Merry Xmas!

Well, we had a cracking xmas, and we hope that you all did too! We don't know many folk lucky enough to be able to go cut their own hand-picked xmas tree from their own land, but we found a lovely spruce for the purpose. We plan to pick a balsam fir early this year and trim it ready for next xmas.

Cameron had put all of his money into a drum kit and so we topped it up and got him a full-size kit. Breagh is doing a horse course at 4H this year, so we arranged to borrow a horse for her on long-term loan. The kind fellow who is loaning us the horse lent us another to keep it company, so the barn is substantially fuller than it was a week ago! We had a frantic few days before xmas to convert the cattle stanchions into suitable loose box stabling for horses.

Xmas day took the usual format, sherry and mince pies whilst opening presents (after the barn chores are all complete of course), a short walk in the snow and then get stuck in to cooking. We had marinated the locally-produced free-range turkey for a couple of days in apple juice and sage and it was just superb, still is in fact, as it was over 14lb in weight!

We picked up our smoked bacon and hams on xmas eve, so with a freezer full of home grown meat we feel prepared. We have done substantially all the barn conversion work that we envisage for the time being. We need to get out and do some fencing, and a lot of fuel wood timber extraction, with a view to having 6 cords of wood cut, split and stacked ready for next year (and more).

The other big task is the renovation work in the house. We intend to create another room upstairs, but convert one bedroom into a family bathroom. Most of the walls and ceilings will need to come down to re-wire, plumb, then drywall and insulate with cellulose. We have been doing a lot of thinking about the jobs needing done and are still not quite sure about some aspects of the build. Many of the skills we learned building 22 Geary are not actually applicable here, as many things are done differently - back to feeling like a DIY-numpty, sigh.

Plans for next year and a review of this year will be forthcoming in a Hogmany special edition blog shortly, featuring new correspondents, Breagh and Cameron - at least that's the plan.

Oxen

Oxen extracting timber
Originally uploaded by rubhadubh

Jonathon, our nearest neighbour, yoked up his pair of oxen today to extract some timber from his woods. Well, it was more to give them some exercise, but they might as well be of use at the same time.

There is a long tradition of working oxen in Nova Scotia, and there are still many pairs in this part of the province, though they are mostly kept now for showing. The county fairs have many classes for pulling or logging, but not that many years ago, they were the backbone of agriculture, clearing land and every task from ploughing, mowing, spreading manure to hauling logs.

This pair are Herefords (with a bit of Durham?) and are incredibly placid and well-behaved. I wish my cows were more like this!

In other farm news, our flocks and herds expanded somewhat unexpectedly this afternoon, with the discovery of a pile baby gerbils in the critter cabin. Dammit, the pet shop assured us that we were buying 2 male gerbils!! What do you do with unwanted gerbils? Leave us a comment with your best suggestions?!

Snow time!

Snow time!
Originally uploaded by rubhadubh

I haven't mentioned the snow on the blog yet, I don't think? The kids have been making up for lost time, for all the years of sledging disappointment in 1cm of slush over 10cm of mud.

I'm being kept busy trying to keep the driveway clear with tractor and snow bucket. We got the snow chains on and so far it is coping well.

We have plenty of food in, and aim to travel as little as possible. The kids haven't been sent home from school yet though, and it should be their xmas concert tonight. We won front row seats and the privilege of parking in the Principal's parking space in a raffle, it'll be a shame if it's cancelled.

Fame! I wanna live forever...

I think we reached the pinnacle of our media careers this week.

Sheila and Tom Sheppard are a very interesting couple who settled in West Caledonia about 30 years ago. They have many strings to their respective bows, but both are involved in local journalism. Tom writes a column in The Advance, the local newspaper from Liverpool, and Sheila has a periodic spot on CBC radio about local affairs.

It turns out that the hill that our farm sits upon, was one one of the original 'seven settlers, seven hills' that was the start of Caledonia in 1817. The original settler of our land was a man named Alexander Spears and he hailed from Greenock, which as you may know, is only across the water from Arran, the Scottish island that I come from. Tom and Sheila wanted to talk to us about what brought to Caledonia and spotted the parallels between the old and the new settlers.

So, we featured in their respective journalistic output and I'm attaching Tom's article for your delectation! You can read the article here. It's a little bit big filesize-wise (for those of us on dial-up), my apologies.

There were two other outcomes from this episode...

The first concerns the aforementioned dial-up internet connection. As a postscript to Tom's article, Eastlink announced yesterday that they have won the contract to supply broadband service to our area, which means that the trial of high-speed wireless internet should soon become open to new subscribers - muted hurrah! One shouldn't count one's chickens...

The second was that it prompted us to ponder on a name for our farm. We're not sure how pretentious it is here to name your house/farm, but if we are going to market produce, we do need something with a little more ambience than our civic address. The original name was possibly 'Scotch House', though this is more likely to have been the original settlement in a different site. We like the ring of 'Settler Hill Farm', but given the geographical proximity of the two settlers' origins, we are thinking about calling it 'Kilbrannan Farm'. The Kilbrannan Sound separates Arran from Kintyre on the Scottish mainland, and strictly speaking the body of water between Arran and Greenock is the Firth of Clyde, but a small amount of poetic licence is perhaps allowable?

What do you think? Any votes?

Busy Times

We're not ones for resting on our laurels, I guess, but this has been a busy week in a series of busy weeks (months, years). All good stuff though.

Jane spent her birthday slaughtering a pig - a third of which is now butchered and in our freezer. We have a quarter of a cow coming soon too. Another steep learning curve was needed to put the theory of what we have been reading for years about dealing with intact dead animals - as ex-vegetarians neither of us have the innate knowledge of beef and pork cuts that many other folk probably have.

Our century farmhouse needs renovation and a good place to start presented itself when we saw an advert for grants available for energy efficiency work. You pay for a whole house audit, which looks at air tightness, insulation, heating systems, appliances - the whole thing. The consultant then produces a thorough report which highlights the work to be carried out, and the amount of grant assistance you can expect. You have 18 months to do the work, after which it is inspected. It was money well spent. We haven't had the report yet, but it sounds like there is a lot of scope for improving energy efficiency, and saving money. We are going to look at changing to a ground water heat pump with wood stove backup and do away with the oil furnace and water heater. More on this as we go along, I imagine.

Chickens 2 - Humans 3

We have always had our hens completely free-range before now, and put up with them shitting on the doorstep and hassling us when it gets close to food time...

This time, because we want to grow fruit and veg in a number of different locations, we thought we would try confining them to a moveable run using electric netting. $250 later we are one goal up on the day so far - we've fenced them 3 times, and they have found a way of escaping twice (so far... deep sigh).

It's the bloody leghorns - they are the sleek, fast, fit shock troops of the flock, first in to everything. First into the pot too at this rate... mutter, mutter.

Chickens bid for freedom

Chickens bid for freedom
Originally uploaded by rubhadubh

Trying out the blogging option direct from flickr - here are our hens, venturing out of the new chickenopolis for the first time!

First eggs!

Well after weeks of chasing leads on who might be willing to part with a few hens, we finally found someone who was desperate to get rid of loads! Yesterday we picked up 24 hens and 2 cockerels from Diane & Paul, fellow ACLers. 'Picked up' is an understatement. They were loose in the barn and it took a fair amount of cornering and artful diving across chicken shit covered bales of hay to get them all, but get them we did. And a lovely bunch they are too. Mostly young hybrid or white leghorn point-of-lay pullets bar one or two old timers. They seem to approve of their new quarters (a hastily constructed partial barn conversion) and just to prove it laid 10 beautiful eggs in their shiny new nestboxes. We'll be keeping them in for a few days till they get the idea that this is home, and till the snow melts a bit more, then we'll let them out and see how we get on. A couple from further south are coming to pick up 6 hens plus 1 cockerel (rooster!) on Sunday, so we will have fewer. But in the meantime we need to find egg buyers fast!

And as if that wasn't enough to celebrate, we passed our Nova Scotia drivers tests today, something that was quietly bothering both of us. Failing would have been inconvenient, not to mention highly embarrassing. However, all those sloppy habits developed over the last 25 years didn't put the 'driving enhancement officer' (not half as scary as the Uk examiners) off too much. Phew!

farm planning I

We have been trying to get a fingernail under the edge of the sticky roll of bureaucracy that will allow us to get going on some farm projects, and I think we have now spoken to the right people.

As a start, we need a Farm Registration number for which we submit forms (and a fee) to the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture. It seems that we have to do this whether the farm was previously registered or not. There are a few unknowable questions on the form to do with income and livestock held, but a very helpful lady at NSFA went through it with us.

We also put our names down for an Environmental Farm Plan, which is a prerequisite for other plans - however, they are advising that there is an 8 month wait for this to be carried out - will need to follow this up later.

Once we have the farm registration number, we can submit an application for a Nutrient Management Plan to be carried out. This involves GPS'ing the fields, taking soil samples and analysing them, then producing a report and suggested application rates. This work is done by consultants and we are hoping that we can attract funding for the cost. It is certain that the fields will need substantial addition of nutrients, we don't think anything has been applied for years - just grazed and cut for hay. One possibility for the Spring is wood ash from the biofuel station in Liverpool. The producer is paying for the first 100km of trucking, and the ash is free, so the only cost will be that of a contractor to spread around 3 tons to the acre. There will be around 25 acres to be treated.

We have a neighbours oxen and cattle on the field just now, grazing off some rough patches.

I have failed, so far, to find a supplier of hens at this time of year. There is a dearth of egg producers around here, at least for good quality, free-range eggs and we are missing our chooks.

Sister visiting

My sister Claire arrived in Halifax on Saturday 20th for a week visit. Today, Nova Scotia was at it's best, temperature climbing to the mid-20s, cloudless and leaves in fall colours. Beautiful.

new country - new scotland - new blog

Having relocated ourselves from bonny old Scotland to Nova Scotia, Canada is enough reason to start a new blog. We aren't doing anything radically different from before, small-scale mixed farming to mop up the funds generated by a sputtering career in website application development, but hey! all the doings of animals, weather and associated characters need to be recorded somewhere...

Mostly for our own benefit, so we can look back and see what happened when in the agricultural year - that way we get a prod to get on with the jobs that need to be got on with.

There are also family and friends who are following what we are up to, and this may save emailing the same damn stuff over again!