Vancouver Highschool gets Growing
Take a look at this Tumbler feed and tell me if it doesn’t just set your heart aflutter.
Somethin’ about kids growing veg and raising eggs that gives me so much hope for humanity . . .
A word on compassion in farming
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Omnivorous Complications & Oversimplified Thinking
Along with the rising interest in where our food comes from and how it’s grown, many people are educating themselves about how farm animals are treated. For the most part, I’d say it’s a good thing. Many of our food animals are raised in absolutely unacceptable conditions.
However one consequence of this raised-consciousness is a lot of all-or-nothing, non-sensical thinking. Unfortunately, it’s easy to have black and white opinions when your experience is strictly philosophical.
Now, I’ve had my own misgivings about our omnivorous nature. One of my first jobs was in the kitchen at McDonald’s, and it wasn’t long before I was off meat, doing rock-paper-sizzors with the other vegetarians to be able to work the bun station instead of the grill. Something about regularly coming home smelling like a Big Mac makes one question their meat-eating habits. I figured I’d had a hand in killing enough cows during my tenure at the grill station and didn’t eat any pork or beef for six years.
Since then I’ve returned to eating meat, and we have raised our own fowl for sometime. The first time I came home to find one of my chickens in the crockpot, I cried. I married a man who grew up hunting, and that combined with my experience raising my own protein (although I admit I’m still too squeamish to do the deed – I’ll get there) has changed my attitude towards meat in general, and I can now truly understand how complicated the issue is.
When Good Intentions Go Wrong : Why abolitionists and farm animal sanctuaries miss the point
Lots of folks look at the horror of industrial animal production and believe the answer is to not eat meat altogether. This is completely understandable and natural. I have a deep respect for people who choose to abstain from meat and animal products. However, the abolitionist vegan point of view is underpinned by a major misunderstanding of sustainable farming, and the nature of farm animals in general.
If we want to get rid of all the harmful trappings of industrial agriculture, farm animals, FOOD animals, are an essential component of a small-scale, sustainable, deep-organic, ecologically sane food system. A small, essentially closed-loop farm like we aspire to be, requires an on farm source of soil-nutrition. Animals serve this purpose with simplicity, elegance and grace. This is how nature functions, and how our farms should, too.
Our animals not only provide us with essential manure and nutrients for the soil, they turn the soil, break pest cycles, harvest sun energy via the pastures, store that energy in their bodies, provide supplemental protein like eggs, renovate our pastures, manage potentially invasive weeds, turn our waste products into food and beautiful manure.
Our animals are here BECAUSE WE EAT THEM. The heritage breeds of chickens we raise have been bred for over 100 years to elegantly meet the needs of farmers just like us. If we didn’t eat them, they wouldn’t exist. Putting them away on a farm animal sanctuary robs them of their purpose and turns what could be a productive, purposeful life into one of consumption only.
My chickens live a good life. They are loved and well-fed. They are allowed to express their chicken-ness, breathe fresh air, eat green grass, preen, scratch for bugs, take dust baths, enjoy the companionship of other chickens, sleep in the sun. When it comes time for them to grace our table, we will enjoy them having a full-understanding and deep respect for the life that was given in order to sustain ours.
Death is an Essential Part of Life
We are all meant to live and die. Even I will be lunch one day. My body will feed the worms and the soil I will have lovingly tended all my life. We can see death as cruel and grotesque or as perfectly elegant and unwasteful. I prefer the later.
This simple truth of life – that everyone dies so that someone else may live, is a difficult one for us to face in modern society, and by our not facing it, we have convinced ourself that it is not true. This basic misconception about the nature of life can only have a negative impact on both our own lives and the quality of life of those around us. We must come to terms with it before we will learn to truly respect and honour life as a whole.
A word from Joel Salatin on Compassion in Farming
Joel Salatin is one of our guiding-inspirations here at the farm. We have been fortunate enough to meet Joel on a couple of occasions and even lucked out and got to eat dinner with him at one conference.
If you have watched Joel on YouTube, I can tell you he is exactly like that in person. Some who aren’t so ah – evangelical? about their farming practices might find him over the top (and he kind of is) but if you are passionate about food and farming, you will find him one of the most uplifting, inspiring people you will ever meet. He has a can-do attitude and doesn’t mince his words. You know where you stand when you’re talking to Joel.
Here’s the note from Joel:
feed the soil
Out this morning at dawn before the boys woke up, watering, planting, spreading straw. Such rare moments these days, quiet time by myself in the garden. Moments like that I can forget about everything else, set aside the busyness, not have to keep one ear and eye open for the kid and dog and other critters, actually lose myself in the work of my hands and my thoughts . . . what a gift.
This morning as I spread the straw I got thinking about one of the simplest, but most profound shifts in our thinking about growing food since we began our inquiry into organic gardening.
For me, the idea that we should feed the soil instead of the plants completely changed my outlook and actions in the garden. Industrial / conventional agriculture largely views the soil merely as something to hold the roots, not as an integral component, a living being. Agri-industry spends most of its time depleting soil, it certainly doesn’t seem too concerned about nourishing it.
I often think we’ll one day look at this attitude towards soil the same way we look at the “flower pot” theory of human reproduction. (There was a time when it was believed that the woman contributed nothing to the equation, she was simply the “flower pot” for the man’s seed. Nice, hey?)
Soil is our most precious resource and we are losing it by the ton. In North America, soil is lost at a rate of 5 to 10 TONS PER ACRE every year. Take into consideration that it can take 1000 years for nature to create just one inch of topsoil and you realize how staggering this is. What soil remains to us is being poisoned under the guise of saving it. Industrial “no-till” agriculture relies heavily on herbicides to be effective. We are Solomon splitting the baby and calling it success.
If you are interested in soil loss and what we can do about it, I would suggest checking out Wes Jackson and the Land Institute. His recent book Consulting the Genius of the Place is an eye opening account of this history of soil loss and what he believes can be done about it.
Here’s what I do to feed my soil:
birth, death, a near miss and other amusements
I often wonder if industrial farmers have as many adventures and as much excitement as I do here on our tiny little farm. What a crazy time!
Maybe it’s because I have a two year old to provide me with a daily dose of perspective on life, or maybe my life is just a bit sillier than others . . . but either way it seems there is always something bizarre or beautiful happening around here.
Yesterday our first Muscovy duckling hatched in the brooder. We’ve hatched out our fair share of chickens and quails, but never ducks. Now, Muscovies are pretty much a silent bird. So when I started hearing a peep peep peep coming from the kids playroom where the brooder is, I was decidedly confused.
Do ducks that don’t quack, peep?
For two days my son would make a surprised face - a gasp, eyebrows arched, finger to ear and eyes looking off dramatically towards the sound. We still couldn’t tell if it was actually coming from the brooder, until finally we saw one lone egg rockin’ and rollin’. By dinner it had pipped and by bedtime a tiny, wet little soul had emerged. My son was absolutely thrilled.
The wee one is all dried out and our resident mama duck has happily taken it under her wing. Check one for awesome.
One of our daily chores is to let the ducks and chickens completely loose into the pasture and collect the eggs. Seems simple, right?
Well, on Tuesday morning, we found the gate between the birds large pen and the back half of the barn open, the barn FULL of escapees. There were chickens EVERYWHERE. All three stalls were full, the little girls had managed to wedge themselves in the space between the studs behind a chest of drawers, the dog was going crazy and my son was enthusiastically “helping” fishing chickens out of nooks and crannies with his plastic shovel.
If you’ve never kept chickens, rounding up girls that aren’t yet trained to follow a shaking tin of grain is kind of like herding cats. Flying cats.
The eggs are a whole other story. Our hens are all quite new to us and our farm. We have about 55 young girls that we bought as chicks in March who aren’t laying yet, and 25 . . . errr 24 hens that we bought a week or so ago at point-of-lay and about 6 laying ducks. Some folks keep them locked up till they learn where to lay, but I just can’t bare to keep my girls indoors. Instead we leave them relatively confined until mid-morning, and hope most of them have done their laying by the time we let them out to roam.
Well, let’s just say everyday is Easter around here.
I thought my ducks had slowed down laying until I found a hen setting an entire clutch in our inherited junk-pile by the barn. I block up one enticing spot only to have them find another. Further down the pasture, along the fence line next to the creek, my boy scrambled under the hazelnut and scampered back out with a duck egg in each hand. Every morning one goofy duck breaks out of her enclosure, trots down to the creek, lays her egg in the long grass, covers it up and breaks back into her enclosure. Apparently my carefully constructed nests aren’t to her taste.
Just before lunch, while visiting with my boy, the dog and chickens in the pasture, we heard a muffled “whoop whoop” of wings and a huge red hawk dropped out of the sky, nabbed a rodent right at our feet and “whoop whooped” away again. Completely startling and totally awesome.
Making my tea later that afternoon while the boy slept, I glanced out my kitchen window to see not one, not two, but FOUR coyotes within feet of my girls. My dear Ruby, the “livestock guardian dog”, sleeping soundly on the porch bench. There I go – running the 100 meter dash between the house and the barn, in slippers, pregnant, flailing and yelling like a crazy person. Thank goodness I have no neighbours to speak of.
Coming home from our latest ultrasound, I went to release the dog from her (fortified) pen in the barn, and found a chicken in with her, dead as a doornail. She had quite deliberately, and with much apparent effort, made her way in and out of three different stalls, across a hallway and over 3 walls to climb into the pen that had the chicken-eating livestock guardian dog locked in it.
Now one might count that as strike two against the dog, but for me, I’ll chock it up to natural selection doing it’s good and important work.
So that was our week . . . How was yours?
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- Farm Update, March 2013 (slowfoodsmama.com)
country mouse, city mouse
I drove through my old neighbourhood yesterday on my way to a meeting downtown. Popped into my favourite bakery with the boy for our old regular treat, a french eclair.
The pangs of homesickness caught me by surprise. I can’t believe how much I miss it.
East Van, Commercial Drive in particular, is such a vibrant, quirky, diverse neighbourhood. You can find the old Italian and Portuguese guys sipping espresso, arguing over football, laughing, tipping their hats cordially to the ladies as they walk by . . . Hippies lounging half-naked in the park . . . Men in the shade of the cafe filling the air with the sound of their impromptu drum circle . . . The smells of Jamaican, Cuban, Italian and Ethiopian food, proper southern BBQ, new age vegetarian, organic bakeries, stale beer and pot . . . The infamous Spoon Man, serenading patio diners with renditions of Girls Girls Girls! on the spoons . . . Children and dogs everywhere . . . Patios bathed in sunshine . . .
You can walk or bike everywhere you need to go . . . There is the lake, and the farmer’s market and the organic co-op grocery store . . . During soccer season every cafe and coffee shop puts a TV in the window and locals gather by loyalty, spilling out across the sidewalk, cheering and drinking beer . . . You can get the best cup of coffee, a pint of locally made craft beer, the best pastries I’ve had outside of Europe, all day $3.95 breaky, and a run through the water park with your kids. It is warm and friendly and usually bizarre and chaotic. Just . . . lovely.
I miss it so much it hurts my heart.
Some days when I’m out chasing chickens or trying like a mad woman to scare off coyotes or I’ve completely buggered something up through inattention, like yesterday when the new puppy’s spaz-out in the barn resulted in her unplugging the warming light for the chicks and I didn’t even notice, I wonder if I’m really going to cut the mustard as a country girl. When other people refer to me as a farm-girl or a country-girl, I still look around to see who they’re talking about.
I think about some of the women I’ve met from my hubby’s hometown. They are farm girls, through and through. They are strong as most men I know and tough as nails. These girls can toss a bale after bale of hay onto the truck, carry a huge milking can in each hand, get up at dawn to milk, sling muck, you name it. And most of them have been doing it since they were knee high to a grasshopper. Jeff’s mum’s doctor said she’ll probably never have to worry about osteoporosis; all those years growing up drinking fresh milk and working her tail off on the farm has given her the bone density of a 20 year old girl.
They just make ‘em different out there. A city girl like me can’t expect to compare.
But the more women I meet here in my neck of the woods, the more I realize we’re a different breed of country mouse. I had tea this week with two other mums – one raising eggs and goats and veggies, another tending 80 hives of bees. Both have two wee boys and are full-time mums. In their past lives they were a lawyer and a stock broker, respectively.
Kind of bizarrely wonderful, isn’t it?
There’s a lot I miss about the city, and there’s a lot I don’t. The thing is, the city isn’t going anywhere. I can still stroll the Drive with my boy and enjoy everything it has to offer, and then happily leave the chaos behind and head home to a quiet, starry night filled with frog-song.
If you were to pop by my farm on a Sunday morning, you’d probably find me wandering the fields, weeding or chasing ducks, gumboots on and decaf vanilla latte in hand. What can I say. The city girl in me still enjoys her wi-fi and fair-trade organic coffee and good local wine.
Maybe I’m a city mouse in country mouse clothing . . . Maybe I’m a new kind of country mouse altogether.
Farm Update, March 2013
We have been blessed with absolutely glorious weather the last little while. The whole family is rosy-cheeked and my hubby and son have matching farmer’s tans. At the end of March?!!!
We have been making hay while the sun shines like crazy.
There have lots of small tasks completed in the last little while, and some enormous ones, too. We’re all sore and sleeping hard at night!
Veggies
We’ve made a wack of soil blocks and the broccoli, kale, and other cole crops are all poking their heads out in the greenhouse. The leeks were broadcast sown in a tray and are well on their way. With any luck today I’ll get the tomatoes started as well.
The potatoes will finally get into the ground today as well, come hell or high-water. We’ve got 50 pounds of organic seed potatoes . . . The estimated yield from that is 500 pounds. I’m not sure where we’re going to store all those yet, but my hubby works best under pressure. I’m sure there’s a root cellar of some description in our future. (Probably around potato harvest time.)
We scored a ton of rhubarb cuttings from our neighbours, and it is growing like gang-busters. There was one existing rhubarb plant in the garden, so we won’t have to a couple years for a harvest – thank goodness! Strawberry-rhubarb anything is my hubby’s favourite.
We’ve also staked out a spot for the asparagus patch which I’m hoping to order this week. That harvest we will have to wait for.
Soil
I planted the peas about a month back and they are just, just, making their appearance now. Our rock-hard clay soil is proving to be more difficult to manage than we expected.
So (despite our commitment to frugality) we bit the bullet and had 30 yards of organic garden soil brought in and 6 yards of gorgeous compost. The organic garden soil is a pretty skookum product – greensand, glacial rock dust, lots of organic matter and importantly for us – a fair amount of sand. Hopefully this will help fend off the garden’s tendency to become a lake / raging river during heavy rains.
We are using the soil as a top-dressing. Once we get growing in the soil and get the biological activity ramped up, the worms and other critters will do the work of incorporating it for us.
The kid and dog seem to think we’ve had the huge mound of dirt delivered just for them. They’ve been playing plenty of King of the Castle and the mound has kept them blissfully occupied while mama and daddy work.
Kitchen Garden
We’ve found the basic ideals of permaculture to be very helpful in our understanding of how to garden and farm. One of the big ideas is to keep crops you use more regularly or ones that are more tender and require more care as close to the house as possible.
(Also, I’m lazy and don’t want to schlep all the way down the driveway to the garden to gather herbs for supper.)
So we’re putting in a small kitchen garden just off the back deck, which has easy access from one of the kitchen doors. A good measure of where to put a kitchen garden is how far are you willing to walk outside in your slippers. The grass (ok moss) has been tilled up and composted and we’ll put slightly raised beds in later this week.
Berries
One of the fun parts of buying the farm is we can now qualify as “wholesale” buyers of nursery stock. In our neck of the woods, blueberry plants usually cost about $15 each, at best $9 if you can catch a sale. Strawberries are generally sold in sets of 5 for about $5-$7.
We’ve scored 20 blueberry plants for just over $3 each, and the strawberries are $23 for 100. Yes, 100!
Our veggie garden’s west end terminates in a small seasonal creek. The margins haven’t been maintained well, and that coupled with the fact the whole garden slopes westward means it’s subject to some serious erosion with fall and winter rains.
To combat this we’ve planted our blueberries just in from the edge of the creek, running parallel with the edge. I’m hoping the small hill they’re planted in, along with their roots and mulch, will help stabilize the bank and keep the soil in place. We also plant to plant some sort of soil-holding, bee-attractive plant along the leading edge, probably something like catmint, which forms a low mat of perennial roots and the bees love.
Clearing
We had a neighbour in last week to do some serious damage to the blackberries engulfing the section of the farm we want to be the hub of compost and other work. What a difference a day with a backhoe can make!
It looks a bit severe now, but holy smokes what a difference. He reclaimed a ton of land, took down a line of trees that were choking our back field of sunlight and air, and was able to bury some of the roots and stumps in the back field which is nearly always water-logged. I’m hoping this rough-and-ready hugelkultur will help combat that and give the field a better chance at storing all that water without becoming a lake. The back field was also graded and we’ve got lots of wood now for the wood-burning stove we plan to install this fall.
{ Hugelkultur is a permaculture technique of burying wood to create a sort of underground water-resevoir / heavy-duty compost that you then cover with soil and plant on top of. }
Our neighbour made us a work area for chopping and storing wood, a zone that will become a material depot (we’ve now found free sources for both hog-fuel and horse manure who will actually bring it right to us!) and a compost centre. The area lies to the east end of the veggie garden and we’re going to extend the veggie garden from 84 feet long to 100 feet long to meet up with it.
Of course, these kind of projects fall into the “getting worse before it gets better” category. Clearing the brush revealed the contents of an entire bathroom and a huge row of fence between our place and the neighbours that is virtually non-existent.
Chicks
We split a chick order from McMurray Hatchery with our neighbours. We don’t have a ton of hatcheries here in Canada, and virtually no direct access to heritage breed chicks. It cost $75 for health papers to bring the chicks across the border, so pooling the order meant that not only did we only need to make one trip south, we halved the cost of importing them.
We got a selection of heritage breeds, 10 of each of 6 breeds. Not the most practical, but I’m feeling flippant about my chickens this year. I just want lots of lovely, friendly girls in the garden. They are growing like stink and eating me out of house and home. I can’t wait to get them outside eating grass!
Ducks
We also picked up a flock of Muscovy ducks at the sale barn. I’ve never had Muscovies before and I absolutely love them. They’re the only creature I know of that will eat our humungous west-coast slugs, the forage like champs, lay beautiful, rich eggs and don’t quack! They are quite comical on their daily stroll to the creek to eat roots and bugs and my son loves filling up their water trough and watching their crazy daily bath.
We hoped they would set their own eggs but so far they seem uninterested. Instead we’ve got the brooder full and hopefully we’ll have some duck for the freezer before long. I’ve heard Muscovy is wonderful eating.
Farm Dog
We lucked out and picked up a Great Pyrenees puppy about a month ago. We’ve been looking for a livestock guardian dog for quite a while, but my goodness they’re expensive! 12 to 1500 dollars for a dog?? Plus we’d have to pay to fly it from who knows where? Sheesh.
We found our sweet girl just by fluke not far from home. So far she’s not doing such a great job of minding the ducks, but she’s doing a really good job of minding my son and I. He’s in love.
And last but not least . . .
A bun in the oven! We’re expecting our second baby at the end of September. I’m anxious after my ridiculous birth-experience with my son and am struggling with my decision to have a doctor care for me instead of a mid-wife like last time.
However, the time is going fast with all the work to do and my lovely little boy holding my hand and telling me “it’s ok mama” when I’m suffering from morning sickness. He is determined it is a baby sister in there . . . We’ll have to wait and see!
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Help Save Farmland on Southern Vancouver Island
This is an urgent call to action!
I’m calling on all my online girlfriends, farm gals, bloggers, readers, urban farmers, renegade homemakers and anyone out there who values local food, real food, saving farmland, heck – if you just like to eat, these folks need and deserve your help!
Please help me spread the word about an amazing group of people from a little town called Sooke (pronounced SOOOOOk, not Suk) outside of my hometown on Southern Vancouver Island who are trying to save a large tract of endangered farmland from development and turn it into a thriving farm cooperative and eco-village.
Even better, visit their Indiegogo page and make a donation to help them buy the farm!
For those of you who aren’t familiar, Vancouver Island is a gorgeous island off the southern west coast of Canada, just north of Washington State. It features beautiful, rugged coastline, old growth forests and a temperate climate that makes it lovely for farming. Sooke is growing fast and this swath of farmland needs our help to be saved.
As a young mum who has just bought a farm (much smaller than this one), I can tell you it is an insurmountable financial challenge for many families. Land in our neck of the woods is highly sought after and the prices reflect that, even for farmland. These folks are facing that challenge by joining together to create opportunity and a legacy for their community at large. I think that deserves our support.
The farm will cost 1.6 million dollars to purchase. They need to raise $35,000 in order to secure the farm. They’ve already raised nearly $15,000 but they have a long way to go, and not much time left to do it.
