August continues to be a busy farming month. It has brought out the horse drawn potato digger pulled by a four horse team, which sure saves a lot of forking by hand! We still have to gather the potatoes up on our hands and knees. I guess the next step would be to attach some sort of bagger behind the digger…We have been working around the weather and managed to get the garden weeded again and two fields of second cut hay in the barn. Ken brought out our old combine ready to harvest spelt and found the radiator had a leak. It has now been over a week while we waited for the repair job. Then Ken discovered a nut and bolt that needed to be replaced on one of the wheels. It is an odd size and he has been trying to track down a replacement. Fingers crossed that it will be found this morning and he can start the harvest. However, thunderstorms are in the forecast for this afternoon in our area. This morning the apprentices are discing in our buckwheat cover crops. Sometimes I feel like I need to just run around with a camera all day taking pictures of all the different activities that are taking place simultaneously.

Charlotte dug out an old saddle and asked if she could try riding Ned. One afternoon, Ken tried out the saddle and although Ned didn’t really object to having Ken on his back, he refused to move. (We question whether he had ever been ridden in his life before.) Charlotte then got on and with her experienced ridding confidence got him to start moving. Old Ned managed a small buck in objection, but did respond and was trotting around the front yard with Charlotte on his back before long. The joyous smile on Charlotte’s face was heart warming to see.

 

We have been enjoying the fruits of our labours with meals prepared by everyone on their cooking day. Jayme out did herself making two blueberry pies which were works of art. The tomatoes, melons and sweet corn continue to be a big hit. Our green beans have been out producing themselves this season and we have tired a delicious new recipe provided by CSA  member Maria Drangova.

FRIED GREEN BEANS AND GARLIC

Saute four cloves of finely chopped garlic in about 3 tablespoons of olive oil until they start to turn golden brown around the edges.

Add 4 cups chopped up Green Beans. Cover and cook over medium heat for about 10 – 15 minutes stirring occasionally. Add salt to taste.

Uncover, stir and cook until the pan juices start to caramelize. Serve warm. Oh so good…

Amounts can be adjusted depending on number of servings desired.

The second half of July has flown by! We held our July Southern Ontario Draft Horse Workshop with relative ease and a great group of participants. The apprentices looked after the farm, while Ken and Grayden taught the workshop and Martha cooked. Our CSA harvest and pick-up on Saturday, during the workshop, went smoothly with added help from our working shares and other extra helping hands.

I continue to be amazed at the beauty of the produce as we gather it together twice a week for our pick-ups. The bountiful time of year is approaching and we are looking forward to the start of the sweet corn and early potatoes. Our first tomatoes from the hoop houses are ripe and a few of the outdoor tomatoes are starting to turn colour.

The sweet corn has grown too tall to cultivate with a riding cultivator that straddles the row. Instead, we cultivated for the last time with a walk behind  single row cultivator. One person rode a horse and the other followed behind to steer the cultivator. We spread  cover crop seed before we cultivated. It will grow on to cover the ground after the corn is harvested and we mow off the stalks.

The next three big jobs on the list are 2nd cut hay, taking off the spelt and straw and harvesting the garlic and hanging it to dry.  All three jobs require dry weather and it doesn’t look very likely for the rest of this week. We are hoping the forecast will be wrong.

 

 

 

Cultivating Corn

 

 

 

 

The Season is moving along! Strawberries are well over and the summer squash is rolling in. Our hoop house cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen and hopefully the full size ones won’t be too far behind.

On the horse front, some of our most reliable horses for apprentices to drive have developed sore necks from too much time working. Well-trained Suffolk Punch horses are hard to come by …so we have welcomed two older reliable horses into the herd. Queen is a Belgian mare who blends in well. Ned makes me do a double take because he is a white Percheron gelding. Ned is a sweet natured horse and has become a star already because of his previous experience on a vegetable farm cultivating, spraying and standing. (Some of our other horses take great exception to the smell of fish emulsion when it is being sprayed and caused a run away, which thankfully ended without disaster). Ned has a taste for all sorts of vegetables and enjoys nibbling on whatever is within reach. The added horsepower has given our other horses some needed rest.

Our young stallion, Eli, is a stallion no longer. We hope that some of our mares are in foal for next season, but decided that we didn’t want to cary on breeding after this year. The hope is that Eli will make a fine working gelding. Ken hopes to spend more time training him this season.

Haying has been a challenge again this year with rain coming just in time to spoil our hay, we have our last field of 1st cut hay down now and are hoping to get it into the barn later this week.

The apprentice team has been working hard getting the gardens into tiptop shape. We have the tomatoes trellised, beds weeded and a beautiful crop of cabbages. Our last planting of fall broccoli and cabbage were seeded in the greenhouse on Monday. The fall carrots, beets spinach and rutabaga have been direct seeded in the garden. The lettuce this season has been particularly good. Many of our CSA members have commented how much they are enjoying it. We wonder if it is the biological sprays we added to the soil or the cover crops , compost and soil amendments. Likely it is a combination, but it is gratifying to know that all Ken’s care and study of soil fertility is paying off.

We have appreciated all the help from our working shares with harvest. The children are also a wonderful addition to our pick-up days as they enjoy our bushel basket of farm toys and of course picking flowers.

Time flies when you’re having fun or you’re farming in the spring! We have been so busy it has been hard to find time to take pictures and make blog entries. The CRAFT Day here on May 14th was well attended by organic farm interns in our CRAFT network from southwestern Ontario. Our granddaughter, Della, was the youngest in attendance. She and her mother have now returned to Oregon, but were here for our first CSA pick-up days.

Our CSA fields are filling up with transplants and seeded areas that have come up and are being weeded. We have put row cover on and taken it off too many times. The squash field, with young transplants, has been irrigated and rained on and the plants sprayed with white clay to deter the cucumber beetles. Our hoop houses have supplied the CSA with lettuce, spinach, pac choi, green onions, cilantro, dill and arugula and now have been transformed into tomato and cucumber houses. The outdoor plantings of greens are taking over and we hope to harvest our first Hakueri, summer turnip, on Saturday. The strawberries won’t be ready until the end of June because of the late spring, but we didn’t loose any fruit to late frost!

After our weekly Sunday tour and looking ahead at the forecast, we have decided to go ahead and have our first pick-ups on Saturday, May 17th and Tuesday, May 20th. The asparagus is coming up, the rhubarb is growing and the greens in the hoop houses will be ready. We hope that the greens under row cover out doors will grow fast to take over when the hoop houses are harvested. It is always a challenge to mesh the planting dates with the uncertainty  of weather.

We have been very busy planting and covering crops with row cover to bring them along faster.The first onions and brassicas have been transplanted. The strawberries for 2015 are in the ground and we finished planting our potatoes yesterday. It is wonderful to have some warm weather, finally, to encourage everything to grow. The trilliums in the woods have burst into bloom in the last two days – always a sure sign that we are underway. Our Suffolk Punch horses are out on pasture and loving it after a long winter of dry hay!

Our daughter, Ellen, and granddaughter, Della, are here for Mother’s Day, visiting from Portland, Oregon. What a treat it is to have them here. Della is enjoying all the animals like a story book come to life.

We are hosting a CRAFT day on Wednesday, May 14th and expect about 60 organic farm interns to come to our farm for a tour, workshop on soils and draft horse power with a pot luck lunch. Our interns are looking forward to the day! We may even squeeze in a work bee of some sort.

 

We have finally gotten some seeds in the ground outside and the row cover on! All the hoop houses are up!  The directly seeded greens in them are coming up and the transplants are growing well. I peeked under some row cover today and found that the head lettuce planted on April 5th is sizing up well. Yea hoop houses and row cover! They really make a difference when we have a spring like this one! Our Greenhouse is filling up and we have mixed up another batch of potting soil  to be ready for the next big planting of squash, melons and brassicas – scheduled for next week.

The apprentices have been enjoying learning to drive the horses. Charlotte Giard-Laliberte has come from Quebec as our fourth apprentice and she is a great addition to the farm team. She is taking part in the Draft Horse Workshop this week to learn the basics as a foundation for her work here with the Suffolks this season.

The CSA is filling up, but we still have a hand full of shares left. The rhubarb is poking up and the grass is green again after the long winter. The horses are looking forward to going out on fresh pasture soon!

What a backward spring! We are all ready to go, waiting for the weather to warm up to let us out on the land! Ken and the apprentices have drug out and serviced our equipment. Earlier in the week Ken was able to do a bit of “snow ploughing” with our Suffolk horses in the field, because the ground was thawed under the snow, but this morning the snow is gone and the ground is frozen again! I feel like we are horses chomping at the bit waiting to get on the land! However, we are getting a lot of odd jobs done and it is important to have things in place so that when the window does open we are ready to take off running. Hopefully, we will be able to do some more ploughing this afternoon. Four of our five hoop houses are up and planted we have one more ready for its new plastic and then we will plant it. Once things warm up the everything should come along quickly.

Last Saturday we hosted an Ecological Farmers of Ontario composting workshop. Ken taught the course and we have some pictures courtesy of EFO staff member, Emily Hansen.

CSA member Chantelle Diachina sent some pictures along that she took during the CSA season last year. It’s nice to see the beautiful flowers, herbs and aray of popcorn  in her pictures from the 2013 CSA season. It gives me confidence that warm weather will come and we will again have a bountiful harvest to share with our CSA members. We still have some shares available for the 2014 season.

 

We put the first plants into the ground in one of our hoop houses last Saturday!  Since then we have been doing some more seeding and transplanting in the greenhouse and have been trying hard to get the other hoop houses ready for planting. The big snow dump at the end of November last year ruined about 150 feet of hoop house- bending the hoops and tearing the plastic. It has been a major job to take apart the old hoop houses, clean up the plants and trellis that were inside, and salvage what hoops and plastic we could to rebuild one 50 footer.  We have purchased a new 100 foot hoop house to take the place of the one big one. We are getting closer, but the strong winds today mean that it is not the day to cover a hoop house with plastic!

The Suffolk horses are becoming accustomed to jumping up on the treadmill and Ken milled some more flour, with their help, last Saturday. Our small mill is slow and we are wondering if we should buy another small mill and run two at once or purchase a larger mill. We’ll see.

Our chickens are starting to lay more eggs as they gear up after a winter “off” getting ready for the CSA season. We have ordered some young ready-to-lay pullets for the middle of May to replace some of our older hens.  They are really enjoying scratching around since the snow has disappeared. We will have some extra eggs for sale at the farm before the CSA season begins for anyone who wants to come out for some real free range eggs!

As the snow disappears we are getting ready to work land and hope to have some seeds in the ground next week. Ken is happy that the horses are in good shape to start the spring work because of all the logging and treadmill work they have done already.

Our CSA membership is gradually filling up, but we still have some shares available for the 2014 season and welcome new members.