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. 

November was a blur

This past month seems like a blur. I am working lots at the tea shop, 4 to 5 days a week; that level of busy-ness will last probably until Christmas. Doing that, I'm not home as much, which means Orrin has a harder time getting things done on the farm, as he is also taking care of Oliver. Oliver has his days when he can be more independent, but much of the time he needs to be in the backpack on Orrin. And now that it's getting colder, he doesn't want to be out as much as he did. But still, Orrin is getting things done, bit by bit.

In the last month or so, he has put a lot of time and energy into fixing up the cow shed for winter, improving it from last years make-shift state. He created better walls to protect the animals from the weather, and he also added a protected area for the sheep as well as a protected alleyway that allows access for getting the hay into the two feeders. He's got the sheep enclosed in their side of the shed now, with an outdoor fenced area. He's put additional posts in the ground to expand the cows outside fenced area, as there are three cows this year instead of two, but he's still working on setting the railings in the place. The cows are using their side of it, but are contained by electric fence for the moment, except that Daisy the calf can still duck under it. She wanders around the house and greenhouse still looking for grass to eat, as she doesn't seem quite ready to settle on hay. Gigi doesn't seem to mind too much that Daisy wanders off, but every once in a while she calls out to her to remind her to come home once in a while.

We'd put a bunch of apples down in the basement hoping to store them for a couple of months, but with the warm fall the apples have continued to ripen and are no longer crisp. So we've made more apple butter and dried lots and lots more in the dehydrator. We will probably dry more, as we haven't used up all the apples yet from the bunch that are overripe. There is another bag of apples that we put down in the basement more recently, which have not gotten overly ripe yet, so we hope the average daytime temperatures have dropped enough to allow us to keep one bag of apples. It's so nice to munch on a good, crisp apple!

We have eggs! About two weeks ago, our laying hens started laying. These chickens were born around mid-May, and we had heard that it usually takes 5 to 7 months for chickens to start laying. We have 10 laying hens, but I think only one or two have started laying as we are just getting one new egg a day, sometimes two. The eggs are so cute – they are about half the size of a regular egg that you'd buy at the store. We find that these new eggs have stronger shells than the eggs that we occasionally get from our two old hens (who may be around 3 years old). We'd been wondering if the weak shells were a sign of not enough high-quality food in their diet (we feed them organic grain specifically for chickens, but they aren't getting any greens right now), but now that we are getting eggs from the younger chickens, it seems to be just because they are from old hens. Interestingly, the yolks in the baby eggs are just about the same size as the yolks from the larger eggs.

A wee egg next to a regular-sized one.

I'm starting to realize that my dear husband is a collector. When we lived in Sacramento, Orrin collected English roses. When we lived in BC and he was landscape gardening, he collected plants that he found unusual or interesting (not to mention that they were generally deer-resistant, as that is what was called for in Nanaimo). Now, on our farm in Nova Scotia, he is collecting livestock. Today, for instance, he brought home a Saanen dairy goat. We now have three cows, three sheep, two pigs, twelve chickens and a rooster, a dog, two cats, and now a goat! The nice thing about adding a goat is that this is one particular type of animal that Orrin has first-hand knowledge in raising, as he raised show goats in California when he first moved down there years ago.

We recently stumbled across a website that led us to realize that the reason our pigs weren't fattening up very quickly was because we were giving them all carbohydrates (apples and grain) and not enough protein. A great protein source for pigs is milk or whey. At first we thought we needed to run out and buy a milk cow, but that would be pretty expensive as well as giving us way more milk than we are prepared to deal with. We thought that maybe a goat would be a better choice to start - we could get comfortable with milking, it would be less expensive than a cow, and it would produce a small enough amount of milk that it could all go to the pigs. So that's why we now have a goat! I definitely want a dairy cow at some point, so we can learn how to make our own butter and cheese, but that will require much more time and energy than we have right now.

We found a new home for Charlie the black lab, and Orrin took him there today. His presence here seemed to keep the deer away from the garden over the summer, but when he slept right through a weasel attacking and killing four of our chickens, we realized he wasn't quite the guard dog we needed. That's when we got Zoe the maremma, who has shown already that she is very bright and alert to animals moving around nearby. We were a bit torn about it, but the reality is that we can't afford to feed two dogs if they aren't both working dogs, so decided we'd try to find a new place for Charlie. Sounds like his new place will be a better fit for him, as Orrin said his new owner let him right into the house (he was an outside dog at our place), and immediately gave him some treats (we gave him bones from our food, but didn't buy special treats for him). So long, Charlie!

And last but not least, I have started teaching a second weekly yoga class in Mahone Bay. I've only been doing it for a couple of weeks, so I will see if I get enough interest to continue, but I decided I was ready for a second class. I really look forward to having my own studio here someday, hopefully in the coming year, but for now I am glad to teach in town and continue to build up a base of students who enjoy my classes.

One of the other many things we have been doing - collecting firewood.
Here Oliver and I are hard at work,  he with his very own brand new wheelbarrow.