Tag Archives: farming

birth, death, a near miss and other amusements

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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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country mouse, city mouse

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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.

Help Save Farmland on Southern Vancouver Island

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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.

Please visit their website here to learn about their vision, plans and the beautiful space they are trying to save.

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.

Please give what you can to help this community save an invaluable resource, and most importantly – spread the word!

neighbourliness part two : things that make me want to dance

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We have been on the farm for two full months now. Already I know my neighbours better than I did in the city.

Neighbourliness is changing my life.

It makes me want to sing from the roof of the barn. Hallelujah! AHHHHH!!

It has occurred to me very quickly living out here in the sticks:

Neighbourliness isn’t a choice. Neighbourliness is a necessity.

For the last five years or so I’ve struggled to be a homesteader in the city.

Wrestling to put by hundreds of pounds of tomatoes with only two hands, having to buy all our own equipment, working double-time to run the house while pregnant, chasing children, facing a mammoth to-do list come planting and harvest time, and on and on and on.

It’s exhausting.

I’ve realized since living here; this lifestyle isn’t conducive to the modern, isolated individual model of “community”. It just doesn’t work.

We can’t fully become truly independent without embracing interdependence.

It’s just too much dang work.

About a month before we moved here, we found ourselves scoping out wood-burning fireplaces. Another family with a little boy were in the store at the same time, and we got chatting. We told them we were moving to the area from the city, and when we gave them an idea of where our new farm was we discovered they live right around the corner!

(OK, a country corner, about a mile away – but STILL!)

Fast forward a month or so and her and I have been taking our boys for walks around our (very big) block, sharing harvest tips, recipes. This past week when I found myself needing an emergency trip to the doctor and my husband two hours away at work in the city, she watched my son. Without a second thought. Insisted.

Over dinner at their place this weekends our husbands started plotting how they can split the expense of a full-scale chicken processing operation, you build the plucker, I’ll buy the scalder, planned work on their barn, sharing the rental of a post-auger to mend both our fences. We’ll watch their boy later this month as they prepare for the birth of their new baby.

We share the same goals of independence, but really what we are working towards is even better than independence, and will give us TRUE independence from the influences in our lives we would rather do without.

Doesn’t that just make you want to dance?

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mama get your . . . gun?

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The first time Jeff took me home to meet his family on the other side of the country, he checked in on his guns. Cleaned them, oiled them, put them away. He tried to teach me about them, wanted to show me how to hold them, shared memories and family history.

I refused to so much as touch them.

Fast forward to a clear, cold November afternoon and I’m asking if he will teach me how to shoot.

What the . . . ???

We laughed, because it really is ridiculous how far I have changed in the last 6 years or so since that first trip home.

But, circumstances change and so do people. I would never in a million years have said I would want to hold a gun, never mind learn to shoot one.

Then a big, healthy, bold coyote came strolling down my drive in broad daylight.

Things change.

We both immediately brought to mind a line from one of our favourite plays Wingfield Farms. If you haven’t heard of Rob Beattie and you farm, you must watch.

The story follows a Toronto stock broker who moves to the country (not far from where my hubby grew up) and tries his hand at farming.

You will wet your pants laughing. We saw this show live a few years back and we were the youngest ones there. It’s a one man show. Just sublime.

Anyway. There is one scene where he is having trouble with a protected species of hawk killing his livestock. He can’t shoot the hawk because of it’s protected status and goes through quite a bit of trouble trying to figure out what to do.

Then one day he comes home and the hawk is suddenly gone.

His wife simply states, matter-of-factly :

“Guinea fowl are a protected species, too, Walt.”