contrary to the Mexicana, is described as one of the best types on the island. Damp and mucky until the water table drops but...full of nutrition. "Cowichan soils are poorly drained soils that have developed on deep (>100cm) silty clay loam to silty clay marine deposits that are usually stone free."

Under 'Land Uses', it goes on to say:

"Cowichan soils represent one of the most important agricultural soils on Salt Spring Island. The surface soil is well supplied with organic matter and nitrogen. They are strongly acid (pH 5.1-5.5) soils. Poor drainage is the major limitation for growing a large variety of agricultural crops on these soils and, for this reason, they are mainly used for pasture and hay crops particularly on Salt Spring Island. With improved drainage, these soils are good for growing a wide variety of crops including vegetables, berries and small fruits."

Now, I'm not sure whether I've got the whole drainage thing licked on that patch but, if so, all I need is a couple of loads of lime and it should be pretty good for my heavy feeders. Having said that, tomatoes apparently shouldn't get too much N or else they put on too much foliage at the expense of fruit but I'm willing to live with that problem.

Now to find the on-line version of the map...

Stoopid tools

While working on the high tunnel a couple of weeks ago, I vowed to write a post on tools. The impetus? Yet another sub-par Canadian Tire special doing its best to thwart my progress.

Dad and I were trying to attach the polyethylene-wrapped 1X2 to the base of the .75” schedule 40 galvanized posts (which also had 1.25” sched 40 PVC around it). So, wood, plastic, steel. Through that we would turn a single 2” #12 wood screw. Doing this required first drilling a hole through the whole material sandwich.

Out came my Mastercrap Titanium drill bits. Fail. Bit broken off in the steel. New bit from 50-pack of assorted replacements. Fail. Fail. Success! Fail. Fail. FAIL!

So we headed over to Windsor, which has a very passable tool department, considering the size of the population it serves. Maybe because people expect things to be more expensive here, many of the tools and supplies tend to be just a little better than the average. Not to say that they don't also sell junk. Just that their junk isn't all that much less than the good stuff, so may as well get the good stuff.

For the price of half a jumbo pack of Crappy Tire's drill bits, I bought a single cobalt-tipped bit. And while I was lamenting our struggle to the helpful staff, Ken suggested that we go super slow with the drill. I said we were using a slow (but powerful) .5” drill. He said 'Make sure you can see the bit turning'.

We got back and tried the new hardware and technique out. Success! Still not easy, but very do-able. The old half inch drill only has one speed, 600 rpm, so I just pulsed it, maybe once every 3 or 4 seconds. Then I put in one of my old bits and used the super slow technique, just to see whether the technique alone was key. Still not much luck getting through but I didn't break the bit.

Needless to say, the old bits will be relegated to drilling wood and plastic. On the other hand, that probably just makes life more complicated. I might just give them away, after I find a multi-size assortment of the good ones to replace them with.

So it is in this second week of February 2011 that I vow to be MUCH more selective in anything I buy from Canadian Tire and its ilk. When I go to Vancouver Island next week to pick up a bunch of stuff, I will be exchanging my Mastercraft 7 amp corded drill for a new one, for the second time (it's bad if you can smell burning when you pull the trigger, right?). If I could exchange it for something else – like something that was supposed to only be used once … I wonder if they sell Motomaster toilet paper - I would. I may also try to take back a router bit set that I bought a couple of years ago but still haven't used. You know, not having a router and all.


* * *


In other news, we must have gotten a pretty fierce wind the night of the 6th. Not only were both of the low tunnel poly covers blown off but there was lots of unfastened farm supply strewn about. Most disconcerting was the farm stand which appeared to have been blown over backwards. Fortunately it sustained only minor damage; a cracked cedar post; a portion of its tin roofing bent. And, best of all, the newly constructed high tunnel was unfazed. Now I can hope for the other big test: a big dump of wet snow. Don't tell any of my co-islanders I said that.

Voila! A high tunnel

In the interest of making this post less long-winded, I think I'll let the pictures save me writing (and you reading) a thousand words and just briefly outline the basic info. My dad drove in from Calgary the day after Duncan and I put up the basic frame. Dad and I then took about another 6 days to: install the polyethylene; install 2X4 supports underneath each hoop; replace the 1X2 side purlins with EMT, build removable ends, one with a door; attach purlins to the line of 2X4's running down the centre of the tunnel; install plant shelving and a potting counter down the centre; wash the inside and outside of the polyethylene; build a secondary enclosed and propane-heated volume within the tunnel for seed germination at higher temperatures; lay down lumber wrap over the whole "floor"; and move all of our potting stuff into the tunnel. Before he left, 10 or so days after arriving, Dad also helped me build a slanted wash station, prepare another seed bed adjacent to the 13 we already used last year, and prepare the squash plot.

He must be worn out. I know I am.

High tunnel construction - Part 1

The high tunnel project officially got underway on the 22nd with (friend) Duncan not only lending me his truck but also his time. We started at Windsor Plywood and picked up about $600 of materials, including 1.25" Sched 40 PVC, .75" Sched 40 galvanized water pipe, and a stack of lumber.

We began by setting up a single guideline close and parallel to the seasonal creek. If, at that point, I knew how wide the tunnel was going to be, we could have run another parallel line at that distance. In this case, I wanted to use up some existing 24' wide polyethylene. But the 24' is what gets pulled over the structure, not the interior width. Furthermore, some of the poly width is consumed because it has to be wrapped around 1"X2" battens along each sides' edges Accounting for that fact, I figured on only being able to use 23'. Mathematically, one could then approximate the width using the equation Circumference = PI X Diameter and assuming that the high tunnel is essentially a half circle; an upside down half-pipe for all you boarders out there. So, doubling the 23' to account for the full circle that the equation is based on and re-arranging it to solve for Diameter (width)we have:

Diameter = Circumference / PI = 46'/3.14 = 14.6' or 14' 7"

In practise, I mumbled something about PIthagoras, both of us briefly tried and failed to find a pencil and we began cutting the water pipe into 4' sections. I then post-pounded in all the posts on the marked side, leaving 2' in the ground and 2' above. Then we slipped one end of a 23' coupled piece of PVC over one of the posts and bent it over in an arc to see what length it naturally gravitated to. Turns out, right around 14'.

The .75" water pipe, BTW, went into the sopping wet soil really easily, so easily that I was concerned that they might also come out really easily. But when I tried to pull them out, I nearly pulled my back out first. Which probably means that I'll need some sort of pipe jack to extricate them if/when we leave the property, particularly if the soil is dry at the time. In any case, I'm confident that they will not come out due to structural lift on a windy day.

With the width now known, we ran another guideline square and parallel to the first line (oddly, I didn't mention Pythagoras even though I used his 3,4,5 rule for finding square) and pounded in the other sides' posts before slipping each 23' PVC rib on to each of its designated posts.

The area we marked out is as flat as unlandscaped ground gets around here, which means there's a bit of variation in elevation from post to post. In addition, the posts I pounded in were 14' apart plus or minus maybe 3", plus their degree of plumbness varied by a few degrees. All this to say that, once all the PVC "ribs" were mounted on posts, we had to adjust some of them up a little so that, when viewed from the top of the structure, the tops were even.

One of the critical components in the building of this type of high tunnel is the top purlin which goes on top of the highest point of the ribs, running perpendicular to said ribs, from end to end. In this case, the top purlin is also 1.25" PVC which we carriage-bolted to each of the ribs. Having the top purlin on top of the ribs prevents the polyethylene cover from sagging between ribs at the top where water is at most risk of ponding. Once a volume of water has accumulated at the top, the weight stretches the poly and allows even more water to accumulate which then threatens to collapse the entire structure.



To finish off work day number one of this project, we ran a guideline on the inside of the ribs at about 5' above ground and used it to screw 1"X2" wood purlins on either side. While the purlins were 12' long, they did not meet up nicely at the mid-point of the 3rd rib spaced at 4'. There was simply too much variation in the installation of the ribs for that to happen. As a result, we had to overlap the purlins, above or below each other to ensure all ribs were effectively tied to one another. This ended up looking quite bush-league and, as you will see in a later post, was re-done quite skookumly.

Flock's flux

We've had a small flock of chickens since moving to Salt Spring. We started with two hybrid laying hens that we got as wonderful parting gifts when we left Haliburtion in 2009. We had raised those two - plus 26 of their 'sisters' - from day old chicks to 6 weeks old in our suburban Saanich basement. I would not recommend doing this unless you are aware of the many issues like smell, noise and canabalistic violence that can ensue. But it was an unforgettable experience in any case.

A few weeks after we moved to Salt Spring, Hannah and Laura got 5 bantam heritage birds from a Vancouver Island breeder. The whole lot of them spent their nights protected from raccoons and mink in a coop that the kids and I built out of scrap lumber and Windsor Plywood giveaways. They stayed safe from raptors in a 30X30 bird netting-covered pen. About a year ago, Pauline put a call out on the community list for a particular breed of rooster, for the purposes of mating the hens. Almost immediately someone nearby offered her rooster for a Valentine's weekend of debauchery. Shortly after, one of the bantam hens got out of the pen and was killed by a hawk. Happily, 'Ginger' had left a clutch of 5 fertilized eggs prior to her death which her broody ex-coopmate warmed up over the next 3 weeks to produce 4 viable chicks. Of these four new home-growns, 2 were roosters. The roosters met their end somewhat unnaturally in July.

About the same time Ginger's chicks hatched, we bought an unsexed Ameraucana chick which turned out to be female. We were also given 3 more silver sebrights, 2 of which were roosters. Last summer we sold a 'mating' pair of sebrights, leaving one mating pair for ourselves. Then, just prior to Christmas, we moved the whole flock from our backyard setup to a new home on the farm. Given all the extra space, both inside the coop and outside in the pen, we started adding to the flock by purchasing 3 barred rock pullets.

Since then we've been having a very distressing problem. Despite taking others' advise to hang several strings of fishing line above the coop to keep out avian predators, it was only a couple weeks before we lost one of our prize heritage hens to a hawk. Because of this, I built 2 70'long X 6' wide covered tunnels, thinking that this extra covered area would give them ample space to avoid or escape attack. But just after Christmas, another of our favorite hens and surrogate mother to Ginger's eggs, was killed by a hawk. Most recently, our beautiful white bantam leghorn was killed although the hawk could not or did not fly away with its kill, implying that perhaps it has run out of birds in our flock small enough to remove.

To conserve the last of our bantam birds (a rooster and 2 hens), we moved them back home. Just before we had moved them to the farm, a dump of wet snow ripped and flattened the bird netting, rendering it unusable. So the girls replaced it with lots of ORANGE baling twine, copiously criss-crossed to and from each pen post . Orange apparently confuses hawks and other birds of prey but I'm not sure of anything these days. In any case, we missed the sound of Splash's (the bantam sebright rooster) crow so it's nice to have him back.

Oh yes, just before New Year's we picked up another 3 full-sized pullets from a guy on the island who's liquidating all his farm animals in preparation for a move. Two out of the 3 went to the farm but the runt of the litter is at home with us, where the other small birds are unlikely to abuse her.

A couple of days ago I got out the mega roll of baling twine and did the same overhead criss-cross at the farm pen that the girls did at home. It took about an hour and a half and was actually kind of fun because I tried (successfully) to do it without cutting the twine (I figure that if this protection technique is also unsuccessful, at least I can salvage my twine, sort of). With this new grid - which BTW, reminded me of a complex map of aviation airways-, the natural tree cover at one end and the larger average bird size, we're hoping that predation will stop. If, after a month or so, we've not suffered any further losses, we'll resume our flock expansion. The coop can probably handle 40 birds and we only have 9 at the moment. Demand for our eggs is significantly higher than our ability to supply them.

And, with that, I shall conclude this post with evidence of our third serious bout of winter this season, which occured a week ago and lasted two days. Oh, and a little known fact: last Wednesday (or possibly Tuesday), it snowed in all Canadian provinces.

Pomodoro ad nauseum

As promised, the tomato "trellis" post which, it turns out, has become much more than just trellises. Sadly, the photo I posted is the best I could come up with. Our other photos show the trellis but also conatin very unflattering images of the resident farmers.

We had a pretty dismal tomato crop last summer for a number of reasons. First, we didn't get them transplanted until summer (i.e.June 22). That's too late. The plants we got from Hali were in big 6” pots but still, they've got to begin spreading their roots unrestrained earlier than that. The year earlier, I transplanted Haliburton Ray's tomatoes on the 17th of March. But the next day there was a killing frost and he had to start over, which he did – successfully – and goes to show two things: that starting seedlings too early has more risks than rewards; and that you can often bounce back from things that look catastrophic. Nevertheless, transplanting mid-May last year would have been fine. But June 22nd? No. Again, that was out of our control.

The crop plan I’ve been drafting for this year calls for us to seed tomato plant starts in the first week of March for transplanting late April. But on second thought, given that we’ve got a plant start business to off-load unneeded seedlings for our own farm, perhaps we’ll do a couple of successions a few weeks apart. If all goes well on the first round, we’ll have early tomatoes. If not, the later batch can bail us out.

The second mistake I made last year was arbitrarily putting them in the shady second bed. I put them there simply because I started planting stuff from the long side and put the fingerlings in first because they were starting to rot. Next priority was the tomato starts. Why I didn't just mark off the beds and find a sunnier bed a little further east, I'm not sure. Putting them under the maple shaded half the bed in mid-afternoon most of the summer. Another consequence of this decision was that our salad greens ended up being in the sunniest spot, a place they certainly didn't need to be.

Third, they were not under cover which is not recommended here due to the cool, rainy weather we inevitably get either in the spring when they are very small or in the fall when they are very large. This sort of weather promotes blight. Last year, though, we got rain unexpectedly at the end of June, shortly after we had transplanted them. Fortunately, they did not get blight. In fact, friends of ours who had theirs in a greenhouse did get blight. They figure it was because it was too humid inside. They had been watering them a fair bit, apparently, so when it got cloudy and rainy, the humidity and lack of air circulation allowed the blight to get established. I note this because we will be housing our tomatoes in a greenhouse this year. Anyway, we did not escape late blight which occurred sometime during the September rains. It hardly mattered though because most of the fruit would not have ripened anyway. We partially salvaged the crop economically by canning green tomato salsa and selling it at $8/pint.

Finally, I don't recall off hand what if anything we used to fertilize the starts but apparently it should be light on nitrogen and heavier on phosphorus. This year we're going to get a sack of rock phosphate to give them what they need. I’ll also water them more frequently although probably not much volume. The reading I’ve done recently suggests that periods of dry followed by lots of water promotes blossom end rot and cracking. I don’t think we had either last year -just the blight- but still, better safe than sorry. On the other hand, they will be growing in a partial swamp this year so maybe they won’t need much irrigation at all. I'll also space them at 18" rather than 24'. I think that by the end of the season, they should just be starting to touch one another. At two feet spacing, we generally had 6" between them at the end.

One of the last things I did on Foxglove Farm last May before finding our land was plant tomatoes. Interestingly, they put their tomatoes in 12” wide hills into which I used a bulb auger on an electric drill to produce deep holes into which the tomato seedlings were deeply buried, exposing only 6-8” of stem and leaves above ground. But that only worked because the root ball of the seedlings was 1”X2”. Last year, our tomato plants had a 6” diameter root ball so I had to use a shovel to dig holes. And we didn't put them in hills because I decided I had a hate on for raised beds of any sort - didn't believe in them – but I'm not sure about this year. I may very well put them in hills and drill out holes since our seedlings will be much smaller and planted out much sooner. In fact, if the early April forecast looks good, I could see planting them out then, and using a low remay tunnel within the high tunnel for extra protection against cold.

The bright spot of the last year's failed crop was the T-post and wire trellis I built. For this scale of growing, it was quick, effective and reasonably cheap.

We started by transplanting the tomato starts by digging deep holes every two feet (a little closer next year, 18"?), adding some organic fertilizer, putting one end of a 10' length of baling twine at the bottom of the hole and burying much of each start's root ball and stem, leaving only ~8" of plant above ground. The other end of the baling twine just sat on the bed until I built the trellis.

For the trellis, I pounded in 10' T-posts every 12' along the row but the ones at the ends I pounded in at a ~20 degree angle to vertical so that they leaned out past the row ends. Then I used 10' 2X4's to temporarily prop the end posts straight up while I ran 14 gauge wire end to end and put on as much tension as possible with turnbuckles. After I kicked out the 2X4's propping up the end posts, there was even more tension on the wire as the post wanted to go back to its angled orientation. I used some light gauge steel wire to tie the main 14 gauge wire to the same height on each intermediate post. The “free” ends of each plant’s twine were tied to the high tension wire above. Every 7-10days, when I pruned the plants, I also wrapped the plant's new growth around the twine.

In the high tunnels this year we won't have to bother with the T-posts since we'll have the structure of the high tunnel to tie baling twine to. But our plant starts will be smaller, probably in 2" cells as opposed to the large 6" pots that we got from Hali. My concern last year was that the end of the string below the root ball would come loose, but that didn't happen. I suspect the weight of the soil and the action of the water and soil cement the string into place. When I cleaned up the tomatoes last fall, the strings only came out after a very sharp tug.

In which I babble for an hour...

One of the cool things about Salt Spring Island is its radio station, CFSI. I've actually been on the station before, in fact, about a year ago when I co-interviewed my friend and finance/energy-blogger just prior to her presentation here on the various forms of doom we are likely to experience some day. But yesterday I was the guest as my friends and show co-hosts Dennis and Belinda peppered me with questions about all things Chorus Frog Farm. AFAIK, in order to post an audio file on blogger, you have to actually make a simple "movie" with (in this case, about 15) photos which, I hope, capture us, the farm and the west coast.

Resolutions

It's sunny but cold these days; think Winnipeg in September. I was planning to harvest some greens for New Year's eve munching but that was not to be. The greens should be fine by the middle of next week when temperature are forecast to rise a little.

This blog has been particularly quiet recently because we went on a little vacation to California (where we hoped to escape West Coast Rain) and subsequently to Arizona (where we were successful). We saw lots of mega agriculture in both places but California's Salinas Valley was particularly interesting in terms of its scale. Miles of plastic-covered raised beds which, among other things in the summer, produce 6 million heads of iceberg lettuce per day. It's a terrible waste of water, fuel and soil, of course, to grow such a water-dependent low-nutrition crop only to have it shipped to Boon Dock, Newfoundland yet my Industrial Engineer mind was fascinated just the same.

While on vacation, we had a lot of time to talk about all things farm. We brought a seed catalog along and, on a few of the longer drives, made lists of what we will be growing for plant starts and for growing in our fields. The situation we have now is so much different compared to last year. We're starting at the beginning of the season as opposed to the middle. We'll have high tunnels (rodwilling), chickens, lots of infrastructure already built (more time to concentrate on growing) and just a whole year of mistakes and successes in our recent experience to learn from.

Which brings me to a list of New Year's resolutions:

Not that we had any choice in the matter last year, given our late start, but we will have a much greater selection of produce this year. People must have been disappointed last year at our limited selection. We compensated with baking and preserves to the extent we could - and I will still bake bread this year - but we hope to shift the focus to unprocessed food this year.

We will only grow greens under cover to avoid soil splash, fallen conifer needles that float in rinse water and are hard to remove, and, for brassicas, airborne pests like the cabbage moth. The washing machine as a greens spinner, in theory, works well but ours has a leak which causes an electrical ground fault so I have to fix that by spring.

Polyethylene-covered low tunnels worked poorly for us in the fall/winter, as far as I can tell. Even using twice as many sandbags as prescribed, the plastic still blew off during wind storms (80+km/h). I will have much more on this in a future post.

We will grow potatoes using only top quality seed which we will plant much earlier so as to avoid the disease we encountered on the Yukon Golds last year. We will grow more fingerlings as they were a hit plus we will experiment with a couple other varieties for which we can obtain organic seed.

Tomatoes will go in our high tunnels and, compared to them being outside partially under a large maple tree, we'll have more heat retained over night, less chance of blight and more light. We didn't sell any tomatoes last year, a crop that can really pay the bills if done right. I had meant to talk more about our tomato growing over the summer but was overtaken by events. This will be my next post.

We'll continue to grow Hakurei turnips to radish size except I'll probably seed them even closer than before using multiple passes of the precision seeder as per Haliburton Ray's suggestion. He harvests several bed-feet at a time, bunching the ones that are the right size and composting the ones that are too small or otherwise unsellable. Last year we painstakingly selected individual turnips and waited for others to catch up. Seed bought in bulk is too cheap to worry about economizing it. After harvesting, say, 6 feet of a bed, we can immediately reseed with something else, instead of waiting until all of the crop in a bed is removed.

We will probably not grow many green onions or, if we do, it will not be via transplant but rather direct seed and, again, in a dense planting. We will, however, grow lots of bulb onions which fetch attractive prices and, apparently, were in relatively short supply last summer. We also had no trouble growing or selling our bulb fennel so we'll do much more of that.

We'll be on a bit of learning curve for our summer plant starts for sale (tomato, pepper etc) in terms of varieties and quantities but Pauline's made a lot of notes on how to improve the winter plant starts based on our experience. First, people wanted many more broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts starts than we had for sale. We will also grow out more large brassicas ourselves for produce sale. We have to do a better job protecting our brassicas from cabbage moth this year and, to accomplish that, we will ONLY plant brassicas of the same growing characteristics together. Last year we had all kinds of plants in our brassica beds, for example, green onions, turnips and radishes. We had a cover over the brassicas but it became too much of a pain to uncover and recover every time we wanted to harvest a few radishes. This year we'll do a whole bed of large brassicas, cover them and leave them for several weeks before fertilizing, spraying (maybe) and weeding. Also, we need to give these large plants more room.

We didn't have any flowers or herbs last year but this year we're starting early enough to do so. We may not do so many herbs as to make a big crop out of them but we will start enough to sell and to eat. We really want to make the farm a little prettier and more attractive to pollinators by planting lots of flowers. How exactly we accomplish that in the context of operational efficiency remains a mystery to me. I suppose we'll just interplant them amongst crops that have similar lifespans (e.g. tomatoes, rather than radishes or peas). And, of course, they can't be under a low tunnel.

I haven't quite figured out what our wash station should look like yet but I have some ideas to make things more ergonomic. Last year we placed a sheet of corrugated tin roofing on the ground upon which we garden-hosed things like turnips and radishes prior to bunching. There wasn't much room under the apple tree to build a dedicated wash stand last year but this year our wash area will be moved adjacent the chicken coop. I will probably extend one side of the coop roof several feet to cover a large wash area under a couple of conifers about 8' from the coop. In that area, I would build a counter height slanted metal wash stand and run a water supply to it. I would then copy Pauline's observation from her volunteer day at the UBC Farm of an overhead sprayer that stays on while both of the worker's hands are freed up to handle the produce.

We also need a bar fridge to set up at the farm stand. In it we will put eggs, greens and other heat-hating foods.

All in all, a satisfactory 2010. Not much money but much learning occurred. I think I'll be disappointed if we don't triple our sales in 2011.

Happy New Year!