The Elusive Sugar Maple

This afternoon we spent a few hours tromping through the woods, in search of the elusive Sugar Maple. You'd think in a 90-acre parcel of land that we'd be able to find quite a few, but sadly, when the property was logged 15 or 20 years ago, they must have cut most of them down. Maybe sugar maples are a high-quality wood, but those loggers had their priorities all wrong. I mean, wood or maple syrup? To me, there's no competition - the syrup wins every time. But regardless, we hiked all around with baling twine (twine from hay bales are plentiful when you have animals, and this is one of the many ways we have come up with to re-use them), just hoping to find some sugar maples that we could tie a piece of twine around to mark it, so we knew what to look for in February, when it's time to tap.

Orrin's recently figured out the difference between the sugar maple leaves and the red maple leaves, so that's what we were looking at. The leaf shape is very similar between the two, but the red maple leaves have little serrations all around the outside edges, and the sugar maples have smooth edges. Ambitiously, I had grabbed 20 lengths of twine, hoping to find that many trees to tag. I jokingly said that we couldn't go home until we'd found 20, but we didn't quite get there. We managed to find 16 sugar maples, although most of them are pretty small trees, since they've mostly just been growing in the last 15 years or so. Apparently it's not recommended to tap trees that are less than 10” in diameter, so that rules out a number of them for next year. Although, we might fudge it on a few of them that are close because, well, we really like maple syrup. We did manage to find 2 rather large trees that we could put a couple taps into each when the time comes. They must have been deep enough into the woods that the loggers didn't find them. Lucky us!

I don't have a problem. Really. I could quit my maple syrup habit any time I want to.

Harvest Time

It's harvest time! I've been looking forward to this season all year. Finally, I feel rich because we have so much fresh food to eat, a freezer that's getting filled, and pantry shelves getting stocked. In the past few weeks I've made a second batch of basil pesto, canned 33 lbs of tomatoes (which resulted in 15 liter and 4 pint jars filled) and dehydrated about 12 lbs; I've got cucumber's fermenting (to be canned into dill pickles next week); we've picked about 30 lbs of blackberries from the hillside above the garden (which is a one-time deal, as that area will all be pasture next year); sliced and froze 6 lbs of peaches that we got from a friend (traded for with Orrin's fruit tree pruning earlier this year); and froze 30 lbs of local, organic blueberries (which we decided to buy this year, since our plants are just getting established). We've also eaten two of our honeydew's and two watermelon's. The honeydew's were both super sweet. The first watermelon we picked too early and it was just starting to turn red inside (that was a week and a half ago). We just had another one yesterday, and it was delicious. It looks like we'll have two more honeydew's and five more watermelon's.

The lovely tomatoes in our greenhouse 

15 lbs of tomatoes, before canning them.

My first tomato canning experience

Additionally, Orrin, Zane, James, and his sons Jacob and Christopher, along with a neighbor (who's large, heavy-duty truck we rented for the occasion), gathered 300 bales of hay from a nearby farm and socked it away in the (future) yoga studio for feeding the animal's this winter. Orrin had pre-arranged to go get these bales directly off the fields, once the farmer had cut and baled them. Fortunately, the field was just a few kilometer's away, and our neighbor's truck could carry 100 bales at a time, so they were able to get all 3 loads completed in less than 4 hours. It's nice when new adventure's take less time than anticipated!

Orrin and Christopher tossing hay bales into the yoga studio, where
Zane, James and Jacob are stacking them.

Today, along with canning tomatoes and slicing peaches, we prepared another 50' garden bed. Orrin recently completed two more beds at the top of Row A, which gets us to 28 beds in that row. The bed we worked on today is Bed 2 in Row B. We'd love to complete all of Row B before winter, so that we can cover crop it and have it more fertile for next year's garden (in preparation for starting to sell more food), but I don't think we'll get it done. We'll just keep working on it as we can. We alternate between working on the garden and working on the other house, because both are a priority. We've gotten 5 windows installed upstairs in the other house, and there are 5 more upstairs and 2 or 3 small windows down in the basement.  

August activities

So much has happened in the last few weeks, that I figured I better sit down and try to get caught up a bit. I went to Wolfville for 6 days at the end of July for a yoga teacher training intensive. It was my second week (out of 4), but the first time I'd been away from Oliver for more than one night. It was a bit hard emotionally, but it was really nice to get some time for myself. A week of yoga training ends up being part yoga, part group therapy, as there's a lot of meditation and self-awareness exercises that we do, and is a wonderful mind/body/spirit process to go through.

At the end of the week - before I was allowed to come home - I drove to a nearby farm and picked up 3 sheep – a ram, a ewe, and a ewe lamb. These are Jacob sheep, a heritage breed good for meat and wool, and they are endangered in Canada. Orrin decided that he wanted to get sheep this year to start clearing more of the brushy stuff out of the areas that we are trying to make into pasture; stuff that the cows won't eat like blackberry and raspberry bushes, goldenrod, and anything else taking up space. Turns out they are awesome at clearing – Orrin moves them every day, and all that is usually left are tiny alders.

Our Jacob sheep. They need to be shorn, but we need to find someone who can do that for us.

Before sheep.

After sheep.

A week ago Thursday the cows got out and ran away again. We think a deer knocked over a post, lowering the electric fence and enticing the cows to explore. It took us all day to get them back (it might sound like a lot, but really that was a record, because the last couple of times they'd run off it had taken 2 and 3 days to get them home). Thanks to the help of Zane and James (our brother-in-law visiting from BC), we got them home and back inside electric fencing. The event made us realize how important it is that we have a stronger perimeter fence set up, so that in case they get out of one paddock they would still be contained inside the main pasture area. Orrin realized how little grass we have to offer them right now, though, and packed them up a couple days ago and took them back to the farm where we'd bought them from. They'll be there for probably 6 or 8 weeks, to get Gigi bred again, and fattened up on real pasture.

I've been working 3 days a week at a local tea shop. I am learning a lot and enjoying chatting with visitors who come in, as well as with my co-workers. It's hard to believe how only being away for 3 days a week can really cut in to how much we get done at the farm. But of course, Orrin has to hang out with Oliver while I'm working, so he's able to get some things done but is not as efficient as if I were there too. But it's pretty helpful to make a few bucks this way since the farm is not making any money yet. We hope to start selling greens at a local farmer's market in the fall, and to start a food box program next summer.

In the last couple of weeks, we have begun eating bush beans, cucumber's (1 to 2 a day), and we ate the first yellow meteor summer squash today. We jumped the gun a few days ago and ate a tomato that was mostly red, but not fully ripe. It was pretty good, but we'll try to be patient and let the rest of them ripen up. We are eating new beds of lettuce, and continue to eat kale, chard, endive and radicchio from plants that have been producing for a while now.

The pumpkin and winter squash plants look fantastic out in the garden now; some plants have spread to two beds over from where they were planted! There are lots of flowers on them, and a number of actual pumpkins and squash on the vine. The dry beans and pole beans are doing well, and there are lots of beans on the vine there, as well.

In the greenhouse, there are lots of large tomatoes now, but just a couple starting to turn red. When you're waiting for it, it sure seems like it takes forever for them to turn red! There are several watermelon and honeydew on the vine, and lots more flowers, so we're excited to think that we might have some tasty melons later this summer. The eggplants look big and healthy, and have just started flowering. Pepper plants are picking up steam now too, and at least one plant is flowering. We have peppers on a couple of the plants that we bought as starts, and have tried one of the spicy peppers so far (I can't remember the name of it). The basil is doing well, and I made a bunch of pesto yesterday from the first stems that I cut.

The apples are getting big on the trees, and every once in a while we try one to see how they're doing. They're still too starchy, but they're getting there!

We pulled all the garlic a few days ago, based on the fact that there were 3 to 5 green leaves left on the plants (this criteria came from the book “Growing Great Garlic”), which corresponds to the number of skins covering the garlic bulbs. Some of the garlic are decent-sized, but a lot of it is fairly small. Out of our 10 varieties we ended up with just under 10 lbs of garlic, which includes bulbils as well. A good portion of the garlic will have to be used for seed in the fall, so I don't expect we'll have enough to get us through to next year, but I am grateful for what we do have. Last year was a pretty dry year for garlic, since we moved here and didn't have anything but the seed to plant. Garlic is a huge staple in our house, and my kitchen was feeling pretty empty without it (I had attempted to use some store-bought garlic a few times, but it's just not the same). I made a couple ice-cube trays full of garlic scape pesto in July, and that has been a nice addition to pastas. 

Seven of our garlic varietals, hanging above our masonry wood stove.

Poultry-preppin' pictures

Here's a bit of a pictorial of the description I wrote up yesterday. May help to visualize what happened. Or it may be more than you wanted to see...

The killing cone, with a newly killed chicken.

That's actually me dunking the bird to loosen the feathers. Oliver on the left, Zane on the right.

Zane, plucking a chicken.
If you click on the picture, it'll make it bigger and easier to see what he's doing.

Orrin, butchering a chicken on the first day. We used the table
 on the tent trailer as the butchering station.

Orrin, butchering the very last chicken. It's not that he enjoyed doing it,
but he was sure happy that he was almost done.

 I forgot to mention last night that we ate our first chicken for dinner yesterday. The first bite was a challenge, I guess because the association of butchering them was so recent. It was pretty tasty, though, and leftovers were even easier to eat today. I guess it is just something we will get used to, as we have no plans of becoming vegetarian!

And the main course last night. A nice looking chicken, spiced and lemoned up
and ready for the oven.

Chicken becomes Poultry

We spent the last two days butchering our meat birds, of which there were 35. We had originally started out with 40, but a few died along the way. A friend who sells organic vegetables at a local farmer's market came over yesterday morning to walk us through the process. She raises meat birds for herself and her family but does not sell them. She killed and butchered a bird, then walked Orrin through it while he did it a couple of times, and then she left it in our hands and went on her way. Zane and Alice came to help, as well as our friend Kim, who also wanted to learn the process so that he would be able to kill his own meat birds when the time comes.

Here's the process that we went through:

1. Get a chicken out of the coop, hold him or her calmly for a minute and then place them upside-down in the “killing cone”. For us, the killing cone was a large traffic cone hung upside-down so that the small hole was on the bottom. The bird's body was inside the cone and the head hung below the hole.
2. Cut the main artery in the neck and let the bird bleed out. The bird flaps around briefly, but is contained in the cone. The first time I saw it happen was probably the hardest, and I almost burst into tears. Supposedly they are dead very quickly, but it's still hard to watch.
3. Put a short length of twine around one of the chicken's legs, then after the bird is dead and the blood has stopped draining, pull it out of the cone and into a large pot of water that is 150 to 155F. Hold the legs and dunk the bird in and out of the water for about 1 minute, pulling it out completely every time you come up. This scalds the skin enough to loosen the feathers.
4. Hang the bird by the length of twine at a height where the bird is right in front of you, and then pull the feathers off. This is truly one of the worst parts – Orrin claims it is THE worst part, but I think the butchering is just as bad – because the feather's stink and you have to get ALL the feathers, including the ones on their belly that have poop on them. Those were the hardest for me to pull off emotionally. Physically, the hardest to pull off were the wing feathers and the pin feathers. Yesterday I found myself grimacing every time I plucked. I had to consciously relax my face every time I realized what I was doing, because I was pretty grossed out by it. Today was a little easier.
5. After plucking, take the chicken to the table and butcher it, which involves cutting off the head, feet, neck, and oil glands, and removing all the organs very carefully so as not to burst anything. The last thing you want to do is get digestive juices or poop all over the food you plan to eat. The trickiest part was pulling out the crop, which is the first stage of digestion after the chicken has eaten. It's recommended that you not feed a chicken for 24 hours prior to butchering, because then the crop will be empty and less difficult to remove. We followed that plan the first night, but since we weren't able to get all of the birds butchered yesterday we fed them last night. We didn't start again until noon today, to try to let the crop's empty as much as possible, but still the crop's were very full of the grain that they had eaten, and they had all been empty in the birds yesterday.
6. After butchering, rinse the bird off inside and out to get as much of the gunk and blood off as possible, and then put it in a tub or cooler of cold water.
7. Weigh it, take it into the house and do a second, finer plucking job. For this part, tweezers were helpful for getting any stubborn pin feathers out that couldn't be removed with fingers alone.
8. Rinse it one more time to get any last little bits of tissue, organs and feathers off, and let it drain for a few minutes on a drying rack. We used a cooling rack for this part, which normally gets used to cool bread or cookies.
9. While one bird is draining, go outside to get another one, weigh it and bring it in to the house.
10. Pat the first bird dry and put it into a large plastic bag. Use a vacuum cleaner with hose attachment to suck the air out of the bag, then tie it with a twist-tie.
11. Write the weight on it and put it in the freezer.
12. Repeat this process 34 more times.

This was really hard for me yesterday, emotionally. I had a tension headache most of the day, and felt really overwhelmed by what we were doing. Orrin said he felt nauseous most of the day from the smell. We started at 9am yesterday and finished bagging the last bird at about 6:30pm, and had completed 18 of them. We were totally exhausted and were not really looking forward to having 17 more birds to butcher. Towards the end of the day yesterday I asked Orrin, how on earth will we butcher a pig if we are having a hard time with chickens? He said that a pig will be easier – one kill, one butchering. The butchering will take longer, but you only have to do it once. That sounded a lot more reasonable than having to do it 35 times.

Today was much better than yesterday, so I'm really glad that we didn't get them all done yesterday. If it had only been yesterday that we butchered, I might not be so keen to do this again. Fortunately, both Orrin and I felt a little more comfortable with the process today and neither one of us felt sick. Today it was Orrin, Zane and I, and we started at noon and finished bagging the last bird at 5:45, which was 17 birds. With one day of butchering under our belts, we were able to accomplish the same amount of work in almost 4 hours less time.

Over the course of the two days, I did some plucking, some scalding, and a little bit of the butchering, but mostly my job was weighing them and taking them in the house to do the final processing and bagging. I did not end up actually killing any birds myself. At first I wanted to do it, so that I could say I had, and so I could know what it was like to feel the life drain out of an animal that I had killed. And also because this is a big part of why we are here in this beautiful place, on this land. We want to know our food personally. But I think Orrin realized how hard it was for me to go through all this for the first time (he and Zane had butchered chickens growing up, so he had a little sense of what it would be like), and told me it wasn't necessary. I know it's not necessary, but I think I will want to do it at some point. And there will be chances in the future, probably in the not-too-distant future, too, since our heritage chicks will soon be big enough for us to kill the roosters.

We learned a whole heck of a lot raising meat birds and killing them. One thing we learned is that meat birds are pretty disgusting. They are bred to be meat, and are really only meant to live about 8 weeks. We let ours go to 10 weeks so that they would be bigger, but we lost a few to heart attacks, which can happen with this type of bird, because they are growing so fast. Plus, they are really dopey compared to the heritage birds that we are raising to be laying hens. They don't move much, and just seemed really zoned out. Orrin pulled their pen over fresh grass twice a day, but we don't think they actually ate that much of it. Mostly they gorged themselves on the organic feed that we gave them, going through a 50 lb bag every 2 ½ days.

We also learned that it will be crucial to make a mechanical plucker, especially if we want to butcher large amounts of birds again. That would make the whole process quicker (plucking took the longest time of anything), plus we wouldn't have to get so up-close-and-personal with the poopy, stinky feathers.

Now I'm going to get all geeky and get in touch with what's left of my old engineering self. Yesterday we butchered mostly roosters, and a few hens. Today was mostly hens and just a couple of roosters. At the end of yesterday, we had butchered 18 birds, totaling 144 lbs of meat. The largest weighed 9.9 lbs (this is the dressed weight, ie. no head, feet, feathers or organs), and the smallest weighed 6.5 lbs, with an average weight of 8 lbs. We thought today would be more like 70% of that average because we knew there were mostly hens left, which would have been around 5.6 lbs/bird. Amazingly, the hens were not appreciably smaller than the roosters, and the average weight today was 7.0 lbs. The largest bird today was 8.0 lbs and the smallest was 5.9 lbs. So we ended up with a total of about 262 lbs of chicken, averaging 7.5 lbs/bird. These are big birds!

That's all the energy I've got for tonight. It's late and I need to get to bed. I'll post a few pictures tomorrow.

What is there to eat in July?

Earlier in the year I had this fantasy that we would be eating much of our own food by July. Sadly, it appears that a fantasy is all that it was. I think that there are a few reasons why we don't have much to eat yet. First, plain and simple, our soil is crap. I wish I wasn't exaggerating, but that's a big part of it. There is very little organic matter present. Second, some of the seed we've been planting we've had for a few years, and the older it gets the lower the chance for germination, generally speaking. Third, we are used to west coast summers where things warm up a little earlier, so we didn't realize that there is a bit of a lag in the soil heating up to give seeds the germination temperatures that they prefer. And fourth, we also got started late in planting. Since we had to build garden beds from scratch, that took time to set up, so we got our seeds in the ground later than some other folks around here. So based on those reasons (and possibly reasons we haven't even thought of), some things are growing very slowly, and some things just didn't come up at all. And fortunately, despite those reasons, some things are doing very well.

I'll do a bit of a summary here of where things are at in the main garden, as of the middle of July. Veggies that are doing really well right now are kale, chard, some of the salad greens, turnips, a few varieties of pumpkin plants, one area (out of 3) planted in shallots, a few summer squash plants, beans (bush and dry), forage turnips (for the pigs), and about half of the potatoes. We are eating the greens daily from outside now that they are big enough, and some of the bean plants are starting to flower.

In the “so-so” category I'd put our garlic (it's there, but not particularly tall or vibrant), about half of our potatoes and peas, and possibly the carrots. The carrots have been slow to get going, but recently have started to look a little stronger.

Veggies that didn't come up at all, or maybe a couple came up but are tiny and struggling, are most of the summer squash and a couple varieties of winter squash, beets, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, a couple sets of shallots and onions and spinach. We noticed that one set of dry beans were getting pretty munched, which was located near a pile of wood that had been milled in the spring. We thought that maybe a critter was living under the wood and helping themselves to bean plants at night. Orrin took the time to move the whole pile further away from the garden and sure enough, those beans are no longer getting eaten, and are also starting to grow back. Small victories!

In the greenhouse, we are having better success. We have 3 watermelon plants that are healthy and big, as well as one honeydew. Out of about 70 tomato plants, most of them are 3 or 4' tall now, and a number of them have tomatoes on the vine. The cucumber plants are doing very well, as well as eggplants and some of the peppers. Tomatillos don't seem to have done anything, even though we planted them twice. I'm pretty bummed about that because I was particularly looking forward to preserving some tomatillo salsa. The garlic that we planted in the greenhouse we had hoped would give us some early garlic. We just pulled it today, and see that it will give us some garlic to eat now, but most of the bulbs aren't very big. Same with the potatoes that we planted in the greenhouse – the one's that we have picked have given us a few early potato meals, but are pretty low yield.

We have some compost now, and have been using it to supplement our initial plantings, where the plants have come up, as well as adding it to the soil prior to our more recent re-plantings. Tonight, for instance, we re-planted beets in an area where the spinach didn't come up.

This is such a learning experience! I keep hoping that the things that seem healthy now will continue to be healthy, and maybe August will be the month we have lots to eat...

Tomorrow is our first chicken kill on the farm, and that will be another learning experience. We have a friend coming to show us how to do it, and family and other friends who are coming to help. It's nice to have community to share these kinds of events with. 

Buried Treasure

The area where the laying hens are located is on a bit of a hillside covered in oregano, planted who knows when, which has gone horribly out of control. The hens dig around for bugs, but unfortunately don't seem interested in helping us pull out the oregano. Then yesterday Orrin went into their enclosure and noticed a patch of what looked like garlic scapes. He dug some of them up, and sure enough it was garlic. Like the oregano, we have no idea how long it's been there, but there is a pretty decent little patch of garlic that may have been just one or two, but that now has split into probably 20 or 30 small cloves of garlic. We've been wondering how well our own planted garlic will do this year, so this bit of extra garlic is like finding buried treasure. We can eat some of it, but also it can contribute to next year's garlic seed, so that we will hopefully need to save less of some of our other varietals.

Everyday it seems we find another reason to be grateful for the greenhouse. We have about 40 tomato plants, of which most are about a foot tall now, and a few are around 2' tall. The biggest ones are now flowering. There are a handful that are still tiny, but they were planted later, and are a later variety, so hopefully they will get big as the season progresses. The heat in the greenhouse is pretty amazing, how the sun's energy can be harnessed into this space and help veggies grow. I'm so glad we invested the time and money in it, as I think it will significantly lengthen our growing season, both in the spring and fall. We found that out already, with being able to have greens over the winter, and now we are seeing a similar effect with the warm weather vegetables.