Goodbye!

Dear Friends,
I am excited to announce the launch of our website this past week, www.mirellarosefarm.ca. As a result, I am ending this blog and starting a new one on the website - it's hard to miss, it's the page at the top of the website that says "Farm Blog". I hope you'll join me over there, to keep up with our farm adventures.

A City Girl Becomes a Farmer holds a special place in my heart, as it journals the first steps we took as farmers, here in the lovely province of Nova Scotia. But now that it's been 2 1/2 years since we moved onto our property, I really am not a city girl any longer. I have butchered chickens, helped harvest 450 lbs of potatoes in 2012 and over 200 lbs of winter squash in both of the past 2 years, cooked down sap into maple syrup, pressed apples into juice, picked several pounds of salad greens in one day (among other vegetables), learned to can, dehydrate and freeze large quantities of a variety of vegetables and fruit, helped build a 1000 sq ft greenhouse, petted cows and pigs (Seriously! I'd never even been near cows or pigs before moving here), watched animals giving birth, experienced animals die, and pick and prepare food for our members each week. And by experiencing all of these things and more, I feel more connected to the earth and the cycle of the seasons than I ever have before. Farmers are a dying breed on this continent, and I am proud that we have increased the numbers even slightly, by taking on this role. It's hard work, but so rewarding. I can't imagine anywhere else I'd rather be.

So I hope you'll continue to follow along with us on our website, and maybe you'll even have the chance to try some of our food. We'd love to share it with you!

Itching for Spring

The new cows are integrating well with the existing ones. They're all together in the same paddock, and are now eating from the same pile of hay. Everyone seems fine with the new arrangement.

The pigs are getting big; less than a week to go until we take them to the butcher. Ginger, the sow, is due to farrow (have babies) in the next week or two. Orrin built her a house of her own (separate from the one she was sharing with Buxley), to have her babies in. He put a bunch of hay in the paddock, and she will use that to build a nest in her house for the piglets.

We've got someone coming to stay with us next weekend, for an indefinite period of time, as kind of a work-share situation. He won't pay rent, in exchange for helping us out on the farm. So that's prompted us to get the suite finished as much as possible in the other building, so that he can stay there. He may be in our house at the start, but hopefully not for long. So far, we've gotten drywall up in the bedroom and half-bath (walls and ceiling), and insulation in both those rooms, as well as insulation in part of the living room. Having enclosed walls makes it feel like we're really getting something done over there. Today we swept out the bedroom, and put a bed, dresser and night stands in there. It'll be rather “cabin-like”, but it's looking pretty good. We still have to finish the plumbing and electrical, although both are fairly far along. We've got appliances in the kitchen and bathroom that are ready to go, once we get the plumbing and electrical finished up.

There are lots of salad greens in the greenhouse now. I picked 3 times this week, picking for our CSA members as well as for friends and family that wanted to buy a bag of greens from us. The kale in the greenhouse is looking good, and there's more available of that now, too.

None of the onions we planted a couple of weeks ago have come up, except for the green onions. Orrin did a little research and learned that onion seed has a pretty low germination rate if it's older than one year, which ours is. So we'll be planting a whole bunch more this week, with the newest seed we have.

I'm looking forward to getting into the garden and starting to prep beds, but that'll have to wait until the snow is gone. It's been a long winter, and I'm looking forward to spring.

I'm back!

I'm going to attempt to resurrect my blog. It's been awhile, but I hope to write once a week, updating interested folks on what's happening at Mirella Rose Farm.

With the time change behind us, it's really starting to feel like spring, with light later in the evening. We've got big growth in the greenhouse. We've been able to offer our CSA members lettuce all winter, except for a couple of the coldest weeks in February. And as the days grow longer, the growth is much faster now, so we can pick more. We've also been enjoying carrots in the greenhouse that Orrin had planted back in July. New lettuce that he planted in January and February is up and starting to get bigger. We planted turnips and radishes in there this weekend, for the third time. We're planting every few weeks to ensure a longer period of availability, once they're ready to eat.

Last weekend, Orrin planted approximately 800 onion seeds in soil blocks. He planted both green onions and storage onions. Within a few days, the green onions had already sprouted, and are looking healthy and strong.

Yesterday we transplanted all of the lettuce out of Bed #6 in the greenhouse (there are 6 beds total), moving them into empty spaces in other beds. Then Orrin planted Bed #6 with potatoes. These will be our early potatoes, ready sometime in June.

Saturday was also the arrival of our 2 newest additions to the farm, a cow and bull, which are Milking Devons. The cow is bred, due to calve in early summer. These will be dual-purpose meat and dairy animals. I look forward to making our own grass-fed butter with the milk. The milk will mostly go towards fattening pigs.

Red leaf lettuce - our big champion of winter. It never seemed to stop growing, even in the coldest part of winter.

Greens in the greenhouse, prepping the far left bed for potato planting this past weekend.

From left to right: Nils, our new bull; Delilah, the new cow; Gigi and Elgie.

Delilah.

May and June

A lot has happened in the last month - I already mentioned the twin goats and calf born in mid-May. The boy goat ended up dying (Tiffany the mama just didn't have enough milk for both of them, it seems), but Tascha (the girl) is doing great now. Then Dee, the other goat, had twin girls a few weeks later. Both of those babies are doing great - getting big and eating lots of brush along with getting milk from Dee. Gigi had her baby at the end of May, and Oliver named her Little Gigi. We call her Elgie for short. For some reason that we don't understand, Elgie is probably about double the size of the calf that Gigi had last year. We like to think it's because she's getting enough food here on our somewhat-pasture, but we don't really know.

We've been planting lots of seeds, and working on succession planting too. Our onions look better than they did last year, and one patch of shallots look good. Our garlic looks great, so that's an exciting improvement from last year, too. The first patch of carrots and beets didn't do much, but the second set is looking really good. We've been using compost to amend the soil as much as possible, and Orrin also bought some concentrated liquid kelp fertilizer, which seems to be helping as well.

On the down side, we have continued to find boulders in the greenhouse, through the process of prepping beds for summer vegetables. Some were a manageable size that Orrin was able to carry out. Others are big enough that we've had to use a come-a-long on the car to crank them out. We are currently wrestling with possibly the largest boulder of all that we've seen. Orrin has been attempting to break chunks off by drilling holes in a line in the rock, then hammering metal rods into the rock to try to  encourage it to crack. It worked on one part, but hasn't worked in several other lines that he's tried to do. We think the rock is so deep that the rods are just not going deep enough into it to cause a break. We are contemplating burying it again, because it's mostly below a path, and we need to plant out that section of bed that is affected. Maybe we'll just have to wait until another transition period to try to deal with it. It's been so frustrating to continue finding boulders! Enough already!

Our CSA starts this week, with one member for now. Two more start in September. It is very exciting, getting to this point, and we're so glad we're starting out small so we can figure it out as we go. This week we'll be providing kale, spinach, mixed lettuce, garlic scapes, rhubarb, a few different herbs (oregano, thyme and sage), new potatoes and eggs. Yay!

Skinny sheep - newly shorn at the end of May.

Gigi with her brand new baby, Elgie. Elgie was probably an hour old.

Elgie, two days old.

A pregnant Isabel at the end of May, starting to look a little bigger. She's due any day now.

Boulders that Orrin has recently pulled out of the greenhouse.

The biggest boulder yet, still in the unveiling stage at the time of this picture.

Cows in the "infield" (our name for the area between the other house, greenhouse and garden). Add a couple of babies to the mix, and suddenly it seems like we have a herd of cows. Six in total now.

Oliver and I finding time for some yoga.

A view of the garden from the upstairs of the house, taken in mid-June. Things are very lush right now.

An Unexpected Surprise

Baby goat kids, about 14 hrs old. They are seriously adorable. We haven't come up with a name for the girl yet. We won't name the boy - we don't want to get too attached to what will probably become food.

 And then we had a bit of a surprise yesterday morning. Around 6:30 am, we hear a cow making some strange grunting noises, and are wondering what's going on out there. Orrin jumps out of bed and heads outside. Around 7am, I'm too curious to stay in bed any longer, and head out to find out what the situation is. Turns out that Buttercup, the Dexter cow, has just had a baby. First off, we'd been told that she wasn't due until August, so this is a bit of a surprise. The baby is just fine, not a preemie at all, so the previous folks possibly didn't realize when she'd actually been bred. But the second thing is that this is Buttercup's first baby, and she's very young, not even a year and a half old (or so we've been told). So that means she was bred when she was 6 months old, which is pretty darn early for a cow. And she's just had a calf and is kind of going a little crazy now, probably because she's the equivalent of a teenage mom. Fortunately, she settled down after a little while, and the calf has been nursing, so she's turning out to be a pretty good mom.

Here she is, about a day old, little Charlotte.

And here's Momma Buttercup, probably wondering how this happened to her...

Kidlets!

I came home from work tonight, changed from “Office Worker Tracy” to “Farmer Tracy” and went out to help move the sheep/goat fence. I found Tiffany, the goat, lying on her side with two little legs sticking out of her hind end, and making some strange goat grunts. About a half hour later, she gave birth to a little boy. And then another half hour later or so, unexpectedly, she gave birth to a little girl! The boy came out pretty easily on his own, but the girls head was out first, when her feet were still inside (it's an easier birth if the front feet come out first and the head is between them), so Orrin had to reach in and find one of the legs to help her come out easier. They are nursing and look healthy. 

Year 1 of our CSA begins

I'm excited that we now have reached our quota for CSA members for this year. It's not many, but it's a huge step for us. I love that these people want to buy food from us, and help support what we're doing. Now the hard work begins, as we are responsible for growing and raising food to feed people, people that we know personally.

We've planted a lot of everything that makes sense right now in the main garden, for this time of year. Things like kale, chard, lettuce, spinach, arugula, turnips, beets, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, peas, and potatoes. Next we'll start succession planting, to keep a steady supply of food maturing throughout the summer and fall. We just planted over 70 tomato seeds and 24 sweet pepper seeds in soil blocks yesterday, which will be planted in the greenhouse once the weather is consistently warm enough for those types of vegetables. 

We hope to start providing food to our members in July, when we think a greater quantity of food will be ready to harvest.