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:

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

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.