Category: CSA

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Transplanting head lettuce and Pac Choi into hoop house
Cultivating the garden with four Suffolk Punches

Welcome to Ryan, our fourth apprentice, who arrived at the beginning of the week.  Monday morning we woke to the sound of flapping plastic and realized that our fourth hoop house, that we had just covered with plastic, had come loose in the wind and ripped off during the night!  What a disappointment.   While Ken and Andy were busy getting ground worked up to plant the early seeds in the outside garden and the oat ground ready to plant, the other apprentices retro fitted the hoop house for plastic reassembly. They put a bottom board down and used U-Bolts to attach it to the hoops then moved one of the ends in by one hoop width. Now we can have enough plastic to re-attach it to the ends and use battens to wrap the side plastic and screw them to  the wooden bottom boards.  Our CSA members can think of  all this effort when they eat their first mesclun – grown in the hoop house.

This week we also took one of our big pigs to be butchered and made into sausage to sell to CSA members. The hens are cranking out about 70 eggs a day so if anyone wants to make the pilgrimage to the farm they can stock up on eggs and sausage for Easter.

We also managed to get the early garden planted and covered with row cover and three of our four oat fields worked up and planted. Now all we need is some warm weather!

On Thursday, we started our three day April Draft Horse Workshop. Participants from Ontario and Quebec as well as three of our new apprentices took the course together. To begin they do some line exercises driving “George the Trike”. Caesar takes on a supervisory job during the workshops and especially enjoys accompanying on the wagon rides.  So life continues to be full and busy here at Orchard Hill. As we gear up for the season ahead.

Driving George the trike
Ryan Hanging up the Trace
Shannon Driving Gwen
Richard Driving Gena

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Ken Plowing

Spring plowing has begun again. Ken and our Suffolk Punch draft horses got a false start in March before the last snow storm and freeze up. Now they are back at it and getting ready to plant oats as soon as possible. We will also be planting the early CSA garden as soon as we can work up our early garden area.  We did manage to plant one of our hoop houses this week to have greens for our first CSA pick-ups.

Lisa Unloading Oat Seed
Grahame Servicing Mower
Andy Plowing

Our full season apprentices have arrived. Andy, from New Zealand, has returned to fill our Senior Apprentice position. It has already been a great help to have a trained teamster to work with the draft horses. He has jumped right in doing some of the spring plowing. Lisa, from Maryland, and Grahame, from B.C., have come to become teamsters and hone their farming skills. We feel privileged to work with such fine young people as we pass on what we have learned over the past 30 plus years farming and look forward to working with them this season.

Arthur Ford Public School Planting Bean Seed

Earlier this week we had a grade two class from Arthur Ford Public School in London come to the farm for a field trip. One of the students is a CSA member and we agreed for the class to come. They enjoyed a wagon ride, egg collecting and bean planting. Normally we are too busy to host school field trips, but we squeezed it in early and were fortunate to have good weather. I am hopeful that it will stir a horticultural bent in some of the students…

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Morning Emergence of Free Range Hens From Chicken Coop

The Laying Hens are very happy to have the land free of snow! They are laying again with the longer day length and we have eggs for sale at the farm. (Available in the breezeway of the house if we aren’t around.)

Big Pigs that Escaped!

Last week our two big “composting pigs” escaped! We had just mucked out the horse stalls and put the manure in one of our three composting areas. Two “Free Range” hens had made there way into the pen and we left the door open so they could get out. What we didn’t realize was that the door to the pen next door, where the pigs were, wasn’t nailed shut! While we were eating lunch and I was anticipating my afternoon nap with pleasure I looked out the window and saw two 500 lb. pigs rooting around in the horse paddock! Ken and I spent the next 1 1/2 hours chasing pigs before we got them back into their pens. They were out in the woods, in with Mable and finding nuts and grass roots to chew on – having a grand time!

Hoophouse Conversion to Greenhouse

On a good note we have our retrofitted hoophouse/greenhouse up and running with a wood stove installed. The little plants are looking happy. I have more sweet potatoes getting ready to send out shoots that we can plant as slips. Leeks, onions, and early lettuce and Pak Choi growing.

The end of February I visited our daughter, Ellen, in Portland, Oregon and enjoyed attending her graduation from a Chef’s Studio. She has written a blog http://pommeroyale.com/where she writes about her experience and adds recipes. I hope she can post some good ideas for using our produce when the CSA season begins. I also brought back a recipe book written by Robert Renolds, the chef she studied with, From a Breton Garden. I plan to share some of the recipes from it over the season as well.

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I never tire of seeing the first Snow Drops of the season. What a harbinger of spring they are. Despite all the snow that lingers around and the cold weather they burst forth with all there faith that spring is here! Ken heard the first Whistling Swans this morning too.  I have been receiving a steady influx of applications for our 2011 CSA garden. We are looking forward to our apprentices arriving the end of the month.  It has been quite a chore this year sorting through work permits for our non-Canadian apprentices, and we hope that everything is in place in time for the start of our apprentice program.

Snow Drops at Orchard Hill Farm
Seedling Trays / First of the Season

Our make shift greenhouse doesn’t have heat yet so I started our first seedling trays yesterday in the house. They will be fine until they germinate and then they will need the sun. When our CSA members eat their first head lettuce and pac choi they can think of how this was the beginning. I enjoyed getting my hands into the potting soil and planting again. A sure sign that I must be in the right profession. Ken is busy doing tractor repairs in his heated workshop.  A good job on a cold raining March day.

When we first started farming we made up a logo with a stump and sucker. (You can still see it on some of our farm road signs.) Ken had spent a lot of time in orchards and was familiar with the site of young suckers growing out of tree stumps. We were  a young farm with new energy starting up out of  my old family farm.  The original farm house, built in 1837, is at the other end of the original farm. My Quaker ancestors cleared this land, but my parents had rented it out for almost 30 years before we started farming again in 1979. There was an old maple tree at the top of the hill that had survived since before the farm land was cleared and in the late 1990’s the old maple fell down in a March ice storm. It gives me great pleasure to see the young sapling growing up beside the old maple stump as a reminder of the life that continues to grow strong on this little farm with deep roots.

Martha and Siblings after the Old Maple Fell

Old Maple in 1996 with Ken and Daughter, Ellen

Stump and Sapling

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Back for Another Log
Hooking Up to a Log

We have enjoyed having another  Logging Workshop today. Ken has been demonstrating how to safely skid logs from the woodlot to a snowy field. Gwen and Buttons two of our Suffolk Punch draft horses are behaving very well.  We will cut up and split many of the logs for firewood later in the spring for next winter.  Some of the better logs we will  saw into lumber to be used for various projects around the farm.

Sunflower Oil for Winter Fuel

Ken has also been experimenting this winter with sunflower oil to run diesel motors. He has added a bit of gasoline to the sunflower oil (see jar on the right).  It keeps the sunflower oil from jelling up at cold temperatures (see far 0n left) and makes it so it will burn directly in a diesel motor without having to be first heated up or  made into bio-diesel.  Making bio-diesel is a complicated business and has some byproducts that are difficult  to dispose of easily. Using our draft horses makes sense for many jobs around the farm, however we still use the tractor for front end loader work and to run a Power Take Off for our baler and bush hog.   Ken is trying to figure out if he could grow an oil producing crop that would provide enough fuel to run the tractor  and perhaps a diesel generator for some electrical needs.

I walked down the farm today with a potential apprentice and was happy to see that the irrigation pond is almost full to over flowing.  Our CSA garden fields are becoming visible as the snow melts and I can feel my blood starting to stir as I anticipate the spring and the coming season.  We will soon be starting our early transplants. Most of our seeds have arrived and I am feeling rested up and ready to go again.  I enjoy having an occupation that is so closely linked to the natural word, where the work slows down during the dark time of the year and picks up again as the days lengthen out and my energy returns. We still have some spaces in our CSA for the 2011 season. We have a steady trickle of applications coming in and in March, when people are ready to think about spring again, I will contact all our past CSA members to remind them that it is time to save their spot!

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Suffolks on Winter Holiday

Life here at Orchard Hill Farm takes on a rhythm with the seasons. We mulched the strawberries again in December. January has been spent continuing the interviewing process for apprentices, mapping out the CSA garden for 2011, putting in our seed orders and building wheel hoes to sell at the Guelph Organic Conference to be held the end of the month.

Our herd of Suffolk Punch Horses suffered the loss of Jasmin in December with colic. This was sudden, unexpected and very sad. Jasmin was our lead mare and has had six foals here on the farm. We will certainly miss her. Our vet once told me that horses intestines dangle loosely in their body cavity and are “an accident waiting to happen”! On the bright side, Gina and Gwen have been checked in foal and we look forward having new foals born on the farm again this summer.

Greenhouse to be

In December we were in the process of a major renovation of our winter greenhouse (where we start our seedlings). Ken had the great idea that when we enlarged it we could fill in the ground under the greenhouse with all the rocks we have gathered up off the farm fields in the past 30 years. He had just finished taking down the old greenhouse and digging the hole for the foundation when we got our first snow of the year and freezing temperatures! I guess I will be starting my seedlings in one of our hoop-houses while we finish the greenhouse construction in the spring.

Mable Growing Up

Mable is spending the winter in the middle barn with access to a winter yard for exercise. She is continuing to grow and has decided that hay is good to eat after all. She still likes to be rubbed under the chin. We hope to breed her in the fall so she will have her first calf in May of 2012.

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