Amarosia Organic Garden

Today we checked in on the compost piles to see if anything was happening.

The first big pile is finished and will be making its way to the greenhouses in the spring (it should have a lower salt content being only vegetable based) and, despite the chill, the youngest compost pile is still warm enough inside to keep the microbes happy.

We are still going to have to buy in compost for a while yet. Our sum total of a years worth of vegetable scraps is about 1/6 of what we bought this week… so we need to find 6 times more stuff to compost…

Mmmm, chocolate pudding!

Every spring a beaver moves into our pond, but by early summer they have moved on. This year the beaver arrived in October and has been hard at work building his lodge.

He has also been doing the other thing that beavers do, which is damming the exit to the pond and making it flood all over the farm track and the perimeter of the pond.

Twice Dave has broken the dam down and twice Mr Beaver has repaired it. This time he added a thick layer of mud to the top, and you can even see his paw marks in the top. I can imagine him muttering away as he slathers mud on his dam of sticks and branches “Now this time, this time you are going to stay put!”

So Dave decided to remove only the top couple of inches of mud to drop the water down to a level that doesn’t damage the farm track, but hopefully keeps it high enough not to upset Mr Beaver. We’ll seen if he accepts our proposition.

OK, so I can understand people in many developing countries taking part in activities that we would never consider because they are fighting to survive.

BUT I am completely unable to understand how a Wal-Mart employee could be crushed to death by crazed shoppers. I know that crushing deaths occur at concerts and in football stadiums where you have crowds surging forwards at intense moments in the show or game, but shopping?! Really?

The idea of queuing from 4am to buy something that is likely 25% packaging, 70% promotion and  only 5% actual thing, and getting SO hyped up about it that you don’t notice when you are walking over the top of a person is just grotesque.

I wonder whether these shoppers will even consider that their passage to a great Christmas gift for their child was paid for with a human life.

During the winter I get the opportunity to catch up on some research, but even in the midst of the chaos of summer I still find time to check out these blogs because I want to see what other farmers are managing to grow in more favorable climates!

Tiny Farm Blog is writen by a (more) experienced farmer in Southern Ontario. I love the fact that really often when I log on I’ve been doing the same thing as him that week. It’s also great that he shares the things that worked and those that didn’t and the vegetable varieties he grows. It saves a lot of wasted time when someone else says “don’t grow this variety it tastes funny”:-) He also has quite the fan base, who write comments on his blog which I’m sure make him feel loved… come on guys, please write some comments!

Salad Bowl Gardens is owned by Roxanne Beavers (of organic record keeping fame) who is a fellow organic inspector and Jamie Coughlin who works for the Dept of Ag in Nova Scotia. They are also new(ish) farmers working a small(ish) patch of land andthey never fail to make me laugh, or at least smile, at their antics:-)

Jen and Derek of ‘Jen and Derek’s Farm Fresh Veggies’ came and visited us this summer which was lovely. Meeting fellow farmers is always fun. They have a small organic farm on PEI and my first encounter with Jen was when she showed up at the Dieppe Market and cooed over our lovely signs. Like us they are doing their best to make their farm financially sustainable without subsidizing it out of Derek’s off farm income.

Stone Spoon blog is written by a Université de Moncton Student who has decided to try to eat an entirely local diet and does the majority of his shopping at the Dieppe and Moncton Markets. He also comes out to help out from time to time to try to gain some experience of what it is like to grow your own food. He is constantly cooking new things (his girlfriend is a lucky lady!) though is uncomfortable with my cooking methods which involve reading the recipe and then deciding to do it differently.

SteveBeing is the online diary of Steve the Wwoofer who was here in late September/ Early October. It’s a great account of his travels and experiences of Wwoofing on farms in Eastern Canada. Please note that he can spell, but he only has access to the internet for fleeting moments at the occasional farm so does not have time to check for spelling and grammar!

p.s. regarding writing comments on the blog, we have a spam guard feature. For any first time posters, I have to confirm that you are not a Russian spammer, so please be patient when you write anything because I have to plow through about 30 spam postings a day to pull out the real ones. Once you’ve been accepted for the first time, you are considered safe, so then you can advertise your great fake Rolex deals;-)

As some of you know, I also do some inspecting of organic farms. This year I inspected in Nova Scotia which was a first for me and I got to see some wonderful fall scenery around Tatamagouche.

For the last two years at the ACORN  conference Roxanne Beavers and I made a presentation entitled ‘Record Keeping for Organic Certification and Farmer Sanity’. Bizarrely, the room is always packed, so we are going for a third year. There should be some interesting presentations too so check out the ACORN website for more details.

As a result of the presentation, I have been roped into coauthoring a book for the Canadian Organic Growers or COG entitled “Record-Keeping for Organic Farmers: how to get and stay certified”. Needless to say its a blast, but once again it is likely to be very popular (hmm, maybe I should have asked for a share of the profits…) because while most farmers know how to farm, the paperwork aspect drives them crazy. My job has become, showing people that its not that difficult and unusually its pretty darned important.

Did I mention that I was given 4 days to write the two largest chapters of the book? Its lucky we organic farmers have stamina!

So while being an organic farm inspector does not take up a lot of my time, it has created a lot of spin-off opportunities. Next up, T-shirt and ball-cap;-)

The early snowfall managed to bury my parsley, kale and hakurei turnips which were all producing well, but now that it has melted I’ve been able to start picking them again which Dave is particularly happy about. He loves it when I cook the baby salad turnips with a mix of 90% sunflower oil 10% sesame oil (because it is SO strong and very expensive), Tamari organic soy sauce, maple syrup and garlic.

If the winter ended now we would have something close to a British climate. A few very cold days, a bit of snow maybe, then onto Spring again. We could have fresh veggies year round without even having to make use of a greenhouse.

Winter Bloomsdale Spinach

Moss Parsley

Arugula

Red Russian Kale

However, we don’t live in the UK, so we are making the most of the fresh veggies while we can, greedily guarding our storage veggies and dreaming of when the next fresh crop will be available, in, maybe April if we get really lucky.

I’ve also been enjoying some garlic that I preserved in a syrup made with sugar, salt and vinegar. It is so strong that nothing can live in it… except maybe garlic! The garlic is juicy and sweet but quite mild (though Dave would disagree when it comes to my after garlic breath) and the syrup has taken up the garlic flavour so I used it to make a ‘honey garlic sauce’ for some pork and carrots yesterday. Scruptious!

The snow melt has also revealed row cover and mulch that we did not have time to get out of the field so we spent a merry hour this morning lugging around what resembled giant soggy sheets of toilet paper.

I’m feeling generally happier about our erosion control strategies. We have seeded white clover around most of the field edges and in the walkways, plus we managed to get a green manure of some description onto much of the field. The roots of the plants help to bind the soil together so now the water pouring out of the field is clearer and less full of our precious top soil.

If the ground firms up again any time soon we are going to try ‘planting’ our remaining sunchokes by placing them on the soil surface and then burying them in straw. With a good layer of snow on top they should make it. Normally its impossible to kill these plants. We shall see…

We are still eating tomatoes every day. I’m not saying that to make you feel bad, just to make the point that its remarkable how far into winter you can still be eating fresh, local produce. The only tricks are a) to have enough space to store them and b) to not eat them all at once! The tomatoes are a bit wrinkly at this point but they still taste wonderful.

As soon as they are finished we will start on the frozen tomatoes which occupy about 50% of two freezers. In case you missed the lesson on freezing tomatoes you just remove the stem, stick them in a freezer bag then drop them in the freezer. Plum tomatoes work best. I froze mostly San Marzanos and Russian Pastes this year because they are so dense and fleshy.

We also have half a greenhouse full of napa cabbage which is wonderful chopped up as a salad green. Really fresh and crispy. It was frozen solid yesterday, but I picked a head anyway and it defrosted nicely with just a bit of limpness in the outer leaves. If anyone is passing by, do drop in and we’d be happy to let you pick your own:-) (offer valid until it drops below -15 at which point I don’t know if they’ll make it).

Another surprise storage vegetable, well fruit, is watermelon. Their tough shells mean that they don’t dehydrate quickly so they are still sitting pretty in the sunroom.

We were interviewed this morning by a journalist from L’Acadie Nouvelle for an article about local organics. This was both wonderful ‘as we appreciate any positive press coverage we can get, but it was also challenging  for me as the interview was in French so I was left rummaging around for the French for ‘Marketing’, ‘isolation distances’ and ‘defrost’… as ever saying the English words with a heavy French accent came far too easily! It was also the first time that I have tried speaking more than a few words of French in front of Dave and I think he was actually impressed.

They said we would likely be in the paper before Christmas and would keep us posted… so we’ll keep you posted too:-)

Our 60 tonnes of organic compost arrived today and while I love and hopefully will continue to love Jim Cunningham of Cardwell Compost and his wonderful farmyard compost blend, today is not one I want to repeat in a hurry.

Truck number 1 arrives and decides to ignore Dave’s very specific instructions to reverse into the unloading area. Instead he goes in forwards and overshoots into an area that is a marsh in spring time. With 30 tonnes on board he quickly sinks into the soft soil.

We figure he might have a better chance of being pulled out if he unloads first which means Dave pushing the compost out of the way with the loader so he is free to back out (hence the suggestion to reverse in, to avoid having to back out over a huge pile of compost, but hey, why follow instructions?!)

Step two, use the other truck to pull the first truck out.

Great idea, however, second truck rapidly got stuck due to its own 30 tonne load plus the weight of the truck it was trying to haul out.

Step 3, call for assistance. Jim Cunningham sent for Clarkes Towing to pull the two trucks (plus one 30 tonne load of compost) out. At this point I started filming figuring that at worst I could make my fortune on Americas funniest home movies.

 Happily for us (or sadly depending on how you look at it) the driver of the Happy Hooker was a real professional and had them out of there in no time!

 Leaving behind a churned up mess of mud and compost which is going to be a quagmire in the Spring.

But the second truck still had a load of compost on board so had to back up into the quagmire where of course it promptly got stuck.

Thankfully having Clarke’s on hand meant he was swiftly pulled out again. All hail the great truck puller outer!

As an aside this gentleman kept commenting on my trigger happiness (maybe I was making him nervous) until I pointed out that he was the only person who came out of this looking good:-)