Too many seedlings!

It has officially been spring for a couple of days, but around here it has not felt like winter for weeks. It is warm, mostly sunny, and weeds are starting to appear in the garden beds.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to start some seedlings.  I had been meaning to get started for a couple of weeks but dragged my feet. Then somebody mentioned they already had seedlings in their greenhouse and that was enough to light a fire ...

That night I separated some worm compost and started a tray of 36 seedlings (12 peppers and 24 tomatoes) using exactly 32 seeds (yes, I was counting).  I placed one seed in the middle of each of the 36 seedling starter pots.  This sounds pretty anal but last year I did much the same thing, only I planted a few seeds in each tray in case some seeds did not germinate.  I figured I'd just trim back the plants I did not want and life would be good.

Unfortunately, I discovered that worms do NOT kill all of the seeds in the finished compost.  I had volunteer plants starting like crazy (much like this year) and consequently did not have a clue what was what in my seedling trays.  I ended up guessing which plants were the ones I had intended for the garden and culled the rest.  Last year I culled all of my pepper seedlings and wound up with tomato plants instead.  I am not sure why but the vast majority (possibly all?) of the seeds left in my worm compost are tomato seeds.  We do eat a lot of tomatoes, but I have seen other seeded vegetables appear on our chopping blocks occasionally.  Fortunately, I got tomatoes off of all of the tomato plants in my garden, but I wanted some peppers too!

This year will be different.  Yesterday I culled the volunteers from my first seedling tray.  I still made some guesses but in most cases it was pretty obvious (from their relative positions in the pot) which was a plant I had intentionally started, and which was a volunteer.  Again this year, the vast majority of the volunteers appear to be tomato plants.  I also think I have figured out how to distinguish pepper and tomato seedlings.  The pepper seedlings take longer to germinate and they develop a little knob below their first leaves where the tomato seedlings remain smooth.  Progress I guess!

I just started a tray of onion seedlings (last year I waited too long and our onions were uniformly small).  This time I bought sterilized compost from the store to start the seeds.  I am curious to see if it is indeed 'volunteer' seed free, and if my life will be easier.

Potato Famine

This summer I planted potatoes in six stacks of tires.

The hope was that in each stack the potatoes would grow to the top tire and start potatoes in the entire stack of tires instead of just below the surface of the top tire in the stack. I was giddy with excitement as I hoped for over fifty pounds of potatoes per stack!

I have dug through the first two stacks and removed maybe five pounds of potatoes in each one. I am crushed!

I did get potatoes in the top tire, but very few anywhere else. I am suspicious that the soil I used had too much clay in it. It packed down in the lower tires and it was almost impossible to dig without a shovel. I think the soil needs to be much more loose for this to work.

Next year less clay!

Apples!

After a day in Kamloops meeting with some coaches from the Overlander Ski Club--Chris and I are head coaches of our Barriere Club -- we came home and processed more apples.

The apple juice was so good, we made more. This time Chris used our potato ricer to recover apple sauce and it worked much better. We made 8 quarts of apple juice (about 2 gallons) and recovered about 10 quarts of apple sauce. I seem to still be having some issues with head space/tightness of rings as inevitably I have at least one jar pop open in the canner, letting loose apple goo.

I'm not sure what we will do with so much apple sauce but the kids do like to eat it all on its own...


























I swung by Wal Mart today and took a picture of all their crushed cardboard. When I was there months ago they wouldn't let us take any and I was quite struck by the irony of this as we were parked by their bales of crushed cardboard. T his is a much smaller pile than when I was there before...to be fair to Wal Mart (cack, did I just extend fairness to them???) other big box stores also refused to give us cardboard.














The pictures in this blog posting will be the last ones I'll post using the kids cameras! Today we bought a new digital SLR camera (yay, yay, yay!). After 6 months of research and questioning need vs. want we decided it was time.

I bought a manual SLR back in the late 80s when I was still in Journalism School and I simple loved it. I took it everywhere until the repair bill for it in early 2000 made its maintenance uneconomical. Since then we've had a series of campact digital cameras but I've yearned for more ever since.

I compared prices on the Nikon D-90 for several months and discovered the prices were no better in the U.S. Plus, a Canadian repair shop would not honour the warranty on a U.S. purchased unit. I checked ebay and look at used units. But today The Future Shop put many of its cameras on sale (open box, which meant we didn't get a box for it). We've purchased many open box items over the years and are quite happy to save hundreds of dollars to leave the box behind (which we usually throw away as soon as we get home anyway). For the camera and a universal lens we ended up paying about $250 less on these two items than was priced several days ago. And Chris asked for an additional discount for buying the "package". He pushed it a little further by asking for a camera case thrown in but that appeared to be the threshold! We were offered a discount on that too, but Chris remembered I already had my old camera case. So the sales person gave me a bit more of a discount on a high transfer memory card.

Chris has learned over the years that the big box stores have a lot more room for profit and that it is acceptable to ask for a lower price (something we do not go for at smaller, independent stores). I have been amazed at how much lower a salesperson will go and how quickly. I am still not good at this. We are quite polite when we venture into bargaining and are always conscious of frugal vs. cheap.

As we left the store, Chris turned to me and said, "How are the effects of that endorphin rush? Run out yet?" Nope, nope, nope! I had a full caffeinated coffee right after the purchase, too so I've been pretty happy all afternoon and evening!

I hid the camera tonight to avoid the kids putting fingerprints all over it but might sneak a few minutes later tonight to put it together. Here's the body of the camera.














Check out the blog late tomorrow night to see some of my new photos!

Eggs have come

On Monday we got are first egg from our hens. Instead of it being in the laying boxes it was in the corner of the chicken house. It was tiny compared to the Schillings eggs. Yesterday we put fake eggs and somebody told us to put golf balls in so we did. This morning I went to go check for eggs and there I saw a small egg a little bit bigger then on Monday. It took me a long time to get the hen out of the laying box.

Flower Mystery Solved!

Stephen's student teacher posted a reply to our mystery! The flowers are called Livingston Daisies and she purchased the seeds at Art Knapps.

It's a small world. I was in at the Royal Bank in Kamloops today and I noticed the lady helping us had the last name of Curle, which isn't common. I asked if she was related to Stephen's student teacher and it turned out she was her mom! I left Stephen's email address and this blog address with her. Jillian had just returned from Asia and took a look at the picture on the blog tonight!

Jillian just received her teaching certificate this spring! Congratulations! I know all the students in Mrs. Fraser's Grade 4 class loved her. Here's to finding a job quickly, Jillian!

Help us identify the mystery flower

Stephen's student teacher gave him seeds in February before she went back to school. He couldn't remember what they were so we planted them indoors and this spring we transplanted outdoors. The plant was green for the longest time (and snaked out like a vine). The stems and leaves are rubbery. A few weeks ago the green stems and leaves started to turn red. A few days ago it bloomed! It closes at night and then opens again during the day. Nobody we know has been able to identify this flower! Can anybody put us out of our misery????

A garden to live in

Chris mentioned visiting a friend's garden last week and being very impressed by the coziness of it. That friend is Jennifer Kerslake of Barriere and a few days ago I asked if I could return to take photos with the intention of posting them here. She agreed!

Jennifer was in Band with me at Barriere Secondary School, many years ago. I'm a little older than she (one of her brothers was in my graduating class, though!), so we didn't spend much time together, but she eventually became a teacher and is teaching our daughter Helen this year at Barriere Elementary School. We've gotten to know her a bit better the last few years through piano lessons, 4-H, and of course, the school Katie, Stephen and Helen attend. (Small towns!)

Here's a view of her garden, taken from her back porch, and tucked against the fence at the back of the picture. I had to include the tree in the foreground because it framed the picture so nicely! You can see her new greenhouse on the right.

I don't think I could show you Jenn's garden without mentioning her husband Robbie (who also grew up in Barriere!) I think that Jenn has the gardening "bug" but Robbie is the dirt mover, builder, and garage sale professional. Everytime I asked Jenn where she found something decorative or functional, it seemed that it was one of Robbie's finds or manufacturing projects! Robbie is something of a handyman; pretty accomplished at many things. He actually operates his own business as, you guessed it, a handyman. What really impressed me is that he built an igloo in their back yard this past winter and spent a night in it with their two children! Very cool (literally, I guess!)

Here is a picture of the greenhouse, which Robbie built this year after their old one collapsed over winter. Jenn is experimenting and has put plants directly into the dirt floor of the greenhouse. I'll try to get a picture of this when I go back in a month's time for "progress" pictures of the garden.
















Here's the garden to the left of the greenhouse. Notice that there are no rows!!! Many of the gardens we admire (including our own) are rows, grids and patches. Totally functional. Nothing wrong with that. But Jenn's garden, which is mostly vegetable and fruit, is a little botanical garden. She and Robbie have been in the house five years and each year they keep adding to the end of the garden strip. Their garden now stretches from one end of the lot to the back fence! And, it's a reasonably large lot.
















Here's a nice touch!





















The hose pipe! Yes, I did a double take, too, but the spray nozzle was either attached by one of their children or was screwed in to keep track of it! Apparently Robbie found a coil hose (like the springy plastic wrist bands that hold keys) that can be attached to this nostalgic hand pump so that Jenn can water plants inside the greenhouse.





























Here's something neat. A series of metal hoops extending perhaps 15-20 feet allow raspberries to twine around, making the raspberry bush an archway.















A creative use for an old wire basket...something for a vine plant to grab on to.


















A miniature wishing well.



















A view of the back end of the garden. There's a bench in the back corner that just invites a cup of tea and a good book!

Chris and I are always very curious about other people's gardens as we are such newbie gardeners. We have spent a few years really thinking about soil, varieties, and in some instances, just wondering how to get things to grow and bear fruit! We have been talking a bit over the last year about how our indoor planters would look in the Earthship and Jenn's concept of "garden" really appeals to us.

We've also been discussing what our front yard would look like once we remove the old office and move into the Earthship. Traditional lawn is high maintenance and requires lots of water. But, we still wanted a front yard that we could sit in, barbecue in and entertain comfortably in. We also want to use every available bit of front yard for the production of our food (and flowers) and for living space. Although I'm sure Jenn's garden is not the only garden that has moved away from the "row" concept, it is certainly the first one we've seen up close.

And we like it!

First Tomatoes Spotted

I got a thrill this afternoon while weeding the garden. A tomato plant has two tiny green tomatoes started on it! I was surprised ... the plants have been flowering but I did not expect to see tomatoes yet.

I added the second tire to my potato stacks today. I have started six stacks in total and the claim is fifty pounds of potatoes per stack. We'll be in potatoes all winter!

The dog continues to dig in the garden. Onions seem to be her favourite choice so I have put a string fence around that planter. I may have to resort to more drastic measures, although I am not sure what those measures would be ...

Sandra and I visited a friend's garden this evening. She has done an amazing job with her garden. It is very inviting and cozy ... something to aspire to. We walked away with four plants, and I now have high hopes that we will be feasting on eggplant before the summer is out.

We are planning to go kayak camping tomorrow for four days. Katie is sick (Stephen already had it) but we are hoping she will be feeling well tomorrow. This is our first trip of the season and we are going to Clearwater lake. The kids are excited! Stephen got freeze dried food in his stocking last Christmas and he is looking forward to his apple cobbler.

When we return we should be back to thinking about the house within a couple of days!

Spring and our Food

The last month has seen much warmer weather and the valley has been getting progressively greener.

Spring started for me with the apple trees beside our house. While clearing for the house foundation I took a little time out and aggressively pruned these trees. They are well established trees, but were never cared for and pretty much ran wild. We canned some of the apples last year and have been using them in muffins. The apples are not very good eating apples, and I am hoping that by pruning the trees I can improve their quality (Sandra is skeptical). I took the upper half of the trees off. I am a little concerned by this drastic step, but in the words of one of the neighbors what have I got to lose? The trees are blossoming now (very pretty), and I did see a bee the other day so hopefully we will get apples this year.

Stephen and I built a cold frame on the south side of the shop. The hope is that the frame will stay warm in cooler nights due to the warm shop wall. So far it seems to be working as the plants I put in there a month ago are doing well.

I hit a snag with my cold frame in that I am not actually sure what I ended up planting in it. Helen and I used the compost from the worm bins to start tomato plants and we are pretty sure we only put one or at most two seeds in each of the transplant containers. Two weeks later the containers were loaded with plants ... way more than we expected. I am now guessing that something with seeds (cucumber, pepper, tomato ...) that went into the compost did not get completely composted. Do the seeds just go right through the worms? Anyway, I think the picture at the start of this paragraph is a tomato seedling and I am guessing the one at the end of this paragraph is a pepper. If anybody can clarify this for me I would love to hear from them!








We slaughtered our meat birds a week ago, and our lambs arrived over the long weekend. Having farm animals has really led me to question my food choices and how I view food. I've also been reading on this subject; I read In Defense of Food earlier this spring and am right now reading The Omnivore's Dilemma (both by Michael Pollan). These books strongly condemn existing food practices, and present some alternative options. The subtitle of one of these books, "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Less of It", is a very simple and effective rule I have been using to evaluate what I am eating. Sandra and I were vegetarians for a number of years and for various reasons (the kids, the business, ...) we started eating meat again. I always felt bad (guilty?) about this decision without really thinking about it.

Raising some of the animals that we eat has been interesting and brought a number of things into focus for me. The lambs and the chickens have made an important contribution to my compost adventures. I am betting that without the sheep's manure and wool my compost pile would not have composted as well or as quickly this last year. After slaughtering the chickens we were left with the innards and feathers. Sandra was not going for my idea of adding any of this except the feathers to the compost pile, so I dug a trench with the backhoe and buried these remains. I put finished compost over this trench and planted my sunflower seedlings. I definitely felt better about slaughtering the chickens after planting these flowers! (I got lots of warnings about how the chickens bodies spasm for a while after decapitating them, but NOBODY warned me that to a lesser extent the head does the same thing!) The sheep grazed on the uncontrolled grass and weeds that make up most of our acreage as will the layer chickens this summer. The point is that in many ways these animals improve the sustainability of our food supply.

This is not to say that there are not issues with raising animals. Both the chickens and the sheep are fed some grain that we are buying. The simple sustainability argument is that it is far more effective to eat the grains directly in terms of resources used. I agree with this argument. However, I can now see the reality of grass fed animals raised on land unsuitable or simply unused for agriculture.

There is also the issue of eventually killing these animals and keeping them in captivity while they are alive. I cannot say this bothers me. We have been raising animals for food for millenia ... I do think that many of our current practices are unhealthy and unsustainable and need to be changed.

This last weekend Sandra and I planted most of the garden. We have expanded it a little and hope to can more of what we grow this year. We planted potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, onions, beets, radishes, turnips, herbs, lettuce and peas. We will plant a few more things later this week when it is supposed to be warmer. We bought most of our compost last year, but this year we are using our own (hopefully all goes well)! We are growing the potatoes in tire stacks this year. I have read that one tire stack can yield in excess of fifty pounds of potatoes (I'll keep you posted). All in all we are farther ahead with our garden this year compared to last.

It has been busy getting all of this done. Hopefully in a few days I am going to eat the first radishes out of the garden ...

Finally! Our lambs have arrived!

On May 15th we got our ewe lambs from the Preharas in Knutsford, BC. All of us got a lamb. My lamb is named Whiskers! (This first picture is of Mrs. Prehara and her son trying to catch Stephen's ewe lamb).

When Whiskers was born her mom rejected her. Mrs. Prehara had to bottle feed her and twice she almost died because she got too cold. She was such a favourite lamb, that the other women from Mrs. Prehara's office in Kamloops, came to her farm and helped feed Whiskers.

When it came time to sell lambs, Mrs. Prehara just couldn't sell Whiskers as somebody's freezer lamb. She knew that mom and dad were looking for a ewe lamb of some kind for me, because I am too young to do a ewe lamb project in 4-H.

When we looked at lambs earlier in May, Mrs. Prehara surprised me by saying if I promised not to keep her as a freezer lamb, I could have Whiskers...for free! Mrs. Prehara wrote on my bill of sale, under "price paid": Just love and affection!

Whiskers has a black and brown face that is fluffy. She comes right up to people because she's used to being bottle fed. She loves to eat grain. Mom says she is a cute piggy-wig.

Katie and Stephen have really fiesty lambs. Stephen named his Zoom because she jumped over a four foot fence when we picked her up at the Prehara's. Tonight we couldn't even catch her from the pasture to take her back to the barn, so we had to let her follow Whiskers and Katie's lamb.

Katie's lamb is named Twirl-a-Girl. She is a brown lamb and is also hard to catch. Zoom and Twirl-a-girl are really protective of each other and stick closely together when we are around.

We got market lambs yesterday from Kershaws. Mine is the blackest and her name is Whiplash. Stephen named his Harley and Katie, who has the only male lamb of all of our lambs, named her lamb, Don Juan.

We have a Friesen lamb coming soon. A Friesen is a dairy milking lamb. You can make cheese out of the milk and we will breed her in two years, at the same time as Whiskers, Twirl-a-Girl and Zoom.

That brings our lamb count to seven!

(The last picture is of Dad trying to lure Zoom with some grain, but Whiskers kept jumping up on his legs, trying to get the grain for herself! She is very greedy!)

P.S. Mom helped me type this.

Have you seen this chicken?

If you buy chicken at your local super market the odds are high that you are intimately familiar with this bird. It is a Cornish Giant and according to the limited reading I have done this breed provides well over 90% of the packaged chicken that hits our grocery shelves in North America.

Our family started raising day-old chicks on March 19th. We chose 26 Red Rock layers and 25 Cornish Giant meat birds for our foray into raising chickens for food. The Red Rock lays a brown egg and is considered suitable for egg production and meat. The Cornish Giant is pretty much raised for its meat.

We finished building a coop for our birds and moved them in over a week ago now. The coop is spacious, providing close to 3 square feet of space per bird. We enclosed a run attached to the coop that allows them to go outside in the warm weather. When they are older we intend to allow them free range in our yard so they can forage. The chickens are young and are still hesitant to leave the safety of the enclosed coop.

We are feeding the birds feed purchased at the local feed store, and are introducing them to vegetable scraps from our table and worms from the composting bins.

When we got the birds they were tiny, fitting into one of the kids hands. The Red Rocks and the Cornish Giants were different colours (dark brown and white respectively) but were otherwise the same. Four weeks later I am beginning to wonder if all of them are really chickens.

The Red Rocks are fiesty little birds. They like to perch on the divider separating the two breeds and either watch or jump into the Cornish Giant enclosure. One of them, that has turned a deeper red colour, will actually peck at us when we come close, and has earned the nickname Little Red Hen from the kids.

The Cornish Giants are now on average 3 to 4 times larger than the Red Rocks. The Giants eat constantly, waddle slowly when they move and cannot perch because they are too big to hop up. These birds are a fascinating example of genetic selection. All chicken breeds have been domesticated and culled genetically for desirable traits for centuries. The Cornish Giants have been selected for their capacity to eat and develop body mass.

We lost one of the Red Rocks early when it was struck by a falling lamp. Otherwise, these birds are very healthy, and seem to be having no problems.

Over the last week we have been having problems with the Cornish Giants. Four of the birds seem to have injured their legs and are now having difficulty walking. The chickens like to huddle together when they sleep, and if it is cold they huddle closer. This huddle is like a rugby scrum, I have watched birds bowl over and walk over birds already in the huddle. My guess is that it does not take much to injure their already over-burdened legs as they get jostled in these huddles.

We have isolated the injured birds, and this seems to help with their recovery. Otherwise, the injured birds get trampled when they go for food or water, and eventually just lie down and stop moving. The separation gives the birds a chance to recover while they are not competing for food and water.

Unfortunately one of these injured birds died this past week. Our son Stephen took this very badly, insisting it was OK to slaughter them when they are fat and ugly, but they shouldn't die 'young and cute'. He has been very involved looking after the birds, and I suspect the slaughter is going to be an interesting day. Stephen and I buried both of the birds that have died. I realized a few days ago that Stephen has been raising little crosses on these sites after we are done.

The Cornish Giants are the product of the factory farms of the modern agricultural system. These birds are economically viable because they maximize the return on time, feed and money invested. In a small farm setting they have difficulties; they are slow, injury-prone and not very robust. Anecdotally, others who have raised these birds have told me similar stories.

I am reminded of a science fiction novel I read as a teenager (I do not remember the author or the book's name). The premise was a society that had consumed all of the open spaces left on the planet and lived in continent-spanning cities. The primary food source for these cities were genetically modified chickens (unrecognizable as today's birds) that provided the protein for the world's citizens. I now suspect this author was raised on a farm and had an over-active (but not totally far fetched) imagination.

I am not sure what all this means to me as a consumer of chicken meat. I now have a less-than-rosy image of the lives of meat birds raised and slaughtered by larger farm operations. I am uncomfortable watching these meat birds waddle around unsteadily in our own yard. Will I eat these birds? Yes. Will I raise them again?

Unhappily, one of our injured birds is not looking very good. Stephen does not think the bird will survive the night. I suspect I am going to see more of these over the next little while ... I just pray the dog does not figure out the significance of these markers!

Composting and an Earthship

So ... other than the fact that I like the smell of compost (and Katie apparently does not), what possible tie in is there between an earthship and composting?

One of the principles of earthship design and living is food production within the building envelope. We have only just started wrapping our heads around the idea of a greenhouse being part of the living space. In principle I completely support the idea ... in practice I have only read about it.

We are neophyte gardeners. We just planted our first garden this year (a square foot garden), and we were reasonably pleased with the results. It took me a while to accept that some plants are going to die no matter what you do, and the quickest solution is to tear them out and replant!

We did spend a fair bit of money on store bought compost this year and we do not want to repeat the experience as we fill our planters in the house after it is built. I have embarked on an aggressive composting regime to make sure we do not!


I built a 3 bin composter (pictured above) this spring, and have been experimenting with it for the last seven months. The idea in this composting is to create large piles (minimum of 3'x3'x4') of layered compost. The compost pile is supposed to heat up (anaerobic composting) and composting should proceed fairly quickly. The more often you turn and mix the pile (hence 3 bins), the faster the composting should go as the material gets uniformly mixed and oxygenated.

A month into my first pile I turned it and discovered I was not watering enough. Some of the material in the pile looked as fresh as the day it went in. When I turned the compost pile over I had my son Stephen hosing down the pile continuously (this is the perfect job for a nine year old boy).

Our kids were in 4H (an agricultural youth club) and in August their sheep, and all of the other kids' sheep in the club, were sheared. I learned at the shearing day that all of the wool went to the local dump, and I could not pass up the composting opportunity. Consequently, at this point I added lots of wool, hay and sheep manure to my compost piles. Also, when I turned the piles this time they smelled wonderful (for a very short period of time). Wet compost seems to do the trick, and I cannot say that I have overwatered my compost pile yet.

Not many people think I will do well composting the wool. Experienced sheep ranchers claim that they have seen many year-old-piles of buried sheep wool look almost as good as the day it was buried. I added lots of water!

The image at the top of the post is me turning the piles last week. I had noticed that the piles slumped quite a bit over the last month, indicating that composting was occurring. When I turned the piles I was amazed. It was below freezing that day and steam was pouring out of the pile as I dug into it, and it was very warm. I did not measure the temperature but I know I have active composting! The sheep's wool also looks like it is breaking down nicely. The round drum in the right side of the picture is a tumbling composter that Sandra obtained from FreeCycle. It seems to work quite nicely.

By far our most expensive purchased compost this spring was worm castings (over $20 for a 35 litre bag). I used to keep a composting bin of worms, but had stopped about five years ago. This summer I bought 2 pounds of red wrigglers at $35/lb (ouch). I tried to pick up where I left off five years ago, but things did not go smoothly. I almost completely killed off the first 2 lbs by overloading the bin with compostables too quickly. I think the compost went anaerobic (i.e. hot) and essentially cooked and dissolved the worms (it was not pretty).

Discouraged and humbled I went back to the worm supplier and got another pound of worms. Raising worms and making my own compost was not working out cost effectively. I built the worm population up over the last six months in two commercially available composters that I owned (a wriggly ranch, and a City of Toronto worm compost bin from our Toronto years), and last week I added a third much larger composter that I built to the mix. If I can keep this up I should have plenty of worm castings this spring.

In the back of my head I have been thinking of integrating hydroponic food production into our earthship's gardens. Rather than have an inside cistern, I hope to use that space as a fish pond (say tilapia). My thinking was some of the fish food could be worms! I do not know the practicality of this idea, but I was just reading about an earthship called the Pheonix that is designed to use this approach, so maybe this idea is not as half baked as it seems to me!