Drama and water.

So as many of you know, we share this property with another farmer and the owner as well as several of his friends living in various buses and trailers all on one side. It's kind of odd but it's his property and as long as they stay on their side, we stay on ours. Not what we signed up for when we moved here as it used to be very quiet, but what can you do?

It's suddenly quieter now that one of our 'neighbours' has been arrested for a forearms charge and the owner has had his tractor impounded for DUI. I believe there was a brief article in the Parksville Qualicum Beach News. See, you shouldn't drive any vehicle when you are or have been drinking. Not your mower, your bicycle, or your tractor. This was a case of being still drunk from the night before and driving the tractor. Don't do it!! It's dangerous, stupid, and will cost you a bundle in fines and impound fees. So now there is less traffic around here and less people too.

Ahhhhh, the peace and quiet! I miss it from when we were the only ones here.

I could actually hear the water trickling into the furrows when watering the potatoes this morning. It's getting hot and has been very dry so I gave each row a good flood with the hose. The greenhouse reached 50 degrees today so emergency measures were taken to cool it and the plants are all headed for the garden this evening and tomorrow morning. It's definitely much more comfortable to be working outside in the early hours or in the evening. It's a better time to water too as the plants have time to take up the water before the heat of the day and we lose less water to evaporation. Around here, indeed anywhere on a well, we are very conscious of how much water we use suring the dry months of the year which are typically August and September. Even once it starts raining again it takes a while for the water to soak down enough to make a difference to the wells. Ours is a surface well of 15 feet deep so when the water table drops...there goes our water!

In the garden things are starting to get much better. The peas have set some lovely pods and are still flowering like crazy so that's good. The corn and beans are doing well, carrots are slowly growing...but slowly. I'm going to water once it cools down and then add some more organic fertilizer by hand. I think it will be time to move the hoses around again and give the front pumpkin patch a good watering all evening too.

The animals are doing good though we've lost a goat...anyone seen a little white goat kid? Our escape artist pigs are sleeping, the sheep and alpacas are snoozing in the shade and looking forward to getting their pen moved again so they can have some fresh grass. The cows are munching their way through a nice tall field of grass as we speak and drinking a bathtub of water per day. A typical dairy cow drinks between 25 and 50 gallons per day. A sheep of our breed can drink 2 gallons or more, chickens can drink up to a half liter each, turkeys twice that much. A large hog eating 12 gallons of food will drink 24 gallons of water plus need some for wallowing and keeping cool. So as you can see, we don't just need water for toilet flushing and veggie watering.


Ok, enough about water. It's starting to cool a bit so I'm going to take the kids to the waterpark for a splash and a cool down.

Gotta run and get back to work.

Elizabeth

Strawberries

Well the garden is finally beginning to look like a garden! Yes, it's about time! I know that our vegetable deliveries have been very sparse recently so it's heartening to see flowers on the peas and squash, the potatoes are up and the russian blues have lovely lavender flowers so we hilled them all up again yesterday. Not long now until fresh new potatoes! And we're planting several more rows this afternoon after I do the animals and get the field squash watered.

We're getting down to the last of the lettuce from the first batch so now we're planting some more hot weather friendly and more bolt resistant types. This weeks box will include some mouth watering strawberries if we're lucky and we're thinking of doing a trade with another local farm for some cucumbers. They're organic too. What do you guys think?

Our appologies to our egg customers who didn't get eggs this past delivery. Best laid plans and all saw us leave on time, get our daughter to the dentist on time, and then realize we'd forgotten eggs. Then our daughter in law was sick and rushed to hospital where they parted her from her appendix. She's doing much better now but it was a crazy and hectic last few days around here. It was lovely to have time with our granddaughters more than usual though.

I'm making baked beans today in the crock pot for dinner tomorrow and shepherds pie for tonight. We've got lots of eggs at present so last night the kids voted to have breakfast for dinner so we had a sumptuous feast of french toast, yoghurt and blueberries. It used up a couple dozen eggs so I was happy.

The lambs and sheep are moved to new lovely pasture while their home pasture rests. The pigs moved with them but have discovered they can get under the fence so we keep finding them in the adjoining goat pen. They're sure growing fast now and eating about 3 lbs of grain a day each plus the table scraps they so enjoy. We've discovered that their favourites include watermelon rind and strawberry hulls. Yum!

Dates are booked for our meat birds to meet their maker so we'll have fresh chicken in July at $4 lb. Did you know that's actually cheaper than the store? Same with our turkey. Speaking of turkey, they're moving this week into new housing.

I've got to get back to work. Hope you're all well and happy!

Elizabeth

Dost mine eyes deceive me? Is that the sun?!?!

It finally happened...a day of sun! And wouldn't you know it, we were working at the youth group's fundraiser garage sale at Q.Bay resort. We did well though making nearly $600 so far and a couple of big ticket items still to go. Camp is definitely looking better for the boys now :)

Once we got home we headed right for the garden. Reports of a rabbit were not exaggerated, one has a taste for lettuce (preferring romaine) and peas. Not too much damage but I have no intention of feeding this little critter again.

We got lots more planting done. More peas, beans, kohl rabi, lettuces, scallions and we put some leggy tomatoes outside using our sideways method. More tomatoes will be going out tomorrow and lots more seeds are going in the ground. Next week will see the planting of main crops of oats, buckwheat, more potatoes, leeks, cabbage, turnips, corn, and all the squashes including pumpkins. It's going to be a very busy week. The weather looks like it will be sunny for a few days and then showers so finally we have good planting weather! We'll be putting our first application of organic seaweed fertilizer for those crops that are up already.

On the animal front, we're deciding if we should attend the Coombs swap and find homes for some goat kids. Maybe the Silkie roosters too. Or a few odd chickens we have around. Hmmm, what else can I sell? Alpaca fibre? Maybe the billy goat.

The turkeys have stopped their big die-off so we're holding steady at 41. However the meat birds are eating and growing and eating and growing and eating...you get the idea. 5 more weeks and some will be eating sized, it's hard to believe...until you see them eat! We usually grow ours a little more slowly and let them outdoors as it's so much more healthy for them and more natural if they can peck around outside and feel the sun on their backs. They certainly seem happy.

Our injured chicken is ready to return to the flock tomorrow once his bandage comes off. Jasper the smelly Manx cat is fixed so that's a good thing and the last 2 kittens should be going to homes tomorrow with any luck.

That's it for tonight. I got most of the dirt from under my nails, fed the cats, and washed some laundry so now I'm going to bed for some well earned rest.

Thanks for praying for good weather!

Hail and more Hail.

Yep, it's true. Having Mother Nature for a boss is never easy. While others have been working on their tans we've been re-planting and cleaning up after 3 hail storms. But never fear! We've set our delivery schedule! Due to the weather we've had to push back the delivery dates and they will now be Friday June 4th-Friday October 22nd and possibly later. We were asked by several people to change the delivery to Friday afternoon so that they could enjoy the produce at it's freshest all weekend. Please let us know what YOU think.

Coming to our place this weekend are 125 meat birds and some 10 or so turkeys. 25 heritage turkeys are arriving at the end of next week. So there's gonna be some cheeping going on around here for sure!

The new bees are settled in their hive and the queen must be doing ok because there are lots of larvae of various ages. That's good because bees have relatively short lives and so they have to raise brood all the time to keep the hive strong. Here's some reading about bees if you're interested.

Well, time for me to be getting up and back into the garden. Hopefully it's a nice day. As long as we can have a few nice days it'll jump start all the veg again.

Have a lovely long weekend. See you in 2 weeks!

Spuds and duds.

Not much interesting going on this weekend. We're enjoying a day of no kids and hitting some yard sales to find a few bargains. Last weekend we found 6 grass plants and a moisture meter for 25 cents each. Now we're looking for tools, hoses etc. We're also checking out the Market in Qualicum.

Yesterday saw the raspberries all go in and 60 ft. of potatoes. We're re-potting tomatoes in the greenhouse. They're doing well but not growing as fast as I'd like due to less sun than I would have expected this time of year. It's bumped our first CSA harvest date now to the beginning of June, and while I know that's the same as everyone else on the Island, it's still frustrating! Grrr!

Delivery dates now look as follows:

Approx. June 4th to October 29th. We're still seeing if we can have a smaller delivery in May to at least get you all started and to run through our delivery route.

Well I'm off. Gotta hit the market and sales early so i can get back here and plant more. Peas and beans are going in today. Onions too.

The 100 Mile Diet

Why is locally grown food better? We believe that some things are self-evident:

*Supporting local farmers keeps jobs and younger people in the community which is important in an aging area such as Oceanside.

*Less shipping means you get fresher and more varied produce such as heritage tomatoes that do not transport well making them delicious but unsuitable for commercial production.

*Less shipping also means less depletion of precious oil resources.

*Fresh grown local organic produce does not contain the chemicals and heavy metals found in many commercially grown crops, but it does contain higher levels of minerals and vitamins necessary for health such as beta-carotene and vitamin C.



It's no surprise to anyone anymore that the food we eat comes from miles away. We readily accept that our melons are available year round from as far away as Chile, Australia,and French Polynesia. Our cut flowers are from Africa and South America, even the flour we eat may not be Canadian.

So why does this matter to us? It's not like food actually costs very much in terms of real dollars. We're not India where many people spend more than 60% of their daily earnings on food. We're not "poor".

Maybe not, but we're depleting the Earth's resources at an alarming rate. Resources such as water, oil, even the very soil we depend on to grow our food and sustain us. Sure we can all look at California's water shortages and say things like 'well that's what you get for messing with nature and growing food in a desert' but really this is a problem that affects us all. We're not protected from the price increases forever. Sure, other countries will see starvation increase as the price of food goes up while we sit here all cozy in North America, but it'll catch up to us too.

We all know cheap oil isn't going to be around forever and with it's decline go the easy use of petro-chemicals used for fertilizer and pesticide by almost all farmers currently. Even organic farmers aren't immune. We face the very real problems of water scarcity even here on Vancouver Island where it seems always to rain, and soil erosion due to run-off and wind occur regularly at a rate that mother nature cannot replenish. Many farmers are doing things like composting and cover cropping to not only stop this but actually reverse it, but not enough of the commercial farms do. Here's an excerpt from a recent Alternet post.



The Food Nightmare Beneath Our Feet: We're Running Out of Soil
Each year the world loses an estimated 83 billion tons of soil. What does this mean for food production and what can we do about it?
April 28, 2010 |

At his farm in Willits, California, John Jeavons teaches the next generation to grow soil.
John Jeavons is saving the planet one scoop of applesauce at a time. Jeavons stands at the front of the classroom at Ecology Action, the experimental farm he founded on the side of a mountain above Willits, in Northern California’s Mendocino County. For every tablespoon of food he sucks down his gullet, he scoops up six spoonfuls of dirt, one at a time for dramatic effect, and dumps them into another bowl. It’s a stark message he’s trying to get across to the 35 people who have come from around the country to get a tour of his farm -- simplified, to be sure, but comprehensible: For every unit of food we consume, using the conventional agricultural methods employed in the U.S., six times that amount of topsoil is lost. Since, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the average person eats a ton of food each year, that works out to 12,000 pounds (5,443 kilograms) of topsoil. John Jeavons estimates that using current farming practices we have 40 to 80 years of arable soil left.

If you don’t already know the bad news, I’ll make it quick and dirty: We’re running out of soil. As with other prominent resources that have accumulated over millions of years, we, the people of planet Earth, have been churning through the stuff that feeds us since the first Neolithic farmer broke the ground with his crude plow. The rate varies, the methods vary, but the results are eventually the same. Books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse and David Montgomery’s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations lay out in painful detail the historic connections between soil depletion and the demise of those societies that undermined the ground beneath their feet.

According to the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC), as of 1991, human activity has brought about the degradation of 7.5 million square miles (19.5 million square kilometers) of land, the equivalent of Europe twice over. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. has estimated that the value of lost soil nutrition in South Asia amounts to some $10 billion a year. Each year, says Montgomery, the world loses 83 billion tons of soil.

Still, these abstract facts have a way of eluding our comprehension. When we put a human face on them they begin to sink home. The U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has estimated that desertification in Sub-Saharan Africa will drive 60 million people from their homes in the next 20 years. While agriculture has thus far been able to keep pace with growing demand, it has done so by borrowing soil fertility from the future. But whether a global crisis is 20, 50 or 200 years away, the point remains the same: We as a species would be wise to take better care of our dirt.

In the hyper-abstracted economics of today, it is easy to forget that land is one of the irreducible foundations of all economies. As the world economy has deflated in the last year, it has driven many people all over the world back to earth, if only to grow a few tomatoes in their backyards. In 2009, the Associated Press reported a 19 percent increase in residential seed sales in the U.S., a bump known in the business as “recession gardening.” When the Obamas planted a garden on the White House lawn, it was at once an economic, environmental and spiritual gesture -- a nod, if nothing else, to the primacy of dirt.


There are many ways of making a difference and I know I don't have to tell you. So I won't. You support local agriculture and we appreciate you. We support our planet by importing more into out soil in the form of compost than we remove in the form of vegetables. One of our lovely customers sent this short movie I thought you'd all enjoy watching.




Have a wonderful weekend. I'm off into the garden to go get my hands dirty.


Elizabeth

We Dig Diggs!

Diggs is our new pig in case you were wondering. Named after or Grandson Diego (diggs). He's settled in quite happily with the cows and has his own stable for sleeping and he's made a cute little nest in his straw. He really is very clean too, no poop in his stable at all. We just go in there in the morning and find him buried in the straw with his ears sticking out and sometimes an exploratory nose. Having made it all sound like roses though...he escaped the very first day and spent his first night at large in our cow pasture. We found him sleeping in a pile of dry leaves (smart pig) at the end of the field. Now he's used to us a little more but still not totally comfortable with people. That'll change I'm sure.

Our piglet is a Tamworth boy but fixed so no breeding for us unfortunately. Tamworths are lovely medium sized ginger pigs and are a heritage breed. Their meat is very tasty and they are very healthy and robust pigs suited to being raised outdoors. And outdoors is in our opinion, the best place for a pig. He's got a nice dry place to sleep and if our luck holds he'll have a buddy or 4 soon.

I have to run into town to take kids to school but will write more later. Did I tell you we got our alpacas moved over from Karyn's place yesterday?