April fools day is a great day for snow because it reminds me that April is a dangerous month and planting outside too soon is so tempting as the temperatures rise and we get warm days followed by cold snowy ones. Fool if you do!! I always have this plan to do better at writing blog posts and then I just don't. I do have a couple of well intentioned drafts half finished but obviously nothing posted since last June. Hopefully this one makes it to the live site. This month I will have some daffodil bouquets available for purchase. I bought and planted 700 fancy daffodil bulbs last year and I can't wait to see their pretty faces! I have the bouquets available to reserve in the store. Delivery will depend on when they decide to flower and that depends on the weather so I will coordinate delivery when we get there. I also planted 700 tulips and they will be ready in May but are also available to pre-order. I still have some CSA subscriptions available for flowers. Every year is a little different and this year I have added a few new flowers to my roster. I tried drying flowers last year with great success so I will be doing that again this year. I will be planting quite a few peonies in the next month as I made a big order and they arrived recently. I love growing vegetables and fruit but flowers are so rewarding and I can't help myself with them. I have thought about transitioning to just flowers but I can't because I love being able to provide food that I've grown. My greenhouse and dining room are filled with seedlings and I know it won't be long before the ones that can handle the cold can go outside. Until then I will be playing the seedling shuffle as I add more and more trays to the mix. Happy spring!
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Right now I'm watching the snow come down, adding to the foot of it we already have. The greenhouse is warm enough for the onion and leek seedlings. On sunny days it can get above 20C but at night it hovers around 4C with the heater going. My dining room windows are steadily filling with new seedlings and dahlia cuttings. I have to restrain myself so that I have enough room for everything. I put my seed orders in extra early this year and I haven't had a lot of delay in getting them but the seed companies are pushed to the limit this year. There is enough seed but it's difficult for them to keep up with demand considering the Covid restrictions that they need to follow. I know they are doing their best so if you are ordering seeds, please be patient with them. My seed order was also extra large this year because of all the new flowers I am going to try. Hopefully my seeding plan works out so that I have enough space for everything in the greenhouse. All in all, despite the pandemic changing our lives completely, I am looking forward to 2021. One more year of farming under my belt. One more year of dirty hands and beautiful produce. One more year of cultivating my dream.
I'm so very excited and a tad scared about this year. My garden has matured one more year and this winter the bones of it are very clearly visible. The trees and bushes I planted in the last 3 years are maturing. I was even able to pick some apples in the fall. This year I'm offering some CSA shares for vegetables and flowers. I'm also going to take the leap and apply for a market stall at the Ridgeway Farmers Market. I can use all the support I can get. Purchase one of the shares or make a trip out to Ridgeway. Send me an email or just give me a like on my Instagram or Facebook pages. Wish me luck and send me some love! Thanks!!
I haven't posted for a while. It's been quite busy as I try and make a go of it and let me tell you that this year has taken everything I have to keep going and not lose sight of what I really want. Why? Because I'm afraid. I'm afraid I can't do this. The CSA that I did a few years back was the first time I ever did anything like that and it was a failure by the standards of the owner of the land I was renting. I picked myself up and told myself that it wasn't a failure because I had tried. I had enjoyed a vast amount of the work that I had done. I wanted to keep going. We bought a property that I could experiment on. I almost signed up for a market this year but changed my mind and backed out. I was afraid I would fail to come up with the goods. I was afraid people wouldn't buy my stuff and it, and all my time, would be a waste. I consoled myself in the spring when it was really late and I couldn't plant anything until May, a full month behind schedule. Thank goodness I didn't sign up for that market. I planted my ass off all spring and, although loads of things have grown, I feel overwhelmed by it all. I'm working more hours at my office job and when I come home I spend most of my free time outside in the garden and it just doesn't feel like enough. It feels like half my weekend is just mowing the damn lawn! I have some beautiful savoy cabbages but I don't know who wants to buy them. I have fallen in love with zinnias and they look delightful but I don't know how to sell them. I will keep going but right now failure doesn't feel like an experiment, it feels like failure. What am I doing? How do I get there from here? And then I also love every minute I spend outside. I go to bed and I feel proud of what I have done. I take pictures of the beautiful flowers I've grown from seed. I give a bunch of those beauties to my ex-neighbour, my coworker, my best friend and love how happy it makes them. Many of my coworkers have bought produce from me. Sure it's not enough to make a living but it's a start. Patience. Use Slow and Small SolutionsIt's moving towards autumn now and I'm anticipating putting the gardens to bed. I'm already evaluating my successes and thinking of where I want to focus my energies as I go forward. I love flowers and herbs. Vegetables are more difficult but seem to do really well in mixed plantings. I love flowers. Hmmm I'm seeing a pattern but that's for another post. This is the hardest permaculture principle for me to live by. I see it's value. I remind myself about it all the time. And yet I regularly think things should move faster and be bigger than they are. This makes me doubt my accomplishments. It makes me feel like a failure. I preached this in yoga classes and often chuckled at the adage that you teach what you need to learn.
It is imperative for sustainability that we stop using things that only get used once. Plastic packaging and gas for our cars both come from a resource that is not easily renewable but it's extremely difficult for us to get away from these habits of use. One step at a time. It's important to value ways that we can change these habits. It's not going to happen overnight but I think the key is to change our values. What is it that we value that gets us to use these items? Time? Money? Ease? How often do we even think about it? Or maybe we don't because we wouldn't like the answers. Maybe that's a heavy start to this blog post but examining our values is a heavy subject. The interesting thing is we probably don't need to change our values that much, we simply need to shift our emphasis. Kind of like changing where a comma goes in a sentence. My New Year's resolution was to use Bulk Barn's reusable container program. Bulk Barn (a bulk dried goods retailer in Canada) now allows you to bring your own clean containers and fill them up. They weigh the containers first so that they can subtract the weight of the container later and then you go and fill them up with their products. I spent about $30 on some new mason jars and now I buy most of my dried goods there. Coffee, spices, pasta, rice, flour. They even have peanut butter and not just the natural stuff (I know but we like the sugary stuff better). I've drastically reduced our packaging garbage and the side effect is that my cupboards look really nice. When I started using the container I needed to change my shopping habits. It's a little more effort to remember to have some jars in the car so that I can stop in on my way home from work. I'm a little more organized because I always have a list going for the things I need. Another side effect is that I spend less because I'm not so tempted by the grocery store's convenience foods and although the snack aisles at bulk barn are sorely tempting I'm limited by the number of jars I brought that day. All in all this New Year's Resolution has made it to the middle of February and it's not a pain in my ass so I think it's a habit now. I value all the benefits that creating this habit has given me. Now I'm hoping Bulk Barn or some other smartie pants will expand the bulk/own container trade into things like oil and soap. Let me bring my own container to get cheese or ham from the deli. How many throwaway containers can we eliminate? We've been recycling for a while now, let's move it to the next step. I know this is a farm blog and you probably want to know how this works on the farm. I guess that feels to me like the easy stuff but maybe it's not. Farms these days use a lot of fossil fuels, tractors, lawn mowers, plows and the like. We use plastic for greenhouses. Plastic is an extremely useful material which is why it's so ubiquitous and hard to let go of. Permaculture doesn't ask us to stop using things like plastic and fossil fuels but to find ways to reduce our reliance on these things. A garden farm made up largely of perennial plants with a good mulch layer doesn't need to be plowed and rarely irrigated. Using recycled windows to help create a greenhouse lessens the need for plastic. Growing a grove of bamboo will give you garden stakes for life. Building swales and ditches means less piping needed for water works. Growing and relying on crops that work in your climate also reduces the need for a greenhouse. Renewable resources like chickens, perennials, leaves, wood chips, broadforks, rain water and compost deserve a higher place on our value list as we create a sustainable food system.
I think the beginning of the New Year is perfect for the fourth principle. A look back at the previous year. What worked, what didn't. What tweaks in the system do you want to make? How is what you are doing serving the bigger picture and your goals? As I watched the birds flit around the feeders on an extremely cold January day I couldn't help but think about how climate change is one of the ways the earth applies this principle. Self regulation The last month has been challenging for our family. I'm not going to go into details but it's made me reevalute the next steps for the farm and specifically the CSA. A CSA can be a really lucrative, up-front income but it also requires a certain amount of knowing you can live up to your end of the bargain by providing your investors with a relatively good return. I'm not feeling so confident about that right now. I've only grown on this land for one year and we only just put most of the beds in place at the end of the season. I'm going to go with my gut this year and opt to delay the CSA another year. I will be at the Ridgeway Market on Saturday mornings and will use the website and a roadside stand to sell the produce I have available this year. This will allow some breathing room while we get the gardens more established. It's a gamble but I think it's better than leaving people feeling like they didn't get a good return on their investment if something goes wrong and we can't fulfill our committment to the CSA. This decision also follows another principle that counsels slow and small solutions. Building this garden farm slowly and thoughtfully is what I need to focus on. I tend to be impulsive and I'm trying to learn how to pull back and take my time Accept Feedback Accepting feedback can be really difficult but within every failure is a seed for success. You learn a lot more from your failures than your successes most of the time. I feel like I've failed a lot so I have a lot of seeds to plant. This winter is teaching me a lot about what I want to change for the chickens next winter. The hens have been doing really well even in this nasty cold and a rough start to the winter. Just as it was getting cold we lost one and there was a fight with another getting injured. The injured lady made it through and was back with the flock in a few days. Since then they have their pecking order in place. The older ones have mostly finished molting and the younger ones are still laying eggs. Even in the depth of the cold we are still getting 2 or 3 eggs a day. The ladies do not like the snow at all. They will not step on it if they can help it and we have had a lot of snow since the middle of December so they have been cooped up most of the time. I open the coop every morning just in case they change their minds. The warm few days we had and are having now have brought them out for some scratching. Yesterday I put a dry bale of straw in their yard, on top of the snow, that they happily scratched in all day. I'm sure they are as happy as the rest of us to see the end of January (they've been crossing off the days in their calendar) and hopefully we'll see some more eggs in the next few weeks. The rise in temparature coaxed the bees out for some "cleansing flights". Apparently they wait to have their bathroom breaks when they can leave the hive. They don't hibernate, they cluster together in the centre of the hive to keep themselves warm with the queen in the middle and feed off of their stores. Do you want to know a little more about Permaculture? A google search will give you loads to choose from but check out this link to the Permaculture Principles website. It will take you straight to the principle for today's blog and it's a great place to start if you want to learn more about this permaculture stuff.
So much for a principle a month. This principle is kind of a no brainer. Obtain a yield. I have yet to think of anything we do where we aren't obtaining some sort of yield. Everything I put in place around here is so that I can obtain a future yield. Even in the moments of creating this garden farm I am obtaining less concrete yields that include excercise, pleasure and pride. Read on to find out more about what kind of work is being done for our future yields. It's almost winter again. I haven't posted since last March. In fact I hadn't even logged into the website since March. It's been a busy and very satisfying year. Our first full year on our new property. We've built a whole lot of garden beds. Enough of them that I feel comfortable starting the CSA up again in 2018, though it will be small. Looking at them all covered with leaf mulch is so satisfying right now. I collected almost 300 bags of leaves in the last 3 weeks with help from friends and family and the people of Niagara. Most of the people who helped don't even know. They just went about their business and raked up the precious gold and put it in bags at the side of the road. I hope they don't realize for a few years the precious biomass they are giving away. Ssshh don't tell. Bees In February we ordered two bee nucs. A nuc is a small started colony with a queen. After a very rainy spring we were able to pick up our bees in June. One colony expanded very quickly and seemed to do really well. The other colony wasn't doing so well and I noticed a queen cell on one of the frames so I figure that's one of the things that took some time. I saw the new queen and the colony seemed to do ok after that but didn't expand into a second brood box before fall. That colony is going into the winter smaller and I really hope it does ok. It warmed up one day last week and I took a quick peek into the hive to see how the girls are doing. The cold weather came on suddenly and I was a little worried about them. They are still there all clustered together. I set up a windbreak around the hives, another use for the bags of leaves and hopefully they will survive the winter. Chickens Also in June, the same weekend we got the bees, we were gifted with 4 lovely young chickens It was a busy weekend. These young ladies were only 6-8 weeks old so it would be September by the time they were ready to lay. We renovated an older coop and enclosed a yard for them. Then in August a friend of mine was looking for a home for 7 mature hens and so we added them to the 4 we already have and now we have 11. A nice prime number. Those ladies started laying right away and it's been so great to have the eggs. I love the ladies! They are so fun to watch and they give us eggs. I've put the dog and cat on notice that they are at the bottom of the pecking order. Ever since, the dog and cat have been working harder to convince me that they have their uses too besides snuggling. Between the 2 of them they have caught a lot of mice hanging around looking for a free handout and a place to crash. Gardens Gardens, gardens and more gardens. This property was a blank slate. I started installing beds last fall and continued adding beds all through the spring and summer. The final push has been with the leaf collection. I can tell you that I have a whole lot less grass to mow and that makes me ecstatic. Not my favourite chore. I've always said that gardening is my art and having 2 acres to manifest that art has been very exciting. The pictures don't currently do it justice but I'm very happy with what I have so far. The beds and paths are not always straight lines and they will be planted with a mix of vegetables, flowers, herbs, trees and bushes. We planted a number of trees in the spring including heartnut, apple, pear, cherry and pawpaw. All but 2 of the pear trees have made it. We also planted about 10 hazels and a couple roses, sea buckthorn and siberian pea shrub. We had some problems with deer and needed to figure out a way to protect the trees. I really hope they make it through the winter because they didn't have the best start. We started seedlings in our greenhouse at the end of last winter and they went like gangbusters. We had cabbage and brussel sprouts, fennel, kale, chard and a few flower perennials do really well in the newly established beds. I was able to sell some of the veg that we grew to people I work with at my office job. Our squash crop was obliterated before it even got started because the deer like the young shoots. I think I've figured out a way to protect the vegetables from the deer using bird netting over the crops. The pumpkins that were able to establish themselves did pretty good though and I ended up with a nice little crop. So now we are into winter, we even have some snow on the ground right now. Everything is put to bed and I'm going to enjoy the holidays and take a little break. Back to it in January when I get the planning started for the new gardens and our CSA. Look for the CSA page in early February.
Catch and Store Energy. I started writing this post in February but then I got busy and used my personal energy up. I ended up not catching it soon enough and getting sick. Sounds like one of the problems the earth is having. Speaking of which, strange days of warmth in February kept reminding me that the earth is sick and running a fever. Winter is a time for nature to store it's energy for spring and it's not getting much of a chance to rest this year. How many of us actually do that for ourselves, never mind the earth? Change starts in the personal sphere or in permaculture speak, zone 0. If we can't rest and recuperate then it's no surprise that we aren't able to give the earth a chance to rest. In some ways I enjoy the warmth, winter is hard and February is notorious for being a torturous month, but it just doesn't feel right. In any case, catching and storing energy is an important principle on many levels. Give yourself a break, take a breather and catch up on some sleep. As for winter, maybe it's decided to take a little break. I'm not betting on it being gone yet but spring is defintitely coming. The warm sunny weather has raised the temperature in the greenhouse and we have begun to plant some seedlings. At the end of December my dad finished the greenhouse on the south side of the garage. We are catching and using the energy of the sun and water so we can extend our growing season. We placed 4 IBC tanks against the side of the garage in the fall and my dad built the greenhouse around it. Our intention is for the water to keep the greenhouse temperature warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Water has great insulating properties and holds heat and cold a lot longer than the air. Unfortunately when he was finishing up the greenhouse the temperatures were well below zero and a couple of the tanks froze a bit. Dad got a pump going and started getting the water moving around and with a couple of sunny days the water melted. It hasn’t frozen since and now that we’ve had a few more sunny days the temperature of the water and the greenhouse has crept up. On a sunny day the temperature in the greenhouse has reached almost 30 degrees C. This also means that now the temperature in the greenhouse doesn’t go below zero. I’m sure it would if we had a sustained cold period but it doesn’t look like there’s much chance of that anymore this year. Our theory is that next winter the water will retain the summer heat and keep the greenhouse warmish for most of the winter. We planted some seeds in the last couple of weeks. We've got some perennials like sorrel, bee balm and catnip coming up and also a few vegetables like kale, cabbage and brussel sprouts. This week I started tomatoes, peppers and onions. Another way we are catching and storing energy is by building soil. It seems that up until recently there wasn’t much thought about how precious good soil is, that you could add a few fertilizers and you would be good. I believe it's starting to change but change is often slow when it's voluntary. In the previous post I talked a little about our hugelkultur beds. These beds catch the energy of the wood, compost and water that go into them. My husband keeps talking about how he wants to have a big bonfire and burn all the brush from the trees we cut down and all I can think is how much soil I’ll lose if we do that. I'm also using these beds as a water catchment. Our property is very wet and I want to take advantage of it. I want to catch the water in place so that I don't have to irrigate our garden so much. We are also catching the energy of our food waste by composting and my dad has built a rolling compost bin to help that process. It’s a prototype but the idea is that we can roll it around to mix the compost and encourage it to breakdown. In addition to creating soil it will help us store the energy needed to move compost from one place to another. No more wheelbarrows, just roll the thing out to the garden with the finished compost. Patent pending. We've used recycled pallets and a few large spool ends that I found on the side of the road. Another permaculture principle in action--no waste, but that's for another month. |
JackieI'm a garden farmer, herbal enthusiast, motherwifesisterfriend and Archives
April 2022
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