Merry Christmas!

It has been far too long since I last posted an update on farm life, but I plan on rectifying that right now! September was a flurry of activity with the last deliveries occurring, potatoes being dug, vegetables being processed for winter, and harvest in the fields.  October wasn't much better because we were in a bit of a hurry getting the fertilizer on because there was snow in the forecast. Luckily, we squeaked in under the line by finishing the night before the snow started.  Right after completing the fertilizing we started to fill up the feedlot. Now that the booster shots are done, we can sit back and enjoy a bit of Christmas spirit!

In the feedlot business we had a few weeks of uncertainty with XL in Brooks having so many issues with E. Coli.  It's heartbreaking that so many pounds of beef had to be destroyed due to potential contamination. We are still feeling repercussions because consumers haven't gained their trust back in the beef industry. I just want to say, that if anyone has any questions about how we raise our beef please ask! I would be more than willing to answer anything. One thing that you may want to look up is the Verified Beef Production Program http://www.verifiedbeef.org/  On-Farm Food Safety protocols are at the forefront of the program, and there is a very high percentage of producer participation, including our farm.

I'm working on drawing up the contract for the 2013 Delivery Share, and they should be available Mid- January. There will be 20 more Shares up for grabs this year!  In addition, there will be a Sign Up Sheet for people who would like to purchase extra vegetables for preserving or fresh eating.  Some people would like to have a bundle of carrots, beans or peas but not the whole delivery, so the idea behind the sign up is to help me know ahead of time how much seed to order to fill the extra demand. I really want to focus on winter storage potatoes (you'll see why below!) so if you have room for some spuds in your basement... keep me in mind!      

Enough of the serious stuff - lets look at some pictures shall we???

Imagine my surprise when, in mid November mind you, I moved a sheet of plywood and found this butterfly.  It was with sheer disbelief that I witnessed it's wings move. The warmer Chinook weather is potentially the reason for this unseasonable occurrence...?

For a week or more at the beginning of November we were locked in by ice fog.  We spent most of the time waiting with baited breath for the power to go out because the lines were covered in so much frost. The day before the fog lifted, sure enough, the power was off for about eight hours. When the sun finally came back out and the frost started to fall from the trees all you could hear was the shotgun snap of branches. Out by the Garden Patch the ground is littered with debris, which means a big cleanup in the spring.

Big Spud has Arrived!!!!! This is what I was referencing earlier. It is a potato digger that will be hooked on behind my tractor.  It's just a shame that I have to wait until July to try it out!!! This purchase will allow me to grow many more potatoes than I did this year. It's backbreaking work to dig them all by hand. This machine will get the job done in minutes instead of days. So please, tell your friends, neighbours, and colleagues - let me grow potatoes for you!!! 

This is the back end of the digger. The plow share at the front goes under the ground and scoops the potatoes up. Then, the back of the machine vibrates and in theory, the dirt falls through the bottom and the potatoes are deposited on the ground at the back.  Very Excited to use it!

Wishing you all A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, full of Blessings for you and your Families. 

Best Wishes,

Sarah

P.S. I hope you get to enjoy some Pie :-) 

Ahhhhh September is just about here!

Fall is upon us and the garden is starting to slow down.  The lettuce has bolted and strangely, so has some of the swiss chard.  The peas have dried down, the beans have turned to something resembling a cross between baler twine and super glue (not very palatable – ick) and the volunteer canola has somehow turned the garden into a virtual honeybee haven overnight.  I was keeping on top of the weeds until this flush of canola hit.  Today, I went out with the express intent of attacking the canola with all the fury of a tornado, but when I saw the plethora of bees frantically hauling loads of pollen off to their hives, I lost all of my gusto.  This time of year the flowering plants have just about called it quits, and with the numbers of honeybees declining, what’s the harm in letting them collect some winter food from plants that aren’t doing any harm other than damaging the aesthetics?  Here’s to the honeybees!

            

 Aster’s yellows have appeared with a vengeance in the carrots, effectively ruining the carrot root all the enthusiasm that a disease can muster.  Leafhoppers that arrive in April-May carry the fungus and they transmit the disease when they start to feed.  Carrots aren’t the only crop infected either- canola, barley, wheat, and peas can all be infected, causing a great decrease in yields.  The below picture is an example of an infected carrot.  They send out abnormal amounts of foliage and the root gets very hairy.  The root doesn’t taste very good either. 

            

I really hope that the corn will be ready before it freezes! I picked a cob off last night to check and lo and behold! It was ready!  Sadly, upon inspection of any other cobs… it was the only one.  What are the odds of picking the Only Ripe Cob in a row 60’ long??? Talk about extreme excitement quickly switching to morose disappointment. Fingers crossed that the rest of the cobs will mature soon! 

          

 It's time to think about next year. That’s right – looking forward to it already!  Let’s just skip the fact that there’s nine months between now and June shall we? Seed catalogues will be arriving in December and I'm pretty excited about that.  Just think, that means next years pepper crop will be seeded in six months and the seed will be ordered in four!  I won’t be growing as many hot peppers next year, instead I’ll be focusing on the sweet banana and bell peppers. As well, different varieties of your favorite garden vegetables will appear to add a bit more spice and flavor to the oldies.  If you have any special requests for vegetables that weren’t grown this year, let me know and I will try to add them to the repertoire for next year.  

         

The weekly price will see a small increase over this year, but until I see the seed catalogue and can guess how much gas is going to cost, I can’t say for certain how much of an increase it will be until next January or so.

            Thank you all so very much for supporting me in this venture.  It has been a wonderful experience getting to know everyone and do something that I love.  I’m very much looking forward to next year already!  Happy Harvest everyone, and Happy Eating! 

~Sarah

Mmmmmm!

So, looking at that... what do you figure the ingredients are? I'll let you have a little hint! The only thing not home grown is the canola oil - and there's a very minute chance that it could have been.
There's a spineless beauty zucchini of medium size, a flying saucer summer squash, an eight ball zucchini, one medium red onion, one small cajun belle pepper, half of a hungarian hot wax pepper, and some dill to taste. I added a bit of canola oil and sauteed them until just cooked. It was served with home grown Irish cobbler potatoes and a slow cooked home grown cross-rib roast. Yum!

Here we have a Cajun Belle pepper (the red one), a stalk of dill, and a Hungarian Hot wax pepper.

This is a tote from two weeks ago (before the latest batch of hail!) included in it was: bunching onions, a white onion, a pepper, flying saucer squash, beets (and greens), spinach, swiss chard, lettuce, and red norland potatoes! 

Sorry about the small post this time - when the manure hauling is finished I'll write about my experience hauling silage in the latest hail storm :-) It was quite the hail-raising experience... and on that rather punny ending... until next time!

~Sarah

Aw... Hail

*Sigh* Yesterday... yesterday was... one of those days that is hard to describe.  I woke up yesterday and immediately after breakfast started weeding.  Five hours later I was through the entire Patch!!! Little did I know that five hours later... the Garden Patch would be gone, and so would the majority of 400 acres of barley and 160 acres of canola.   Today though, I'm making plans to reseed!  Reseed you say? Reseed indeed says I. Yesterday we had a hail storm rip through the area, leaving behind around 2 3/4" rain and one inch of hail in one hour.  Usually a hail storm lasts 5 or so minutes, this one lasted 35.  There was so much precipitation flying out of the sky that the downspouts couldn't keep up, and the thunder was so ferocious that I watched it shake the screen door in it's track.

If all goes like the past two years though, we will have a beautiful Indian summer well into the fall season, so the crops will have time to mature! My Garden Patch was quite hard hit, with the softer vegetables like squash, corn, spinach, swiss chard, lettuce, and carrots being lambasted. Strangely the beans, beets, and potatoes came through nearly unscathed... they were at the far end of the patch, and with the way hail works... that could be why they survived!

It's easier to tell the storm story in pictures, so here goes.

This was when I started heading for high ground. (And my camera... hahaha!)

and 15 minutes later... I was standing on the deck under the roof and WOW what a noise!!! You can see the hail accumulating on the roof of my brothers house. 

I'm not sure if this picture needs any description so I'll just point out the specimen 'tree' in the background.  It's a lovely red elder that a bird planted for us :-) Just in time too, because there used to be a mayday in that spot but we had to remove it. 

This is the pile of hail on the leeward side of the house! It made me very thankful that there was a roof between myself and it's fury. 

This picture was taken yesterday after the hailstorm, but it's funny, kind of, that there's still ice in front of the greenhouses tonight... more than 24 hours after the fact and after a bright sunny day! Luckily the greenhouses didn't sustain any damage so the peppers and tomatoes are still growing gangbusters! 

This was taken after it had been raining steady for about 20 minutes, so the true majesty of the snow white ground is slightly diminished.  The little river was running about three inches deep. At the end of those black Big O hoses, I want to build a wetland to catch any runnoff... looks like a decent spot eh? 

Annnnd here we have the view of the Garden Patch from the road... By the time we drove by it, most of the hail on the black ground had melted creating a lake where the swiss chard and spinach once resided.  The water has never pooled in that spot during the growing season.  Occasionally during a very heavy spring runoff, water may accumulate there, but never after a rain.  Yesterday was just exceptional that way! 

  I'll leave off tonight with one last picture.  This is overlooking our Coalition 2-row barley crop.  The white band on the horizon is hail.  So it definitely hit harder a mile away... some of our canola was under all that ice! 

Hail is a part of life in Alberta.  The main thing is, that no one was caught out in it, the cattle are all fine, and for the Garden Patch at least it isn't too late to reseed. The field crops on the other hand, need a bit more examination...  Dealing with the weather is certainly a challenge but it is a challenge all farmers must face.  We weren't hurt as bad as others in previous hailstorms, our house is still standing and all of our livestock is ok.  We suffered damage to our crops yes, but, most importantly, we are all still here to carry on and give it another try! We'll just be a bit later doing the first delivery this year than planned... 

I'll post some pictures of the Garden Patch as soon as I get some! I hope that this finds everyone safe and secure and far away from disastrous hail storms! Take Care everyone,

~Sarah 

Rain!

It finally rained! We received 3/10ths of an inch last night, along with plenty of thunder.  The wise weather forecasters are calling for hail this afternoon, and I really hope they miss that forecast!  It hailed a bit a few days ago when I was out in the greenhouses and I had to make a decision.  Do I run for the house, or do I wait it out here?  *ponder ponder* I looked up at the 4mm rigid poly covering of the greenhouses and thought 'Well, if it starts hailing heavily, I think I'd rather be under a tin roof' so, I made a run for it. And it stopped hailing. Go figure eh?  My farmers gut is telling me that this summer may be shaping up to be a rather wicked one weather wise.  We shall see...

Today, the 5th of June is our 7th consecutive frost free day!  What a struggle it's been this year to get things out of the ground and growing.  Case in point, check out this red norland potato!      

These potatoes are much tougher than you think.  I could have sworn they were toast after the last frost, because the leaves were all limp and black, but they've grown through it.  I used my own seed for the Irish Cobblers and that may have been a mistake, since the emergence has been very poor.  However, the plants that are growing have great vigor and are ready to get down to the business of growing spuds.

This is an 8 ball zuchinni.  It seems like it'll be so long before they start to fruit, but I know that as soon as the fruit starts to come on the different varieties of zuchinni's I'll be praying for winter to come.  The only thing cuter than a seedling zuchinni is a seedling hemp nettle.  Hemp nettle is one of the most prevalent weeds in the Garden Patch, with it's pair of oval shaped cotyledons and pair of furry little true leaves, it's so cute! But it's a menace.   Kind of like a gopher or a squirrel. 

Looking at the above picture of the Garden Patch, it looks so small and insignificant.  But then I remind myself - that's only half :-)  For those who are curious about the greenery growing to the left of the picture, that is Thompson barley.  It's coming into the 3rd leaf right now and just about ready to be sprayed.  I have an agreement with the farm that the sprayer won't come any closer than 50 feet from the Garden Patch, so you don't have to worry about any chemical residue.  To control the weeds we will be silaging the barley next to the Garden Patch and feeding it to the cattle in the winter.  

I've given the name the Garden patch, to this area because we have three other gardens in the yard.  It was confusing when I said I was going out to the garden, because the garden is the house garden.  I couldn't even call it the south garden, because that's the other garden to the south of the garage.  So this one, south of the south garden, is the Garden Patch. Convoluted? Yes.  Chaos? Not anymore! 

Have you ever seen the movie Tremors?  The first moment I saw this eggplant flower bud my first thought was Graboide!!!  Then I got excited over the fact that there was a bud on my eggplant, which means that eggplants are on their way! *Excited!!!* 

This is Nick.  Keeping the area around the greenhouses ( he's not allowed into the greenhouses) mouse free.   He quite enjoys his job, since there aren't any mice, and he gets to laze around and sleep in the shade all day.  I have to admit, it's rather distracting when you hear snoring and you look out the door to see the dog curled up with the cat, snoooooring away.  Wouldn't life be grand if we could take naps like that? 

I'll leave you with a picture of Dicentra spectabilis commonly known as Bleeding Heart.  They're so pretty, but it makes you wonder - what caused their heart to break? 

  

 

Growin' in Spring

Finished seeding for a week or two :-)  This was a view of my end gate while seeding was still going on.  The round discs are seed plates designed to seed specific varieties. Some of them work really well, many of them didn't. 

Before the wind took over today and the rain came pouring down (finally!) I moseyed out to my garden plot while feeding cattle to see what was cooking.  Have you ever gotten that slightly desperate feeling after planting seeds that nothing is going to grow?  *panic!* It's too dry! It's too wet! Cutworms! Not enough fertilizer! Too Much Fertilizer! Seeded too deep! The seeder killed the seed! *panic!*

That's why it's always Such a Huge Relief when you walk through the garden and all you see - are nice, neat, long rows of Green! Wonderful Green! The tally of vegetables through the ground and growing today, includes: Red Norland, Warba, and Irish Cobbler potatoes (which were actually touched by frost a few nights ago), three varieties of Beets, Two varieties of peas, bunching onions, onions sets, two varieties of lettuce, and two varieties of radish.

It's hard to see in the picture, but this potato was touched by frost. 

In the greenhouses, the peppers are growing gangbusters and if all continues as it should, will be setting fruit in the next few weeks.  They seem to grow so painfully slow, but when I look back on the pictures I took of when they were first set out, they have really improved.  A few weeks ago, the temperature dipped down to 1.9 degrees Celsius in the pepper house, and 0.9 degrees in the eggplant/tomato house.  I was dismayed to find all the peppers and eggplants wilted and falling over.  You could practically hear them gasping out their last breath.  Quickly, I opened all the vents to get the air temperature down from 20 to ambient which was about 6, installed shade cloths (raided the linen closet for old blankets...) and by noon every single plant had stood back up.  I'm not taking anymore chances with the heaters so every night they're getting set just about as high as they'll go.

This is one of the hot peppers. It's been pruned to two shoots and the fruit removed up to this point in order to facilitate vegetative growth, but it's just about ready to fruit for real now! 

Aerial photo of --- Epic Eggplant! Awesome isn't it? Well, really, it's Epic... because it's Epic. 

In the other house, the tomatoes are doing fantastic, and the eggplant are starting to really spread out.  The strawberries have rooted in really well and when the weather clears up they'll get transplanted outside.  I had a request for some early radishes, and the first two handfulls were harvested today (yay!) and will be delivered tomorrow. It was a new experience for me growing radishes in the greenhouse, and so far it's been interesting.

And as promised, I'm going to include a picture of the water collection tanks that capture water off of the garage roof!  3000 gallons of storage and, right as of this minute, it's all full! 

Happy Spring to Everyone :-)

Spring is Here

The last month has flown by in a blur so fast that I could have sworn it was the Enterprise at warp speed.  However, I was able to accomplish a lot of things that are vital to the operation of growing vegetables! Awesome! I owe my brother and my Dad a huge debt of gratitude (and free food) for all the help they've given me, without them, this project would be much smaller.

Dad and I built a watertower between the two greenhouses, so I can gravity water.  I can run a pump for fifteen minutes and put in 60 gallons of water, then use that water throughout the day, without having to run the pump. It is quite handy, and hopefully, better for the electricity consumption. 

Bet you can't guess where I bought the tank from can you....

The water for the watertower is stored in two 1500 gallon poly tanks inside our garage.  Last summer we plumbed in a collection system, so we can collect the rainwater and snowmelt off of the roof.  So far this year I have collected 2300 gallons.  That should be enough to do me quite awhile!  I'll try to remember to post a picture of the collection system in the next blog.  It's something that took a day to put together, and has it ever made a difference.  It's like a rain barrel on steroids. 

I had three parcels arrive last week as well.  One contained strawberries that will be planted as soon as it stops freezing every night and the other two contained gooseberries, currants, tart cherries and honeyberries (haskap) which will hopefully be planted tomorrow.  However that plan may have to wait as it is currently raining. (Which is ok, because we were quite dry.  I'll never turn down rain!)

Speaking of honeyberries, the ones that I planted two years ago have come through the winter fantastically and already have visible flower buds.  Since this species of plant originated in Siberia it's likely going to be a very good fit on our farm, since it has the tendency to freeze every month of the year.  The great thing about honeyberries is that they fruit in June! I'm quite excited to try some this year!!! 

This past week I sealed off Greenhouse #2 and prepped it for pepper planting.  So, that means that I built a sliding energy curtain to help contain heat, drilled a hole for the water hose, and one for the power cord, helped build the power cord, mixed up the media (Peat moss, coir, vermiculite and perlite.) and installed an electric heater.  Then, on Friday the peppers went out.  I'm not a mother, but if the separation anxiety over putting my peppers outside is anything like raising a child I'm not sure if I can hack it.  The first day they were out I was working in Greenhouse #1 and every 15 minutes I caught myself looking over the cat doors, peering down on the babies and asking how they were doing... My dog thinks I'm crazy. 

Cat doors. 

To keep the critters out, because cats really, really, really like the warmth of greenhouses. I'm contemplating building them their own greenhouse.  I have a piece of poly that was destroyed in the windstorm last year that would be perfect for the job! 

So the next topic I'm going to explore here is the Peat Moss verses Coir debate.  This year I've used a 30% peat to 70% Coir media that I prepped myself.  Peat Moss comes from peat bogs that filter a lot of fresh water and that take over 200 years to grow, not to mention they're home to countless species of flora and fauna.  Coir comes from the fibre of coconuts, and is hyper renewable.  There are peat bogs within 100 miles of my farm, and we have a peat moss processor in my local town.  Coir is packaged and shipped from Sri Lanka, Vietnam or Thailand. So the debate is - which is better to use? Something that is not quickly renewable and that's harmful to wildlife and plants, but that's local, or something that is hyper renewable but has to be shipped from overseas?  (For growing purposes I prefer a mix, but I'm still in a conundrum as to the environmental impact.)

Last Friday, the 27th of April, I planted the peppers as I mentioned above.  The day was cool, rainy and I strongly questioned my sanity as I lovingly placed each pepper in peril of perishing. (Sorry, couldn't resist a little poetry)  Shortly after planting them, they all fainted on me with little gasps of displeasure. That was masked by my own jaw dropping silent scream of horror that I'd killed my babies.  I cranked up the heat, shut the door and prayed that the sun would come out for about an hour to warm things up.  Lo and behold, the sun came out, the soil warmed up, and the peppers jumped back with a joyful smile.  *Note - Peppers really dislike the following: cold roots and being transplanted.  What did Sarah do? Transplanted her peppers into cold soil.  Genius. The sad thing is that I knew that before hand... but they had to go out or they'd die on the bench. This was a 'calculated risk' that turned out ok! 

My first row of peppers variety "Ethem" 

That is all for now :-)  I will update again when I get a rainy day during seeding, or when I'm finished.  If it's not too wet tomorrow I'm hoping to plant some potatoes! (Irish Cobblers, Warba, and Red Norland) and in the greenhouse I'm going to get a head start on some radishes... Time to get to work! Talk to you soon! 

~Sarah