We are happy to finally have some warm weather! The rhubarb is poking up and the spinach in Hoop House “A” has germinated under the row cover. The head lettuce and pac choi that were planted in Hoop House “B” are also growing nicely under row cover. We have moved three of the hoop houses and have only the tomato hoop house  to move. The brassicas: broccoli; cabbage; cauliflower and kohlrabi that we started in the greenhouse have grown well.  We are hoping to have sturdy transplants the beginning of May, when we will use our transplanter for the first time pulled with our Suffolk Punch horses. Although the spring seems to be getting off to a slow start I am encouraged that the seedlings are growing and look healthy. The CSA will start as soon as everything has grown enough.

Everyone here has been working hard with many different jobs. Around the edges of farm work all of our firewood for next winter has been cut and split! It makes quite a mountain of firewood. When we have a cold spring we use a lot of wood between our house, the greenhouse and the bunkhouse. Tonight is the first night that I haven’t started a fire in the greenhouse since the beginning of March, when we started the first transplants.

The ground for the main garden has mostly been ploughed and we are working on preparing the fields for spring grain. There is always more to do in a day than we can do, especially when the land dries out, but we keep plugging along and we get there eventually.

We have had two draft horse workshops this April. During the first, our new apprentices joined in as an introduction to working with the draft horses. The second just finished today. Everyone was a good sport about carrying on despite the rain and cold. Ken searched for a field that was dry enough to plough today and managed to find a spot for the workshop participants to try ploughing. In the meantime, we have been transplanting in the greenhouse and managed to do the early garden seeding outside and cover it with row cover before the rain started. We are waiting for a break from the wind to put up the plastic on our third hoop house. Next week we have two more hoop houses to move and plant. It was encouraging to me today to peek under the row cover in hoop house number one and see that the spinach has germinated. It feels like a real leap of faith this year to believe that warm weather will come and the plants will grow.

Early spring brings a variety of activities as we gear up for the start of our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Our apprentices have been with us for a week now and have been busy with a variety of jobs. Initially, they worked in our passive solar/wood heated greenhouse. The onions and leeks are growing well. We will be planting them with a transplanter that is being retrofitted to be pulled by our Suffolk Punch draft horses (a rare breed that originated in Suffolk, England). The broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and kohlrabi seeds that were planted a week ago are popping up.

Another of the first jobs that we do is to get our hoop houses up and running in order to have early lettuce, pac choi, spinach, mixed greens and green onions to accompany our early perennial crops of rhubarb and asparagus. The process began with plowing under the clover cover crop with a team of Suffolks. The clover was planted last year to prevent erosion over the winter and fix nitrogen. After spreading compost and cultivating it, the hoop house was erected and the first transplanting of the season began.

Today we worked on getting the frame ready for another hoop house and started plowing the main garden area with the horses.

March brings the start up of the greenhouse regardless of how cold or warm the weather is. We started up the wood-stove in the greenhouse to keep it warm on the cloudy days and sub zero nights that we have been experiencing. It turned out that Michelle Jory was here again this year to help with the first tray filling and this year she took the picture of me…The first lettuce and pac choi transplants for the hoop houses are up. Our onions and leeks that we start from seed are coming along. It looks like we will have to replant some onions to make up for the poor germination of some varieties. Saturday, I brought out the sweet potatoes that wintered over in our attic to start slips. We will root the shoots and then plant them in 50 cell trays. We will then wait until all danger of frost has past to plant them out in the garden.

Our transplanter has arrived and Ken and Bill are working to retrofit it to be pulled by our Suffolk Punch horses. It will be a learning year for the transplanter. Part of the challenge with the onions is that in order to use the transplanter I planted the seeds in 200 cell trays. Previous years I broadcast seeds into flats to be separated and planted individually by hand. This year,  I carefully counted out two seeds per cell. Where the germination was poor we have some empty cells. Next year, I will plant four seeds per cell and thin out where necessary.

Friday, Bill broadcast the red clover seed onto the winter cereal crops. The under seeding will grow under the wheat and rye and when the grain is harvested the under seeding will grow on. The clover will become a cover crop to fix nitrogen and protect the soil from erosion over the winter.  It is good to do the under seeding on a day when there is a bit of snow on the ground so that you can see where you have already spread the seed. In the spring when the snow melts it helps water in the little seeds and the seed settles into the soft earth where it waits to germinate and spring forth.

Ken has been doing some round pen training with three of our young horses. The jury is still out on what to do with our two young stallions. We will see how they progress.

The arrival of spring is bringing the first three of our new apprentices, who expect to be with us until Thanksgiving. We are looking forward to a good season and are itching to get out to the field and start ploughing the CSA garden. One of our first jobs will be to move the hoop houses and get them ready for the first spring planting.

 

February brings our annual Logging Workshop. Ken marks the trees in the woodlot and then fells them to be ready for the big day. He then spends several days “sharp shoeing” our Suffolk Punch horses so that they have good traction for pulling in icy conditions. One team moves the logs down to the trail in the woods and lines them up ready for the other team to pull them out  into the field.  Some of the small and damaged logs will be cut up and split for our 2014 winter firewood and other good logs will be sawn into lumber with the sawmill. We were happy to have good conditions for logging – enough snow for the logs to skid along on without getting dirty, but not so much that it was hard to walk around in the woods. The sun came out and made for a very pleasant day in the woods.

The sun also makes the greenhouse warm up and we are ready to start the first onions, leeks and head lettuce the beginning of March.

We are very happy to be having what feels like a real winter! After all the insect pressure last season after a very mild winter I am hopeful that the cold weather this year will result in fewer pests. Time will tell.

In January there was a big push before the Guelph Organic Conference around here. Bill spent most of the month working on his future farm plans and  building wheel hoes to sell. All but one of them was picked up at the conference. He is now back to helping out around here and today he is working on getting ready to rebuild our old rototiller. Ken co-taught a soils course for Ecological Farmers Ontario on Thursday before the conference and spent some time revising the course. There is always a lot of desk work in the winter. I spent considerable time ordering our seeds for the CSA garden. The first batch arrived yesterday and Caesar and I had our annual seed order picture…I have also been mapping out the 1013 CSA garden plan. Now I need to plan the  greenhouse schedule. Around the edges of  making “Mabel Cheese” I have been experimenting with sourdough bread and have been pleased with the results most of the time. It seems you can mimic a bread oven by using a dutch oven to bake the rounds in. It works pretty well, but I can only bake two loaves at a time. It feels like it is time for an outdoor oven. I am excited that Grayden has promised  to come home this summer to build one.

The Suffolk Punch horses have been having a well deserved holiday, but will soon be back to work logging. Eli and Wendel, our foals from 2011, are due to be trained this season. We will keep one as a stallion and geld one, but Ken keeps going back and forth on which one he wants to keep as a stallion. I think that Eli is winning out. We will try and breed our younger mares for some replacement horses. We have a 1-Day Logging Workshop scheduled for Saturday, February 23. We also are offering one 3-Day Draft Horse workshop to teach people how to drive April 11 – 13.

People often ask what we do in the winter. It seems like winter is never long enough around here to get all the winter jobs done. However, as the days get longer and the new seeds arrive I feel the familiar itch to get the greenhouse going again. I always enjoy greenhouse work and our new greenhouse is a pleasure to spend time in. I am also looking forward to the arrival of our new apprentices the end of March.

We had a lovely family Christmas on the farm and very much enjoyed seeing our sixth month old granddaughter, Della Jane, who brought along her parents, Ellen and Aaron. Grayden was home for the holidays as well and helped us mulch the strawberries. It seems like strawberry mulching always makes it onto the blog because it is one of the major farm activities that takes place in the winter. It is usually the last outside farm job that is on the “list” and we like to wait until the ground is frozen before we cover the plants. The last few years that means waiting until the end of December or even early January…I’m very relieved to finally have frozen ground and snow. It makes the paddocks for the animals so much cleaner and sure beats all the muck and mud that comes this time of year when the ground is thawed.

Our days are busy even in the winter…Bill is getting ready to build wheel hoes and has been making plans for his independent farm enterprises. He and I are continuing to milk Mabel and I am still making cheese and stock piling it for the spring when our apprentices arrive. We now have a full team of apprentices lined up to come for the 2013 season.  I am gearing up to make my seed orders and plan the CSA gardens. Ken is waiting for his replacement saw blades to arrive next week so that he can start sawing lumber again. I am delighted that today he is putting the interior window trim back on windows that we replaced last winter. The job was supposed to be done last winter, but our early spring put a kibosh on that when Ken’s focus moved outdoors and it has taken until now for him to get back to it!

 

November has been a busy month. Ken and Bill finished the fall ploughing with our Suffolk Punch horses and we have of course been focused on the Fall CSA. It takes the three of us a good three days prior to the pick-up day to harvest. That pretty well eats up a week.  Today Ken is finally getting back to sawing logs. It is a job that he was hoping to have done last spring, but the early spring jump started our farm work and put a stop to that idea. The one window of opportunity to saw during the growing season was kiboshed when the saw engine broke.  It took a while to get that repaired because the small engine repairmen in our area were all focused on irrigation engines during our dry summer. When Ken got ready to start today he found that the mice had chewed a hole in the air filter…after a trip to town he is now starting to saw and I am crossing my fingers that all goes well.

 

 

 

 

 

We ended up with lovely weather for our annual CSA Pot Luck. As usual there was lots of amazing food to share with a relaxed , happy time for all. After our big meal we enjoyed horse drawn wagon rides and for some a walk in the woods. Later in the afternoon the children made a jungle gym out of the straw bales that we had put out for people to sit on and had lots of fun playing on them. It was a nice end of the season party for our apprentices and Michelle Jory, who helped make the day enjoyable for all. It is very special to be able to form a community around the food that we grow and eat.

The coming week will wrap up the main season of our CSA and we are happily anticipating slowing down a bit after that. We hope to plant our 2013 garlic crop this week and mix up potting soil so it will be ready for the winter startup of the greenhouse for next season.

I am happy to report that we have had a major break through with the milking of Mabel. She was not very happy about being milked and was kicking to the extent that it was impossible to milk her. Finally, after much perseverance, she has turned into a dream cow at milking time. Mac is now permanently separated form Mabel and is being bottle fed. We have a small milking machine system to keep me from waking up with numb arms in the night and are now able to start thinking about making yogurt, butter and cheese! Our apprentices, Michelle and (Ken-reluctantly) were a big support to me in this endeavour and I am very grateful. Ken thinks that I am crazy to want to take on more work and perhaps I am, but for some reason I am excited about the prospect of having our own milk and making our own dairy products.