Dream Farming

We've been following 'My Dream Farm' on UK tv Channel 4, and although we're a fair bit ahead of most the participants in that programme, it has made me reflect on how far I need to get my finger out if we are serious about making this farm work.

The principal of the programme is that the presenter, Monty Don, tries to help folk who want to 'get back to the land' put solid business ideas together for the farm or smallholding that they own. I've often thought that this could be a successful commercial venture, in fact, or even better, a free service to be offered by Agricultural Colleges! Unless you inherit an existing farm business, or are an exceptionally focussed entrepreneur, trying to work out what is actually going to pay the bills from the land is daunting.

Monty Don is obviously of the 'do it now and think about the problems later' school which comes of having experience and confidence. Most of the participants have neither and he becomes frustrated with their reticence. It's easy to say "get some cows", but if you are strapped for cash, how are you to pay for them, how are you going to make your fences stock-proof, will they have a roof over their heads, and how are you going to round them up and restrain them for essential maintenance?

Despite this, he's right - it is the right attitude to have, because problem anticipation = paralysis = energy drain.

It's all relevant at the moment. Jane is currently working full-time for MTRI (www.merseytobeatic.ca) and I'm torn between building my web business back up, or concentrating on making the farm pay. Practically, I'm going to have to do both!

So, Farm Plan 2010:

• double (at least) the number of laying hens, need more mobile houses built


• cost out producing meat birds for other people, in addition to our own


• new greenhouse to go up, first concentrate on transplants for sale in spring


• garlic crop went in the ground last fall, research adding value


• ordered a dozen fruit trees to create a new orchard in fall 2010


• need at least one beef creetur for Cam's 4H project


• looking for a jersey / guernsey house cow for ourselves, but there is also an obvious market for smallholder cows - breeding stock?


• more pigs - loved the pigs last year - consider upping the numbers to 4? Breeding sow?


• veg sales - farmers market again, but also develop farm gate sales and CSA


• we have a lovely south facing slope, perfect for grapes or hops - need to research the market


• make the woodland work for us, mushrooms, ginseng, rustic furniture making? Plus our own firewood needs of course.


• acre of barley, for brewing, feed, and straw. Hope for a hay crop too.


• put a system of managed intensive grazing in place to improve pasture. Needs fencing!

That's not everything, but it's quite a lot to be getting on with! Must go and have a lie down...

Autumn Frenzy (Get Set for Winter)

We have managed to tick off quite a number of items on the grand to-do list recently, which is encouraging. Most are related to getting ready for winter in one way or another.

That process started with the canning and preserving of a whole range of late summer produce, from cranberries to sauerkraut joining the array of tomatoes, pickled cukes and chutney. We bought half a cow and that went in the freezer with our table birds. We should have half a pig coming this week to round out our meat store. More of the pig when it happens!

The garden and greenhouse are just about cleared and prepared for winter, the strawberries and asparagus are pruned and mulched. We have some experimental greenery in the tunnel, it'll be interesting to see how it gets on, though with Jane's accident, we didn't really catch up on winter planting, so the experiment will have to wait for another year properly. The one and only apple tree still needs to be pruned, but presumably there isn't any rush to do that now. We still have plans to put in a bit of an orchard next spring. We really wanted to have a new propagation / transplant greenhouse up before next spring - maybe we've missed our chance now, but we might get to it yet.

Last winter's manure was tractored to join this year's cut grass in a large windrow compost heap, and we divided the stable into 2 separate loose boxes for the horses - hopefully they'll be easier to manage singly. I made a start brushcutting the rushes and weedy grass in the lower field, where I didn't mow this year - it's wet and boggy down there at the moment, and I thought I would end up with the tractor stuck, but the longer it lies uncut, the worse the tangle will become. I was hoping to cut it all by hand, so the new growth in the spring would be palatable for grazing. We still need drainage though.

When Neal was here, he managed to stack most of this year's firewood, and I have added to that and made an outdoor stack, covered, which may even do us for next year too. For the first time ever, we are actually ahead of ourselves in firewood. I even felled a couple of small trees to make up the cordage.

In the house, we got the insulation done - we have blown cellulose, recycled newsprint into the attic and coombe spaces, which will hopefully make it a little more bearable upstairs for the kids bedrooms. The upstairs bathroom renovation is coming along, albeit painfully slowly. I have stripped the 'den' behind the bathroom. We did the pre-winter chimney sweep, put away the trampoline and the volleyball net and gathered bags of birchbark and kindling for fire lighting.

After a mixed spell of weather, the temperature has announced winter with a vengeance. There are snow flurries today and it has been below freezing all day. We brought the horses in tonight for the first time, and shifted the new chickens into their winter quarters. The latter process involved a cardboard box and a pokey stick - good grief, are we professionals at this?!

So, are we ready for winter? No, it doesn't feel so, but we have managed to do a bunch of pre-winter tasks and that feels fairly good!

Caledonia in the the Spring

We've gone from snow cover to sunburn in a few short days. Those in the know reckon '3 snows after Easter' and I think we've had them. The weather forecast here is pretty reliable, Environment Canada, the last frost date isn't until early May, but the temperatures are now forecast consistently above freezing. Fantastic - time to get doing...

You may know that one item we brought with us from the UK was a 18' x 32' polytunnel (term not used here, folk look at you blankly - it's a greenhouse, or a hoophouse). We had bought the tunnel not long after we moved to Skye, but never found the time to put it up - that's five years or more that we've had it, making that a very long erection indeed (sorry).

We could not find any flat ground at all! 76 acres, and not enough flat ground for a wee polytunnel. So, we've had to be inventive. You'll see from the photos,that we dug one corner in below ground, and I bought some tubing and made my own 5' ground tubes for the other end. That is going to cause other problems with fitting the plastic, opening doors, bed layout, but I think we have it sorted.

I can't remember if I mentioned the Hun yet? He's a 13hp BCS 2-wheel tractor with a 30" rotovator attachment. Beast. Why the Hun? Well, he's 'a tiller' - boomboom. The Hun cost us a fortune, but will handle most of the land cultivation. We do have a tractor with single furrow plough and disk harrows, but for small beds, and small turning circles, we feel the compaction and damage the tractor would cause isn't justified.

So, we now have 56 x 30' rows cultivated, plus some rows for fruit bushes. Working on the fences around this plot, so that we are ready come the last frost date to get a whole load of stuff in the ground.

Yesterday, and today, there was a frost first thing, but the thermometer (in the sun) had reached 34deg. by afternoon - wow!

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?!

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?

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.