Planting our fall greens

We have now planted 3 beds of 25' with 5 rows of greens in each bed. The first greens we planted are coming up very slowly, and unfortunately we don't have any compost yet to help improve the soil. Our dream of having greens all winter may not work out as we had hoped, if the soil is not healthy enough to grow the greens right now. We're crossing our fingers, and working on a back-up plan. Stay tuned!

Working on the Chain Gang

Our driveway is half a mile long. It's a bit strange, since all the other houses on our street are within 100 ft of the road, but we kind of like the privacy. (Although, ask me again after our first winter, and we'll see if all that snow on the driveway changes my mind!) The driveway is a one-lane gravel road, with potholes on it. I figure, if we're going to be driving back and forth on this road on a regular basis (which we already are), I wanted to try to level it out some. So I flexed my muscles a bit, loaded up a wheelbarrow with a shovel and heavy-duty rake, and headed out to go fill in the holes. There is large gravel/dirt/shale pile on the property that I used as filler. I went and filled my wheelbarrow with as much as I could heft, and started filling holes. I'd dump some dirt in a hole, rake it level, then stomp on it with my feet to pack it down a bit, and maybe throw more dirt on there if it still wasn't level. Then I'd head back for more dirt and move to the next pothole. At one point, Orrin and Oliver came and helped for a bit, which mostly meant that I held Oliver while Orrin gave me a break with shoveling and raking. Then Oliver and I did the “pothole dance” to pack it down.

The more holes I filled, and the further I got from the pile of dirt/gravel, the harder my arms had to work to heft that wheelbarrow. A few hours later, I had spaghetti arms, and most of the holes were filled. I probably need a couple more wheelbarrows worth of dirt to finish the job, but was pretty happy with what I'd gotten done. It was a pretty basic kind of task to do, playing with dirt and shovels, but very fulfilling. I got to enjoy our forest, with the leaves starting to change color now, and a warm, cloudy fall day.

Farmer's Market: On the Other Side of the Table

We've been spending about a day a week gardening at a local farm. We help out doing whatever needs to be done that day, in exchange for fresh veggies at the end of it. It seems like a pretty good deal for both parties. For us, it prolongs our having to get “real” jobs because we're not spending as much money on food. The farmer recently asked if we wanted to go to market for her to sell, as she was going to be away for a few days and didn't want her produce to go to waste in the fields.

We took on the job. We went over to the farm the day before market day to harvest, picking cucumbers, zucchini's, tomatoes, herbs, greens, and the like. We harvested amounts that she recommended, based on how items had been selling in previous weeks. The day of the market, we went to Mahone Bay and set things up. It was fun to lay things out on pretty tablecloths and in baskets to make everything look nice.

It was a great day! Not particularly financially, but for so many other things. I really enjoyed chatting with customers, hearing what they liked, and seeing some of them being open to trying new veggies. When it was slow, I chatted with some of the other vendors. There was a nice comfort there, of all these people coming together to sell their local food. I could sense the pride in them, selling what they had worked hard for. It was a little different for us, as we hadn't been involved in growing that food to the same extent, but I know I will feel similarly when we get to the point where we are selling our own food.

It got us thinking about things like how to harvest, how to care for greens so that they don't wilt before they get to market, and how to present the food at market. I'm so glad to have had that opportunity.  

Digging up (truck) body parts

At first we thought it might be a car bumper

But it kept growing!

We'd levered it up so it was standing up on end, with logs and rocks behind it

And finally dug it all out and pulled it out of the hole!

This is what we think is either the hood of a truck, or the top of the cab of a truck. Either way, it was a lot of metal to dig up!

Getting started

note: this was written on Sept. 9, but it took me this long to figure out how to blog

This is the story of a city girl who thought she fell in love with a city boy, but it turned out that he was really a farmer in disguise.

We got together almost 5 years ago, and at some point thereafter I looked up at him all starry-eyed and said, “I’ll follow you anywhere.” A couple years into our relationship he decided to take me literally, as we moved from our big city life in California (approx. 1 mil people) back to his home province of British Columbia, first to a city that had about 80,000 people, and then 3 years later to a smaller community that had about 10,000 people. Are you catching the theme here of less and less populated places that we seem to be living in?

All along the way we were becoming more aware of our culture’s effect on the environment, both from conversations with people and from books that we read. We started to realize that we didn’t really like the direction things were going, with our culture using and abusing the planet and not giving much, if anything, back. We aren’t big protester’s or violent in any way, but wanted to find a way to make our mark - to reduce our impact on the planet, and maybe even have a positive effect instead. Green marketing is very focused on reducing consumption, but not on actually stopping mass consumption (and I’m talking here about things like the oceans of plastic that are clogging the real oceans and wreaking havoc on marine animals, just as one example).

My now husband, Orrin, has a love for soil and plants. (I suppose it should have been obvious to me at the beginning of our relationship that he would turn out to be a farmer, but the way I learned of his love of plants was by him wooing me with beautiful English roses from his personal collection. And let’s be honest here – what girl doesn’t fall for roses?) I’ll admit that I have always appreciated plants and trees, too, but more in the big picture sort of way. Like, “Oh, that tree is beautiful”. Whereas Orrin can tell me the name of the tree in Latin.

But I digress. We were trying to figure out how to minimize our impact on the planet, possibly even have a positive effect, and wondered what would that look like to us? We thought, if the world ever falls apart around us, one of the most important skills we would need is to be able to grow our own food. We have had small veggie gardens the last couple of years, but that would certainly not have been enough to live on. It was only enough to augment our standard grocery shopping, which was mostly done at farmer’s markets in the summer.

So then we started looking at property on the west coast of BC, hoping that we could buy a small farm, grow our own veggies and maybe have a few animals too. It turns out that, at this point in the history of the world, property on the west coast of BC is insanely expensive. This is where it really starts to get exciting – if we couldn’t afford land there, where could we go to make this dream a reality? We didn’t want to move somewhere where we didn’t know anybody, as we had already gone through an adjustment moving to BC and making new friends. We finally decided to move all the way to the east coast, to beautiful Nova Scotia, to be close to Orrin’s brother and family. It was a huge decision, but once we realized we could actually afford to buy land and a farm there, and that we would have a community to be a part of, it suddenly felt like the right thing to do.

So in July, movers took our worldly belongings to storage, and Orrin, our then 13-month old son, Oliver, and I packed ourselves into our truck and tent trailer, and drove across the country. I have ALWAYS wanted to drive across the country. Since I was American, I figured eventually I would do it in the States, but was perfectly happy to drive across Canada. We enjoyed many parts of our drive, but were ultimately very ready to settle down when we got to Nova Scotia. We found “our” farm right away (we had done our homework ahead of time), came to an agreement with the sellers, and spent August doing the necessary house-buying activities (getting water and septic tested, home inspection, etc.) all while dreaming about what we would do once the place was actually ours. Oh, and by the way, the population of this area is pretty sparse – something like 47,000 people in the whole county. I guess we really did want to be in a rural area.

We became landowners (or “land barons” as I like to say) on August 31. We have 90 acres, most of which is forested. There is a cute, recently renovated cottage that is perfect for the 3 of us (and our 2 cats) and a second building that needs to be completed. It has Tyvek paper around it and a solid roof on top, but is only framed inside. It needs to be sided on the outside and finished from top to bottom on the inside. I dream of having a yoga studio in there, and part of it will be a guest suite, as well as a root cellar and workshop in the downstairs section, which are built into the hillside.

We moved in on a Tuesday evening, and the next morning we were already out hoeing up weeds in what will be our first veggie garden space. It will be the home of our first greenhouse, which will be 20’ x 50’. Can you imagine hoeing up that big of a space by hand?? I haven’t even done the bulk of the work – and there is still about ¼ of it left to do – but I have lost the skin on the inside of one thumb from wacking that hoe so many times. Of course Orrin hasn’t gotten any blisters, but that’s because he’s the farmer and I’m the city girl.  In my vanity, I’m hoping for some nice arm muscles out of this job…

On Monday (as in, 3 days ago) we prepared our first garden bed (there will be a total of 5 beds in this area when we are done), and planted 5 rows of 5 different greens – red leaf lettuce, pac choi, swiss chard, arugula, and another asian green I can’t recall the name of. Just this evening we noticed that lots of arugula are up already, as well as some of the chard and the pac choi. Woohoo – we are farming now!

We also have had a bit of excitement as we have been digging this area out. First off, this is the site of an old barn, which we know from old aerial photos. We have found lots of old pieces of metal, like horse shoes, a spoon from the ‘40’s (we googled the name on the back, so that’s how we know its age), random hinges and other unknown parts. The most exciting thing we dug up took us about 3 hours – because it was the top of a truck cab. Can you imagine? I joke that the rest of the truck is down there somewhere, but I’d rather not know it’s there, so that we don’t have to dig it out. It was like an archeological dig – removing soil, trying to find the edges, prying up what we could, and repeating it all over again. It was actually pretty cool to dig that sucker up.

Our farm is on its way!