Saturday, April 5, 2008 – Dirty hands and sore bodies

This weekend we are planting 3,500 strawberry plants. Yes, thirty-five hundred. The rows have been dug up and tilled, the deer fence is 99% done (and will be 100% done by the end of the weekend), and we are officially starting a crop. We are planting 1,500 June-bearers (that means they grow strawberries in June — we won’t be able to harvest from them until next year) and 2,000 ever-bearers, which produce whenever they’re in the mood.

It is very hard on our (flabby, sit-all-day-at work) bodies to do this. It involves being on your knees for hours, moving up and down the rows. Apparently it’s not nearly as difficult as PICKING the strawberries. Anyhoo, after two 100-foot rows we’re taking a break now. I’m drinking tea and doing dishes; Brock is rototilling another row. Rototilling, for anyone who hasn’t done it, is a lot like using a lawnmower, except that the big blades right by your feet make it more dangerous — like everything else in farming.

Brock has one week left working for government, before he becomes a full-time farmer. He’s giddy about it. I’m often jealous, until the weekend when we work all the time and I’m grateful to get back to my office job on Monday. Other milestones: the tomatoes I planted back in March are almost a foot high now, with pencil-thick stems and lots of green. They smell tomato-y when I brush against them. I’ve planted nine different kinds of melons in a seed tray, all of which are now up and an inch or so tall. We were mystified by three oddly tall sprouts, until Brock realized they were sweetpeas and that I must have double-planted that part. (I was defending them as vines, and told him to be open-minded.)

Our asparagus look like baby ferns, except they’re almost a foot high and are supposed to only be 4-inches tall when I plant them outside a few weeks from now. Somehow that timing seems to have gone awry. I tried “hardening them off” by putting them outside during the daytime, but some frosty mornings seem to have culled the weaker ones. They are now recuperating in the greenhouse.

Is it just us, or is the news FULL of prophecies warning of an impending food crisis/shortage? Grain has doubled in cost. The price of rice has increased by 100% in some parts of the world. Gasoline (and therefore transportation costs for your winter strawberries) is going up, with no end in sight. If we hadn’t already bought land and started an organic farm, that’s what I’d be doing right now. Good thing we have an 8-foot high deer fence surrounding the property: when the apocalypse comes, we’ll have to fight to protect our tomatoes.

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Monday, April 7, 2008 – Farmer Heather vs. the Stinging Nettle

I first heard of stinging nettles in Carolyn Heriot’s book. She suggests making nettle tea, as a “spring tonic” to rejuvenate gardeners post-winter. Nettles can also be rotted down into a potent plant food. This excited me. I like tea.

When we were strolling the fence line of our farm awhile back, I asked Brock to identify a few of the stranger, more prolific plants. “Weeds, weeds, and that’s a stinging nettle.” YAY! I had my own stinging nettles!! I could make tea and plant food for my baby tomato plants, which are growing way too leggy for their 4-inch pots!! I envied our neighbours, Hank and Gladys, who had a lovely crop of stinging nettles on their side of the fence. Maybe I could ask them for some, if I needed extras . . .

Then there was the soup. We attended the launch of the Cowichan Valley’s food security action plan, which was catered by Amuse, a local/French restaurant in Shawnigan Lake. The appies were amazing: mussels, pate, all local . . . and small samples of nettle soup. Ohmigod, I could make soup. And it was delicious. Sort of creamy, but with a pleasant tang. I took seconds.

Tonight we were putting up yet another strand of barbed wire on our deer fence, and Brock dropped a nail. Being the wonderful love partner I am, and appreciating that my freakishly tall man has a sore back these days, I bent to get the nail. Which had fallen among a bunch of stinging nettle plants.

Un-gloved fingers met nettles, and I realized that there’s a reason they’re called “stinging.” It hurt like a wookie wook. My fingers were full of bee-sting, needles-in-soft-places, there’s-something-crawling-on-the-inside-of-my-skin pain. Brock claimed more fencing would distract me from the burning agony, and he was right — a few minutes later I could function again, with minimal whining. But holy cow, I now respect these edible, nutritious weeds that are sprouting along our fence line. My fingers are still tingling.

Also: there are crickets outside. This is way too rural.

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Monday, April 14, 2008 – Brock’s wearing his dress shirts while rototilling

This weekend was deliriously sunny and 21-degrees, and Brock’s only long-sleeve shirt was too dirty to wear (that’s saying a lot). That is the explanation for why I caught him rototilling while wearing shorts, a hat, and a white dress shirt from his government wardrobe. With the tea towel on his head, he looked a lot like Lawrence of Arabia + a crazy man. (The tea towel was to protect his already-red neck from the sun. Logical, I suppose.)

In other exciting news, this Saturday was my 28th birthday!!!!!! It was a wonderful day. I did all the things I love doing, including drinking wine and watching the bunnies romp, and transplanting my tomatoes into gallon pots. Not exactly the sort of thing I would have chosen to do last year, but times are a’ changin’ and I love getting my hands dirty. Aside from the 75 tomatoes, I also transplanted a bunch of melons (8 different kinds), sweet peppers and red habanero peppers. I do not enjoy spicy food, but the challenge of growing the Hottest Peppers Possible is one that I have taken on. I ordered one packet of seeds that I have to wear gloves when planting.

Two other projects this weekend were: 1. expanding the bunnies’ play area from their 20 sq. feet to an area larger than my wee home. Peter and Delilah are so spoiled. Brock built their super fence as a birthday gift to me — he knows that when my bunnies are happy, I’m happy. And wow, this new area is exactly what they needed. My favourite thing is to sit with Brock and drink a glass of wine and watch them explore their new habitat.

2. We also built a small greenhouse onto the Southwest side of our home. It’s temporary, since we only need it for another month or so, but it’s a huge relief not to be sharing our living space with 1,000,000 tomato plants – no matter how yummy they smell. We’re hoping the attached design will keep them warm enough overnight. We’ll be monitoring the thermostat throughout the night, and might have to do a midnight rescue, but hopefully this will solve our limited-space, too-many-goddamn-tomatoes problem.

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Wednesday, April 23, 2008 – Healthy eating is relative

Back in the early days of farming (yes, I’m already becoming retrospective), Brock said “Imagine how healthy our meals will be! Eggs, bacon, toast and butter from our own farm!” I questioned this as a weird Atkins-way of thinking. His logic was that local and homemade = healthy. We’d know what those chickens and pigs ate, we’d have grown the grain and could be 100% certain that there wasn’t anything icky in our food (e.g. DDT, Round Up, Miracle Grow).

I browsed Duncan’s organic grocery store the other day with my lovely coworkers, Patti and Kathleen, and we had a similar conversation. What’s better: the certified organic bananas from California, or the beets from Cobble Hill? Does “healthy eating” mean buying local and keeping our money in the neighbourhood? Is it eating seasonally (and therefore no bananas EVER if you’re a Canadian)? Is it choosing organic? How about vegetarians: is it healthier and more environmentally responsible to eat veggies from Mexico or Argentine, where they’ve been sprayed with unknown chemicals and then shipped vast distances, or should we eat beef that’s lived a cruelty-free, pasture-raised life on a local farm?

My mom has questioned why I microwave potatoes. “Doesn’t that destroy all the nutrients?” Maybe that’s a good thing, considering that Round Up (a serious pesticide) is routinely used in conventional potato farming to “toughen up” the potatoes.

I think it all comes down to what your individual politics and priorities are. I’m a farmer, and I like supporting local businesses, so I think eating local is important. Eating seasonal foods is not only logical, but helps keep me on the “eat local” track, since if there’s asparagus in the store in the fall, I can be sure it didn’t grow in the Cowichan Valley, much less Canada. I love steak and bacon, but I’m a huge mush when it comes to animals, so it makes sense that I should eat animals that I know have lived good lives. I’m entirely convinced that cancer and other terrible diseases are the result of our consuming poisons through our food and other environmental factors, so conventional farming methods are not okay for me. And if all that means I can have bacon, eggs, toast and butter for breakfast and feel great about my choices, then why not?

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Sunday, April 27, 2008 – B&E at the farm

Instead of an alarm clock this morning, I woke up to:

Brock: “THERE ARE DEER IN THE STRAWBERRIES!!!!”

Like Batman (farmer version), Brock jumped into his superhero outfit (i.e. mud-stained sweats, gumboots and a dirty coat) and raced to the back end of our property. I supervised through the window as Brock herded the two wee deer around the strawberry patch and toward our front gate, where they jumped through a weak spot in our fence into the neighbour’s field.

We walked out together to survey the damage: the deer had browsed one 100-foot row of June-bearing strawberry plants like a salad bar. The rest of the rows were untouched. We were SO VERY LUCKY.

As a result, we spent our day building a deer fence to block our vegetable rows off from the vulnerable front of our property, where the gate opens to the road, surrounded by the weakest parts of our fence. About halfway through the first section (165 feet of 6-foot page wire, held up by 2x4s that Brock sledgehammered into the ground while perched atop a ladder), Brock decided to call his parents and ask for help. Randy and Debbie came to our rescue and spent a good 7+ hours with us in the rain.

It is now 8:05 p.m. and we are exhausted. Best-friend Quinn mocks us for going to bed at such early hours, being the Vancouver socialite that he is, but this is what happens when you battle plant-loving pests in an attempt to earn an income.

Also: the bunnies are doing very well. I caught Peter napping out in the open, mid-monsoon this afternoon. At least Delilah was smart enough to sleep under a lawnchair.