Farm.

Melons!

2007-08-31T13:02:00.000-04:00

We're just at the end of the melon season.. here'r some photos from one of the harvests:

More Photos

2007-08-24T12:41:00.000-04:00

Clearly I'm too tired to write anything these days.. so photos will have to do...

Bunching

Washing Turnip

Rock Melon

Hungarian Hot Wax Peppers

Currently Harvesting...

2007-08-12T17:43:00.000-04:00

Oops, I've let that list slide a bit. The past couple of weeks have been all about the harvests really. We're now harvesting zucchini and cucumber three times a week (monday, wednesday, and friday) along with our usual harvests on tuesday, thursday, and friday.

This passed week was a great week, with a few different crops becoming ready, and in enough proportions, that we could bring them to the CSA dropoffs and market. So, from the top, here's what is currently being harvested:

Melons. But you knew that.
Tomatoes.
Green Peppers.
Zucchini. This includes the familiar green or yellow sort, plus other sorts of summer squash: patty pan, and crook neck.
Cucumber.
Lettuce.
Green/Yellow/Purple Beans.
Carrots.
Onions.
Beets.
Potatoes.
Garlic.
Parsley.
Cilantro.
Basil.
Dill.

We also managed to harvest some corn on Friday, but Ali felt it was too unevenly pollinated and pesty to bring to market or to the CSA.

Cantaloupe, corn, different sorts of tomatoes, fennel, chard, and green onions are all in the near future.

Pictures from the Garlic harvest

2007-08-07T12:58:00.000-04:00

The only way to harvest melons...

2007-08-07T12:55:00.000-04:00

... is with flair.

The Dignity of Manual Labour

2007-07-20T17:37:00.000-04:00

Here's a little exchange I had with a friend of mine over email recently about returning to the city for school and that sort of life in the next few weeks:

Me: I think we're all looking forward to the winter simply for the chance to slow down a bit.

Him: Heh -- *your* winter isn't going to slow down at all, lad ;-)

Me: Yeah, I'm certainly aware of that. Although I think I'll enjoy being able to lay down at night and not have my body hurt. ;-P

Him: The dignity of manual labor wearing a little thin? ;-)

The dignity of labor. It's an album by the Human League, but knowing this fellow, it's a phrase that has some historical import. Can anyone point me to something which describes it?

There's a lot going on in that last line of his, isn't there? The phrase "the dignity of manual labour" suggests to me the idea that manual labour isn't inherently dignified, or often seen as dignified, but that also in some ways it actually is... you know, the whole shtick about "a life of quiet contemplation, a job in the fresh air, hard labor" (see other comments on that blog post for more examples). It's as if manual labour is both seen as something undignified -- maybe because you get dirty or sweaty whilst doing it? -- and simultaneously honest and wholesome.

The thought that the dignity of manual labour could be wearing thin suggests that seeing manual labour as dignified is illusory; that whilst one might believe the labour is honest and wholesome, in reality it isn't (maybe even suggesting that it isn't either, it just is).

Personally I find it irrelevant to think about the dignity of work in such generalities. I'm sure -- wait, I know -- a lot of manual labour is soul sucking and awful (sweat shops, in the extreme). But so is a lot of white collar work (see the song "In Tall Buildings", sung by Gillian Welch, or the movie Office Space). The work I'm doing at the farm is manual labour and happens to be wonderful and something I'm proud of, and certainly something I could see anyone doing with honest dignity. But so was the work I was doing in Toronto as a computer programmer working to revamp a reporting system for a not-for-profit health-care insurance company.

I suppose I could turn slippery and suggest that the dignity of the work really depends on how you view it -- that any job could be dignified if you take pride in it, and such. I could do that, but I think when we talk about "the dignity of manual labour" we're talking about the general societal impression of manual labour, not one's own feelings about one's work. I suppose what I'm saying above is simply that dignity can probably be found in many types of work, manual or otherwise, and so can undignified work. In part I think it does depend on how you think of yourself in the job. If you think your job is soul-sucking and awful then I doubt that job is going to be seen as generally a dignified job. But I think the dignity of a job also comes from how you are treated as a human being, how you treat yourself, and how you treat others while doing the job. If your job requires you to do damage to yourself or others, or you are damaged because of it, then it's hard to see it as dignified.

But that's all for now. I'm off to take a nap.

Weather and Picking Green Beans

2007-07-20T17:13:00.000-04:00

Today was the usual Friday harvest routine. Only, the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Before I started working with farmers I never really gave thought to why we have this stereotype of farmers always talking about the weather. I mean, I suppose I knew it had to do with their concern for their crops and all. And it does, but I suspect it also has to with being outside so darn much. Compared to living in the city, the weather gets so much more of our attention during a day. I mean, we're constantly feeling the sun or the wind, seeing the clouds pass, putting on or taking off clothing and hats, and gauging how the rest of the day will unfold. Because it's on our minds all day it just naturally becomes something we think and talk about. I reckon it's just like in high-school, where the image is of high-schoolers' conversation dominated by gossip about other students; for farmers, weather is gossip.

So what does absolutely gorgeous weather mean to me? Well, it means 23 C (23.5 C in Newfoundland), sunny and partly cloudy with 20 km winds from the north. With a good night's sleep at my back I could probably work an entire day and still feel up for more. At least, that's how I feel today.

Today we started picking green beans. Picking these guys is very much like picking peas, in the sense that it's relatively slow (compared to the other crops), and requires careful attention to find the beans amongst the clutter of leaves and stalks. It's also not as gustatorally entertaining because eating green beans raw gets really old, really fast.

I spent an hour or two yesterday searching for recipes for the next CSA newsletter. I came across the idea of roasting green beans with garlic and oil and salt. "Ugly Green Beans" the website called them. Yum. I'm really looking forward to trying them.

More on Sleep Schedules

2007-07-19T18:55:00.000-04:00

You know, I don't think I really gave enough context for why I've been so concerned with my sleep schedule. Of course it's to do with feeling energetic and sane enough to work hard for twelve hours a day, but the reason for my interest in that is because I'm curious as to how sustainable this sort of job is. That is, I'm trying to figure out how, if I were to make a living as a market gardener, to keep up with all the work whilst not burning out. Figuring out how much sleep I need is all part of that.

Anyhow, I've returned to the original schedule of 4:30 - 9pm. Going to sleep at 10pm worked out for a few days but then I started to feel like the days required so much more effort than they had been. Once I had returned to a 9pm bedtime... well, I'm just surprised at how much more easy the days are. This week I've sort of been staying up late again and it's a real drag -- at times I've had to push myself to keep awake, or to keep moving, and it's no fun.

Anyhow.

Taking Photographs

2007-07-19T18:41:00.000-04:00

So I'm leaving the farm in about five weeks. I realised this a week or so ago, and since then I've noticed a bit of a shift in the way I regard myself and my work during the day. I guess I mean to say that I'm starting to notice that I will sometimes pop out from behind my eyes and see myself and everything around me as if I were another person standing near by. I end up taking mental photographs of all of us working, or of the fields and horizon, of the animals. It's sort of like I'm mentally documenting things so that later I can have the appropriate fodder for the bit of my brain responsible for nostalgia.

Eat the World

2007-07-19T18:31:00.000-04:00

Rain. We finally got some today. I think we've only really had about 6/10ths of an inch over the past month and a bit. Today we had 7/10ths in two bursts. It's a beautiful thing to be standing in a field while the rain pours down in a steady spatter. It's cool and smells clear and really... present. I mean, you can't help but feel entirely situated in the world when you're standing in the rain, you know?

Anyhow, the harvest routine is still driving the days forward. We harvested the last of the broccoli today, kohlrabi, turnips, and cabbage finished up last week or the week before that. Just today we started harvesting fennel, and earlier this week we started on the zucchini. There's talk of harvesting the first of the green beans tomorrow, and possibly carrots and new potatoes next week. Holy.

Preserving

2007-07-05T21:21:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we spent the morning harvesting cabbage and kohlrabi for a wholesale order. In the afternoon we preserved some of the left over vegetables from the previous day's CSA harvest.

We blanched and then froze broccoli, snow peas, and garlic scapes. We also made 33 bottles of pickled scapes. I think the prospect of me actually enjoying pickled scapes is rather dubious, but I'll give it a shot -- they're so good when they're fresh, they have to get better once they've soaked in salty acid for a week, right?

Anyhow, it was a great day. And a busy day. My head felt quite full on the way home. I thought a day of preserving would be rather relaxing and enjoyable because of the change (and the extreme lack of bending over to lift things). Maybe it was the pacing of the day and how much focused attention it took. Everything we did involved coordinating the timing of things: making sure water was boiling, keeping track of how long something had been boiling or sitting or cooling, making sure things didn't get too hot or too cold, etc... I felt more tired after a day of that than I have been feeling after a day of transplanting.

I'm glad we did it though. Knowing that each of us will be able to eat our amazing broccoli and peas in the winter... well, it's just great.

An Experiment

2007-07-05T21:02:00.001-04:00

This week I've been running a bit of an experiment on myself. As I've explained, for the past three weeks I've been keeping to a sleep schedule of waking at 4:30 AM and going to sleep at 9:00 PM. My old routine was to have no routine, which meant really late some nights and others really early. So far, keeping this routine has been great. I've had plenty of energy during the day, and just enough time to get done anything I need to in the evenings. Well almost. I've been finding it a little compact of a life, since I usually don't arrive home until about 7:00 PM at the earliest, and so by the time I had cleaned up and had something to eat I would have about an hour to myself.

So this week I've pushed my bedtime to 10:00 PM. See, I've found that getting 7.5 hours of sleep a night is sustainable but the question is, is 6.5? The results so far: promising. This week the weather has been rather cool, which makes it hard to compare my energy levels to previous weeks when the weather has been particularly warm. I don't do so well in the heat; I sorta loose a few of the middle gears so that I'm only able to operate sluggishly or in frenzy.

In any case, I've felt fine when we're working and only noticeably more tired in the corners minutes of the day -- when we're walking tools back to the shed, sitting after lunch, or if I lay down when I come home.

I figure next week I'll try going back to my previous routine of a 9 PM bedtime and see happens. I'm sure you're all looking forward to the results!

Pictures

2007-07-05T13:07:00.000-04:00

At the Georgetown Market

Our stall. Note the beautiful sign. Note the fact that I'm standing on my knees.

Our broccoli is incredible! If only you could have so much fun, huh?
(l to r: Amanda, Ali, Me, Jarrod, Jeff)

Weeds

2007-07-03T22:05:00.000-04:00

Here's a little extract from the 'Notes from the farm...' section of the CSA newsletter I wrote. I think it sheds some light on why we weed:

We harvest for your baskets as near as possible to the pickup times so that your veggies are as fresh as they can be. We harvest on Tuesday morning for the farm and Oakville, Thursday for Guelph, and Friday for the Georgetown market and drop-off.

On the other days of the week we spend most of our time in the fields and the greenhouse tending to the crops. One of our main tasks is weeding! A weed-free garden is essential because weeds steal nutrients, light and growing room from the crop, plus they can provide a home for pests and make harvesting more difficult. Conventional farmers use herbicides, pesticides, and genetically modified crops to manage weeds and pests. These chemicals have harmful or unknown health effects on humans and the surrounding ecosystem, besides which the weeds or pests that do survive are generally more resistant to the toxins -- making this a never ending escalation of attack!

Organic farmers choose to use other methods to control weeds. Day to day this often involves mechanically uprooting the weeds. A surprising amount of the weeding on our farm is done by Jeff on the tractor. With his sharp eyes and lightening fast reflexes he maneuvers two blades or claws to within one or two inches along either side of the rows of plants. This quickly kills most of the weeds. Any weeds that remains are pulled out by hoe or just simply by getting down on our knees and pulling them out by hand. Quite a task for the six of us in the ten acre garden!

But the result is worth it: superior fruits and vegetables grown without using chemicals!

Catch Up

2007-07-03T21:49:00.000-04:00

Well now, let's catch up. It's been the regular pattern of harvest days and fields days. The garden is looking amazing. New crops popping up all over the place (hint: beets soon, and also zucchini!). Our field work has been mainly removing row cover, hand weeding, and hoeing. Maintenance work really.

One piece of news, the massive brassica planting we did last week was entirely ruined. We covered the seedlings in floating row cover after we planted them, and then left them for two days before coming back to have a look.

Bad idea.

The farmers think it was a combination of the extreme heat last week, row cover, and not irrigating. We pulled the row cover off on Thursday to discover that almost every seedling was burnt to a crisp. This is a bit of a shame because we had planted the cabbage and half of the broccoli that was intended for the winter.

This week we managed to plant a few trays of left over cabbage and cauliflower, but I think the farmers are going to ask other CRAFT farms if they have any transplants to spare. Okay, I have to say it: it's amazing how quickly things can turn from promising to disastrous with crops.

The market went really well on the weekend. I think partly because of the variety we had, our increasing skill at displaying our veggies and engaging the customers, and because we had a newly painted sign. I'll see what I can do about posting some photos of it tomorrow.

This week Jarrod, Jeff, and I worked on making a better device for rolling up the row cover. I could explain, but I think a picture would be more helpful.

I've also still been fiddling with the cool room. Last week the thermometer outlet arrived. It's working wonderfully; it's keeping the temperature at 10 C within 1 C, without frosting up at all. This week I'm working on tracking how much power it's consuming and comparing it with the power consumed by the old cool room (i.e. the entire farm store).

Finally, snow peas. We harvested snow peas today for the Oakville and farm CSA pickups. Delicious. I like snap peas a lot, but I get pretty sick of them after munching on them for an hour. Not so with snow peas. There's something infinitely satisfying about them. But they have to be perfectly ripe, otherwise they taste either like masking tape or potting soil.

Fun

2007-06-26T20:50:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine wrote this to me the other day:

Do you guys ever get tired? you and the gang there seem to have endless energy? You must feel great at the end of each and every day.

Good questions, and I'm here to tell you that the answers are: yes, not even close, sometimes.

Personally I've found myself with so much more energy now that I've had a chance to adjust to the work and the routine and, most importantly I think, over the past three weeks I've been keeping a fairly strict schedule of waking up and going to bed. During the day I usually find myself with enough pep to start or carry on any task, but I regularly feel a bit sluggish after we take breaks. Maybe that's because we're usually cramming food in whenever we stop working so I'm sharing resources with my digestive system.

By the end of the day, and especially if it has been hot like it has been this past week and a bit, it feels really great to call it a day. I don't necessarily feel great but more often just satisfied with what we've been able to accomplish. My ride home is a lot slower than my ride in, and I end up getting caught up in thoughts about the traffic and the people I see rather than just motoring home. But anyhow, I'm usually not so totally drained that I don't have the energy to go for a short run or something. But this is now; for the first month and a bit I was pretty wiped out after a day and I could only really think of sleeping or reading.

Anyhow, what have we been up to? Well, today was a massive harvest day. We harvested: kohlrabi, radish, turnip, broccoli (!), cabbage, lettuce, lettuce mix, beet greens, pac choi, cilantro, dill, green onions, and snap peas. This took us the entire day. Half of it was spent harvesting the 110 pounds of snap peas. It's amazing what has come up though -- it seems like just last week that everything was still a little seedling.

Yesterday we transplanted thirteen beds of fall brassica and covered them with floating row cover (that took all morning). In the afternoon we harvested garlic scapes from most of the garlic patch. That's a bit of a grueling job. It involves bending over just slightly so that you can reach the scapes (which are about knee high) and picking as fast as you can. My back held up okay, but several other people found it extremely harsh and eventually picked on their knees.

(I figure we really need some sort of device that will bring our hands and face close to the ground without having to support ourselves with our backs and legs. I imagine some sort of rolling massage table with peddles that you would lay down on so that you could reach the crop easily while being supported, and then peddle to move forward. If I have a spare afternoon I'm going to try building it.)

A New Routine

2007-06-20T20:07:00.000-04:00

So, starting yesterday we've settled on our final daily and weekly schedules. Here's what a day looks like for me:

4:30 - Wake up. Read or sit or stretch for ten or fifteen minutes.
4:45 - Eat breakfast.
5:00 - Ride to Jeff and Leslie's house.
5:20 - Drive with Jeff and Leslie to Ali's house, and then drive to the farm.
5:50 - Arrive at the farm. Spend 10 minutes weeding in the greenhouse while the farmers meet quickly to plan the day.
6:00 - 9:00 - harvest if it's Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday, otherwise do other tasks.
9:00 - Break and eat a snack (usually 70% almond butter).
9:15 - Finish harvesting and processing, or carry on with other farm work.
12:00 - Lunch
1:00 - Work. Typically at this point in the day it's hot enough that we're only doing field work or other farm work (i.e. not harvesting).
6:00 - Leave with Leslie and Ali for Guelph.
6:30 - Ride home from Jeff and Leslie's.
6:50 - Arrive home. Shower, eat, look at the turkeys or the garden or talk with people, read or write blog posts.
9:00 - Go to sleep.

I'm still getting into this routine. I've got plenty of energy during the day, but I find I'm tired by 8:00pm. As I mention above, harvest days are Tuesday and Thursday, because we have the store, Oakville, and Guelph CSA drop offs then, and Friday, because we have the Georgetown market on Saturday. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday are regular work days where we do whatever else needs to get done, like weeding, planting, building, seeding, etc.. Currently our harvests are pretty small so we can get them done in about the first half of the morning.

Anyhow, here's what we were up to today:

Harvested 200 Pac Choi for the Buy Local! Buy Fresh! Map (sorry, couldn't find a real link) project which is delivering boxes of local veggies to people. Ali drove them to the drop off point in Guelph.
Jarrod and I built a large box that can sit outside to house all of our garbage between trips to the dump.
Jeff and Amanda weeded the tomatoes in the greenhouse.
Weeded all the Allium (you remember what they are, right?), and the celery and celeriac.
Ali and Leslie did the monthly accounting and called all the Guelph CSA members to remind them of the pickup tomorrow evening.

Yesterday we:

Harvested for the farm and Oakville CSA drop offs. We harvested Pac Choi, garlic scapes, radishes, lettuce mix, spinach, and kohlrabi.
In the afternoon we strung all the greenhouse tomatoes up, and weeded some of the seedlings in the greenhouse. Actually I spent most of the afternoon doing this with Jarrod and then on my own, as everyone else was involved in running the CSA drop offs.

I have to say I really love working alone. Maybe it's particularly nice because it's so much of a change from the typical days where we all work together. It's nice to have some time away from the busyness of other people, and of my own voice.

Prep.

2007-06-18T19:54:00.000-04:00

Today's activities:

Transplanted lettuce and fennel
Seeded endive, and lettuce.
Weeded the broccoli. We only pulled the big weeds that will be competition for the broccoli in the next short while as the broccoli is growing quite fast. Since we weren't as thorough it meant we did this standing up but bent over to grab weeds quickly, and thus, this was a rather grueling hour and a bit.
Moved drip tap around.
Met with the farmers to talk about harvest protocol.

Harvest

2007-06-15T20:15:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was all about the cucurbits. We weeded every last bed, which was a bit involved since we needed to take off and replace the floating row cover. Luckily we have a pretty good team, so although it was sometimes a touch grueling overall it went smoothly.

I spent an hour or two in the afternoon looking around for a thermostat to control our air conditioner. It seems to freeze up when it stays at 8 C for too long, and the time it takes to reach 8C depends on the surrounding air temperature so using a timer to turn on and off the air conditioner, as we currently do, isn't enough. What I'd like is an outlet that is controlled by a thermostat. After calling around to many many places it turns out that this beast is rare. Alas, I found one that's only available in the USA, and so we're having it shipped up. I could have done it using a regular wall thermostat which we could wire into an outlet, but when I figured out the costs it comes out even or even slightly more expensive. Plus, I'd have to spend a bit of time hooking it all up, where as the one we've ordered should just plug in and go.

My plan is to connect the timer and thermostat outlet together so that the timer forces the air conditioner off after three hours of use or so, regardless of the temperature, so that it'll give it a chance to defrost in the event that it starts freezing up. I'm hoping we don't actually need to do, and instead rely on the thermostat to keep the temperature high enough that the air conditioner never freezes, but low enough (10 C or so) that the veggies are cool enough. But without the timer, if ever the air conditioner freezes somehow, then the temperature will rise and the thermostat will keep the power going, in which case the A/C will stay on and keep frozen, and that's no good for the machine or the veggies.

What I really want is two temperature sensors. One for the ambient air, and one for the grill of the air conditioner to sense when the air conditioner freezes. Then I could build a little switch to trigger a defrosting period.

Hrm.. if only I knew a bit more about electronics. I think I'll have to learn.

Anyhow, today we harvested for the Georgetown Market tomorrow. We harvested: lettuce mix, spinach, kohlrabi, pac choi, radishes and garlic scapes. The pac choi are looking great... super huge and tasty. The radishes were tasting pretty disgusting last week, but with some water this week they've grown and have a much better flavour. Actually, they're delicious.

After doing the harvest thing in the morning we did odd jobs in the afternoon. Actually, for me it was mostly hand weeding. Amanda and I, and then Jarrod and Jeff managed to hand weed three beds of lettuce mix and a bed of salad greens (beet greens, chard, and some mangy looking cress).

At the end of the day Jeff and I experimented with the sprinkler system by bypassing the pressure regulator to get the maximum pressure to the sprinklers. Works very well now. The spray is much more even and has doubled in range.

Mapleton's

2007-06-13T17:37:00.001-04:00

Today was the second CRAFT day of the season. We went to Mapleton's Organic farm. The website has a decent introduction to the farm and it's history. We started the day by dividing into two groups and toured the joint. No wait, we started with an icebreaker in which we all got pieces of paper attached to our back and had to ask others yes or no questions in the attempt to figure out what was written on them. Most people had things like "tractor", or "holstein", or "mulch". I got "subsidies". :(

Anyhow, the first thing we toured was the CSA garden. This is a new addition to the farm started by an ex-CRAFT intern (and OT grad), Caitlin Hall. She has done an amazing job. Really, it's quite impressive. Since October or November last year she has bootstrapped the entire 20 member operation, on her own. She's working a two acre plot and greenhouse. All of her vegetables look pretty good, and her garden is super well organised (okay, well as soon as I see labeled stakes in the ground marking each row, I'm happy). She puts a lot of time into it though; she works 12-13 hour days six days a week, plus works half of Sunday. A machine.

I think I'll try to keep in touch with her to see how it goes over the season. We're now heading into the most intense time of the season, I'm told.

Anyhow, after the CSA gardens we saw the ice cream and yogurt making facility. Lots of stainless steel. We learned a bit about the milk quota system and ice cream regulations. Interesting stuff.

Then on to see the dairy cows and their milking shed. They're such beautiful animals. Cows. I think I'd like to own a few someday, but only just so that I could let them do their cow things, and collect the manure maybe. These cows were mostly Holsteins, with some Jersey crosses, I think. Enormous udders. Painfully enormous. It's the size of a full garbage bag hanging from between their legs. Apparently their top producer gives them 50 L of milk a day. Holy cow.

We learned all sorts of info on the differences between the conventional and these organically raised cows. After hearing all of this I find it a little hard to imagine farming conventionally. I mean, I can certainly understand it, but I just as certainly couldn't do it myself. As I say, and I know this sounds terribly flakey, but there's something about letting animals and vegetables be themselves that I find intensely wholesome and important. Performing the conventional horrors to an animal or vegetable to make it grow just because it appears easier, or more efficient, or even necessary somehow seems ultimately like short-sightedness.

Anyhow, then came lunch followed by a talk by Johann of our farm, and Steve of Fourfold Farm on livestock. Then we worked. Then we bought ice cream. Then we left. (Sorry, I'm tired).

10 GOTO 10

2007-06-11T19:03:00.000-04:00

Well now, here we are after a week or so since my last post. I'll sum up our work for the last while: hoeing and hand weeding. We've all been on weed control almost full time, except for some of those rainy days. We've worked our way through all of the beds of carrots, beets, parsley, cilantro, parsnip, onions, spring onions, leeks, parsley, celeriac, celery, and the cut flowers. Last week the work was wonderful -- the overcast and cool days make this sort intensive work a joy. I mean, what could be better than hovering a few inches from the earth whilst decapitating helpless weeds and chatting with folks about your favourite t.v. shows as a kid? Actually, much of the time we're quiet, chatting intermittently about nonsense for a bit and then returning to our work.

On the rainy days we worked on the cool room, seeding, and getting the harvest area set up. The cool room is currently in the integration testing phase. We've got the room completely insulated, the air conditioner installed and venting. We left it running today to see how it works. Unfortunately it's hard to say if it did anything at all. The room was 14C in the morning, and then at the end of the day the out room was 23 C (because we left the door open purposely) and the cool room was up to 15C. Now, we're thinking that maybe the air conditioner isn't even cooling since we haven't done anything to recalibrate the thermostat, but we'll need to keep testing to be sure.

The harvest area has been cleaned up a bit and is looking close to being ready to go. Last week we tested the new system for rinsing lettuce mix. Here's how it works. We have three barrels (actually, halves of pickle barrels) filled with water. The lettuce mix to be washed goes in a big net which is pushed into the first barrel of water and sloshed around a bit (gently so that the stuff doesn't bruise). Then the net is lifted out of the first barrel and put in the second. Repeat for the third. Then the net of clean, but wet, lettuce mix is transferred to the old washing machine we hacked up. A few seconds in the spin cycle and voila! Dry, rinsed lettuce mix. Beauty!

Well that's the plan anyhow. We gave this a shot last week and it seemed to work very well. We'll know at the end of this week when we head to the Georgetown Farmers Market to sell our stuff. What are we likely to be selling? Well, hopefully salad mix. In any case, from now on I'll keep a list up on the side bar of my best guess as to what will be available at the market on Saturdays. It's not certain since what we bring depends on exactly what is ready and what we harvest, of course.

Overcast

2007-06-01T22:15:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I try to pick post titles that reflect the essence of the day. Today's essence was the weather. It was hot, but the heat was tempered by the fact that it was overcast and occasionally rainy. It actually made the day entirely comfortable -- an easy rain does that, I think. When it did rain, the drops were sparse but big and cool. When I was out in BC recently I heard someone describe this sort of spitting rain as a "dry rain" because you don't really get wet.

Today was another full day. We:

Planted all of the hot and sweet peppers (three beds), and the melons. (That took most of the morning.)
Put floating row cover down on all of these beds. A rather annoy job due to the black plastic already buried there.
Hand weeded and hoed the rest of the lettuce mix bed, spinach, and dill.

Here'r some photos of the farm recently:

Laying out the row cover.

Before planting the melons...

Me, cuddling one of the cows.

Amanda and Ali harvesting Lovage

Intensive Agriculture

2007-05-31T20:17:00.000-04:00

I often find it hard to remember how our days start. I guess now that this is such a familiar routine for me (get up, ride my bike, drive to the farm, meet, start work, ... etc), I'm starting to find it difficult to differentiate the days. But okay, here's what we did today:

Seeded the corn (popcorn), for the seed saving garden, by hand.
Seeded two beds of sunflowers, by hand.
Put out drip line for the fennel.
Jeff cultivated the peas with the tractor.
Jarrod and Jeff worked on the sprinkler system some more. by the end of the day they had got it running.
Moved the very healthy brassicas seedlings outside so that they can acclimatise. The term "harden off" seems rather out of place in this heat.
Hoed three beds of peas that had poorly germinated.
Pulled back the floating row cover on the turnips, radish, and a bit of the pak choi and lo! the pak choi is beautiful, edible and huge! Well, not too huge, there is still more it can grow, but this is slightly poor timing since the CSA and markets doing start for a few more weeks.
Leslie and I used the wheel hoes to weed the turnip and radish.
Put out drip line for the flowers and the turnip and radish.
Then Leslie and I hand weeded the lettuce mix.

Okay, and when I say "hand weeded" I mean it. We were down to the real grit of intensive organic agriculture. It's the kind of horror you think about when first try to fathom farming without herbicides and pesticides. You know, getting down on your hands and knees and picking out every last weed. Well, we did that today, in the lettuce mix bed. Why? Well, it was just rather weedy, unfortunately. Maybe a combination of poor germination in patches, slow growth of the lettuce, and not being able to get much closer with the tractor.

In any case, the job was concentrated and controlled, but actually incredibly fun. I gather this assessment of the job is highly subjective. Leslie describes it as "morally crushing" or something. But whatever, I think the amazing part is how accurate one can be at this task whilst still getting the job done at a reasonable (but slow, undoubtedly) pace. Lettuce mix is, as it sounds, various varieties of lettuce planted all very closely together. It's harvested when it's young. Currently the lettuce is not much more than a sprout -- maybe 1 to 1.5 cm tall, and as I say, packed tightly. In amongst and especially around are the weeds. The job involves precision picking and scraping with your hands to get all the weeds without harming the lettuce.

Part way through Leslie and I discovered a new tool -- the "oscillating finger stirrup hoe". Actually, we just used a small spare pipe clamp that was lying around, like so:
We then just bent it to form more of a U shape (i.e. a stirrup shape). This becomes an excellent device for scraping away at the earth, just like a regular hoe (or oscillating hoe). If bent into more of a V shape then the angled portion of the V can be used to pick out individual weeds from amongst a clump of lettuce and the sides of the V can be used to scrap larger areas clean. Fantastic, I say. I think I'm going to perform some user studies and the publish our results in a farm journal *wink*.

Black Plastic

2007-05-30T20:03:00.000-04:00

I forgot to bring pictures home again. Nuts.

In any case, today was a pretty intense day, I'd say. We transplanted all of this season's tomatoes (seven 400 foot beds, single row, two feet spacing) before nine thirty. Then we moved on to running irrigation over eight beds that will be used for melons and such, and covering those with... erk... black plastic. Erk, I say. What a treacherous job it was to roll out this stuff in the heat today. I think we were all feeling rather beat up by the time we had finished... around four in the afternoon. During that time Jarrod and Leslie seeded the fall roots.

The rest of the day was spent in various jobs. Amanda, Jarrod, Ali, and Jeff weeded a few rows of peas that hadn't germinated well so that weeds were coming through fairly strong. Jarrod and Jeff also experimented with a few old sprinklers we have to try to get a system going (rather than laying more drip tape). Leslie and I transplanted planted tomatoes, melons, ground cherries, and planted cucumber in the seed saving garden.

Good night.

Rather Hot

2007-05-29T22:32:00.000-04:00

What did we do today? We direct seeded 16 beds of squash and cucumber. That took a few hours. Then we had an amazing, and very impromptu, workshop on soil with geologist John Slack (sp?).

Our previous soil workshop was excellent and gave us all the right foundation for what we learned today -- which was a whole lot more. John worked his talk around the soil profile he extracted from the ground using his "dutch auger" (I reckon that's a decent bad band name, or at least lead singer). He explained how taking soil for a soil test from only the first foot is really only worthwhile if you're trying to sell someone fertilizer -- instead, everything down to the "parent layer" is extremely important. He explained different nutrient cycles, the importance of calcium, limestone formation in southern Ontario, what goes on in each soil layer and how they're formed, how soil life adapts to the nutrients available, and on and on. Such an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guy. After learning all of this stuff about soil I'm starting to wonder why I'm not going into soil sciences (seriously!).

He also recommended this site: www.soilandhealth.org as a good resource.

Anyhow, after lunch we put down drip tape for the beds we had seeded, and we covered each of them with floating row cover. There's something very beautiful about seeing the field broken up into even lines like this. (Pictures coming). There's also something vaguely creepy -- it seems incredibly unnatural and somehow... disfiguring... like putting masking tape over someone's eyes.

After that Ali prepared beds for tomorrows seeding, and Jeff and I talked irrigation. He'd like to use sprinklers over part of the field (the early root crops and peas) so that we don't have to run drip tape. I'll have to write more about drip tape, but basically the way we're using it makes it extremely painful. Mostly because we have to keep removing and putting it out again and again, each time the beds are cultivated (by hand or with the tractor). Using sprinklers would save a lot this hassle.

Recap and Pictures

2007-05-27T15:56:00.000-04:00

Alrighty, here's what we've been up to over the past few days:

Jarrod and I finished up the guts of the coolroom. We hung the door, and put up the last bits of the wall. Here's a grungy picture from a few days back:

Leslie and I seeded a bunch of corn, some to save seed from and others for the CSA. We used a neighbour's corn planter tractor implement. Actually all I did was walk behind the tractor to make sure everything was working well whilst Leslie did the hard part of keeping the tractor in line. Okay, actually, this corn planter contraption makes the whole process a piece of cake.
We all did a a lot of hoeing. Most of Wednesday, and Thursday I believe. We weeded most of everything that we had planted up until now. This is pretty hard work, mostly because it involved standing in the sun during those hot days. Oddly (or not so oddly) I'm getting pretty familiar with being uncomfortably warm. It's a rather peculiar mix of feeling sweaty and gross and a bit worn out, but also willing to keep going because it's fun and you know you're making progress. It's a bit like the volume has been turned down on the complaints line from my body. I can hear an upset voice on the other end, but I can't quite make out the details of the complaint. And that makes it easier to just hang up.
We planted a few beds of stuff. I can't remember exactly what. I know fennel was in there somewhere. Poor, unfortunate fennel. Fennel is the pasty white wimp of the group. It's so darn fragile. Anyhow, here'r some photos of us planting (from a few weeks past):

Jarrod

Amanda

Me

Ali and Jeff
Amanda and I spent Friday afternoon retying all the knots for the tomatoes in the greenhouse ('cause we had the wrong knot).
We put out irrigation lines for the all the Alliums (onions, bunching onions, leeks) and the garlic.

Also, remember that I mentioned we had a soil talk the other day? Well here's a few pictures from that:

l to r: Me, Tarrah, Jarrod, Amanda, Ali

l to r, b to f: me, tarrah, jarrod, amanda, jeff, ali

And finally, since I haven't formally introduced you yet to the whole 2007 Whole Circle crew, here we are:

Back row: Manuella, Leslie, Amanda, Ali, Me
Front row: Johann, Maggie, Jeff, Jarrod

All photos here were taken by Leslie.

Hoe-down

2007-05-22T20:26:00.000-04:00

Today:

Seeded lettuce, and spring onions (whilst listening to a This American Life episode on Testosterone).
Hand weeded (via the hoe) the last bed of kohlrabhi we missed yesterday.
Thinned the radish and the turnip.

Today was all about the hoe. It's a wonderful tool, I have to say. Used properly it replaces an squadron of bent fingers and backs. A tiny arm movement and suddenly you've scraped off the surface of the soil and along with it any flimsy weeds. I also used it to thin the turnip very successfully.

I also have my first real and persistent pain. And wouldn't you know it, it's in my hands. It runs in a band across the top of my palm where my knuckles are. It's more of a stiff feeling, as if my hands haven't been used in a long while. It's generally most painful in the mornings after the bike ride in the cool air and becomes unnoticeable once I've started working. Some of the others complain about this sort of pain too, so I suspect it just comes with the territory.

Dirt

2007-05-22T05:27:00.000-04:00

Alrighty here, another few days to recap.

Last Thursay and Friday were spent doing similar things. Jarrod, Jeff, Amanda and I spent most of the days constructing an insulated room within the existing coolroom. The idea being that since the existing coolroom is massive and not air conditioned (it's cooled with sensible opening and closing of the main door throughout the cooler months only) but still insulated we could build two walls and a door and suddenly have our own reasonably sized room to store vegetables. And we could use a hacked window air conditioner I mentioned before to cool it.

We managed to build most of it, less the door. As before, it was a lot of fun to pretend to be a carpenter. I also spent some time calling around to electricians and appliance repair folk to see if anyone could give me advice on how to hack the air conditioner and how exhaust the heat. Eventually I found most of what I think I need to know from my friend Shaun over at Fidalia Networks Inc. who has a ton of experience with refrigerating server rooms.

Saturday was another learning day, and this time we had a talk by my roommate Tarrah on soil. A really fantastic talk. We learnt about the origin of soil, soil composition, the mineral composition of soil, soil structure, and soil life. All of what could be was applied as Tarrah had us out in the fields all morning digging holes and inspecting our soil.

Did I ever mention that I wanted to start a list of organic farming axioms? Well, regardless, Tarrah's workshop highlighted the axiom, "Feed the soil, not the plants". That is, rather than dump liquid fertiliser on the soil intending for the plants to soak it up before the next rain (where it'll get washed away into the rivers and ground water) instead, intelligently rotate crops, apply compost, or other amendments and practices designed to encourage healthy soil life which will make the existing nutrients in the soil available to the plants.

Anyhow, yesterday we spent the morning planting strawberries (just in the home garden), making soil mix, and getting the seed potatoes ready for planting. The afternoon was a frenzy of hoeing and floating row cover moving. Five hours later, and we had de-weeded the entire brassica planting. This was such a dusty job... when I took a shower last night the water ran silty brown for a minute or so.

Crop Rotations

2007-05-16T21:52:00.000-04:00

Another great day. Today we took the morning and part of the afternoon as a learning day. The subject: crop rotations. I've heard the principles many many times before, but Ali, Leslie, and Jeff did an excellent job of going into the gritty details of how to pull off designing a good crop rotation given all the different competing constraints under consideration. (alliteration anyone?) More than giving us a good basis in the theory, they explained exactly how they had come up with the current and past rotations for our farm, and how they had changed it in response to observing the fields throughout the season (e.g. what they did when they noticed one field stays damp most of the year, etc..).

After all that I spent a while researching air conditioner thermostats in the hopes of learning how to hack a room air conditioner into something we can use to refrigerate a cool room. Anyone know anything about recalibrating thermostats? (Taking a look under the hood I discovered that the thermostat has a little Allan key driven screw that I suspect adjusts the temperature calibration. I'd need to change it so that the air conditioner keeps the temperature around 4 degrees Celsius.)

I then spent a long while with Amanda and Ali stringing twine from the roof of the back half of the green house so that we can tether the tomatoes. There's a nifty we knot used to adjust the slack of the twine as the plant grows so that you can keep wrapping it around the stalk. It's something like the Lobster Bouy Hitch or the Tautline Hitch.

Recap

2007-05-15T22:42:00.000-04:00

So I guess I've taken some time off from this. Got rather busy I suppose. Here's a quick recap:

Wednesday: CRAFT day. Very fun. More on this later, I hope. Learnt a lot, met up with some people I knew from a while back.

Thursday: Inside day. Cleaned up the shed. Finished the harvest cart, again.

Friday: More clean up and random jobs for the first half of the day 'cause the ground is still wet. Then... crazy go nuts in the afternoon as the ground dries up and we all stay until 9pm to get all of the planting done that day because of the promise of rain the next day.

Saturday: no school rainy saturday. i.e. no work today.

Monday: planted celery, moved floating row cover around. Did lots of things in the shed... can't quite remember in my delirious state of tiredness at the moment. Oh wait, we seeded lots. All the fall brassicae actually. Plus fennel. Plus other stuff in the shed...

Today: Spent the morning debugging a problem with the webpage. Also worked with leslie to plan out some of the seed saving garden. Hacked down every variety of last years kale save one which we'll use for seed later on. Planted beets for seed saving. Made steamed nettle for lunch. Put seed potatoes in bins to get them ready for seeding soon.

G'night.

Cool Hand Luke

2007-05-08T20:41:00.000-04:00

Ever seen the film "Cool Hand Luke"? I recommend it. It contains several amazing scenes. In one, we get this bit of classic dialog:

Luke: I can eat fifty eggs.
Someone else says: Nobody can eat fifty eggs.

Okay, I guess you have to see the film. In any case, there's a scene where Luke and a bunch of men on the chain gang are laying down a road, in the heat, and the everyone is grumpy and moving slowly just hating what they're being forced to do. All of sudden Luke starts going like a mad man, tossing gravel down as fast as he can. Everyone joins in and they're suddenly enjoying it. Hootin' and hollerin' and getting a thrill out of the intensity of everything.

Well, today was nothing like that. No no, I'm kidding. Today was very much like that, minus the Luke. As a group we just settled into this incredible rhythm of work. Transplanting, like yesterday. Only today it seemed to go at a quicker, more consistent, and energetic pace. We were planting with a wider spacing (every 12 inches, and sometimes 18 inches, rather than yesterday's 6 inches), and sometimes we'd only plant two rows per bed instead of three. That really made things cook.

But more so I think it was just that we all knew what we were going to be doing, and so we relaxed into it and decided to "give 'er", rather than be so concerned about how much our back or legs hurt, etc. Or maybe this is just my experience of the day, and everyone else experienced it entirely differently. I'll have to ask.

In any case, a great day. As I say, we planted all of the brassicae (Cabbage, Broccoli, Kolhrabi, and Pak Choi), plus parsley, I think. Maybe something else too. I spent part of the afternoon baking blueberry muffins for tomorrows CRAFT day (it's a pot luck lunch at one of the CRAFT farms -- more on this tomorrow). We also layed out drip line for the brassicae and floating row cover.

I have to say I'm still coming down from the buzz of today. I think I really enjoy sustained hard work with a fast pace. It's also great to be digging around in the dirt all day. My hands, arms, and face were dark brown with dust this evening. Leslie and I noted that our cuticles have disappeared or are disappearing from our hands -- likely getting ground (get it?) away by the earth as we continually jam our hands into it.

Transplanting

2007-05-07T20:56:00.000-04:00

Today was rather tough (but maybe that's because I'm a 'nub'). We transplanted four 400 foot beds of onions (three rows each) and two of leeks, both at a six inch spacing. So that's six beds of the twenty-one we'll be transplanting this week. Sheesh.

It was a great day though. I really enjoy this sort of sustained and focused work. Oh and, I've had the song "spanish flea" stuck in my head all day too.

A Structural Explanation of Farm Injury

2007-05-06T18:29:00.000-04:00

The other day it occurred to me that there is a very simple structural explanation as to why farming is so darn hard on the body. Consider the following:

That's right, what we have there is a diagram of a human, standing comfortably on the earth. If we roughly categorise the components of the system above, we see there are different bands of functionality oriented in space:

That is, our head contain four out of our five major perceptual apparatuses. Our upper torso houses our hands and arms which for a "small"-scale vegetable farmer are the primary tools for manipulating the world (i.e. weeding, grasping, pushing). Our hands are also our primary tools of our sense of touch. Our torso is all about supporting the upper part of our body in all of its positions, and in addition contains many of our major organs. Our legs are also part of our support system but they are differentiated by their primary role in our locomotion. And finally, at the very bottom is the earth.

Now, for us farmers here's the problem:

All of our tools -- our eyes, arms, and hands -- are located at the top most part of our body. The earth and the vegetables that grow in it -- our primary work area -- are located beneath our body. That is, our tools are separated from our work area by a large gap (relative to the size of our body). To bridge the gap and bring all of our equipment down to where we are going to use it, we need to fold our body. And the folding happens either at our back, hips or legs, or all three -- but it definitely has to happen.

Thus, in order to do much of our work we're bound to put strain on these areas of our bodies. It's an unavoidable consequence of the physical layout of the human body. Of course, this is a well-known problem -- it's why we have long handles on tools, and why home gardeners have raised beds, and such. I just thought it's interesting.

Now, given a few millenia of evolution maybe farmers will end up like this:

(That's an extra head on the lower torso, and a pair of arms coming out of the thighs).

Seeding

2007-05-06T18:26:00.000-04:00

So yesterday was the first day of seeding in the field. It was finally dry enough so Jeff, Leslie, and Ali went out on the tractors and had the seeder (a "planet junior") following the spader. They seeded about two acres of early root vegetables: carrots, beets, parsnip, and peas, I believe. Amanda and I weeded and thinned the transplants that are outside so that they're all set for tomorrow, and Jarrod helped get the main irrigation lines laid out. Amanda and I helped out with that at the end of the day a little.

Make Work

2007-05-04T19:42:00.000-04:00

Today was a bit of a day of random jobs. The farmers are all waiting on the edge of their boots for the fields to dry enough so that we can out there and seed and plant. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and dry so I think we'll do it then.

That reminds me, we begin working Saturday mornings from now on. We're still only working 8am to 6pm, at least for another week.

Today:

Jarrod and I put a rail on the cart to stop the boxes of veggies from sliding off if the cart is tipped too high.
We discovered that the forks we had built for the bicycle wheels were too flimsy, so we scrapped them for an entire wheel and axle assembly we dragged out of the scrap heap.
Lunch. I dug out some wild leeks from the sugar bush and made a spinach salad with them. It was rather basic. I guess I had hoped for more 'cause on their own the leeks are quite sweet, oniony, and also have a strong table pepper taste.
Amanda and I weeded the unheated portion of the green house, and then strung rope to hold up the tomato trellising.
Ali and I removed the piles of rock from our earlier rocking picking sessions (totally not mundane) into the bucket of the tractor which Leslie drove.
Jeff and Jarrod set up the basic framework for the irrigation system.
Ali, Jeff, Leslie and I picked some of last year's kale and collards that are regrowing. Just for eating at home.

Cart

2007-05-03T20:54:00.000-04:00

Time has been a bit bare in the past few evenings, what with coming home at 6:45 - 7pm, and then typically sitting down to dinner with the 'family' here. It's been 9pm by the time I've cleaned up and am ready to sit down to do some reading or typing (and... being in bed at 9pm is a grand thing, I say). I suspect I'll have to unhook myself from the rest of the house's routine if I have any hope of having some time to myself this summer.

So, anyhow, Yesterday was a learning day. The topic: health and safety on the farm. Jeff led us through a discussion on lifting, dressing properly for the sun, hydration, using the tools correctly, wearing safety equipment, interacting with the animals without getting a horn in the temple (our cows have their horns), and safely working with and around tractors. This day was good fun, and also oddly exhausting. Jarrod, Jeff, and I spent the afternoon working on the bus door and the harvest cart.

Today jjj spent most of our time working on the bus door and harvest cart (except for the early morning where Jarod and I rebuilt part of a fence). The bus door is done, and we just need a tire and some tubes for the wheels of the cart before it can be put into service. Leslie used the 'Einbach' (sp?) tool on the bit of the garden we'll be planting in soon. This is a tool that fits onto a tractor and has several little steel tines that drag across the ground (maybe penetrate an inch or two deep). The action is much like if you dragged a garden rake across soil. The intention is to break up the soil a bit and thereby kill any weeds growing. If it's used a couple of times over a few weeks it can essentially rid the top two inches of soil of weed seeds. In this case, since we're planting in it as soon as it's dry enough, it will just lessen the weed 'pressure'.

Ali and Leslie also spent several hours on the tractor cultivating a (the?) potato field with a tool called a 'spader'. It approximates 'double digging' -- a method of deep cultivation which doesn't invert the layers of soil. Material and microbial composition apparently changes dramatically in the upper 30-60cm of soil, and so keeping the soil layers in place is important maintaining soil health. (I'll have to write a post about farming axioms I'm learning, but one of them is "healthy soil means healthy plants").

Amanda did odd jobs most of the day, and in particular did a lot of work in the back half of the greenhouse getting it ready for the tomatoes.

Upholding the Gender Stereotypes

2007-05-01T19:13:00.000-04:00

This May Day we at Whole Circle Farm decided to strengthen our commitment to farm gender stereotypes. Jarrod, Jeff, and I spent the day working in the shop, working with steel. You know, cuttin' steel, bending steel, grindin' steel, hammerin' steel, burnin' steel with flames. The womenfolk (only Ali and Amanda today) spent the day doing girly stuff.. you know, baking, darning our socks, and whatever else they do. Okay, not really. They spent the day picking rocks, doing greenhouse work, painting another section for the sign out front, and tending to the day-old chicks that arrived today.

I think everyone noticed the gender split today, but it "just sorta happened" that way. Ostensibly because Jeff had work to do on repairing the bus door that got trashed the other week, and Jarrod can weld, and I.. well, I guess maybe because I'm handy with designs and numbers and such... or maybe it's just because I have a penis. Most likely not, but you never know.

Anyhow, so what exactly were the boys working on today? Well, Jarrod and I, with a lot of Jeff's help, are attempting to create a wagon to carry our washed and bunched vegetables from the processing area in the shed to the cooler in the barn. It's a short distance, but a real drag if you have to carry one box at a time. Since the fields are not dry enough to work or transplant into we have some time to work on projects like these.

Personally, I find making tools is a fantastic way to spend time. It's what I love about working as a computer programmer. That is, often I enjoy making the tools to automate or assist with the day-to-day cruft, more than I like doing the steady work on the larger project. It turns out that the same is true for me in farming. I really love designing and then building a tool for a job that I know is tedious, but will now be just a little less tedious. I absolutely love the physicalness of working with metal and wood and screws and such, to pull together a functioning thing.

Rockin' It

2007-04-30T19:35:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-27T19:21:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-25T21:21:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-24T21:12:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-21T17:07:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-20T21:13:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-04-19T21:36:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-18T21:21:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-04-16T20:26:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-15T00:22:00.000-04:00

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;
}

2007-04-12T21:00:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-11T20:10:00.000-04:00

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)

2007-04-10T20:15:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

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.

A preview

2007-03-30T07:45:00.000-04:00

An Introduction

2007-03-17T00:33:00.000-04:00

So, it's here that I plan to keep notes on my apprenticeship at whole circle farm this summer. Whole Circle is a mixed farm of veg, grain, cows, pigs, hens, maybe turkeys. I know of it through Jeff, Leslie, and Ali whom I met when I volunteered for a couple months at Everdale Farm in the summer of 2004. They run the garden, CSA, and markets for the farm, whilst Maggie and Johann, who started the farm, take care of the livestock and house the other apprentices (of which there are three others this year... or maybe four?). Anyhow, I'll explain more about all of this as time goes on.

I start there in the first week of April. I likely won't be posting much until then, but once I'm there I'd like to use this space to give a feel for the day to day life and activities on the farm. Why? So that friends and family and farmy types in other parts of the world can follow along, and so that I have a way to actively reflect on it all. Plus, if you're lucky, maybe I'll work in thoughts on how topics in farming and computer science are related.