Rockin' It

Today's Activities:

• Put out the rest of the onions and leeks to harden off.
  
• Transplanted plenty of tomatoes, seeded lettuce(we'll do this every two weeks), and sweet basil.
• Lunch. We had a meeting where we discussed lunch and dishwashing schedules, and other administrative stuff.
  
• Amanda (who just started today) and I put up lines for hanging the plastic liners we'll use in the boxes holding salad mix.
• Amanda, Ali, and I picked rocks for the rest of the afternoon. A good three or four hours.

Again, another beautiful day picking rocks. I might have to add this activity to my list of favourites (right up there with digging holes, turning compost, and hoeing). Again, I assert the magic inherent in the action of bending down and pulling up these sleepy rocks. Ali correctly placed the sound they make as the sound of large marbles colliding.

I'm right-handed, and today I noticed very plainly how much I favour my right side. The actions in picking rocks go something like this: walk in a direction until you notice a rock big enough to pick, bend over (either by bending at your waist... gah... or crouching slightly) and grasp the rock with one hand, and then stand up and carry on to the next rock. At this point I typically shift the rock in my right hand to the nook of my left elbow so that I have a hand free again. Picking rocks like this continues until your arms are full, it's too heavy, or you're close to a pile, so that then you head to the nearest pile and drop everything off.

The thing is that when you pick up rocks with your right hand it takes a bit of a twist at the waist and lower back as you reach down to grab it. Especially to hold on to the several rocks you're cradling in your other arm. Repeating this action for a while meant that my left shoulder got cramped up into your my neck in order to hold the weight of the rocks (I know, I know, there's no need for that, but it's a strong habit); my right arm got a bit tired at the shoulder; as was my lower back from bending and twisting; and my knees were getting a bit achy from bending and lifting.

Switching sides so that I work the left side of my body seems like an essential thing.. something I didn't do enough of today and so something I'll likely feel tomorrow. The thing is that because I must typically favour my right-side I'm so much stronger there, and so working with my left side is rather awkward and I get tired much more quickly. In other words, there's a strong physical incentive to keep favouring my right side.

Castration

Yesterday's Activities:

• None. Well, none on the farm. It was an enforced day off because Leslie and Jeff were taking a first-aid course, and Ali (my only other ride to the farm) was sick.
  

Today's Activities:

• Chores. See below.
• Transplanted lots of tomatoes. Seeded melons.
  
• Lunch.
• Mixed the rest of the compost in the greenhouse into potting mix. Moved it all to the front (the heated portion) of the greenhouse. We had cleared a space the other day when we moved the brassicas outside. We now have a small area to store potting soil and a seeding area. See this diagram:
  
  
• We cleared out the unheated area of all the seeding stuff and then hosed the soil down in hopes of making a bit more workable.
  
• I sorted a few baskets of rutabaga into largish and smallish so that the largish ones could be sold in the farm store first.
  

Okay. This morning's chores came with the added excitement of helping Johann castrate the piglets. We began by separating the mother, Greta, from the piglets. We did this by luring her away with food. We enclosed her in a nearby pen, and Johann warned that she may get pretty violent once she realises that she can't get to her babies. Then we cornered the piglets in their pen and I kept them cornered whilst Johann did the dirty deed one piglet at a time. About half way through Greta escaped from her pen by busting the door open.

Suddenly both Johann and I were in a rather peculiar situation. It was if we were both stranded on an island with dangerous fish swarming the waters around us. The island was the piglet pen, of course, which we had locked ourselves into to protect us from the dangerous fish that was Greta. She was... livid? She was almost barking. Johann managed to maneuver out of the pen we were in and slowly force Greta back into her pen. I braced the door of the pen whilst Johann singlehandedly finished with the piglets.

Pile Dynamics

Today's Activities:

• Chores.
• Collected a few wheelbarrows full of compost from a far off compost pile and brought them near to the greenhouse for use in making potting soil.
• Moved the brassicas (bok choi, broccoli, etc..) and some leeks and onions out of the greenhouse and into our 'hardening off' area.
  
• Jarrod and I put the finishing touches on the harvest table. Well, we covered the edges with a plastic strip. I highly doubt this whole resurfacing endeavor is going to work. We're likely going to be left with a bubbling mess once the water hits the particle board.
• Lunch.
• Jarrod and I fixed up the sign out on the road. It had been knocked down from the wind and rain yesterday.
• Sifted through the ashes of the burn pile with a magnet to collect leftover nails. What a strange job. It felt like we were post-apocalypse, scavenging the wastelands for the now-rare metals and trinkets of a cheery but forgotten world. I'm sure there's a blues song somewhere about this job.
• Then I spent a long while making potting mix.
  

Making the potting mix was also a bit of drudgery, but in someways calming in its methodical routine: fill up the wheelbarrow with ingredients, mix, sift each shovelful of the mix, repeat. Here's a look at the process:


That's sifted compost to the left, a bag each of carbonatite and vermiculite, a wheelbarrow full of the mix, a sifter, and just beyond the sifter, a sifted pile of potting mix.

Actually, looking at the piles can be rather interesting. I noticed that the piles have different shapes depending on their composition. For instance, here's a comparison of our sifted potting mix with a pile of all the gunk leftover from the sifting:


Interesting, huh? The leftover bits don't pile as steeply. It turns out the angle noted above is known as the angle of repose, and is dependent on the "density, surface area, and coefficient of friction of the material". The wikipedia article is a bit unclear on this, but I gather this term refers to the steepest angle of a material in a pile, and so my diagram above may not be entirely accurate.

Changing tracks, I know I promised a photo of the back wall we created, so here it is:


Framing the windows was probably the hardest part. Anyhow, just 'cause I can, here's a photo of the seedlings experiencing their first time out of the greenhouse:

Picking Rocks

Yesterday's activities:

• Did the 'chores' for the animals. (Essentially just mucking out the milking stalls and giving the cows and pigs hay, and also yummy slop for the pigs).
  
• Transplanted lots of tomatoes, and peppers. This took most of the morning.
• Lunch.
• More transplanting.
• Ali and I dug up and transplanted a 200 foot row of Sweet William that survived from last year.
  
• Jarrod and I worked on resurfacing the harvest table.
• Jeff and I did an inventory of irrigation equipment and decided on what joiners we'd need for the delivery and header lines.
• Jeff worked most (all?) of the fields for veg. The intention is to break things up, kill some of the weeds -- in particular the Twitch Grass (aka. Couch grass. The same annoyance I fought with in Australia, along side Kikuyu).
  

Today's activities:

• Chores.
• Changed the oil, and oil filter, and battery on one of the white van.
• Jarrod and I made tables to fit in the van so that we could carry an extra 16 flats of seedlings out to the field.
  
• Lunch. Ali made smoothies. That's a highlight.
• I washed four crates of potatoes, two of beats, and one of rutabaga.
  
• Jeff, Jarrod, and I cleared a space along side the greenhouse, laid tarps and pallets down so as to make a space for 'hardening off' the seedlings before we transplant them. 'Hardening off' refers to giving the seedlings time to adjust to being outdoors (rather in than in the warm, moist, and very controlled environment of the greenhouse).
• The three J's then went to pick rocks from the fields.
• During this time Ali walked the fields to measure and mark them so that we know exactly where the rows begin and end.

Picking rocks is a rather fun process, especially in the afternoon. The three of us spread out about 10 metres apart and then walked the length of a field searching for rocks as big or bigger than about two fists held together (i.e. from average human brain-size to genius human brain-size up to genius Martian brain-size). There's something extraordinarily pleasant about walking under a big sky and talking about whatever (family history, television shows, garden tools, ....). All the while criss-crossing the field and lifting stones out of it, hearing them quietly clunk together as you each throw them into piles. It's the sound of rocks hitting each other that I find most alluring -- such an essential and calm sound.

Today was the first day I've felt any real sense of tiredness during the day. Sluggishness is more like it. I think it's the heat. It only lasted for about twenty minutes. I'm sure I'll meet this feeling again.

Doing the chores has been quite fun. Minus the fact that everyone calls it "chores". I've always hated that word. It reminds me of a vaguely delirious world, slightly askew from my realm of comfort and normality -- i.e. marshmallows baked on top of sweet potatoes, cottage cheese, saying Grace at dinner, face cloths, brick walls in a kitchen, etc. If I think too hard about it these things individually and out of their context they all seem just fine (in fact, I love the idea of taking a moment to cultivate a thankfulness for your food before eating it). It must just be my history, or memories I have associated with these terms.

In any case (phew!), actually doing the morning chores is great. It's a entirely new experience for me to navigate around a living chesterfield with horns (i.e. a cow), unclip it and then pat and talk it out to the paddock. The routine involves releasing each cow (just five) from the milking stalls and leading them out. These animals seem to emote surprise and a little knowing and willful stubbornness with the way they turn only their eyes back at you when you direct them to move. Then, after a moment of consideration, they give up with a small huff as if acknowledging that the outside world isn't so bad after all, and swing around to leave in a wide and lazy three-point turn.

Potting Soil Mix and Compost Tea

I've done a bit of assembling the soil mix that we use to grow the seedlings in. The secret recipe is this:

• 1 part compost
• 3/4 part vermiculite
• 1/6 part sand
• 1/6 part carbonatite

The compost is beautiful stuff that is made from the cow and pig manure plus the bedding used for the animals on the farm. I believe it's 'aged' for a year before being used. Making compost for the farm from the farm is one of the principles of biodynamic agriculture to which Whole Circle farm ascribes.

From the recipe you might suspect the mix to be rather dense, but it ain't.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, the seedlings are given regular boosts of compost tea to keep up the nutrients in the soil. Compost tea, well, it's essentially what you'd expect from the name. We simply take a hessian^* bag filled with a shovel full of compost and steep it in a bucket of water for a day. We use a small fish tank bubbler to oxygenate the water so that aerobic bacteria grow rather than the water putrefying with anaerobic bacteria. The resulting mixture is supposedly full of dissolved nutrients from the compost and helpful bacteria. The seedlings get a shot of this once a week.

^*I just realised this probably isn't a north american term, but I'm not sure what the proper term is. The bag I'm referring to is the sort you might find potatoes in if you bought them in bulk. I think they're made from Jute.

Cellar Door

"Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant."

-- J.R.R Tolkien via wikipedia

Today we did not make a cellar door but we did make something nearly as beautiful in essence. We finished off the end of the greenhouse, and built and hung two eight foot doors. Quite grand an achievement. It consumed about 40 person hours of work (at most), and plenty of lumber. But the result is that the second half of the greenhouse can be used now to grow tomatoes.

Again, I iterate that it is immensely satisfying to pretend to be a carpenter. The aesthetics of working with wood, saws, pencils, and screws is enormous. Especially when it gets to be around four in the afternoon and the day is cooling off slightly, and the earth and wood and trees are lit up with the slanting golden light. It's pretty easy to feel like a king, I say.

Then there's the fact of actually constructing something physical. It's a bit of the same enjoyment I get from writing computer programs, only there's a different flavour with this. Maybe partly because it's a fairly new experience for me... it's like programming with a new language, or maybe like working with databases or threads for the first time. I'm exploring an new terrain and that's inherently exciting. Construction is also incredibly fun because I'm reasonable good at it -- working the numbers, and the designs come naturally enough -- so I'm able to move at a decent pace. And that keeps me entertained.

There wasn't much work in the greenhouse today. Ali and Leslie trimmed the onions because they were getting a bit long and floppy. Trimming them (about three centimetres, or until they stand about ten centimetres) is supposed to cause the seedling to put more energy into root and stem growth rather than continuing to grow upwards. The result is a heartier seedling that is more prepared for transplanting and the outdoors.

We also did a second spraying of the horsetail mixture I mentioned before. Leslie noticed some "dampening off" on some of the broccoli and other brassica family members. Dampening off is a condition where the young seedlings just flop over and die. It's often due to a fungus that grows on the soil because it is too moist. It's part of the reason we installed the fan -- greater air movement means less chance of parts of the greenhouse becoming damp -- and also why we first sprayed the horsetail mixture.

No carpenter

I ain't no carpenter, but it sure is fun to pretend. We all spent the day tearing down and then rebuilding one end of the greenhouse. We're not quite done yet, but we've got most of the foundational bits done. I'll post some pictures of it.

The old adage "measure twice, cut once" is certainly an important and useful one. I'd probably add a footnote about how a redoing all your work twice saves you from sketching a quick diagram ahead of time. Here's another piece of advice. Never force a window into place, unless you like increasing the probability of laceration in your locality. Also, after two near misses of a falling 4x4 beam I've discovered why construction workers wear hardhats.

Clean up, Tables, and Cover Crops

Two days to catch up on.

Yesterday's Activities

Spent the day cleaning up the shed again. This time it was Jarrod, Jeff, and I working together. We did heaps. We organised all the tools, moved a few work benches around, and ran power to the tools benches. We also started work on cleaning up a beast of an old work table with hopes that we can resurface it to use it as our 'harvest table' (i.e. the one we stand around while sorting and bunching the vegetables just harvested).

Today's Activities

Shortened the legs of a harvest table and put wheels on it so that we can move it around easily enough. Did a bit more clean up in the shed, and built a coat rack and boot rack. The rest of the day was spent inside.

I called around to find out what to use on the surface of the table. Since we're planning to be washing it down daily and working with food on it, we'll probably need something sturdy and sanitary. The two choices we seem to have come down to are stainless steel or an acrylic top. Both options are very expensive.

Anyhow, after that we watched a video on cover crops, and had a discussion. I'll have to explain more about that later.

Still cleaning...

Today's activities:

• Seeded several trays of lettuce, fennel, flowers and tomatoes.
• Collected maple sap for the last time. The sap is flowing pretty regularly but it's been consistently cloudy for the past while, and the sap from certain trees tastes very... green. And by that I mean, much like how willow or grass tastes green. When the sap runs clear it tastes pretty watery and plain.
• Spent a long while with Jeff scratching the top layer of fungus laden soil off of the onion trays. The fungus appears either dark green, really dark green, or orange (when it has dried out), and makes the top 1-2mm of soil stick together and resist water. Scratching it off often reveals quite dry soil underneath which is a big problem if you're a... you know... water gulping seedling.
• Lunch.
  
• Met with the Jeff, Leslie, Ali, and Jarrod out in the barn by the new piglets that were born Saturday morning. This is to be a regular meeting time to discuss any issues. The only real issue was sorting out that Jarrod would no longer be doing chores (feeding the cows and pigs, milking, mucking out the milking area, watering the chickens, and collecting eggs), and that I'd start doing that for a bit in order to get the hang of it.
  
• The rest of the afternoon Jeff and I worked on cleaning up the disaster area that is the main shed. Part of this shed will eventually be used as space to process (wash, sort, and bunch) the produce from the fields.
  

Watching the piglets was a bit of a mixed experience. They are pretty adorable creatures. About the size of a loaf of bread (and with similar proportions), these eight little dudes spent most of the time clambering to find a nipple, or sleeping for 20 seconds at a time by resting their heads on another feeding sibling. The mother, the size of a small sofa, just lay on her side grunting occasionally and snuffling distractedly.

Actually, one piglet was away from the action, right by the mothers head, laying on its side and obviously dying. How so? It had glassy eyes and twitchy breathing and was occasionally pawing around at the air in a pathetic way. Over the course of our meeting I watched it slowly become less and less active until eventually its mouth hung open and it wasn't moving really. Between you and me, I silently repeated a little prayer for it. Maybe we'll meet up on its next go 'round, or mine.

I checked back just before I left and discovered a bit of gruesomeness. There were now only six piglets feeding (originally there were seven plus the sickly one). There was one piglet which was dead and only the remains of another piglet (just the ear and a bit of something). So it goes. I was told that the male pigs are kept away from a new litter because they'll occasionally eat the young ones but, as I found out today, in some cases so will the mother.

Transplanting Celery and the Optimal Potato Sort

Today's Activities:

• Spent the morning sorting potatoes. We managed to finish sorting all the potatoes in storage.


• Lunch.


• Transplanted celery seedlings. This is a cool process, and requires dexterity and lots patiences. The idea is this. Celery seeds apparently germinate better when they are together, rather than separated into individual cells in a tray. So, you "broadcast" (i.e. sprinkle, toss, spread, etc...) the celery seed into a tray of soil and let it sprout. Wait until it looks like so:
  
  
  Then you transplant a seedling from this mess of stuff into cells. That is, you grab a clump of seedling-laden soil, carefully break it apart so that you can extract individual sprouts, like this:
  
  
  
  
  And then place them each into a holes you've made with, say a pen, in the tray.
  
  
  
  
  Easy enough, but a bit painstaking. Something I couldn't imagine Annemarie putting up with. ;)
  
  We planted a total of 8 trays of celery, and 8 trays of chard (I think. I double check these numbers). For chard, one seed is placed directly into each cell.
  


• The rest of the day was spent doing random clean up jobs. Sweeping and tidying the farm store and another storage room; disposing of rotten potatoes leftover from the sorting process; etc..

A note about potato sorting. Now that it's over I think I can comment a little on the optimal sorting algorithm. Typically the goal is to sort the potatoes into three categories: those for sale, those for seeding, and those that are rubbish. A potato is deemed "saleable" if it is larger than, say, your average clementine. Otherwise it's probably best suited for seed.

In either case, if the potato is squishy, liquid, or smells like shit (I mean, actual shit), then it belongs in the rubbish pile. Also, sometimes we'd sort a crate of mixed white and red potatoes, in which case there's the additional task of separating the seed potatoes into reds and whites. Anyhow, the quickest and most entertaining sorting method I came up with goes something like this:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick out smelly and rotten potatoes;
  pick out all saleable potatoes in plain view;

  while (more seed potatoes in plain view) {
    pick out all red seed potatoes;
    pick out all white seed potatoes;
  }

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}

This method is miles ahead of some of the other ones I saw people practicing. In particular, here's a terrible method:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick up a handful of potatoes;

  for each potato in the handful {
    put it in the appropriate bin;
  }

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}

This method is far far too slow. You end up day dreaming about Tuscaloosa or something silly like that while your one hand travels to and from the other hand to the different bins. It's also, as you can tell, bottle-necked by the one-handedness of the sort, whereas the optimal method allows both hands to work independently (which, incidentally, is quite an awesome feeling).

One last thing. It turns out that there is a nasty potato-size grey area that makes high-speed categorisation decisions kinda nerve-racking. Typically what happens is that you consistently end up ignoring these ambiguous potatoes until they clutter your view so much that you're forced to deal with them in order to continue. Here's a version of the optimal potato sorting algorithm to work around this problem:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick out smelly or rotten potatoes;
  pick out all saleable potatoes in plain view;

  while (more seed potatoes in plain view) {
    pick out all red seed potatoes;
    pick out all white seed potatoes;
  }

  push remaining potatoes into neighbour's sort area;

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}

Today's activities:

• Sifted composted for an hour or two
• Moved the fan in the greenhouse to a new position because it seemed to be drawing in cool air from the unheated section of the greenhouse:
  
• Sorted lots of potatoes.
• Collected maple sap.

Leslie made a concoction to spray on the seedlings to help with a pale green fungus that seems to be building up on soil. She boiled horsetail for a while and got this:

A bottle of goo. She then mixed this 1:9 with water. This is a Biodynamic preparation, and has to be stirred for twenty minutes (more on this in a later post). After the stirring the preparation is sprayed on the seedlings. Here's Ali in on the action:

Clean up

Up until a moment ago I felt incredibly wide awake. I've felt this way all day. It could be because today was such a good and solid day of work. Nothing punishing, just a consistent going-down-the-checklist sort of day. The sort of day where if it were a race your grade 8 gym teach would describe it as a "strong finish".

The days event's, in order:

• Cleaned up unheated section of the greenhouse to prep it for seeding.
• Hauled burnable wood rubbish from around the greenhouse to the burning heap.
  
• Hung a fan in the heated section of the greenhouse in hopes that the increased circulation will remove some of the condensation.
• Sifted composed as prep for making potting mix.
• Lunch.
• Graded carrots in storage into those we can sell, those so gnarly or misshapen that they can only be used in our kitchen, and those so grossly malformed or rotted that only the cows can be convinced of eating them.
  
• Graded red potatoes by size into seed potatoes (smallish) and for washing and further grading. Here's Jarrod and our current WWOOFer (who's name I won't attempt to spell out here) in the midst of this activity:
  
  
  
  
• Washed a few crates of carrots and potatoes for the farm store.

I'm really aware of my back these days. Having not done much lifting or twisting and such for a year or so now I'm acutely conscious of overdoing it. I think there's a certain way in which risk of injury changes over time. A familiar story, I think it's something like this:

I'm somewhere to the left of the hump at the moment... I'm pretty fresh and enthusiastic, and it's that momentum that could probably carry me through a few spine-seizingly dangerous heroics in the short term. Soon enough though I suspect I'll reach a local maximum of risk of injury as my body finally succumbs to the strain of things. If I make it through that the risk should ease up a bit as my muscles and joints and behaviours adapt to the day-to-day work.

Day One (Again)

Or something. Today was the first day that all the interns came to the farm to introduce ourselves to each other. The interns'd be: Amanda, Jarrod, and yours truly. There is still one last intern to arrive sometime in June, but she's responsible for the animal side of the operation. I think this summer is going to be grand. Jarrod is super keen, and I suspect Amanda will be too once she recovers from exams and the associated exhaustion (so she won't be starting at the farm until late April because of all that).

It was a pretty relaxed day of mostly talking through the text in our snazzy new handbooks. The handbooks outline the ground rules for living and working together this season, plus contain this years seeding and planting schedules, and a bunch of readings. And and and we also got to do some work: weeding in the greenhouse, collecting maple sap, sifting compost, and Jeff and I got started on making a compost tea to be used as a fertilizer for the seedlings.

Of course, I forgot to bring my camera again, so no pictures yet.

Overall today I felt pretty even, both excited and nervous to meet everyone, and a bit tired from all the sitting. At times it was a little unnerving to be going through the grit of the contract and rules and such. It felt oddly formal. Made especially so because of the strange shift of seeing friends suddenly as employers, and myself as their employee. In all other farm work I've done there has never been much of a formal aspect to the arrangement -- typically because I was volunteering, and because I had come to the farm through friends.

Day One

Spent my first real working day at the farm today. Lots of weeding the seed trays -- about three hours of that. Time went by real quick, as it was relatively easy work. Just required concentration.

One thing I notice about repetitive tasks in general -- which I noticed today too -- is that they often start out easy because it's really sort of exciting and novel. My thinking for the first 30 minutes was mostly a series of different strategies for weeding. Should I move down the rows using both hands working one row at a time? Or maybe each hand to a row? Top to bottom, or side to side? Or maybe just an anarchy of search and destroy action. (Turns out the anarchy strategy mixed with a rough side-to-side sweeping is most efficient and entertaining for me).

After a while the novelty wears a little thin, I've picked a strategy, and then I start to feel vaguely restless. It's such a familiar feeling -- of wanting to change position, or shift out of what I'm doing because I've figured it out; it's solved. After staying with the restlessness for a bit the whole action eventually becomes rather fluid. Today I started just to think about how each seedling was probably going to be part of a meal for someone. Each time I'd clear a seedling I'd think, "meal", or "dinner". And that's really what it all became after a while. Pick pick pick, dinner. pick pick pick pick, a meal.

Then lunch. Then more weeding and reseeding some of the kohlrabi ("kongo" variety) that failed to germinate, and a few other random tasks like, seeding a few trays of onions, washing vegetables, and stocking the pellet stove in the greenhouse.