Whitsend Market Garden

April 15 2018

Hello Everyone:

Not much that can be done at the farm today.  Eastern Ontario is getting the freezing rain for the next twenty four hours and we are no different in that respect.

Pepper seedlings from a week ago

That isn’t to say that I have been away from the farm.  The green and very hot peppers are sprouting, the onions have surpassed my minimum needs for the season, and the rest of the plants are growing well (The moderately hot peppers appear to have lost their seed viability - the seed was somewhat old but I had presumed they had one season left in them.  I over seeded as one does in these situations, and have received just one sprout...more on this the next post).

I was out earlier to the nursery to ensure that the plants don’t dry out as I expect the roads will be treacherous at least for the early part of tomorrow.  With the heat on, the seedling trays require a water top-up once every 36 hours.  I can’t over water in advance (that would cause other problems) and so I have to make the forty minute round trip on days which one ought not to be driving. 

Ice storms are by far my biggest worry for weather at this time of year.  The nursery can probably take about 24 hours without power, and a typical power outage is usually no longer than a couple of hours. 

However, if a lot of lines go down across the city, our farm neighbourhood will likely be a low priority. 

Knowing that slowing down the rate of temperature change is the key to helping the seedlings through a period of time without heat, I place a few thermal masses in the nursery.  Water is an excellent thermal mass, and there are always several gallons stored in jugs.  Today, I placed several bags of soil that I thawed out in the outdoor nursery the past few days.  This soil is quite damp and will release it’s heat into the nursery should the temperature start to drop.

With all this down time from the farm, I can catch up on reading:

Free ranging poults at Elmtree Farm

Gene Lodsdon’s , “All Flesh is Grass” (Swallow Press, 2004) is one of the two current books I’m going through.  Gene works a cattle farm in Ohio and has successfully experimented (and continues to experiment) with small herds that are sustained by pasture farming, as opposed to strip grazing or other conventional methods.  Aside from his thoughtful observations on agriculture generally, I look at some of the techniques he uses to pasture cattle without resorting to planting amounts of corn or grain, silaging it for the winter, and spending money on feed and tractor fuel.

These are techniques that I can translate into pork and bird production when/if our farm moves to a permanent location.

I highly recommend this book to anyone considering free ranging livestock on any scale; it was one of the first I picked up when taking the first timid steps to buying a pair of pigs.

Another author I have returned to recently is Joel Salatin.  His books “Folks, This Ain’t Normal” and “You Can Farm Too” were inspirational when I started my farm journey.  Something had pricked my memory a while back when I was thinking about heating a pig hutch during the winter months, and I recalled some notes in one of his books how he buried silage corn under layers of straw in his barn.  Silage gives off heat due to the fermentation process, which moderates the temperature enough to keep the pigs warm.

Now I hope at least some of you are wondering about that buried corn with happy warm pigs nearby.  Joe states that all pigs have a sign on their foreheads that reads “Will Root for Corn” and they are quite happy doing this.  In fact, looking into the window of that barn on a minus twenty day in the Shenandoah valley and the pigs appear to be in a porcine heaven – sprawled asleep on the warm straw or alternately rooting up the tasty cobs.

Side note about accompanying photo:

To keep my 2016 pigs pigs happy and curious (and to dismantle an old hay bale I wanted to incorporate into the soil), I would stuff apples into the edge of the bale after breakfast time.  They would finish their mash and then gallop over to find and tear the fruit out.  This had the added benefit of keeping them preoccupied so I could do a perimeter walk to inspect the electric fence or clean their water trough.

I have a few questions about this method (how is the corn replenished – I imagine bringing several hundred pounds of corn into a pig barn would cause a riot of excitement and a trampled farmer, and what state the pigs’ livers are in come springtime, not to mention what this might do for breeding sows. 

So I have to go through all of Salatin’s books to find the chapter that deals with this topic, and I get a refresher on his pasturing techniques and a lot of the other interesting innovations that I could adapt for my own uses whether for vegetables or animals.

I’ll recommend Joel’s books, but beware...I might compare him with the phrase “the Noam Chomsky of agriculture” – a relentlessly scathing whit and intelligent critique of the current food chain and it’s scientists, apologists, myth sustainers and snake oil peddlers.  I get a lot of my own ideas when reading about how he has DIY’d his way through a problem (be it reducing workload, expenses, or other farm challenges).  But like Noam Chomsky, a little too relentless for me to read in one sitting.

Farming: equal parts being, doing, and observing

My mentor Tom once referred to an old saying:  “It takes ten years to grow a farmer.”  He quickly added that after his tenth year, the only thing that changed were the nature of his questions, and he still wondered at the amount of knowledge he had yet to learn.

Well, we are just a couple of hours into this winter/spring freezing rain storm, so I might as well go back to the books for a little while – who knows, maybe Kanata will lose power and there won’t be light enough to read by later...

Progress report on the Whitsend customer request project...Jen from Sysabee and I are meeting this Tuesday to take a look at a potential draft.  Jen hosted a focus group of some of our customers last week and they had a strong preference for one of three possible formats that Jen was proposing.

I'm looking forward to see how this project is developing.

I wanted to be there for the focus group but wisely didn't ask to be included...best to get the unfiltered opinions from the folks who are going to use this.