A Window of Opportunity

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

One more first, among many recently.

Are we having fun yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until reality clunks up the driveway in his GMC.

* * *

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

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

The carrots will just have to wait.

A bird in the hand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For next year, I will:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State of the Farm - Part Two

Continuing with a general update on various farm things:



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


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



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


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


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


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


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

State of the Farm - Part One

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


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


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



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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

More in a few days.

On wheat : Part Two

On wheat (part one)

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

Yeah, right.

Permanence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so I avert my gaze and carry on.