Saturday morning, November 3, 2007 – Lazy Farmers

Last week we got our property re-appraised. This was a very stressful milestone for us: increasing the property’s value (by making it habitable) cost us a lot of cash, and we had bills to pay asap. We needed our property to be reappraised by a significant amount more than what the land itself was worth, in order to borrow more money from our credit union and pay off our debts.

Brock guessed that the new pumphouse, well pump, septic system, mini-garden, fill, electric lines and 576 sq. ft. market/house would be worth about $30,000 (he’s a pessimist). I guessed $50,000 but hoped for $75,000. Actual worth? All our hard work this summer/fall, our 24/7 days of stress and physical exhaustion and expense, increased the value of our property by $100,000. Holy gees. We almost died when Banker Nils told us.

What this means is that not only can we pay off all our debts/bills earned over the summer, but we can also (ohmigod) buy a tractor. Perhaps that seems like an odd “ohmigod” sort of purchase, but the fact is that a tractor is NECESSARY if our farm is going to be anything more than 10 acres of weedy dirt. We could rent/hire someone to do the work for us, but that’d be unnecessarily expensive. And, as farmers, our tractor is a write-off. Who’d have guessed that the first two vehicles I’d ever own would be a Dodge Dakota farm truck and a tractor? I’ve come a long way from my dream of a 1984 yellow Volvo station wagon with neon green plaid interior.

Anyhoo, now that we’re financially okay, our frantic to-do list has become more casual. We’re doing small projects, like installing the bathroom mirror and shelves in the kitchen. We’ve invited our friends Kyle and Chrissy over for dinner tonight. Brock’s gone back to reading his 1970s “classics” and I’m enjoying my day job more. It helps that it’s almost winter and we can’t spend every waking minute in the garden, and that the days are so short. We’ll have the winter to charge ourselves, order seeds, design our gardens and figure out our plans for the growing season. I can learn to make cheese, pickle/can veggies, bake bread, and all the other things I want to learn for next year. We can visit some neighbouring farms and see how they operate. And . . . we can browse tractors!!!

In other news, I built Peter his Winter Villa. He’s SO happy. It took me an entire weekend and almost $200 in supplies, which even I acknowledge is a little excessive for a rabbit. Regardless. It’s 32 sq. ft (4ft by 8ft), with a sloped roof that I SHINGLED, and three very large, chicken-wired windows. I filled it with a bale of straw (for warmth) and a huge stack of alfalfa hay (to eat), Peter’s favourite toys, water bottles, his food dish, and I bring him fresh veggies from his cilantro & carrot garden daily. He’s only about 10-15 ft from our kitchen window, so I can check on him when I eat dinner, and he’s just a quick walk away.

The best part is that he’s going speed dating tomorrow. The one thing lacking from his bunny heaven is a friend — I can tell he’s lonely and bored. He spends a fair amount of time staring out his window, watching us coming & going. He needs someone to cuddle and play with for the winter. So we’re going to the SPCA, and Peter will have a few hours to meet a variety of female (spayed!) rabbits, and we will hopefully bring one home with us. I’m a little nervous, because Peter’s never been a very rabbit-social creature. He prefers to snuggle with my feet, or stuffed animals. But I think he’s matured enough to potentially bond with another rabbit. I’ll at least give him the chance to try!

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Wednesday night, November 14, 2007 – It’s too cold outside to be farming

Tomorrow I’m taking Delilah to the vet to get spayed.

After we adopted Delilah (nee Honey) from the Victoria SPCA on November 4, she’s been busy making Peter fall in love with her. To record for posterity, here is the tale of their first date:

One relatively sunny November Saturday, Peter the Rabbit went speed dating. His first encounter was with a rather large bun named Sally, who was well-known to staff for her docile temperment. She sniffed Peter, Peter sniffed back, and soon they were fighting, claws and everything. No one was harmed, but I feared Quinn’s prediction (Peter, doomed to bunny bachelorhood) was correct. Then we tried Sally’s sister, who was known to be feisty-er. That didn’t work either.

Then they brought in Honey, a six month old brown Holland lop that looks EXACTLY like Caramel, and made me feel guilty. I hoped Peter wouldn’t like her. But she went straight to him, licked his nose, climbed onto his head and started humping his face. Peter was so shocked / in love he didn’t even bite her. Honey continued humping and grooming him, and even climbed into Peter’s litter box (aka Safety Zone) to cuddle with him, and he didn’t mind at all. I was astonished. We took Honey home, and on the drive I named her Delilah, for taming my wild bachelor rabbit.

Anyhoo. Delilah’s getting spayed tomorrow, which will likely be a great relief to Peter. I tried to keep them separate for the first few days on the farm – Peter in his Villa, Delilah in Peter’s old cage in the pumphouse – but they both looked so lonely and bored that Delilah moved into the Villa within 48 hours. (I’m such a pussy.) Since then, they seem to have negotiated some compromise between Delilah’s hormones and Peter’s introverted nature. They spend a lot of time cuddling (aka Delilah sits on Peter and licks his forehead). And they’ve even built a burrow in their straw together.

I’m a little worried that the surgery tomorrow will be bad for Delilah. I had a bunny die after being spayed (because she was a MALE), and I don’t trust vets anymore when it comes to bunnies. But this is a new vet, and they told me NOT to starve Delilah pre-surgery, due to rabbit sensitivity, so at least they understand that part of rabbit nature. We shall see.

In other news, it’s cold and rainy and windy and dark here all the time. It sucks. It’s sort of okay to be stuck inside all evening, since we’re both still pretty exhausted after the stress & exertion of the summer, but we’re also so eager to start on the farm — the planting, building a greenhouse, making the property look decent, finishing the house/market — that it’s frustrating. Brock’s reading some book called “You Can Farm” and I’ve started a personal almanac. We’re investigating organic certification, contemplating marketing strategies, and not washing our dishes.

Hey, interesting (and smelly) epiphany: a two person family produces a lot of organic compost in a week! We’ve been saving our egg shells, tea bags, lettuce cores, rotten tomatoes, etc. in a big Tupperware container, and boy, that container fills up REALLY fast. It also gets smelly. I want to start a worm composting thingy, so I can feed all that stuff to them and they’ll turn it into black gold (that’s farmer talk for good dirt).

Here’s an interesting exchange Brock and I had the other day, after he read about growing grain crops:

BROCK: We can grow oats! We could eat our own oatmeal!
HEATHER: Ew. I hate oatmeal.
BROCK: Me too.

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Friday, November 30, 2007 – Everybody’s working for the weekend

Delilah survived her surgery 🙂 We kept her inside with us for a few days, but she got antsy and Peter was staring at me when I went to feed him so I put them back together in the Villa. All is well, except that their water bottle freezes every night and I have to empty it out and refill with warm water every morning. Next winter, they’re spending it inside my writing studio.

Meanwhile, it has begun. We started this year as McDonald’s-craving, Starbucks-card-holding urbanites, and now we’re organic-farming hippies. I thought we were holding out quite well, despite the 10 acres of chemical-free farmland: Brock still drinks Coke. I had an A&W Mozza burger and fries for lunch this week, AND LOVED IT. Then Brock decided we was off tea.

“But tea’s healthy for you!” I said, “except for the caffeine, I mean.”

For Brock, drinking tea is an excuse to consume liquid sugar. The man adds a minimum of 4 heaping teaspoons of sugar.

“I’m getting fat again,” he said.

Then we had chicken for dinner. Frozen Costco chicken boobs, “seasoned” with something: the cheapest way to add poultry protein to your diet. I cooked an extra breast for Brock’s lunch the next day. Later that evening, Brock put his plate by the sink: a steak knife was sticking out of the chicken. Red spaghetti sauce and all.

“I think I’m done eating factory chicken,” he said.

So now we’ve started this slippery slope, and what with the organic farm we own there’s no going back. I bought organic Christmas oranges the other day. They were the same price as the normal ones, and they looked okay, so I bought them, despite feeling like some LuluLemon-loving Vancouver vegan. And they tasted 1,000,000 times better than the non-organic oranges we’d had the week before. Maybe because it was later in the season? I don’t know.

People have always assumed I recycle. It pisses me off. And now I don’t know what will happen, if I buy into this “eat organic!” fad. I’ll become predictable. I’ll become my stereotype.

But real food really does taste better than the mainstream factory shit.

Hey, and think of this: when I buy peanut butter, I don’t buy the cheaper, inferior stuff. I know it will disappoint me. Ditto for ketchup: it’s Heinz all the way, despite the 200% higher cost. So why not be picky with my veggies/meat too? Why is okay to prefer the brand-named processed products over the no-names, and pay the higher expense, but not to choose the (sometimes) more expensive staples over the inferior ones?