Tag Archives: 2008

DINKS on the Farm

August 2008

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Monday, August 4, 2008 – The Official Drink of Makaria Farm

I realized the other day that our strawberry farm might not be a coincidence, given that Brock’s favourite alcoholic beverage is a strawberry daiquiri. I confronted/reminded Brock, and we immediately drove to the liquor store to buy some rum.

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Sunday, August 10, 2008 – Farm Fest 2008

Hugs and strawberries to all the wonderful people who visited us this weekend for our first ever farm party! The weather was shitty, which meant I couldn’t roast marshmallows like I’d planned, but we managed to fit everyone into our tiny home and ate a LOT of good, fresh farm food. My favourite part was the guitar & harmonica singalong. Thank you so much for coming and filling our house with happy times! Brock and I have been working our asses off this year, and it was a pleasure to be able to share our farm with the people we love.

Some highlights:
– collecting eggs with Kyle, Adrian and Shoshanah
– herding runaway hens with Sho
– strawberries with chocolate and kahlua whipped cream for dessert
– the roasted veggies, with Russian Blue potatoes from our farm neighbours
– Brock and the Cutler boys singing Rap Trax II songs in the dark, once we were tucked in and going to sleep
– yummy WINE, contributed by the Chalifour clan, Adrian, and Dan & Steve Cutler
– breakfast the next morning: fresh eggs, Cowichan Valley bacon, spelt flour bread (made while drunk, post-party), taters from the fields, and Sho’s french toast with fresh strawberries and leftover kahlua whipped cream
– the odour of our neighbour’s fields, freshly sprayed with manure tea
– Janene’s Martha-Stewart-quality cupcakes
– many, many farm tours as guests arrived
– Sho and Steve eating raw kohlrabi in the fields
– the Xtreme radishes (such a small veggie, such a lot of kick)
– the tomato, basil and mozzarella plate

Sunday, August 24, 2008 – To market, to market

We’ve been selling all our veggies, eggs and strawberries through our farm gate, our Harvest Box Program (CSA) and our mailing list orders, so when yesterday came and we were supposed to be at the Duncan Farmers Market, we had nothing ready to pick and sell. I’ve been half-wanting to stop going to the market, since we sell out by 11am and then I just stand around for 3 hours — time that I could be working on the farm. So we decided to set up our booth, with a table and a sign apologizing to our regulars, and then just sell from the farm Saturday. It worked REALLY well. Hopefully we haven’t alienated anyone who came just to purchase from us!

Harvest Share bags, ready to be picked up.

We’ve found that, if we have or expect a large harvest, we can just put out highways signs and we’ll have a steady stream of customers until we take the signs down. Doing this, we sold out between 2pm-6pm. Since we didn’t start selling until after noon, we were able to have a nice breakfast together, putter around in the veggie patch, pet the rabbits, and generally enjoy our Saturday morning. Then we put the signs out and picked berries and visited with our customers for the afternoon.

Aside from developing our sales techniques, we’re also busy these days figuring out our expansion plans for 2009. We’ve found that there is an almost ceaseless demand for high-quality, local, organic produce. We believe we’ll be able to sell as much as we can grow, since we can always expand to restaurants, B&Bs, retail outlets, and numerous other local farmer’s markets in the area (or just start attending the one we originally signed up for . . .). The problem is what we can physically do, since preparing the soil, planting, weeding and harvesting all take so much time. We have lots of options here too: hire WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), hire part-time labour, develop some sort of “u-pick” option, etc. Another crucial component: cost. Sure, we know we can sell tonnes of blueberries, but at $5-8/plant that adds up quickly. We’d love to offer meat birds, beef cows and turkeys, but that means investing in housing, feed and the stock animals. Ha ha — I just had a whole new understanding of “what comes first – the chicken (which you have to buy, feed and house) or the egg (which you can sell)?”

All in all, it takes a lot of thinking and figuring out what we want our farm to become. Luckily, it’s raining today, so we can’t pick strawberries (they’d rot): instead, we can sit inside and drink tea and make big, exciting plans for the future . . .

Brock gives our first ever sweet corn cob a thumbs up of approval.
DINKS on the Farm

July 2008

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Tuesday, July 15, 2008 – The chickens and the egg

Makaria Farm became the home of 50 18-week old hens late last week. Today, when I went into their coop to open the door to their yard, I found OUR VERY FIRST EGG!!!! So exciting. We weren’t expecting eggs for another week or two! This weekend, we might actually be eating eggs from our own free-range, organic-fed chickens along with our farm-fresh new potatoes and homemade bread. SO cool.

Also, the mosquitoes are brutal out there. Once the sun starts to go down, it’s a madcap race to harvest potatoes/peas/strawberries for dinner and the farm gate stand before we’re eaten by the stupid bugs. Other veggies we are now harvesting from our farm include: zucchini, kohlrabi (ate my first one tonight, sliced and fried with fresh garlic from the garden), the aforementioned garlic, carrots, herbs (mint, chocolate mint, lemon chamomile and tea tree make the best herbal tea ever), basil, stevia, cherry tomatoes and one roma, and the occasional blueberry or raspberry that we split between us because it’s too good and we have to share. Our lettuce is the greatest disappointment this season: it looks stunning, but is much too bitter to eat. We also have one “stirfry green” that looks like purple lettuce but tastes like horseradish — it goes right into your sinuses. Bizarre.

We’re now old hands at the weekly farmer’s market, except that I forgot to load our table into the truck last Saturday. Our Harvest Box Program has officially begun, and we fill regular orders for flats of shelling peas for people who still know how to (gasp) preserve the harvest. All in all, there’s much more demand out there for our produce than we can supply, which is exciting and frustrating, because we want to grow MORE MORE MORE! We take elaborate notes for what we want to do next year: install the irrigation BEFORE the peas grow a foot high; trellising isn’t just for pussies; and you can never have too many potatoes (which were edible a full two weeks before we even thought to look for them).

We’ve also met numerous farmers: the veterans in the neighbourhood, whom we’re sure have cancelled their cable since we amuse them so much; the newbies, who face the same shocking obstacles as us (“what do you mean, you can’t build our house in two days for $1,000??”); and the almost-newbies, who are investigating land options, farm mortgages and loans, and gobbling Harrowsmith magazines like we used to . . . back when we had spare time.

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Sunday, July 20, 2008 – And then things started to happen

Brock and I eat bacon and eggs at least once every week. For more than a year and a half, we have been aware that our traditional breakfast is 100% locally-growable: we looked forward to our own eggs, bread and bacon. Saturday morning we actually ate eggs from our own free-range, organic hens for the first time ever.

The coolest part was that not only were the egg shells tiny (being the first eggs our hens had ever laid), the eggs themselves were tiny: the yolks were the size of dimes, the white a large toonie around. It was adorable, like eating Barbie-scale breakfast. The second egg I cracked had two yolks in it: my first ever double yolker. It took five eggs to feed us both, but they were so yummy and amazing, and they were (I realized with shock) not just 100 mile eggs, but 100 ft eggs, having been created by our very own (locally purchased) hens.

I suppose it’s bizarre that eggs were the highlight of my week. Try this: today I picked strawberries and managed to fill over five pints with ripe, perfect berries. We’ve averaged 2 pints/day or less up until now. Even better: I put them out at our farm stand, and we’ve already sold 4 at $5/pint in the past hour. The less-than-perfect berries filled about three pints, and I will wash and freeze them for future pies — I already have two pies’ worth of frozen strawberries in the freezer.

And: I filled a pint with ripe tomatoes from a variety of plants for the market Saturday, and in accordance with our quality control policies I had to try my first Black Krim tomato, which was so ugly that I was tempted to throw it to the chickens. I sliced it up and ate it with prejudice, and was shocked to discover that it was the best tomato I have ever eaten. Ugly or not, those babies are getting a premium price sticker at the market from now on. If I can bear to part with them . . .