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.