Birch tapping and greens

Somebody we met recently talked about tapping birch trees, now that the maples were done. Since we had a big birch tree by the pond with two trunks, we thought we'd give it a try. For about the past week the sap has been running, and much faster than the maples ever did. We've filled our two buckets at least 4 times, drinking some of the sap, and boiling some of it down to syrup. It's a much darker syrup than maple, and has a stronger taste that is only a little sweet. We figure there must be more minerals in birch than maple, or maybe it's just different ones. The flavor I can relate it most to is the taste of molasses. I'll have to look into how to use the syrup, as it's probably not the perfect choice for pancakes, but maybe baking with it, like you would with molasses.

Oliver standing with the tapped birch tree

We are continuing to enjoy our greens, although the current plants are starting to get a little stronger in flavor as they are beginning to go to seed. Fortunately, we have new greens on their way, possibly ready to eat in the next week or two.

More farm animals

More animals have come to the farm! On Friday, Jake brought 5 chickens and 3 ducks from the last farm that he and Melissa had lived on. The ducks were happy to settle into life on the pond, and after a few days of keeping the chickens in the pen, they have been enjoying being truly free range, scratching all over the place for whatever it is that they can find. The chickens lay about 4 eggs a day, and occasionally we find the duck egg, somewhere along the pond bank. We put chicken wire up on both doors of the greenhouse so that the chickens can't get in there, but we'll have to figure something out for when we fully open the endwalls, as well as for when the outside garden is in production.

Then on Sunday, we got a dog. Charlie is a 6-year old black lab. He knows basic commands, is really friendly, and seems to be starting to get used to us and the farm. Eventually it will be his job to protect the garden and orchard, once we get comfortable with him and can start training him on the property. He had a face-off with the pigs and cows the first day, but mostly has ignored them since then. The cats are scared of him and don't want to go outside while he is out (he's either outside or sleeping in the mudroom). Oscar, our fluffy 8lb cat, freaked out the second day he was here and scratched him, actually drawing blood. Poor Charlie didn't know what to do with that, but seems to be the passive one, regardless of the fact that he's about 100 lbs! Hopefully the animals will all work it out, but for now it's a little overwhelming keeping an eye on them.

Having these animals definitely adds a new dimension to the farm. Hearing the clucking of the chickens and seeing them walk around really makes it feel more like a farm. And again, chickens, ducks, and even the dog are all new animals to me. I've never been around them before, so that could explain why I'm feeling overwhelmed!

Maple sugaring and more planting

Today we planted a kale mix, radish easter egg II and red romaine lettuce seeds in the greenhouse.

A big thing we've been focused on the last few weeks has been maple sugaring. We tapped 2 red maples near the house (we couldn't find any sugar maples nearby), and have been collecting the sap when it's there. We haven't gotten too much, but enough to put on pancakes 3 or 4 times. A generous neighbor gave us about 8 gallons of sugar maple sap this week, which we boiled down over the course of the last few days. It resulted in about 6 cups of syrup. Yum! We'll try not to eat it all in one meal...

Next year we want to get better set up for maple sugaring. We plan to build an outdoor bonfire pit where we can boil the sap down, and get more taps for trees. Boiling it indoors uses a lot of electricity as well as evaporates a huge amount of water into the house. Running the kitchen fan helps, but it gets obnoxious listening to that all day. We took a walk this afternoon through part of our forest, and found at least 4 or 5 maples relatively close by to the house and to each other. Once the trees leaf out, we'll go back out there and try to determine if any are sugar maples, and mark those so we'll know where to go next year to tap. We'll also have to cut a trail to get there and back easily, for collecting sap.

Planting and Logging

Last Sunday we planted Burpee's golden beets, italian dandelion radicchio, palla rossa radicchio, baby green romaine lettuce, hakurei turnips, canary yellow swiss chard, rouge de verone endive, and cascadia snap peas in the greenhouse. Orrin noticed yesterday that some of the turnips have already come up. That's so quick! I've never grown turnips before, so I looked up the germination temperatures, and sure enough, it only takes a few days to germinate if the temperature is around 70F. It's been so warm in the greenhouse lately that we've had to have both doors open to keep it from frying the greens. Once we switch to warm weather crops in there, we'll have the opposite problem, but right now we're just trying to keep it in the 15 – 20C (60 to 70F) range. From the picture you can see how great the greens are doing right now. We're trying to keep them small so they don't get too bitter. As a result, we've been sharing them with family and friends to keep up with the picking.

We are loving have greens every day!

We also noticed a few days ago that a few of the potatoes have sprouted. They've been in there for a while, so it's nice to see them come up.

Orrin and Jake have done a lot of logging in preparation for siding the other building. On Tuesday, they cut quite a few more trees down, and then on Thursday our neighbor Mike came over with his tractor and “the Claw” (as I like to call it) and pulled the logs out of the woods and piled them up near the other building. Orrin and Jake had used Jake's ATV to pull about 100, 10 – 12' log sections out of the woods in 4 or 5 days over the last month or so, and Mike pulled 37 logs out and had them piled with his tractor within 2 hours. Ah yes, the benefits of heavy machinery. We think we have around 4000 board ft of wood, once it gets milled (hopefully in the next week or so). That should be enough to side the house and have extra to build the wood shed. We'll need wood for a barn, too, but first things first.

This is most of the cut logs.

Here's Mike with "The Claw" and the rest of the logs.

Pigs

Oh, and I forgot to talk about the pigs! Ever since the bulk of the snow melted, they were out THE VERY NEXT DAY rooting around again. It was like they had been waiting for a personal invitation, and have been gung-ho ever since. Orrin had been feeding them organic cracked corn twice a day up until then, and is now only feeding them once a day. They seemed a bit annoyed the first day, but it hasn't fazed them since then. Pretty cool. They are turning our garden soil over a bit more every day, clearing big roots out. It'll be in great shape by the time we are ready to make the beds and start planting.

March on the Farm

We are now eating greens daily out of the greenhouse – kale we pick every few days for our green smoothies, and asian greens and arugula we pick for salad every other day or so. The greens have exploded in the last few days; I hope we can keep up with picking them before the leaves get too big and bitter (particularly the mustard greens). We are very happy to not have to buy grocery store salad anymore. This afternoon we just prepped another bed for planting. We pulled out a bunch of old arugula from last fall that had gone to seed, and will plant a bunch of seeds tomorrow.

The strapping is finished on the ceiling of the other house now. Orrin is also halfway through constructing the baffles along the inside of the roof. He and Jake have also spent 3 or 4 days logging trees up on the ridge, and dragging them down to the house. They think they have a day or two left to have enough logs for siding the other house. We hope Jake's dad will come in the next month or two to mill them.

We hired an electrician to do the wiring, which was done about a week and a half ago, and then the wiring inspector came a few days ago and approved the electrician's work. Next up – plumbing and re-papering the outside of the house.

This morning, Orrin, his dad and I were clearing wood out of what will be the main garden area. Orrin had felled a couple trees in the fall, and today he was using the chainsaw to cut the branches off and cut the trees into rounds. We pulled the branches out of the garden area and piled them in the woods where they will break down, and piled the rounds up for firewood.

It's been an interesting spring. The bulk of the snow melted about 2 weeks ago, along with the ice on the pond melting, and we had quite a few days of warm-ish weather. The last few days we've had a bit more snow (an inch stuck one day then mostly melted the next day), and pretty chilly days. The pond has been freezing at night and then thawing during the day. There were two ducks on the pond for a few days that have disappeared now. I hope they (or another couple) return and have ducklings here. I think that would be really fun for Oliver (not to mention me!) to have a duck family around.

We've seen a bit of wildlife in the last couple of weeks – an owl in a tree one morning after we woke up. It's pretty neat how far they can turn their necks around. Then another day we had two hawks circling overhead. They make such an eerie sound! With spring other birds have appeared, as well – robins, chickadees, and woodpeckers. At least, those are the ones I recognize!

February on the Farm

Very exciting news – the greens that we planted in mid-January in the greenhouse started coming up about a week and a half ago! I think 7 of the 9 types of greens have started germinating. The asian greens were the first to come up, as they can handle the coldest temperatures, and just looking at them today, they look much more vigorous a week and a half in than the greens that we had planted back in September. This is probably due to the fact that we were given some manure compost from friends a while back, which is adding nutrients to the soil.

Looks a bit bare; most of the greens are under the row cover

Also exciting – since Orrin finished putting up a couple walls on Gigi's shelter, she has seemed much more content and hasn't tried to make a run for it since I last wrote about it in mid-January. Yay!

Orrin has been creating new areas of pasture for the animals, by cutting down saplings in the areas that would have been pasture before.

Orrin's also been working hard on the other house, with occasional help from me, and now pretty regular help from our friend, Jake. He and his wife and son (older than Oliver by 2 months) will be moving into the guest suite in April. His assistance will improve the odds of it getting done in time, since I can't always help out. At this point, all but one of the windows have been framed, the interior walls have been built and placed in their correct spots (there was interior framing already, so some of it just needed to be moved around to go with our design, and some of it was newly made). They are now working on adding the strapping in the ceiling, and other preparatory things needed to put the vapor barrier in place.

We had been eating greens out of the greenhouse until around mid-January, at which point we ran out of large enough leaves to pick. We left a few leaves on each plant, so that they would be strong enough to start growing when the temperature and daylight allowed. It seems like that time has come already. Orrin just picked a bunch of fresh kale, arugula and mustard greens from under the row cover, the first bunch in about a month and a half. Next year we'll be better prepared by having more plants, and more mature plants, to get us all the way through winter on fresh greens.

A sight for sore eyes - fresh greens in February!

Lots of snow this year, the biggest winter for both Orrin and I since we were kids – Alaska for me, interior BC for him. It's been quite an adjustment. It's definitely a winter wonderland, but we've had some logistical challenges. With a half-mile driveway, we had to hire someone to plow it. The first person we hired is a neighbor with an old farm tractor that could handle a small amount of snow. But once the big storms hit, he couldn't plow it very efficiently – it would have taken him all day to plow the driveway. We then found another neighbor with a plow truck. He's done a great job and been pretty reasonably priced. People have suggested we get our own truck to plow in the future, and believe me we've thought of that. But our goal is to decrease our vehicles, not increase, so we decided that it makes more sense to hire someone who already has the right equipment. That way we don't have to pay for the maintenance and insurance on another vehicle, and could possibly trade plowing for veggies or meat.

I also wish we'd had some snowshoes going into winter, to make it easier to walk around the house and other areas of the property. We were pruning apple trees last week, on a beautiful sunny day, and I was sinking into the snow above my knees. At this time of year, used snowshoes seem pretty expensive. I'm hoping they won't be as expensive if I look for them in the spring or summer. But a definite must around here!

We've had a few nice days in the last week or so that have really gotten us itching for spring. We planted some garlic in the greenhouse today, hoping to have garlic a little earlier in the summer than when the rest of the bulbs will be ready. We've ordered quite a few vegetable seeds, berries, and fruit and nut trees this year, and look forward to creating the garden beds, planting seeds, and expanding the orchard (currently just apple trees) once the snow is gone and the soil has warmed enough.

Yesterday we built a small greenhouse out of pine saplings that Orrin cut down, and scraps of plastic from the main greenhouse. We put it over the compost pile, so that on sunny days the snow will melt faster in there and give us quicker access to the compost. We'll need it in the greenhouse when we start planting the bulk of the veggies, both for what's seeded directly in the ground and for what will be transplanted.