The night sky out here at the farm is magical ~ especially when viewed while standing out in the middle of the property in a cozy sweater and rain boots in the crisp night air.
(The benefits of walking outside every night to shut the chickens in their coop and use the loo).
It’s been a really busy week! Between day jobs, volunteer jobs, farm duties and a sick baby who passed his cold on to everyone else, it’s been pretty non-stop – poor immune system or not.
I’ll try to list everything we’ve worked on this week, but given that I’m sick and fuzzy-headed, there’s bound to be some things I miss.
Before I start listing though, I’ve gotta say THANK GOODNESS for our beautiful fall weather! It’s been crisp and sunny which has allowed us to get so much more done outdoors than we would ever do in the rain. Yay for a non-west coast fall!
TREES
So, now that we’ve started our orchard, there’s been a lot of discussion around trees here on the farm. We added two more trees to our orchard this week: a 4 variety producing apple tree and a 4 variety producing pear tree. By ‘4 variety’ I mean trees that have had multiple types of apple/ pear types grafted onto them, allowing them to pollinate each other and to produce different kinds of fruit throughout a longer fruiting season. Fun! We’ll see how they do.
We also removed a tree from the property this week. There was a huge, sickly alder that lived near our newly planted orchard. We were worried about it’s sickness infecting the fruit trees and our neighbour had voiced concern about it negatively affecting her own trees so we cut it down. Once down, we still had to take care of chopping it all to bits – burning the smaller branches and leaves and cutting the larger ones up for fireplace firewood. I spent 5 hours on friday hacking away at the tree and burning most of the small stuff. I’d had a frustrating day of work (the internet and websites can drive you crazy if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do), so I took on the tree hacking as personal therapy. It helped.
Also on the topic of trees, farm family friend Bob gave us $200 to spend on whatever we wanted this weekend (for the farm), so we used it to take advantage of the clearance sale at Trice Farms and bought ourselves five awesome trees for the property (at 50% off): a curly willow tree, a japanese maple tree, a dwarf burning bush, a very cool green maple tree (with bark that looks like bamboo – can’t remember the name), and one of those tall coniferous trees that looks like it belongs in a Dr. Seuss book – you know, the tall, lanky, swervy ones? Also can’t remember the name. Anyways, we are VERY thankful to Bob for the opportunity to get some beautiful trees for the property that we normally wouldn’t be able to afford ourselves.
CHICKENS
I’ve taken over the duty of locking the chickens up for the night and letting them out in the morning so that’s been fun. I like our chickens a lot and it’s fun to see them all snug in the coop at night. I also cleaned out the chicken coop this week and gave
them fresh wood shavings yesterday so their home is nice and clean and comfy.
Unfortunately, our last sickly Russian chicken died this week. She’d been sick for awhile and finally succumbed to whatever it was that was harming her. The rest of our Russian and other chickens seem great, so hopefully our current seven will live long enough to start producing eggs and see the spring roll around. Go chickens go!
GARDENING
I planted the rest of our garlic this week, transplanted a bunch of my potted plants into larger pots for my deck and planted some poppy bulbs into pots. It’ll be lovely to see those come up in the spring: red, pink and my favorite blue poppies – yay!
Chris rented an excavator yesterday and, in addition to using it for digging up all our drainage ditches, he used it to dig up the area that we will be building our deep beds on. This is super helpful because it would have been A LOT of hard work digging up all that earth by hand. Beforehand, Julie and I marked out where we want the deep beds to go – it’s gonna look great!
FRIENDS
Tommi and Cary and their son Magnus stopped by yesterday and helped with some of the ditch digging and my friend Erin came in from Vancouver to bring me a bottle of trailer-warming wine. She helped me break up and burn some more of the alder tree before we had dinner, played scrabble and drank the wine in the trailer.
WINTERIZING THE TRAILER
The last to-do thing that came up this week was for me to start winterizing my trailer. The frost hit this week and mornings, evenings and nights in the trailer have gone from chilly to downright freezing! So it’s time for me to start prepping that tin can for the winter. I bought plastic to line all the windows with and started up the propane heater for the winter. I’ll need to get some skirting up along the base of the trailer too – not sure what the most economic and efficient method is – hay bales, spray foam, plywood???
***
And I think that’s about it (although I swear I’m missing stuff because that list doesn’t seem to match my level of exhaustion).
Here’s to another week on the farm! Despite feeling like I’m living in a freezer, catching colds from babies, and spending way too much volunteer time trying to build a problematic website, I still really love it here :)
I love garlic. Love it, love it, LOVE it. I’ve been talking about planting it here at the farm pretty much since day one of my arrival so I was pretty stoked to get down and dirty yesterday and get a lot of our bulbs cracked and planted. We planted five different kinds of garlic and I wish I’d written down all of their names when we bought the bulbs because I can’t remember them now. I know there was a ‘classic’ garlic, a red spanish one, a russian one, a ‘Legacy’… and I can’t remember the last one… oh well, maybe we’ll be able to identify them when harvest time comes around.
Garlic was my most successful crop when I grew it for the first time in my community garden plot in Ottawa. Discovering how easy it was to grow it, dry it, and enjoy eating it for months afterwards made me wonder why everyone doesn’t use part of their yard/ garden to grow it. If you don’t, you should!
If you’re interested in growing garlic, now’s the time to do it! Plant in the fall and harvest the following summer. This website has some great step-by-step recommendations on how to do it. The short basics: prep your soil, crack your garlic bulbs (break them apart and separate all the cloves), and plant each clove individually (pointy end up) about 2-3″ under the soil and about 6-8″ apart. Keep your garden as weed free as possible and cover your beds with mulch for the winter if you want to. Garlic has a long growing cycle – it begins taking root under the soil throughout the winter and starts showing it’s green shoots in the spring. Harvest time isn’t until mid/ late summer when the green leaves are a few feet high and the scapes (thick green stem that grows up the centre) starts to curl. (Mind you, I don’t know if that’s with every variety or only the ones I planted in Ottawa – we learn as we go! :). The scapes can be cut off and minced up into delicious pesto and the bulbs can be pulled up out of the soil, ready to eat and dry. Yummy!
We planted about 2/3rds of our garlic in the plot we rototilled and prepped that lives between the barn and the chicken coop. We wanted to leave some room in there for other winter crops, so we’ll be finding somewhere else to plant the rest of the garlic.
I did mention ‘more fall planting’ in the title of this post and indeed we did do more than just plant garlic yesterday. We also got our kiwi vines planted (yay!), our broad beans and some cabbage. We’re hoping to get some onions, kale and beets in the ground before it’s too late as well.
Oh – and we attempted to prune our old, crabby apple tree. We weren’t really sure exactly what we were doing, and it turns out we maybe should have waited a few more months to do it (recommended late winter or early spring), but hopefully our efforts will help the tree rather than harm it.
It was a great way to spend a beautiful fall, sunday morning. Happy thanksgiving everyone!