Greetings once again. Okay, so I missed my May deadline completely! Things just got really busy – you know how it is – and time slipped away. Today, however, is a rainy day and over the last few rainy days I’ve used up all my rainy day jobs, or at least the ones I feel like doing today! So here I am, ensconced in front of the computer, digging deep into my creative inner self to somehow try and express the wonders and joys of a farming life to you good people. Here goes…
We have had a few good, warm days this season, but for the most part the weather continues to be cold and wet. However, the salad greens are finally starting to do some serious growing out in the field and I managed to squeeze a 30 lb. harvest out of them last week. Some of the more heat loving greens, such as New Zealand Spinach, are slow to develop and will need more warmth before having much representation in the salad bowl. I am having some soil fertility challenges this year as I’ve been trying to use green manures instead of compost to build up soil nutrients and it is not working in every case. I have one bed that’s a bit too close to the raspberries and I think their strong perennial root system is getting the lion’s share of what is in the soil. How do I know this? Well, the appearance of a large number of raspberry plants in my spinach bed is definitely telling me how far those roots are extending and I think I can guess what their devious master plan is!
So I’ve bitten the proverbial bullet and put some compost on my salad lands. My early kale planting – remember those incredibly expensive fancy ornamental Japanese kale seeds? – is doing very poorly. Usually they start out okay after transplanting, then get knocked back a bit during root maggot season, and then pick up again. Well this year we seem to have skipped the root maggot but have never quite gotten to the good growth stage. Fortunately I did my second kale planting a bit earlier than usual and it is almost ready to put in the ground. I’m sure there will be a kale reprieve yet, though there’s still flea beetle to reckon with.
I have transplanted my first basil planting into the field under plastic. Basil is very easy to grow in this climate as long as it gets lots of heat. I use ¼” pencil rod bent into hoops with ventilated 6 mil greenhouse plastic tunnels to keep the basil happy. If on a hot day I lift up the plastic and get an oven-like blast from underneath it, I know my basil will be thriving! Its amazing how much heat it can handle and actually enjoy growing in – don’t forget this is a plant that grows into large trees in Saudi Arabia. The plastic does need to be ventilated, though, and the way I did it was to fold it up (lengths of 7’ x 100’) into a 2’x2’ square, press it between two sheets of ¾” plywood and then drill holes through it using a 3/4'” spade bit. Voila! a long sheet of ventilated plastic. I wish I could take credit for this idea but John is the ideas guy on this farm and he came up with this brilliant one. If you are to go into basil growing, I strongly recommend growing it under plastic. It’s the difference between mediocre and magnificent basil.
My laying flock, entertaining though they are, has not been laying eggs the way I’d like them to. They seemed to be off their feed for a while and a few died mysteriously as well. I consulted with some other more experienced chicken people and got a few suggestions. The one that seemed to make the most sense was to make sure the birds had lots of diatomaceous earth to dust-bathe in. Usually I would pour diatomaceous earth onto the soil where the birds dust-bathe, but a few weeks of wet weather made this impossible (mud bath maybe, not dust bath) so this job was neglected. External parasites can really wreak havoc on a flock, causing death as well as debility, so this is an issue that must be dealt with.
Diatomaceous earth (DE) is made up of the bodies of little sea creatures that die and leave an exoskeleton behind. These exoskeletons are very sharp and pointy – though we just find the DE dry and dusty – and these sharp points make mincemeat of small critters such as mites and lice as the birds rub it into their feathers. To deal with the challenge of wet weather dust-bathing, I made a wooden box from scrap ¾” plywood and filled it with sandy soil and DE. The birds were in there in no time, rolling around and getting a good dusting. Since that time, egg production has risen to a much nicer level and the birds seem healthy and happy. The dust level has also risen greatly in the hen house, as every bird is carrying her dust load around and depositing it here and there, but that’s a small price to pay for a more manageable egg laying operation!
The goats are milking well and I’m getting more milk than can be consumed by us hungry farmers. So the cheese-making has begun! I ordered a bunch of supplies from Glengarry Dairy and Cheese Supplies in Ontario and got my magic box of cultures, rennet and a few useful tools. What I didn’t get was a milk thermometer, but that will be in my next order. The broken candy thermometer just isn’t working for me and $12 for a proper tool is starting to seem like a very small investment for a very useful implement! My first cheeses were very simple ricotta and lemon cheeses which required heating milk up to a high temperature and then adding a coagulant (vinegar or lemon juice in these cases). The casein in the milk coagulates and I then separate curds from whey. Curds can be kept soft and made into spreadable cheese or else hung to compress and make a hard cheese that is great to cook with as it doesn’t melt. This hard cheese is called paneer or queso blanco, depending on where you come from.
From these cheeses I leapt into my first batch of feta – not literally though I think it would feel quite nice! It’s a bit more complex and requires more attention to the details of timing and temperature but amazingly enough, my first batch was awesome! I’ve since made two more batches, changing a few details here and there, and they are fine but not quite as nice as the first. The biggest difference is that the subsequent batches aren’t staying firm in their brine the way the first one did. Hmm, what did I do so differently the first time? I think I need to keep a cheese-making journal!
Yesterday I made my first batch of cheddar cheese and the magnificent round that I created is currently air-drying in my oven (cat-proof). I’ll age it for 30 days before sampling it and continue making more batches of cheddar whenever there’s enough milk available. Cheese-making is a challenge for me because I am not a precise person - I studied sciences but always did really badly in lab because of my aversion to accurate measuring and timing! - and sanitation is not one of my strong points. Well, there I was yesterday: measuring and timing and sanitizing for all I’m worth – I guess its different when the goal is food production! The process is quite involved and I guess I won’t know how successful I was until we taste the final product. Aging the cheese is a bit of a challenge as well since we don’t have a cave on the farm (!). So I think I’ll find a used fridge at a garage sale and use it as my cheese-aging device.
Finally, we said good-bye to a fine goat last week. Poor little Flash the Nubian and one of my original goats, died from CAE. She had been showing signs of ill-health for a while and I’d stopped milking her, leaving her in her own space with her kid to feed. She wasn’t eating well and her breathing was irregular so I brought her in for blood tests and she tested positive for CAE. CAE or Caprine Arthritis and Encephalitis is a disease of goats that affects their immune systems. Goats can carry the virus for years, never showing any signs and then a stressful event can bring it on suddenly and devastatingly. Usually goats get crippling arthritis in their joints but in Flash’s case it settled in her lungs. She died on the day she was to be taken in to be euthanized and we buried her in the orchard under a quince tree. Her doe kid, Lightening, is old enough to be weaned though is still having a hard time dealing with life in the herd without her mother. There’s a strong chance that Lightening has the disease as well but she may never succumb to it – many goats carry it their whole life without showing signs of sickness and more and more goat breeders are breeding for resistance to this disease rather than trying to exclude it from their herd completely.
Reading over this article, I realize that anyone who isn’t currently farming will have probably struck farming off their list of career choices by now! It certainly sounds pretty bad with a poor kale crop, chickens laying badly and goats dying, but it isn’t really all doom and gloom! I guess the trick to making a living farming is learning to deal with the challenges that nature, and other forces, present. We farmers are an amazing bunch of problem solvers: dealing with things that arise and also constantly trying to find better, faster, more efficient ways of getting the work done. We are also very proud of how we take on these tasks and the constant learning that goes on as we meet new challenges all the time.
The farming community is a supportive one and I am always getting help from friends – chicken farmers, goat keepers, veggie growers – organic and non, who have their own years of experience to draw on and who love to share what they know. It is definitely a challenge to make a living as an organic farmer but I am finding it a very satisfying one. Every day the modest packet of resources I was born with is being stretched to its full potential as I learn, do and store away for the future yet another chunk of knowledge and skills. What fun!
See you next time….
