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.

Catching up

Things are pretty hectic for me now, and I don't think it'll be changing anytime soon, so you probably won't be seeing many entries from here for the foreseeable future. I now have two part-time jobs that add up to one full-time job, plus teaching a yoga class a week. When I'm not working off the farm, I'm generally helping Orrin on the farm, wherever he needs help. He works hard all day, every day, and is finding that he is able to get more done these days as Oliver is getting more independent.

Orrin's moving the cows daily now, which is a job he can do by himself. But it takes both of us to roll up and move the electric-netting fence for the sheep and goats each day, so that's usually the first thing to be done when I get home in the evening. May is also a big gardening month, as we are prepping new and existing garden beds, picking rocks, planting seeds, weeding and watering the greenhouse, etc. About a month ago we had planted about 200 onion seeds into soil blocks. Most of them grew well, and we just transplanted them into the main garden a few days ago. Lots of other seed varieties went into the ground early last week, preceding several days of rain. More rain is on the way later this coming week, so his plan is to get a bunch more seeds in the ground. We'll be planting out about 26 beds this year, 4' wide by 50' long. In a rougher section of the garden, where there are still quite a few roots in the ground, we plan to skip making garden beds for this year, but will probably plant winter squash and beans there, along with a bit of corn. We've counted 9 potato plants up in the garden at this point, which were planted a few weeks ago.

Several babies have been born in the last month. The buff orpington chicken, who was sitting on 5 eggs up in the cow shed, had 4 babies hatch. One died, but the 3 remaining seem healthy and are doing well.

Taffy, the Jacob ewe, had a baby girl on April 24. We've named her Delilah.

Yesterday Orrin and Oliver picked up 50 day-old meat chicks at the local feed store. They will be ready to butcher in about 9 weeks.

I've been talking up our farm to folks, trying to line up a few members for our CSA (community-supported agriculture) program. There are two people who want to do this with us, and we're hoping for one or two more. We want to start small, to make sure we have enough food to feed everyone (them AND us), and because we know we'll make mistakes along the way as we figure out what we're doing. Our plan is a year-round CSA that will include 3 kinds of meat, eggs, vegetables, and some fruit. We'll add more varieties of fruits and vegetables as the years go by. Our inspiration comes from Kristin Kimball's book “The Dirty Life”, where she farms in upstate New York.

Chicks hatching in an incubator, in early April. The top-most just hatched,
the other two were around a day old.

Zoe sunning herself on the deck.

Oliver, taking the job of holding a chick very seriously.

The buff who sat on eggs in the cow shed (in the background). One of the chicks is peeking out,
the others are tucked in underneath her.

Beautiful rhubarb, the first fruit of the season.

Taffy with her new baby, Delilah. She was probably an hour or two old at the time.

Oliver, feeding weeds to the laying hens. It was so awesome to see him doing this.

A very large bale of hay. It feeds cows, sheep, goats and pigs.

Delilah, one week old.

Chick magnet?

There are a lot of chicken-y kinds of things going on around here right now. Since our chicken fiasco a month ago, we've been working on trying to increase our chicken numbers, hoping for some more hens. We would like to be in a position to provide a dozen eggs a week to around 10 customers by the summer of 2013. There are three different ways we're attempting to increase numbers right now.

First off, Orrin found a couple farms in the area that hatched some chicks recently, so he brought home five Rhode Island Red chicks, who were probably 1 to 2 weeks old when he got them. They are about three weeks old now. He also bought five Buff Orpington day-old chicks, they are now 2 weeks old. All ten chicks seem very energetic and healthy.

Second, we borrowed an incubator from some friends, and 23 days ago we put 11 eggs into it. Our lovely Rhode Island Red rooster recently died for some unknown reason, and so we collected eggs from the Rhode Island hens for the next few days, hoping that they had been fertilized before the rooster died. The general incubation period for chickens is 21 days, and just like clockwork, on the 21^st day (2 days ago), several eggs pipped. Two chicks made their way out of their shells by that evening, three hatched yesterday, and one more had hatched by the time we woke up this morning. One that was born yesterday seemed to be weaker than the others, and didn't fluff out like the others did. That one died this morning. Out of 11 eggs, we found that two did not get fertilized, three did not hatch, and six were born. After that one died this morning, we have 5 vibrant little chicks. It's amazing how much smaller than the Buff's they look, who are only 1 ½ weeks older than them. The 3-week old Rhode Island Red's are so much bigger still that we moved the Red chicks to another brooder, as we didn't want any of the day-old's to get trampled.

The last thing we did to increase our chicken numbers was to put five eggs under a Buff Orpington who recently went broody. Oh, I guess I should mention that after the Rhode Island Red rooster died, we bought a Buff Orpington rooster, so we are now saving Buff Orpington eggs. You may recall that the last broody hen was a Buff Orpington, and you'd be correct. We have two Buff hens, and the current broody hen is not the hen that was broody last month. We have learned our lesson about trying to leave a hen with eggs in the coop with the rest of the chickens, and have put the eggs in a nest of hay up in the cow shed, where this particular hen likes to lay her eggs. We hope it'll be out of the way enough that she and the babies will be left alone when they hatch.

So we now have 15 baby chicks, with the potential for five more from the broody hen. If all those hatch and are healthy, hopefully at least half of all the chicks will be hens, giving us about 10 more laying hens in approximately six months. 

What's in a Name?

We have now been on our farm for a year and a half, and only in the last month have we finally decided on a farm name. It turned out to be way more challenging than I would have thought. We wanted to come up with a name that was meaningful to us, yet easy to pronounce for the public. Our ideas came from all over the place. At one point, we thought about trying to come up with a name based on the local indians (mi'kmaq), because we figure they would have been the stewards of this land long before we came here. It was too hard to find a name that was pronounceable that we liked, and we didn't tend to like the English versions of the names that were meaningful to us.

Then we started thinking about Italy. Italy is a special place to us, as we spent 5 weeks there in the winter of 2006/2007. We enjoyed the hilltop towns, rolling pastures and vineyards, among other things. We thought about names like “Good Earth” or “Beautiful Earth” in Italian, but nothing seemed to flow when we added the word “farm” at the end of it.

So what's the name?

Mirella Rose Farm.

Here's why: Mirella is the name of a character that we like in one of our favorite movies, an Italian movie called “The Best of Youth”. Rose was my mother's middle name, plus it's our favorite flower. Orrin collected English roses when we lived in California, and eventually - when there's time - we'll create an ornamental garden here largely based on the collection he's re-created since being in Canada. He had over 100 plants that we were forced to leave in the States because of Canada's rules around plants, but he's re-built the collection somewhat since then. And lastly, if Oliver had been a girl, he would have been named Mirella Rose.

We've been rolling the words around in our mouths, getting used to the name, and I think it's just right.

So come visit us here at Mirella Rose Farm. And soon you'll be able to buy food from us, too.

Tap, tap, tap!

It's maple sugaring time! Yesterday we put 11 spiles (taps) into maple trees not too far from the house, and hope to put another 10 or so in, once we gather some additional buckets. We are tapping red maples, as we haven't found any sugar maples nearby. We have found a few in a couple far-off corners of the property, but nothing convenient enough for carrying full buckets back and forth for boiling. Red maples require more boiling down than sugar maples, because there is not as much sugar in the sap. For red's, it'll probably take around 50 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup. For sugar's, it's 30 or 40 gallons to produce 1 gallon. Last year we just played around with it, and boiled down our sap inside the house. It produced way too much condensation from the evaporating water, not to mention all the electricity required, so this year we're set up with an outside fire pit that Orrin made. He used bricks to create a U-shaped enclosure that is tall enough to have a decent-sized fire inside, and a grate on top to place the pots. We had tapped the trees around 2pm yesterday, and by about noon today Orrin was getting the fire going and had collected 12 gallons of sap to get us started. We had it boiling down most of the day, continually adding sap to the pot as the level in the pot dropped.

The taps weren't running today, because the temperatures hadn't dropped below freezing last night. The optimal time for tapping is when the daytime temperatures are above freezing, and the nighttime temperatures are below freezing. Hopefully the weather will cooperate so we can be tapping for the next two to three weeks.

We're sure looking forward to the first syrup. As Oliver would say, “It's de-wish-ous!”

"Breaking" News

Our first chick-raising experiment turned out to be yet another lesson in farm life, rather than a success story. We had put six eggs under our broody Buff Orpington hen to start, about 4 weeks ago. A week or two ago, one of the eggs got crushed in the nest somehow, so then we were down to five. A few days ago, we started hearing chirping from inside the eggs, which was pretty exciting. The next morning, there was a baby chick under the hen! An hour or so later, Orrin went back to check on them, and saw that one of the commercial chickens that we had recently added to the flock had killed the chick and was in the process of eating it. Yikes! Orrin then tried moving the hen and her remaining eggs out of the henhouse and into a separate space, but she abandoned the eggs and headed back into the coop to sit on the (now empty) nest that she had been sitting on for the past 3 weeks. So then Orrin moved the eggs back into the henhouse, but put them into one of the higher nest boxes, hopefully out of reach of the aggressive commercial chickens. Of the remaining four eggs, one was half-rotten, so it must have stopped developing early on; two others died in the shell, right around the time they should have been hatching; and the last one would have been fine except that it, too, got eaten by another chicken.

What did we learn from this experience?

1. Keep the broody hen and her eggs separate from the rest of the flock. We didn't have any problems with the heritage hens, but those damn commercial hens have turned out to be way more aggressive.
2. Start later in the spring. Because that hen went broody, we gave her some eggs to see what would happen, but the cold may have contributed to the deaths of a couple of the chicks.
3. We won't be keeping the commercial hens in the flock, long term. They lay pretty well, but we don't want that kind of aggressive behavior in the flock, so we won't be saving any of their eggs to increase the flock.

We're glad we only sacrificed six eggs on this experiment, and hope the next round is more successful. We've got another broody hen, so we'll be trying this process again soon, and will probably put ten or so eggs under her. We'll stick with Rhode Island Red eggs, since that's our rooster.

And then he was gone

Sadly, I have to say that the baby sheep died. We feel terrible about it, because we feel responsible. The day after he was born, we noticed that the ewe didn't seem to want to let him nurse, but we weren't standing there watching them all day, so we didn't know if he had nursed at other times when we weren't around. That afternoon, Sunday, I was away for a couple of hours, and came home to find Orrin in the house with the baby curled up on his lap. He said that he'd found the baby in the sheep shed, collapsed on the ground from weakness. Orrin brought him inside and laid him near the woodstove to keep warm, then went back outside, flipped the ewe over onto her back (sheep become very docile when held on their back) and milked into a small bucket. He went back into the house and used a baby syringe to feed some milk to the baby. Shortly after he'd done that is when I arrived home. I grabbed a heating pad to try to give the baby some additional warmth, and then went and called someone locally who used to raise sheep, for advice. When I came back downstairs, the baby had died. We were kind of in shock, and as I said, feel terrible about it. From talking to other folks, we learned that we need to make sure the baby nurses within 45 minutes to an hour after being born, so they get the first milk, colostrum, and so the mother and baby make that connection.

We realized that the times that are really difficult here are when we learn the most. What will we do the next time we think an animal is going to give birth? Keep an eye on them until the baby is born, and make sure the mother nurses them. In the long run, we won't want to keep animals that aren't very maternal, but we sure don't want to let the babies die because of that. We'll just keep track of that, and try to build up a herd of animals, whichever type they may be, that have a strong instinct to care for their young.

It's a boy!

While Orrin was out feeding and watering the animals this morning, he noticed that the Shetland sheep, Olive, wasn't interested in eating. Normally the animals are ravenous when he takes hay out to them, so this kind of behavior was unusual. She was due to have a baby any time, and he took her disinterest in food as a potential sign that she was going into labor. So he kicked the Jacob ram out of the pen – he was loose but would never go far from the Jacob female. We were gone for most of the day, and when we got home this evening, we went up to the sheep/cow shed to see if there was a new baby or two. There was a beautiful little curly black sheep, tucked in with Olive! Sometimes sheep can have multiples, but in this case there was just the one. We were kind of hoping for a female, so we would have another Shetland to help increase the herd, so now we'll have to decide what to do with the male. I would have taken a picture, but our camera recently met its demise at the hands of a certain boy.

Following up to my last post about bacon, we spent almost the entire next day trying to smoke the remaining 7 lbs in the barbeque. We had a heck of a time trying to get “billowing smoke”, as one of our book resources told us we should have. What finally ended up working was heating up a bunch of briquettes, then spreading out the hot ashes in a cast-iron pan and laying somewhat dried apple wood chips on top. Wet chips just kept putting out the briquettes, but wet ones that had been allowed to dry somewhat seemed to do a better job. We ended up with bacon that was quite smoky (definitely what we wanted), but still too salty, even after I had re-rinsed the meat that morning. The whole salt thing is very perplexing to me, as I didn't use even close to as much salt as the recipe called for, and yet it is way too salty.

Bacon Drama

We have been spending a lot of time with our pork these days. The other day I made sausage for the first time, which was so incredibly easy (if you don't bother with casings), that I can't believe I hadn't done it before. Basically, ground pork + herbs/spices + molding into patties = sausage. Who knew? OK, you probably did, but it was a nice surprise to me. I imagine I'll be doing that a lot more with ground pork in the future.

On the other spectrum of difficulty, we spent much of the day attempting to make bacon for the first time. A few days ago, we thawed one of the pork bellies from the freezer, which was 8 lbs of pork. We laid the pieces out flat on cookie sheets and casserole dishes (three were required) and rubbed a lot of salt and a little bit of pepper into the meat, then drizzled a little apple cider on top. We covered them and put them in the fridge to cure for 2 days (recommendations on curing seem to range from 24 hrs to 7 days). This morning, we tried using the grill to smoke the pork, as that seemed like the best option since we don't have a smokehouse. The book we were using as a reference said to soak wood chips for at least an hour, ignite them, then when they are smoldering place them on one side of the grill and the meat on the opposite side. What we pretty quickly found challenging was that you can't ignite wet wood chips! Orrin then did some on-line research and someone suggested lighting a few briquettes and then adding the chips to that. We tried that several times, but the wet chips kept putting out the briquettes and we had to reheat them. Finally, the chips must have dried out enough that they started to take the heat from the briquettes, and began smoking. We almost threw in the towel and were going to try it again tomorrow, but decided to put about 1 lb of the pork on the grill to try to smoke it, to at least practice on that. It's tricky to keep the grill on low enough to not cook the meat, yet still provide enough heat to keep the chips smoldering. We were trying for 210F in the grill, but mostly it was around 150 or 160F. Once we got to 150F in the meat (the recommended temperature), we stopped, which was late this afternoon. We cooked up our first batch of bacon and definitely got the smoky taste but also found that it was way too salty, so I must not have rinsed off enough of the salt from the meat, or else I put way too much on the first place (which I didn't actually think was possible, since I was following a recipe, and since the point of the salt is to draw out the water from the meat). I'll try rinsing the remaining meat some more before we start up again tomorrow. We chopped up the remains from today and threw it into the pot of lentils that was cooking on the stove for dinner, and it was delicious – and not too salty.

And hey, we made bacon!

And yet more animals...

You really shouldn't believe me when I say that we're not going to buy anymore animals...

We were feeling kind of bummed after the loss of one of our laying hens, so we tracked down a woman who wanted to sell some. On Wednesday, Oliver and I drove out near Wolfville and bought five of her birds. They are conventional, standard laying hens that you can buy pretty easily around here, so it'll be interesting to see how their eggs compare to the eggs from our heritage chickens. I have no idea if there will be a significant difference if they are fed the same food, but right now, the eggshells are pretty weak and sometimes have odd dents in them. The egg yolks from the new chickens are slightly larger and a little paler than from the heritage birds, and the whites are runnier. The new chickens were also on conventional feed. I hope the eggs will improve on organic feed and greens. 

February Pictures

Our new Dexter cow, whom we named Buttercup, since hopefully she'll be providing us some delicious butter starting later this summer. Plus, we're still fans of the Princess Bride.

A recent harvest of carrots out of the greenhouse. I'm so glad Orrin thought to plant carrots in there in the fall, as they are incredibly tasty and so much better than the bland variety at the grocery store (even though we buy organic).

A gorgeous winter day in which we headed down the driveway to post this sign up at the entrance to the driveway. 

The same day - Orrin is pulling Oliver, and Zoe is joining us on our walk.

A Perplexing Death

A strange thing happened yesterday – one of our laying hens died, leaving us with nine remaining. It's very perplexing, as we don't know how or why it happened. The day before, Orrin had let the chickens outside, as the weather was pretty decent, and he said he noticed a few drops of blood on one of the Columbian Rock hens, but she seemed fine. Then yesterday, he found one of the Rhode Island Reds dead in the chicken house. He couldn't see anything wrong with her, he just wondered if maybe she was injured somehow the day before while they were outside, and then died from the injury. I think we'll never know.

In other chicken news, one of the Buff Orpington hens has gone broody, which means she wants to sit on the nest all day, keeping eggs warm to hatch. Well, we hadn't been leaving any eggs under her because it's still chilly outside, but decided to just roll with it and see what happens. At the moment we'd like to keep our breeds pure, so since we have a Rhode Island Red rooster, Orrin is starting to put Rhode Island Red eggs under her to take care of, maybe accumulating 6 or 8 over the next week. Then we'll see what happens. In theory she'll take care of the eggs and then take care of the chicks once they hatch. I wonder if they'll be ok in the cold, but since she's interested, we thought we'd try it. If it works, there will be some chicks in a few weeks (chickens have a 21 day incubation period, on average), and if some of them are female (usually about half are), then we'll have more laying hens about 6 months after they are born. If it doesn't work, we're just out a half dozen eggs or so.

The Animal of the Week, x2

A couple more animals have recently joined us. One, a berkshire boar, arrived a week ago. The other, a Dexter heifer, arrived yesterday. The boar is the same breed as Isabel, our (previously) remaining pig, and we decided to buy him to breed her, so that she could hopefully have 4 or 6 piglets in the spring. Shortly after meeting each other, she bit him on the ear to let him know who was boss, and they've gotten along just fine since then!

The new heifer is going to be the start of our milk cow herd. The galloway's that we have are intended for meat, or at least the males are, and we decided to start getting ready for the dairy side of things. Dexter's are pretty small cows, in general, and known to be generally easy-going. Our new cow is young, and newly bred; her first baby is due in August. That'll give us time, we hope, to get ready for milking. Dexter's can produce 2 to 3 gallons of milk per day, compared to the 10 gallons or so that you can get out of a Holstein – or so I'm told.

Originally we thought we wouldn't add dairy to our list of farming activities for a couple of years, but we realized that if Isabel has a bunch of piglets, then one goat's worth of milk will not be enough for all of them. This way, the new cows milk can mostly go to the pigs and the calf, but we can start playing around with making butter, trying the milk ourselves, and eventually making cheese. We are both lactose intolerant to some degree, so we are hoping that raw milk, which still has the enzymes intact, will be more digestible for us.

Oh, and the last (planned) animal breed to arrive will be in May, when we get our first hive of bees.

Orrin tells me that we now have all the animals he wanted to get to set up the farm. I asked him if I could remind him of that the next time he's looking at livestock for sale on kijiji...

Between now and August there will be several arrivals of new babies – both ewes are pregnant (the Jacob and the Shetland), Gigi the galloway and the new cow are both pregnant, the goat is pregnant, and hopefully the pig will get bred too. In the spring, we will also be separating out one of our types of chickens, the Rhode Island Reds, with the rooster of that same type, and plan to let some eggs develop into chicks, if one of the hens goes broody. If that doesn't happen, we may have to figure out how to use an incubator. I clearly haven't picked up enough farmer-speak, because if I had I would have said, “the cows and sheep are bred (not pregnant!).” Oh well, I'm pretty sure I'm becoming more farmer-like every day. 

Egg-cellence

Our chickens were rock stars yesterday. From 10 chickens we got 10 eggs. That's the first time that has happened since they started laying in mid-November. But it made up for the fact that earlier in the week, on a day when the temperature was a high of -13C, there were only 5 eggs. It's funny the things I can get excited about. 

Olive

In his spare time, Orrin enjoys scanning Kijiji want ads for various things, including livestock. We've collected quite a menagerie here now, in part through his Kijiji addiction, so when he said to me a few days ago, “What do you think about getting another sheep?” I immediately dismissed the idea. We don't need to spend the money, and we've already got three of them, so no need. But then, because he knows me so well (and clearly wanted another sheep), he appealed to the knitty side of me, the part of me that can't wait to learn how to card and spin wool so that I can use the wool off of our own sheep to spin into yarn and knit myself, or sell as one of the products from our farm. He said, “This is a Shetland sheep. The wool is supposed to be pretty soft.” Oh, man. More wool options? And soft, fine Shetland wool? I was doomed. So what did we do today? Drove out past Digby to pick up Olive, a 4-year old Shetland ewe, who is bred and probably due in February. And she IS very soft. Time for me to learn how to spin wool!

Welcome to the farm, Olive!

What's Cookin'?

Happy New Year! So much has happened for us – and we have done so much - in the past year, that I can't imagine what might be in store for us this year.

In theory it's winter around here, but there is no snow on the ground and we have had some gorgeous days lately. Orrin almost always spends the day outside, rain or shine, but I finally braved it too because it was such a glorious day. It was only about 2C but the sun was shining and there was no wind, so it felt warmer. Orrin has been spending a lot of time cutting trees down in preparation for a barn, cutting firewood from the unusable parts of the trees (the non-straight sections of trunks), and making huge piles of rotting logs and branches all over the areas that are to be pasture. It's a 7 or 8 acre area, so it's not insignificant. His thought is that by piling up the rotting wood, it'll make it easier for us and the cows to walk around, as well as promoting grass growth. And we sure need some more grass for those cows! So Oliver and I joined in today, helping to pile wood. Sometimes Oliver was on my back, sometimes on the ground throwing pieces of wood around. It was nice to feel like I was helping out, as I tend to stay inside more with Oliver as it's gotten colder outside. It looks pretty funny though, like there are hundreds of beaver dams across the hillside!

It has now been more than two months since we finished harvesting food out of the garden, and processing it for winter. I thought I would take some time to write out what we are eating these days from the farm, for myself to look back on, as well as for those of you following along who might be interested.

Chicken: We roast a chicken about once every two weeks. We usually roast some potatoes along with it, although they are not from the farm as our own potato crop was not very successful this year. We bought 50 lb of unsprayed potatoes from the farmers market in the fall to supplement our supply. After the first roast chicken meal, we usually have 3 or 4 more meals of chicken (our average chicken was 7.5 lb I think, so these birds have a lot of meat on them!), which we tend to make stir-fries with rice, carrots and kale, or fry up the leftover baked potatoes chopped up with chicken and gravy. Then we'll make broth from the carcass and freeze it. We use the broth to then cook lentils or beans. The broth is not only tasty but very healthy, as it is full of minerals that are extracted from the bones during the cooking process.

Pork: Two weeks ago we had pig #2 butchered, so with two pigs' worth of pork in the freezer, we are feeling pretty rich in the meat department. We eat a lot of pork chops, some ribs (cooked slowly with our canned tomatoes and spices in the crock pot all day), some roasts (either just as roasts or turned into carnitas), and ground pork. The ground pork we like to use in Thai curries or stir-fries, cooked up with onions, garlic, carrots, finely chopped greens and eaten with rice.

Eggs: The chickens have been laying since about mid-November, and we are now getting 6 or 7 eggs on most days. It is a wonderful thing not to have to buy eggs anymore, but to be eating our own. As a result, eggs have become a bigger part of our diet and are one of our main protein sources. We'll eat them fried for breakfast, in baked goods, and sometimes for lunch in a hash with chopped potatoes and onion. Then we'll throw some of our salsa on top to spice it up a bit.

Orrin has built the chickens a coop inside the basement of the other building, using hay bales as walls, branches as roosts, and wooden boxes that he made for them to lay their eggs in. On a warm-ish day like today, we let them outside, so they get to peck at the grass and look for bugs. When they can't be outside, we do a little weeding in the greenhouse and give them the weeds. Giving them leafy greens makes both them and their eggs healthier, and we can see the difference because the yolks go from pale yellow to a rich orange color. That makes them healthier for us, too, giving us extra omega-3 fats.

Squash and pumpkins: Since October, we've been eating a lot of pumpkin, as those are the winter squash with the shortest shelf-life. We've been eating pumpkin pies, various types of pumpkin soup, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin pancakes and of course, roasted pumpkin seeds. We cooked up the last pumpkin at Christmas-time to make a soup, but have a couple large ziploc bags in the freezer filled with pumpkin, so we'll have a few more pumpkin delicacies before the winter is over.

Our most abundant squash, spaghetti, has made for a number of basic but tasty spaghetti meals. We bake the squash (instead of boiling noodles) and make a sauce with our canned tomatoes, our frozen basil, fresh carrots out of the greenhouse, and onion. We also add ground beef, which we have been eating from a quarter of a cow that we bought in late summer before we had pork. We still have quite a few of those types of squash left, so that will continue to be a staple for awhile.

Other squash that we have been eating are buttercup, butternut and acorn. The buttercup are so sweet they remind me of sweet potatoes. I like to bake them, then mash them up with a little butter, and then they really do seem like sweet potatoes. Butternut squash I like to peel and cube, and then throw into a soup with lentils, carrots and onions, and a little bit of Thai curry paste. Acorns are good just baked with a little butter and maple syrup.

Appley items: We've been eating our apple butter and apple syrup on pancakes, although we still use some maple syrup as it is just soooo good. Apple syrup has been a decent substitute for a pancake topping because it came from here, but it still doesn't hold a candle to maple syrup. We also enjoy the occasional apple crisp made from the fresh apples stored in the basement.

Greens: We pick a salad to eat almost every day, out of the greenhouse. Mostly it's arugula, with small amounts of spinach, baby bok choy, mizuna and a little lettuce. We also pick chard and/or kale to eat every day as well. I make a breakfast smoothie of water, kale, apple, blackberries and peaches. The peaches were picked at a friends house, but the other fruit came from here. Greens are so packed with nutrients that we chop them up in the food processor and try to throw them in as many other dishes as we can – stir-fries, scrambled eggs, spaghetti sauce, you name it.

That covers the bulk of the food we are eating, and I'm pretty excited that most of it is from here. Some of the things we eat that we didn't grow this year (or can't grow) are grains (rice, millet, amaranth, sorghum, quinoa), beans (lentils, black, garbanzo – we grew some, but only ended up with a few cups of each), onions (we planted them but they didn't grow in our poor soil), maple syrup, lemons, olive oil, apple cider vinegar (hopefully we can make some another year), breakfast cereal, and of course, chocolate. I'm sure there are other things I am forgetting.

Due to food intolerances to wheat/gluten that all three of us seem to have, we are gluten-free at home (and try to be when we're not at home, too), so that makes baking a challenge. We use a variety of flours with extra's like xanthan gum and tapioca flour to make bread and other baked goods rise like wheat flour does, but I don't think those things are particularly healthy for us. We recently were told about and read a book called “The Resilient Gardener” by Carol Deppe, who has celiac disease (ie she gets very sick if she eats any food that has gluten in it), and she has come up with a variety of different types of traditional corn that can be grown and used for flour to make great breads, without using any fillers. It is inspiring to us, and gives us hope that we can not only grow the grains ourselves to make a decent loaf of bread, but also that we can save money by not having to buy the extra fillers that we thought were just the way it was going to be if we wanted to bake.