Berry garden

It's been another busy few weeks, and we've been trying to power through some projects between work and visiting.

About three weeks ago, we had a line locator come out to find our power and phone lines.  The yard now looks ready for a party, with little orange and red flags all over the place.

A party?  For me??  You shouldn't have! ;)

I had hopes of putting in a walipini on the north edge of that mini-field that's in the middle of the home site.  But, we now know that there are lines there, in some spots only 2' below the surface.  So, we'll find another place to put it; my second choice is up near the trailer.  We'll see - that will be dependent on the state of the water line to the trailer.  If it's still intact and works fine, then all is well :)

We've also had a few companies come out to give us a quote for a new roof.  We picked a company, and we should be getting a new roof in 6-8 weeks.  We'll be reinsulating the roof while the tin is off.  The bats are being persistent little buggers - even though they can't get in to the roof proper, they're still hanging out in the ridge cap.  Crap.  I've been working on the bat house (still, I know) and I really, really, really hope to have it up this week so we can evict them AGAIN before they have babies.  I've given the roofing company a heads up though, and we'll get a conservation officer to come out if we need to.

It's getting there!

Last weekend, I took another trip down to visit Kim's family.  We had a blast (as always!) and I got to meet some more of her aunts, uncles and cousins.  I had a few nice chats with her Grandpa, and got some more advice (including simple farm accounting).  I came home with more plants (raspberries, flowers, and a mock orange shrub).  We needed somewhere to put the berries, so we decided to turn last year's kitchen garden into a berry patch.  I tucked the canes in a hole when I got home on Monday, to tide them over until I could plant them.

Zim and Doodle playing tug-of-war with a stick.  Notice that each is where he is happiest: Zim in the lake, Doodle on shore.

Brave Zim, walking some logs to check out a different lake.  He didn't fall in, though he managed to fall off the dock and into the lake.  Goofball.

Raspberries, awaiting a proper planting.  Thanks Hal and Cathy! :)

During the week, I was having lunch with Kim and another coworker, Flossie, when Flossie offered me some strawberry plants from her garden.  Sweet!  I got the strawberries planted out that night, and just finished the raspberries this morning after incorporating about one and a quarter wheelbarrows of well-aged manure from the huge pile behind the barn.  Total count: 24 strawberry plants and about 100 raspberry canes.  Fabulous :)

Strawberries!  Thanks Flossie! :)

The berry garden!

The raspberries won't produce this year, but our established patch is going hard already so we should have some berries within a month.  And the strawberries are mostly doing fabulous; none of the flowers wilted since I planted them, and a few more have popped up.

I like to think that the gifting of these plants to me is karma - a few weeks ago, someone at work put out a request for any perennials, and I brought her a rhubarb (because there's no shortage of rhubarb here!).  Neither Flossie nor Hal knew that I had gifted this rhubarb.  This has also highlighted something I have heard, and noticed: talk to people about your interests, and if they have similar interests they'll want to help.  It's just how we are, especially in the library world (I find that most library folks are 'helper people': we chose this career path because we want to help people.  This help takes different forms - I work hard to make sure people can access resources, while others love to answer questions and connect users with the information they need.  All of us, however, try to anticipate what users need and provide that to the best of our ability, be it acquiring relevant items, making those items accessible, getting those items to the shelf, directing users to the items, and making sure users walk out the door with those items in hand.  It's what we do).  I have helped others with book repair, putting on two workshops with another early next month, repairing personal items and offering advice to anyone who asks; book repair is something I know enough about to feel confident helping others.  As I gain more experience with gardening and farming, I'll be confident enough to help others the way that I have been, and will be, helped and encouraged.  This was one of the reasons I wanted to start the forum - so we could support each other.  But, I digress.

While I was putting in the raspberries, I found a little friend in last year's mulch:

And Zim didn't even eat him!

There were noticeably less mosquitos today than there were yesterday, so he can stay so long as he continues working this hard ;)

We also rented a sod cutter on Friday and cleared a large garden for this year: 36' x 36'.  We're about half done removing the sod - we cut it into 2' x 8' rolls, which at about 50 or 60 lbs are too heavy for me to lift.  We'll likely finish it through the week, then pick up a truck load of compost from the city and rent a heavy-duty rear-tine tiller and till it all in next Friday.

Jordan working hard, cutting up the sod.  The machine wasn't too hard to run - I could handle it so long as I didn't get it stuck in the ridges and divots.

Done!  And with half the sod removed :)

I also got a chance to talk to our neighbour yesterday - he was out doing his spring fence check while I was getting the planting guides ready for the raspberries.  He is very supportive of us growing veggies for market, and has offered to work with us to repair a section of fence that is between our field 4 and his back hay field.

We anticipate another busy week, of course - finishing the bat house, heading to the rescue for some quality volunteering time (hopefully!), finishing the garden on Friday and heading to another auction on Saturday.  Our seedlings continue to survive - the corn is thriving, but it hasn't been hot enough or light enough for the tomatoes.  They're hanging in there, but they're still pretty spindly.  Hopefully I can get them into pots next weekend and put them in the greenhouse - which we still have to move and re-cover with plastic.

New Forum! And a general catch-up :)

Let's get the big news out of the way:

The forum is up!!!!!  Yaaaaaaay!!!!!!  A huge thanks to everyone that provided feedback and support, namely Cam, Tessa and Matt, Jillian, Lesley and Nicole.

You can access the new forum here:  http://bcfarmers.proboards.com/  I'll be putting a permanent link to it somewhere on the blog.

In other news:

Last Saturday Zim and I went for a wander through the bush along the back of the property.  He had come back to the house soaked from the pond, so I figured that if he's already wet, we may as well go check out the stream.  It's up, as expected (and so is the pond), but there doesn't seem to be any danger to the banks or the beaver dam.  I found another fenceline, so we spent a leisurely 45 minutes walking it, and we didn't even reach the other corner of the property!  What we did find, though, were a lot of moose tracks and pellets.  Some looked fairly fresh, so I kept Zim nearby and called out every few minutes "Hellooooooooooooooooo bears and moose!"  I'll be heading back in there sometime in the next few weeks to continue the trek.  After I ventured out, I decided to check the little brush stand to see what was in there now that the grass was still down.  I found half a round bale feeder, some fencing, and other miscellaneous metal, and a sink!  I've wanted to build a mobile washing station for a while so we can wash veggies outside - now that we have a sink (some enamel paint and she'll be good as new!) I can get started.  I also found a few makeshift tables (the kind with the fold-down metal legs) leaning up against the back of the trailer's woodshed, so I'll dig those out and see if I can get some use out of them.

We spent Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings excluding the bats.  This was accomplished by removing the ridge caps on the roof (it's tin), laying down screen and tucking it well under the tops of the tin panels, stapling the overlaps tight, and bolting the caps back on.  And good thing: we had our first mosquitos drift lazily up from the pond on Saturday, and the bats came back at 4 am Tuesday morning when we were 80% done.  I heard the first few scrabbling on the screen, and any that landed after them didn't even bother, so I presume the early landers went out and directed traffic to somewhere else.  Either way, there's been nary a peep or a squeak from the roof, so our exclusion attempt was a success!!!

That being said, I really like the bats and I hope they hang around.  In fact, I like them so much, that I decided they deserved their own house.  So I've been working on that - so far, I have the pieces cut and stained.  Tomorrow I'll attach landscaping wire or chicken wire to the pieces and screw them all together so we can (hopefully) hang it before Jordan goes to work.  I really, really hope the bats move in.  I'll do another post once it's been put together and installed.

We've been discussing what we're going to do with the roof - we had someone come out during the winter who suggested we use high-nitrogen fertilizer to melt the ice dams.  Well, not only did this remove any hope of getting our organic certification directly around the house, it rusted the tin in the places where it sat for a long time.  Between the leaking, the bats, and the rust, we're ready for a new roof.  We had someone come out yesterday and take measurements for a quote, and we have another person coming on Wednesday.  Hopefully it's not too expensive - we want to insulate too, and some of the roof structure is not that great (remember this?) so anything could happen once we pull the tin off and start removing insulation and get our first good look at the structure.  We definitely can't afford a total roof rebuild right now.

Kim introduced me to dehydrated strawberries two days before they went on sale at the grocery store, so I've been dehydrating strawberries like crazy.  They're delicious!

Our seedlings are looking great:

The huge ones are corn.  The centre tray has tomatoes and onions, and the little tray is pumpkins.

And the birds have returned!  When we were doing inspections in June, I noticed this shiny blue-tinged bird raising her young in the birdhouse/feeder right outside the window.  By the time we got possession in July, they had flown the coop (pun intended).  I've been nervously waiting to see if they'd come back, and... they arrived May 2nd!  I quickly got out my bird guides and I was able to identify them as tree swallows.  Fabulous!!  We have about 6 or 8 couples hanging around.  And the pretty little lady (or one of her offspring) is looking to move back in to the feeder:

I was sitting about 7 feet away, with the zoom lens on the camera, when she swooped down to say hello

And we have someone coming out today to locate lines for us.  He can definitely find the underground electrical lines, but the water lines may be more of a challenge if they're plastic pipe instead of copper.  If they are plastic, the only way he can find them is to cut the lines in the well house, thread a metal  line down them, and follow them that way.  We'll see what he says when he gets here....  And once he's done, I'm going to try and repressurize our pressure tank.  It totally didn't work last year, but I spoke with a well company in town and they gave me a few ideas to try.  It would be wonderful to have real water pressure, and it will lessen the burden on the well pump as well (as all of our pressure right now comes directly from the pump - we can tell exactly when the tank is getting low and the pump kicks in).

It's been a very summery week and a half, and we're glad to see the snow piles melting finally!

Farm auction!

Yesterday, Tessa, Ellie (Tessa and Matt's little girl) and I went to our first farm auction!

As I got ready to leave our place, I looked outside: a little chilly, but it looked like it would clear up.  Excellent, I thought, it's time to welcome Spring by heading out without a jacket.  Well, it was quite windy at Tessa's, and as we were driving to the auction the wind continued to pick up and it started to rain.  Then it hailed for a few minutes.  Then we found some blue sky, and the sun came out.  We cycled through wind, rain, hail, snow, and sun throughout the entire auction.  But we hid in the outbuildings, and when the sun came out we rejoiced and ventured out of the pole shed.

Auctioning off items on a trailer, in the rain

 Jordan was just getting off night shift, so he wasn't able to join us, but I had brought home the item list for him to read.  He got all excited about the welder listed on the flyer, and said "Take the chequebook, I'd pay $400 for that welder, we need one."  I successfully won the bidding war, and got the welder for $210.

Our new welder :)

 I also got some fencing; there was a pallet with two rolls of chicken wire and two bigger rolls of plastic-coated chain link that I got for $35.  I'll use the chain link to build the chicken tractor in a few weeks.

There were some other great items: three tractors, a D6 Cat bulldozer with a blade (which went for $5100; the piling blade for it went for $1000), and a selection of scales.

This is a beautiful platform scale - I didn't catch how much it went for.  Unfortunately, I wasn't lucky bider 137.

The big machinery was all out in a row in the field

A potato planter on the left ($950), and a potato harvester on the right ($2500).

Tessa introduced me to one of our neighbours, Mr. Doug Milner.  He's just up the road, and has a herd of Belgians.  He used to hay our place years ago, and was able to give me a little bit of history on water runoff.  I was quite happy to meet him!

We all came home muddy, happy, and excited for the next auction in June.  It looks like both of the guys will be able to join us, and we'll both bring the trucks.

In other news...

We are working on the farmers forum - keep an eye out for an update on that soon.

Our snow is melting quite quickly, and it looks like we'll avoid any flooding.  There's some water pooling in the low spots, but I'd guess that it's no more than 3 or 4 inches deep, and it likely won't stick around for very long.  There's a chance that we'll be ripping up sod in the next few weeks!

Our seedlings are starting to sprout!  We started a few things last weekend: corn, tomatoes, onions and pumpkins.  There's little green things sticking up in almost each tray section - just a few of the tomatoes are lagging behind, but I'm sure they'll be up soon too.

Project season will be starting soon!  We'll kick it off by excluding the bats and taking a look at what's under the tin on the roof, likely next weekend.  I'll probably build some bat houses next weekend too - I'd like to keep the bats around, just not in our roof!

Creating a community

In advance - sorry for the wall of text!

As I mentioned in this post, I have been thinking about our community of farmers a lot lately.  We run in to each other at events, where we can chat for an hour (or more!) after the event, catching up and sharing information, ideas, and ideals.  There are a few organizations that want to help us new farmers who have our contact information, such as Jillian at Beyond the Market (who also has a list of local farms and an email list for their newsletter) and Garry and Wendy at Twin Meadows Organics.  However, there's no system set up for us to contact each other.  As I've been catching up with new and familiar faces at events, we've all mentioned a desire for more communication within our community, not just from third parties.  I do not want to replace what Jillian is doing for us, as she is a fabulous workshop organizer, a wonderful source of information, inspiration, and advice, and a tireless advocate for all farmers in the region.  What I would like to see is a way for us new and young (and experienced!) farmers to collaborate; there are certain things each of us needs to know (farm status info, where to find tractor implements, good fencing suppliers, etc), and certain things each type of farm needs to know (sources of seeds/breeding stock/young animals/feed, innovative designs for greenhouses/heated waterers/livestock pens and chutes, etc).  There are also some of us who have other time commitments that keep us from farming full time (for example, Jordan and I are both working full time), and also limit the time that can be spent researching.  If every farmer in the region who wants to do chickens this year has to independently find suppliers for chicks, feed, and necessary items, each one would be spending probably at least 4 hours gathering this information.  If 6 farms want to do chickens, that's 24 hours spent researching.  We could collaborate on this, and one person checks out chick suppliers, another checks out local feed producers, and a third stops at the farm stores in town to check prices of equipment, it would be less work for each farmer, and many other farmers could benefit if that knowledge is shared with the group.  If we build a repository of this information that each of us is collecting, we would all save time and money (fuel, phone bill, and we all know time is money) and we'd build a supportive community at the same time.  We could also get together for work parties, harvest potlucks, and other social events.  (Ideally, I'd love to see a makerspace or co-op workshop set up in the future, but that's a little extreme to be thinking of at this time.)

So, what I'm hoping to build is an online space where we can get to know each other, communicate amongst us, share information and ideas, and collaborate to develop innovative solutions.  There are two parts to this: communication and knowledge-sharing.  I've chatted with Tessa and Matt (another young farming couple) and Cam (a student at the local university where I work and a young farmer) about how we can best set this up.

Communication has a shorter lifespan than sharing; email works great, but it can be hard for each of us to build an email list of like-minded farmers.  A few ideas:

• Develop an email list - I've thought about this one pretty extensively.  I can easily build a Google form to capture information from each of us, and then email the link to the results to everyone who submits their info.
• Listserv - similar to the email list, but we wouldn't get as much any info about the subscribers, and the sender has no connection to the receivers
• Forum - captures the conversations, and allows anyone else to join in
• Google groups - in my experience, they can be a bit clunky, and end up being similar to a listserv
• Facebook group - like this one (it's a closed group, but I requested to join and was added with no problems); creates a neutral place for people to post and discuss things, and allows others to join in, can be public or private

Sharing knowledge requires a stable online space that is easily organized and fully searchable.  Potential solutions:

• Forum - like this one; can be public or private, easy to set up, organize, and search
• Wiki - like this one (good find Cam!); easy to organize and search, must know a bit about wikis to add or edit a page; can be public or private
• Co-op blog or website - like this or this; more difficult to organize and search, must know a bit of website coding, can be managed by one person or multiple people, or allow posts from many contributors
• Google docs - like the ones on my Resources page; harder to organize (unless there is a doc for each sub-subject), can be edited by one person or by many, can't search across multiple docs

In my opinion, a forum might be the best way to go; Tessa, Matt and Cam seem to agree.  It is easy to set up an area for communication (with a thread for introductions, gathering the info I would have asked for in the Google form when I was thinking of an email list - good thought Matt!) where people can chat about anything by starting a thread.  There can be another area for knowledge and ideas, which can be organized into subcategories (suppliers, plans and designs, events, resources, etc) and into threads (for example, in the suppliers section, there can be a sub-forum or a thread for chickens where we can post about the best local organic feed producers).  We should be able to make the introductions thread members-only, so our email addresses and whatnot wouldn't be out there for spammers to access.

So, fellow farmers, what say you?  Are you interested in being part of this community?  What do you think is the best way for us to accomplish this?  Comment below (please sign your comment with your name so we know who you are if you are commenting anonymously!), or email me at lonepinefarmbc[at]gmail[dot]com.

Please send this post out to all of the farmers you know, so we can reach everyone - just grab the link from the address bar in your browser :)