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.