Importing farm help from Ontario

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My friend Sandi from Ottawa came and visited the farm for a couple days this past weekend. Sandi is Dutch and grew up on a dairy farm (that I had the GREAT pleasure of visiting a couple years ago) in Southern Ontario. Knowing this, we didn’t skip a beat and put her and her hard work ethic to good use right away! After joining us for her first ever P90X plyometrics session (which she totally rocked), she powered away at the weeds that have been trying to take over our raspberry patch and adjoining ditch (to the extreme delight of Chris who usually tackles them on his own).

After weeding and digging and bending and carrying all afternoon, she helped me sort some freshly pulled garlic bulbs and garlic scapes and deliver them to the rest of the farm members. Julie cooked up a delicious dinner for us, complete with ice cold, home brewed beer from our good friend Darian (with a particularly amusing amount of foam ;).

Thanks for visiting and for getting sweaty and dirty alongside the rest of us Sandi! Come back again soon!

farm fitness

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Becoming P90X rockstars!

Because we don’t already have enough on our to-do list, we’ve added lunch time P90X work-outs to our daily routine. Ryan, the farm’s newest member who married Melanie in May, wanted to get into better shape for their upcoming surfing honeymoon trip and he managed to rope a few of us into join him every lunch hour. I’m not complaining though. P90X kicks your butt, but it feels great afterwards. Here’s to a summer of productive farm work AND buffer bods.

Thanks to Sandi for snapping this awesome shot and thanks to Ryan for encouraging us to get healthier!

Introduction to Permaculture

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This weekend, Chris and I attended a two-day course on introductory permaculture principles and design concepts. The course was taught by Adrian Buckley of Big Sky Permaculture (a Calgary-based permaculture company). Day 1 of the course was spent in a classroom at Kwantlen College’s Langley campus and included a tour of their horticulture/ growing spaces. Day 2 was spent in a greenhouse and on the grounds of the absolutely magical Maple Discovery Gardens in Langley. (Separate blog post coming on Maple Discovery Gardens and what they’re up to there).

The course was great. A number of the theories and principles we discussed were things that I was already familiar with, but the course provided me with a more thorough foundation than I’d previously received from random google searches and YouTube video viewings. Particularly helpful and AWESOME were the lessons in land planning. It was like interior design for land (and we all know how much I love interior design!). Okay, okay – kind of like interior design, but a little more complicated than the kind of interior design projects I take on…

There are a lot of details that I could repeat from the course here, but rather than listing everything I learned, I’m going to break topics and concepts into separate blog posts. Time to make this blog a little more technical and informational (alongside our fun stories and photos).

To start though, for those of you who aren’t familiar with permaculture, the basic premise of it is this:

Permaculture is a philosophy of working with nature – allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions.

It includes three basic principles: 1) care of earth, 2) care of people, and 3) return of surplus. Rather than just focusing on sustainability (meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future), permaculture focuses on regeneration. It emphasizes becoming a producer instead of a consumer and modelling our efforts on the cycles we see occuring naturally in nature. When practiced and carried out correctly (noting that there are many ways it can be done), permaculture results in small pieces of land creating high yields of food, water and other energy sources while regenerating the soil, water, plants, insects, animals and humans that use it.

More details and examples and permaculture farm projects coming soon!