Greetings to all you eaters out there, and I assume “eaters” is a fairly safe assessment of my readership! I hope you’ve had a good summer. I am finally back on track writing again after a long season of long hours. The days are shorter and the weather cooler now, as you’ve probably noticed, and this means things just aren’t growing at the rate they were four months ago. My final plantings of salad greens went in the ground mid August and the barley cover crop was planted towards the end of September. I am still picking salad greens for farmer’s markets and restaurants, and finding that I’m having one of the best late seasons I’ve had since I started this business.
Usually by now we’ve had a light frost, though one year we had a hard freeze in mid October and the tomatoes froze solid on the vines in the cold frame! This year, however, the temperatures have remained relatively high and this has allowed greens to stay around longer than usual. I’m also pleased that my greens haven’t gone all spotty and slimy, as they have been known to do in the fall. Picking good leaves out of slimy ones is not my favourite job, especially when its being done in the cold, heavy rain also common at this time of the year.
My fall salad – though some people still insist on calling it “spring mix” for some reason – consists of chard, beet, New Zealand spinach, spinach, magenta spreen, kales, arugula, chickweed and radicchio leaves. It’s a hearty, colourful mix with some interesting flavour challenges: radicchio is slightly bitter and the chickweed has a strong flavour all its own. The beet leaves take on a dark burgundy colour at this time of the year and are quite stunning, while the colours of the Bright Lights chard and the pinks and whites of the kale are also more vibrant. Yes, it’s a feast for the eyes as well as the palette!
The basil is finally finished and I managed to get my first planting ploughed under and a cover crop planted before the soil got too wet. There are still a few nice glean-able leaves in my second basil planting, so I’ve left it under plastic. There’s not much else I’ll do in the field, other than keep picking salad as long as its viable to do so. At one point, I’ll find myself spending too long to pick a few pounds of greens and make the decision to pack it in for the season. There will still be some leaves out there for personal consumption, but the weather is not nice enough to spend the time needed for a decent harvest.
After a rocky summer, the hens have finally started laying really well and are at just over 80% lay. This is good for them, considering where they’re at in their cycle, and is very timely as the demand for organic eggs has suddenly risen. It was a tough winter, trying to find homes for our eggs, and I think a few people must have finished off their flocks and not started new ones. The farmer’s markets have taken a lot of my eggs but now that they’re finishing up for the season, its good to know there will be other markets out there.
This year I plan to do something a little different with my flock, I’ll take them through a moult and let them lay for another year. The usual cycle is to get the birds at 18-20 weeks of age, have them lay for a year and then slaughter them, clean out the barn, get another flock and then start all over again. The idea behind this is that the birds are laying the most eggs in their first year and production just declines after that. This is definitely true with conventional flocks, but with organic flocks we’re beginning to see some differences. Unfortunately, as one experienced organic egg person told me, the more “organic” your flock, the lower your egg production. So where birds are allowed to range outside, over a large area, all day long in all kinds of weather, you see fewer eggs/bird over their lifetime than in an “organic” flock where birds are let out a few hours/day and then only on sunny days.
My birds are on the very “organic” end of the spectrum: I open the doors at sunup and close them once the birds have all gone in to roost. The hens, once they get comfortable in their outdoors surroundings, range an amazing distance from the barn and stay outside in all kinds of weather. For example, on a rainy day like today, some birds will stay indoors but at least a third of the flock is outdoors taking advantage of the easy-to-scratch wet soil to look for worms. So of course these birds are burning lots of energy, running around outdoors and keeping warm. They are fed free choice layer’s mash so if they burn more calories than birds kept indoors, they have less energy available for egg production. It’s a pretty simple formula and makes total sense to me. However I do the math, though, I can’t imagine restricting the birds’ access to the outdoors. I like the look of them out there – though they do make mincemeat of the pasture at this time of the year – and the barn is way too stinky to keep them locked up on a rainy day! Honestly, I clean out the barn about once/month in the fall and winter but it still stinks up with ammonia pretty quickly. I don’t have any forced air ventilation like the big barns have, just a few windows and that big, open door.
In a moult, the birds lose their feathers and then grow new ones. This happens naturally with the birds in response to a decrease in day length. Sometimes people do a “forced moult” with their birds, where the birds are kept in the dark without food or water for a period of time, and this shock to their system is meant to force them to moult all at once and quickly. With a forced moult, the process takes less time so the birds aren’t out of egg production for very long. Yes, that’s the other part to a moult, if the birds are focused on growing new feathers, then they aren’t producing eggs. I’m trying for a more natural moult, though the human hand will be involved in the process. Starting at the end of October, I will begin decreasing day length (they currently have artificial light to keep them laying) by having the lights come on later each day. I’ve started reducing the protein content in their feed already and will continue to do this until I leave layer’s mash (16% protein) and end up feeding them hen scratch (about 11% protein). So eventually the birds will be eating a bit of hen scratch and living the normal day length and should stop laying completely. They will eventually, but in their own time, lose their feathers and grow new ones and, come spring and the lengthening days, they should pick up egg production again.
All of this is theoretical as I’ve never taken birds through a moult before and I think I’m ready for whatever comes of this experiment. The rationale behind this trial can be summed up as follows: because these birds are very “organic” and therefore probably didn’t produce as many eggs in their first year as they have the potential to do; and because they are very outdoorsy and therefore healthy and well adapted to this environment; and because summer, with the farmer’s markets, is my best time to sell eggs; and because the cost of maintaining a flock over four month with no egg production is about the same cost as buying a new flock; and because in their second year of production the birds will not lay any of those pesky small and medium eggs that are so hard to market, I think I’m willing to give it a try! I’ll certainly keep you all informed as to how this experiment works out. Okay, so one more little thing is that I’ve somehow gotten attached to this flock and I’m not ready to part with them, even though a stewing hen makes a mean pot of soup!
On the goat front, my adventure these days is to get the girls bred. I have my own little buck this year, Opal’s kid who’s been named “Monster Monkey”. We call him Monster for short – I know it’s a funny name but we’ve tried others and nothing else seems to stick. He’s almost six months old and a very keen participant in the breeding program. I’ve been breeding the does as they come into heat but also with a spring time activity in mind: Fiddle Camp! During March break there is a five day camp in Hope, B.C. for anyone interested in learning to play Old Time, Celtic and Metis fiddle music. I’m a keen (some say obsessed) fiddle player and have been to camp for the past two years. If I’m to make it to camp again in 2006, then I have to make sure my does aren’t due to kid during that crucial week. So they are bred to kid well beforehand so their kids have gone through their vulnerable time and are tough little monsters by the time camp rolls around, or else they’ll kid afterwards. Now you are probably wondering just what kind of farmer I really am, breeding my goats on a schedule that allows me to be off the farm for five days! Well, the border between farming and life is very amorphous so the schedule sometimes needs to “give” a little in order for me to have a few distractions outside of farming.
Last season I didn’t have a buck of my own, instead I borrowed a fine piece of buck-hood named Freight Train, from a good friend and goat mentor. Freight Train was a lovely buck, truly dedicated to his function, but I wasn’t able to keep him for very long as his owner had need of his services as well. So after Freight Train left, I had to watch the does who hadn’t been bred yet for signs of heat. Heat is really easy to detect in does when a buck is nearby: just look for the doe plastered up against the fence with her tail wagging like mad. When there’s no buck, though, it gets a bit trickier and one of the tricks to use is a “buck rag”. This term describes exactly what it is: take a rag and rub it all over a nice, smelly buck. Bucks are very smelly indeed and their smell is unlike anything else on earth. They have the endearing habit of peeing on themselves, on their face, beard and front legs, and they also have scent glands up around their horn area to add to that aroma of male urine. As you can imagine, the girls go wild over the scent of a good, strong buck, so the buck rag, impregnated with the scent (note appropriate choice of words!) is just the ticket to determine whether your girl is really in heat or just acting silly.
So if I saw a goat acting silly, I would bring out the buck rag (kept in a tightly sealed jar far from my house!) and try her out on it. Being a goat, she would try to stick her nose in the jar and eat the rag. I discovered that this happens whether she’s in heat or not, its simply a goat thing to do. Thinking she was in heat, I’d load her onto the truck and whisk her away to visit Freight Train. There was more than one false alarm and more than one high speed truck ride that ended with an unhappy female being chased around the barn by an amorous male goat. The beauty of having your own buck is that there is no guessing: the doe is obviously in heat and if you want her bred, you just open the gate and away they go.
Well Monster Monkey is still young though I think on his third try, he’s managed to get the job done: one goat hasn’t come back into heat again after breeding. We are now past the critical Fiddle Camp breeding gap and from now on, any doe that comes into heat will get to meet our young upstart. One goat will not be bred, as I plan to try and milk her through the winter and hopefully throughout next year as well. Goats are able to milk for more than one year without needing to be bred though for some reason, I don’t hear of it being done very much. So Nessie, my biggest producer and all round biggest character, looks like the best contender for a 24 month milking cycle. She’s still producing well at this stage and is very healthy, so we’ll see how she does. I’m told that production will decrease during the winter and then pick up again in the spring. Another experiment! Why not, we wouldn’t want it to get boring around here, would we?
Well I think this wraps it up for today’s episode. Actually I guess its today’s and the last four month’s worth of farming news! Thank you to those who’ve given me feedback on the articles, its nice to know someone out there is reading this! Now that I’m in my quieter season I’ll have no excuse for not writing regularly, though of course there will probably be less farm stuff to talk about. No matter, I’ll keep you all updated on my winter of fencing, construction, book keeping, purchasing, cleaning and organizing, and other off-season jobs.
Until next time…
