Frozen Troll

Happening at the farm: seeding in greenhouse, watering greenhouse for growing plugs, transplanting plugs, weeding, harvesting, feeding and watering animals, cultivating, soccer watching... There hasn't been a lot of farm voyeurism happening on my part though, I've been too busy to follow Lorenz around like a baby duck of late. Nevertheless, on Wednesday night, Germany had been eliminated so the soccer was done for HP and Lorenz knocked off early to hang out and barbecue (perhaps he was celebrating the anticipated troll-free situation?). Before that, though, I did one more nosy-parkering trip into the greenhouse and up to the field.

It's enough to make you realize just how ecstatic you would be at this time of year if you were restricting yourself to local produce. You would be feasting on radishes, kale, broccoli, spinach, lettuce mix, leaf lettuce, asparagus (still!), chard and both snap and snow peas right about now. Tara has been making rather ecstatic noises about the broccoli, I could provide a stereo effect when I steal peas out of Justin's bucket as he's coming down the hill...

And that, folks, is all the news you're going to get out of the red barn troll this month. I am looking out the window at snow-capped mountains with the sun on them still. No cute foals or yams that sprouted in my kitchen, were displayed by me as an illustration of my slovenly housekeeping and were subsequently put in a pot in the greenhouse by Lorenz. There are no yams in pots up here! Though there are some chickens in Iqaluit - I saw organic chicken feed come off the luggage conveyor belt at the airport! I've yet to see chickens scratching away on the tundra - and I'm pretty sure I won't see any north of the Arctic Circle, which is where I'm headed tomorrow!

(If you're really dying for farm news, bug Lorenz. I'll be back at the end of July with less lame entries than this one. In the meantime, you can always read the other site, if things work out, internet access wise, that's where I'm putting the Arctic pictures. Much more interesting than pictures of weeds, I promise!)

Smile and Wave

It's getting empty in the greenhouse - most of the stuff has been transplanted. The transplanter is a cool implement. It has a big tank full of water which it dumps into the divots that the wheels mounted on the transplanter make. Two people - in this case Sean and Justin - sit on the seats at the end, and the trays of plugs are in front of them. Then it becomes a matter of grabbing the plugs and plopping them into the moistened holes. Every so often, the wheel gets gunked up with dirt, and Lorenz cleans it regularly (in the field, and always when he brings the tractor down to refill the water tank and pick up more transplants).

The weeds are as they always are: there. The triplets and Lorenz and sometimes Tara have been taking lots of time to go through with the wheel and hand hoes - they'll often take the row covers off for a short while to do a quick attack. The idea is simply to uproot the weeds, not pick them out perfectly the way I would do in the garden.

Except of course I haven't been doing it in the garden, at least not as much as I should. Looking at all that's sprouting there is making me feel a little bit guilty, but not enough to actually do something about it. Right now, I'm more into enjoying the garden. We've had the tiki torches lit a couple of nights now. The evidence of the level of enjoyment HP and I have been getting out of the garden is in the pear crate...

The other source of enjoyment is the pool which is, thanks to HP's endless scrubbing and vacuuming, finally open. Malcolm was the first to brave the cold water this year on Sunday, and he's been in and out of it constantly since then. I finally had my first swim today, convinced to do so by Malcolm (who isn't allowed to go in without adult supervision, and is quick enough to realize that there are only so many times he can get me to "watch" him and asked if I would swim with him. Smart kid).

Smart kid indeed, actually. He had a project for school: he and his partner, Luke, were to build a model of "something medieval". They decided on a castle. So, over several days, Sean, HP and Lorenz "helped" them with their model. I saw Malcolm and Luke drive a few finishing nails into the tower assembly, I saw them paint symbols on the towers, and I saw them scamper off on their bikes as Lorenz and HP worked away. Even I got involved, with some silly nail and string construction to go behind the drawbridge. Adrian called it, when he dropped by to see everybody except Malcolm and Luke getting into the castle - "so whose project is this anyway?" he asked... HP was still working away when I went to bed. By the time I went to bed, he'd completed gallows and a well, and apparently there was a shed with straw in it by morning. Malcolm claimed he and Luke had the best project in the class - and so they should, given that they had four adults work on it! Malcolm's has a future in management, I think.

Things go on as they do at Greenfields... hens and roosters and vegetables and children and Ruth's colt and weeds are growing. Lorenz still loves his tractor, I'm still obsessed with my garden, HP is still crazy about motorcycling (except now he actually gets to do it, insurance and registration finally being sorted out), Boris still wants belly rubs, and it's still one of my favourite places to be.

Vote Early, Vote Often!

Ontario has six supply management boards for agriculture, and a whole range of other marketing boards collectively referred to as "negotiating" boards. The difference between them is easy: negotiationg boards negotiate prices on behalf of their members, and in some cases have the authority to establish price. Supply management boards do all that, but they also have the authority to regulate production. If the word "quota" comes into play, you're looking at a supply management board. Simple, isn't it? Unfortunately, that's where "simple" ends when it comes to that topic (unless you include "simple-minded", but I give away my slant already!).

The need for supply management is, as far as I'm concerned, a direct result of the application of industrial principles to agriculture. We're striving for greater so-called efficiency (if efficiency is narrowly defined as units of production per producer/unit of land), and supporting this with research and development which enables this intensification and concentration of production. So, one farmer can produce more stuff - be it chickens, bushels of corn, whatever - than his grandfather could. This can only be done with higher inputs - bigger tractors, more (and more expensive) implements, incredible petrochemical inputs through fuel and fertilizer, the application of these new super hybrids and of course the suite of chemical technologies that go hand in hand with these. All of this means that farming has become far more capital intensive, and along with that had come a concern for "sustainability" - because, from an environmental standpoint, what the juggernaut of industrial agriculture is doing can't go on in this trajectory forever. Not if you consider soil, groundwater, antibiotic resistance, disease outbreak in livestock and so forth. And not if you consider that political pawn, the "family farmer". Because net farm income isn't going up, on average - it's the story from the post-war agricultural miracle, isn't it: I can produce more and more and more stuff with my big tractor on my big farm using my big seed drill and my big herbicide spray rig... but so can my neighbour. And when we both produce way more than we as a society need, the laws of supply and demand kick in and prices per unit fall. My natural reaction as a producer, of course, is this: increase production to make more money. Get me a bigger tractor. And so forth. The two hallmarks of industrial agriculture right there: the cost-price squeeze (to get these huge yields, I need huge inputs, and they cost money. As petroleum prices go up, so do the costs of my inputs. But because there is so much more of what I'm growing, the per unit return drops...) and the technological treadmill (If I make less per unit and thus need to make more units, I need more land more equipment more inputs... and more money to pay for it all. So I need to pay off the equipment, using it as intensively as possible, and I get into a vicious cycle).

So... well, wouldn't it make sense to figure out how many units of anything - litres of milk, dozens of eggs, whatever - we need, and to figure out what is a "fair" price, and then stick with that? Of course it would. That's where supply management came in. In theory, this would help address the "wine lakes and butter mountains", as the catchphrase went when supply management was introduced in the EEC aka EU in the late 70s and early 80s. Limit how much is produced, get a better price, because I'm not looking at trying to market twice as many eggs as there is demand for... and let a central agency do the marketing for me, I'm guaranteed my fair price and my buyer. Beauty.

If the theory worked...

I'm not saying it couldn't work, I'm saying it hasn't worked, at least not in our context in Ontario. Intensification and concentration have continued unabated - and helped along by the supply management boards no less. Let's illustrate by the example of chickens and eggs in Ontario, shall we? I've spent a few hours in recent weeks wading through the murky waters of what you can and can't do if you want to raise chickens and/or eggs in Ontario.

There are three supply management boards that relate to chickens and eggs in Ontario: the Chicken Farmers of Ontario (CFO), the Ontario Broiler Hatching Egg and Chick Commission (OBHECC) and the Ontario Egg Producers (OEP). The CFO are in charge of the chickens we eat (broilers and roasters), the OBHECC of producing chicks that end up as either broilers/roasters or laying hens, and the OEP deal with the eggs we consume. And here's how it works: all chicken produced and marketed in Ontario must be on a quota basis. So far, so good. Except that the quota is fixed to certain owners, and they are the ones that, collectively, run the CFO, which in turns makes the rules about ownership. They made the rule, for example, that the minimum quota required to play the game be 14,000 units per annum. A "unit" is 12.1 kg of chicken (live weight). So, to be part of the club (assuming you can afford to buy your way in, but more of that in a minute), you need to pump out 169,400 kg of chicken every year. A "broiler" is defined as less than 2.5 kg. So, let's say you're marketing 2 kg chickens - you need 84,700 chickens every year. If you're using the high-tech chickens that gain weight so quickly and are propped up by all sorts of chemical mixes, you can get six crops a year, sure. That means, if you're buying into the technology, you need a minimum facility capacity of over 14,000 chickens. If you are heretical enough to produce lower-yielding breeds that only give you, say, four crops per year, you'll need a bigger barn: you now need to house over 21,000 chickens at any given time.

That's a bit of capital to put down, especially if you're not a chicken farm but a mixed family farm. Because you're not just investing in getting the know-how to do all this and the barn to do it in and the equipment to do it with, you also need the quota. The quota is valued at about $60 per unit (plus the 20 cents transfer fee if you're buying it from anyone other than your father and grandfather). So, just to meet the minimum entry requirements for the chicken club, you need to plunk down $840,000. Yikes.

Ah... but what about the family farm, you say, what about all those happy chickens scratching away on farmyards all across the province? Well, yes, there are "exemptions". Currently, you can have 102 chicks per year for home consumption. In 2003, you got just under $1.20 per kg live weight if you went through the marketing boards. Assume that for your home flock, assume you can bring all 102 chicks to market weight, and assume you can get them to 2.5 kg each. That's $306 per farmer taking his exemption to the max in Ontario. Total farm gate value of chickens marketed in Ontario in 2003? $492.1 million. If 10,000 people took advantage of the exemption, that would still be less than 1% of the value of chicken produced in Ontario. Huh. Now rumour has it that there's talk of doing away with even that exemption. I'm sure you figured out by now that all exemptions are granted by the supply management board...

As for laying hens - the average egg farm in Ontario has just over 16,500 hens. But at least this one is an easier game to play: you can buy quota at $62 or so per hen, and you only need 500 of them to be allowed in - so your quota cash outlay is $31,000. The average hen lays just over 300 egss per year. Let's be optimistic and say that all of these are large and extra large eggs - currently, you'd get 13.1 cents per egg. So every hen grosses $39.30 per year. At 500 hens, you'd have gross returns of $19,650 per year. Gross. Out of that, you have to pay your loans and mortgage, buy chicken feed, pay vet bills, pay for chicks to replace your flock... if there's any left over... I think it's safe to conclude that, with the current pricing structure, it wouldn't really be worth it to get into the game with 500 hens. But apply the same math to the average size flock, and you're looking at over $650,000 gross returns. A price structure that's designed to encourage intensification and concentration, perhaps? So it comes as no surprise that there are only 421 egg producers in Ontario.

Now, I as a consumer don't want certain things. I don't want battery eggs, I don't want chickens from the minimum 14,000 units operations... and I'm willing to pay for that. I'm quite happy to let farmers have more than 13 cents per egg. But, let's back up, who sets the prices? That's right, the CFO and the OEP. And who sits on the CFO and the OEP? That's right, the people who are big enough to qualify. And who can grant exemptions? The CFO and the OEP. And why would they want to encourage this "cottage" sort of quality production? Right.

--

If you've driven anywhere in Canada in the past week, you can scarcely miss the fact that there's an election on. So, given that agriculture is an issue I'm interested in, and given that my rant of the week is the dis-incientives to family farming our farm policy implicitly and explicitly includes, let's have a look at where our main parties stand on this issue.

From Steven Harper's camp, we have that "The Conservative Party will fight for farmers. We will protect farmers against conditions outside their control and vigorously defend them in international trade negotiations." This means, according to the platform, that they will "ensure industries under the protection of supply management remain viable" and they will "support the goal of supply management to deliver a high-quality product to consumers for a fair price with a reasonable return to the producer". Now, let's see - does that mean that the status quo, which gives a reasonable return to the big guys currently in the club and effectively shuts out all others, remains viable? Hmmmm.

The Liberal Party Platform tells me that "no industry today can afford to fall behind the leading edge of technology and innovation. In fact, many of Canada's traditional industries, whether in the resource or manufacturing sectors, are just as technologically sophisticated as those in sectors we usually refer to as 'high tech' ". Well, somehow, that smacks of investment in biotech... and thus I'm not surprised that they "will facilitate the investments needed to develop value-added food products" (isn't that just a cuddly heap of euphemisms?). Oh, right, my chief interest today, they "will develop orderly marketing systems, including supply management systems". Status quo it is. What's new? Well, no time for anything new, since we're all in a tizzy about managing crises - like avian flu and BSE - and have no time to really think about a vision which includes family farms. No, we're all about the farm "sector", not farmers - which, apparently, means propping up industry.

The NDP, at least, explicitly recognizes the family farm as something we want. But, as always, they are "promoting an agriculture policy that preserves what Canadian farmers have created to protect themselves, including the Canadian Wheat Board and supply management in dairy and poultry". (They're also visioioning "sustainable agriculture outcomes that will help reduce input costs for pesticides, herbicides and fuel". I only hope that that's a typo...) By and large, Jack Layton is saying the best stuff so far when it comes to agriculture. We hear phrases like moratorium on genetically modified wheat and the very promising "food system approach" to agriculture. I can get behind this if there is a) recognition that the way the supply management boards are currently configured is not optimal and b) the goal of making inputs for chemical-intensive farming really is a typo, and we're actually aiming to reduce inputs of pesticides, herbicides and fuel. But you never know. Do I want a party that makes that big a typo, or one that wants to make it cheaper to put this stuff on the land? Rock and a hard place?

Ah, but if you've been to the farm lately, you'll have seen the Green Party sign at the end of the lane. But, here the recognition from the Greens' Platform: "Over the last five decades, federal policies and subsidies have supported the production and export of cheap commodities — much at the expense of family farmers, the environment and the sustainability of rural communities. In short, agriculture has become agribusiness." Furthermore, they would like to "develop supply management that provides stable domestic markets, viable pricing and easier access for smaller family farms." And "encourage a transition to organic agriculture rather than subsidizing costly agro-chemicals and genetically modified crops, adapt regulations to support small and medium size food processors, thus building and strengthening local food economies and shift government-supported research away from biotechnology and toward sustainable food production."

Seriously, how does that not make sense?

--

And that concludes the Barn Troll's Analysis of the Platforms with respect to Agriculture (not seriously considering the Bloc here, I'm in Ontario). We need a paradigm shift in how we think about food and food systems. Thomas Kuhn would call it a "revolution". I wouldn't disagree with him.

In the Weeds

I like to name things - my bicycle is "Judy", my old car was "Bunny" in honour of its VW Rabbit lineage (it also went by "Baby", since my diesel Golf had a hard time with big hills, and was often urged on with "C'mon Baby, you can do it!"). I refer to my garden project alternately as "the Secret Garden" and "the Beer Garden"; I once called myself the "Barn Troll" and the apprentices "the Triplets", and both those monikers are still in use. I'm by no means the only one who does this, Kim calls Lorenz "the Big Guy", and to HP the kids are "die Kurzen" (German for "the short ones", though we've discovered that Adrian is taller than I am now). Ruth's horses are Fay, Odin, Nemo and now the baby (not yet named), but when Lorenz was confirming what stalls they go in a couple of months ago, he said, "on the left it's Baby, Warthog and Mama, and Hobo on the right". (Odin's warts are long gone, and Nemo's "baby" status has been usurped by the new baby). Given his penchant for the manure pile, Boris should really be renamed "Stinky". Tara and the Triplets live in the "Labour Lodge". Other names in the current farm lingo include "the Urban Cowboy" and "Droopy Drawers" - and sometimes we have a hard time remembering the real names of most of these characters!

Given all this naming activity, I thought it was time I got a grasp of the names of one of the most ubiquitous features of this farm: the weeds. Years ago, Marlene gave me a weed identification book for my birthday. Yesterday, I hauled it out and started looking things up. Common ones in the field: buckwheat, ragweed, lamb's quarters, wood sorrel, milk thistle, Canada thistle and (at the field edges) dame's rocket.

It's a bit odd to think of the buckwheat as a weed, seeing as it is usually sown as a cover crop or green manure and for weed suppression. It has a few advantages - it is, for example, attractive to honey bees (there are hives up in the fields) and lots of beneficial insects. It's also attractive to one particular pest that is a problem in the fields, the tarnished plant bug. This, though, can be a good thing, since it means the tarnished plant bug hangs out in the buckwheat and stays away from all the things we'd rather not see it on. Buckwheat germinates very rapidly, grows quickly, and puts up with dry soils and low fertility - all these are reasons it's such a good cover crop, really. That's what Lorenz used it for here in the past too, and these buckwheat plants are left over from that.

Ragweed is notorious for its allergy-triggering (hay fever) pollen. Like buckwheat, it is an annual broadleaf plant. Ragweed doesn't, however, flower until late summer (and if you're on top of the weed control, it shouldn't get to flower and subsequent re-seeding). It is, however, particularly common in over-grazed pastures, and with a couple of very intesively used horse pastures nearby... Fortunately, ragweed's shallow taproot is removed fairly easily with manual weed control - but you still have to be there to do so.

Lamb's quarters aka pigweed is an edible weed, related to spinach. I haven't yet chowed down on it, but apparently both leaves and seeds are good to eat. The leaves are apparently high in a bunch of things, including vitamin A, calcium, potassium and phosphorous. The seeds are a good source of phosphorous, potassium, protein and niacin. And, according to the wild foods books, it's been used as a medicinal as well, as a sedative and, poulticed, to treat burns. Pretty impressive for a weed... makes me (almost) want to try it. A word of caution, though - if you're going to go into weed munching, don't do it with weeds from just anywhere. Lamb's quarters, like spinach (to which it's related), will absorb pesticides if they're present in the soil, and will also accumulate nitrates (very common in conventionally fertilized fields).

Up next: wood sorrel. When I was little, I called this "Hasenklee" ("rabbit clover") - you probably know it as a "shamrock". It looks like clover in that it has three leaves but, unlike clover, the leaves are heartshape and they fold up a little in the middle (to protect themselves against the sun, when they're stressed, and at night) Like lamb's quarters, it's edible (unlike lamb's quarters, it's perennial, spreading underground along rhizomes). I have tried it, it's kind of sour (hence another name, "sour clover"). The sour taste also gives it the "sorrel" apellation, which is a misnomer since the plant is not related to the sorrels at all. It, too, has been used for various medicinal properties.

And since I'm all over the edible medicinals that are weeds here at Greenfields, let me introduce milk thistle, which has been used for liver ailments for generations. You may also know it by its other names: wild lettuce, prickly lettuce or horse thistle. It is considered a noxious weed, and much like lamb's quarters, is a problem in pastures because it accumulates nitrates. It grows as both an annual or a biennial, depending on when it germinates. Milk thistle is considered a noxious weed (besides the livestock poisoning, it likes to crowd out other plants - and it gets very big), and if you're not going to be controlling it chemically (ahem!), you really need to get it when it's in the seedling stage. Which is now, and Lorenz has had the crew out weeding a fair bit of late.

One of the ones that I particularly don't like is the Canada thistle. Sure, it will make a pretty purple flower - but have you ever wandered barefoot over the grass and stepped on one of these, or try to pull one while not wearing gloves? From a cropping perspective, it's a problem for several reasons: it spreads by underground rhizomes, and does so prolifically. These rhizomes aren't destroyed by cultivation, because they're deeper than you normally cultivate. There are eight or so buds per metre of rhizome, and a mature spreads by over six metres of rhizomes every year! Nasty.

I saved my favourite weed for last: dame's rocket. I tend to call this "wild phlox", but it's not a phlox at all, it is a member of the mustard family. It's really a perennial (introduced) wildflower, and it grows rampant behind the horse barn and along the greenhouse. Technically, dame's rocket is an invasive, meaning that it is an introduced plant (yes, we can once again blame European gardeners) that spreads rapidly and thus displaces native plants - but it is also actively fostered by all sorts of gardeners now, since it is a common ingredient in "wildflower" mixes. Lorenz explained that he also had it as part of his wildflower garden behind the house years ago. When the new septic bed was put in, some of the soil from that garden ended up behind the horse barn. What was left of it is along the edges, including by the greenhouse.

So, that was my introduction to the weeds. There are many, many more - and a lot of them, Lorenz doesn't know the names of, just that they're weeds. But, in the case of some of the ones above (leaving out ragweed and the Canada thistle!), one farmer's weed is a gardener's treasure. If you're farming vegetables, you don't need weeds - no matter how useful they are in other contexts - competing with your vegetables for water and light. Weeding is crucial at this time of year, since it's not only easier to get the plants out when they're young, but under no circumstances do you want them to go to seed. One lamb's quarter plant allowed to go to seed, for example, yields about 72,000 seeds! The seeds can survive several seasons. Lorenz says the rule of thumb is seven years - as in, if you let your weeds go to seed, you'll have a problem for seven years (I asked why seven was the magic number, and he said it's because that's how long it takes for most of the seeds to stop being viable - but some can survive 20 or more years!). Unfortunately, just that happened here at Greenfields a few years ago, so due diligence is called for now.

--

Besides weeding, the farm crew has been putting in the plastic mulch for some of the crops (which helps with moisture management and weed control), transplanting like fiends, and harvesting - and that's in addition to the regular taking care of the greenhouse and animals chores. I don't often get to see the Triplets working in the fields - not because they don't work because they do, they work very hard, but because while they're in the fields, I'm at my job... Lorenz, however, works insane hours and weekends, so I can catch him while I'm at home too. I've been hearing the tractor roar to life before six a.m. lately. I ran into Lorenz by the chicken coop on Monday morning. All I'd done that day, so far, was drink one mug of coffee and deal with my email (what? it was 7:15!). Lorenz, on the other hand, had already tilled a field, done a load of laundry, opened the greenhouse, let out the roosters, cooked a full breakfast, and scrubbed the pool (he was also on his second mug of coffee - I'm sure by the time I hit #2, I'd achieved a comparabla volume of stuff. As if...) On Wednesday, I was on coffee #1 when Lorenz climbed onto the tractor and headed up to the fields. I was still on coffee #1 when he returned, but his return was prompted by a torrential downpour (so this time, you get a wet farmer on a tractor photo).

The rain was just what the weeds - and the vegetables - needed. Since that early morning shower, there has been a lot of heat and things have grown at a rate that you wouldn't believe. The row covers have come off the early brassicas, and now they're being harvested. This morning, I decided to wander up to the fields before work (passing first a chicken-feeding Justin and then Ruth's horses on the way). J.P. was harvesting asparagus, Sean was filling a crate with lettuce mix, and Lorenz was harvesting and bunching kale. I can't get over how big everything is now. If the growth rate we've experienced this week were to continue, we'd be in a lush rainforest by the end of the month. Lorenz and the wheelhoe have other ideas on that front, though.

--

The growth spurt has been because it's been hot this week. That has also been the driving force behind the work that Lorenz and HP have been doing to get the pool opened. Lorenz fixed the broken elbow on the PVC pipe and got the pump going to circulate on the weekend (he'd patched the hole in the pool ages ago, and has been running the hose in to bring up the water level). The pool has been shocked, so the nasty algae has retreated. Now, both Lorenz and HP have been scrubbing and vacuuming. Once it's clean, it will be stabilized, and then it will be ready for me to jump in! The Barn Troll is expanding her operations and becoming a Pool Troll as well...

--

And as for the Garden... On the weekend, Malcolm went to a yard sale in Brookville and came running back with a whole bunch of stuff, including tiki torches - he came barging into the barn with a "hey Johanna, I put some of those survivor things in the secret garden!". I quite like them, and I've already picked up some citronella oil for them. (Malcolm had lots of presents, by the way - HP got a weight lifting belt, there was a kitty toy for Malcolm's mom, and for some reason the most appropriate present for Lorenz, in Malcolm's mind, was a dated Harlequin Romance. Hee.)

I love that garden. Despite my initial assertions that I was all over the perennials and annuals were a waste of time, I've gone a bit nuts with the sales on annuals. I have petunias, begonias, salvias, a couple of geraniums, and loads of annuals that I started from seed (I'd like to tell you what all they are, but I have no idea which of the seeds came up and which didn't. I can tell you that I seeded chrysanthemums, snapdragons, poppies, morning glories, nicotina, candytufts, sweet alyssum and sunflowers. Likely, there were some others. The only ones I'm sure came up are the poppies and the sunflowers. The rabbit ate all the sprouted sunflowers, though). So there are things sprouting all over the place, though probably 50% are weeds. We'll have to see. I'm all for a riot of greenery, but I'd rather that greenery include yellow, red, blue, pink, orange... and I'd like relatively low density of burdock, dandelion and twitch at least in the beds).

Thanks to Ellen, I have many perennials. I don't know all their names, but I'm sure of the bleeding heart, peonies, hostas, ferns, forget-me-nots, woodland violets, monk's hood and phlox. She also gave me some virginia creeper, but I don't think it made it. At the nursery, I bought more hostas, honeysuckle, English daisies, columbine, cardinal flowers, more phlox, strawberries, sweet william, serbian bellflower, delphiniums, lavender (it might not make it, it's not looking good), bugleweed and creeping thyme. Tara and HP contributed some perennials (they showed up in the beds one day!), and I dug up more violets, periwinkle and ferns behind the labour lodge and transplanted them. When I list it all like that, it does sound like a lot of plants!

My other major project was getting a lawn going. Where once was a bush lot, there's nothing but ryegrass...

A Lot Happens in Two Weeks

I only went away for a week, which isn't technically long enough to even miss home, but when my airport shuttle turned into the driveway, I was delighted to be back. It's a new thing for me, wanting to be nowhere as much as I want to be home. I wonder how I'm going to deal with a whole month away... but the Arctic trip is coming up quickly. A lot changes in a month around here, and I'm going to miss so much of it!

This time of year, a lot can change in a day. When I left, the baby lettuce mix and spinaches were just coming in to harvest, and the broccoli and kale under the row covers were tiny. The lettuce mix and spinach have been going to market the past two weeks, the leaf lettuce is a week or two from being ready (right now, it's "adolescent" lettuce - meaning it would taste great, but the heads are so small that it would be hard to charge enough to actually turn a profit on them), and the broccoli and kales are thriving.

Lots of things that have been seeded (winter squash, beets, radishes, lettuces, peas, zucchini, chard, beans, spinach, onions, parsnips...) are coming up, but to the untrained eye, it doesn't look like much. Lorenz said, "oh, it's looking good", my response was, "what, the dirt?" - so he pointed out some of the plants. The transplants are easier to see - because things like green onions, basil, broccoli, collards, head lettuces, chicory and kale already look like something when they come out of the greenhouse.

Seeding looks like it's a lot of work - when I wandered up to the field this afternoon, Lorenz was taking what seemed like a very long walk pushing a very small cart. The very small cart is the seeder - you change the white plastic plate depending on what you are seeding, and fold out the guide at the side (which is adjustable to various row widths) and push... It's a very big field for such a small seeder. I did ask about tractor seeding, but Lorenz muttered something about $38,000 worth of implements. Oh.

The fields, though, are not the most exciting place to be. A few months ago, Ruth said to me, "I bet the baby's going to be born June 4th". The baby in question was Fay's foal, and Ruth proved to be exactly right in her prediction. It had something to do with the full moon on June 4th, apparently. Starting the end of May, Ruth started sleeping in the house and getting up several times a night to check on her mare. When she got up at 2 a.m. on Thursday night, the new foal had arrived. Hobo and Nemo got very agitated when Ruth moved Fay and the baby to another paddock, and their noise woke me up - in my pajamas, I admired the not-yet-an-hour-old foal.

It's pretty much magic, watching a newborn foal. Within minutes, the mare has it licked dry and it's on its feet. It wobbles around, not straying more than three feet from its mother, and nuzzling her in all sorts of places looking for her udder and milk. Fay is very protective - even Boris was afraid to enter the paddock in the morning, Lorenz said he was picking up on the mare's signal to stay away. When she comes to the rails, she likes to keep her own body between you and the foal. Only Ruth is allowed to touch the foal, and Fay even lets her lead her out of the paddock and trusts that the foal will follow. As of today, the mother and baby are back in with Hobo, Nemo and Odin - apparently, the "boys" weren't eating any more, they were so disturbed at being separated from Fay and the baby.

Of course, now that there's this unbelievably cute foal to fuss over, the goose has gotten the boot! Ok, not really - but Romeo was getting bigger and more and more uppity. He would no longer stay in his box - so at night, while Ruth was sleeping here, there would be this box with a lid on it that cheeped and quacked away. His cute "me me me me me" beeps were gradually getting replaced with more assertive "quack quack quack", and his poop production started reaching epic proportions. Not only that, but he's also discovered the territory-marking hiss: when Ruth plunked him into the chicken coop with the young roosters, Romeo bossed them all around. At this stage, it's more cute than threatening - I can still reach out and pinch his beak shut when he does that, but soon he'll be annoying. Ruth doesn't think it's good for him to get that used to being with people as he gets older, so he's now moved on to her parents' place to live with another goose.

The roosters have been moved to an outside chicken coop beside the greenhouse (when Lorenz saw the picture I took from above, out of the heritage building, he commented that it looked like some hillbilly homestead - the result of the various weird fortifications that were added when the pigs lived there last year). The young laying hens are still in the barn coop, and the older laying hens are having fun scatching away in the yard. Lorenz doesn't let them out until mid-afternoon, because otherwise they'd hide their eggs all over the place. Much better to get them out of the laying boxes - if eggs show up anywhere else, they get discarded because you have no way of knowing how fresh they are. Lately, the hens have been venturing further and further from the barn - this afternoon, I discovered them hanging out on the concrete pad outside my apartment.

Actually, I've renamed the concrete pad the "Greenfields Cafe" in honour of what most often occurs there. It started with my one beautiful Adirondack chair in Federal yellow (it subsequently got siblings in Ford blue and Case red, but they are hanging out in the garden). Kim came over for coffee after she finished barn chores one morning, and wanted to be guaranteed a prime spot in the cafe. I informed her that reserved seating could only be had through purchase, so she forked over the cash for another chair - and requested that it be painted John Deere green (I'd say it was in honour of Lorenz's tractor obsession, but I think a more likely scenario is that it's a way to taunt him!). As soon as the chair was painted, she sat in it (Lorenz's response? "Well, I'll just get up earlier and sit in it myself!"). The cafe has been busy ever since, and Lorenz has made a point of parking himself in the green chair. He even brought down his matching coffee cup this morning!

Not that Lorenz has much time for coffee drinking, or anything else, these days. When he's not on the tractor (and, as always, you get a Lorenz on the tractor photo), he's in the greenhouse, or bunching asparagus (that's what I watched him do close to midnight last night) or working away in the office. His latest project? Make dozens upon dozens of gaskets for the irrigation pipes fit. They're a bit too big, and he hasn't been able to get the right size in - so he's hand-trimming them. Malcolm watched him do that for a while before turning into a ham - that's him doing the "I'm a farmer" impression. HP has beed doing all sorts of jobs, including shlepping big rocks for my garden, cutting acres of grass, and helping in the fields. The apprentices have been kept busy transplanting, weeding, finishing the farmstand, taking care of the greenhouse and the chickens, and baking. Oh, wait, the baking isn't part of their job - but Sean dropped by to find some flour the other day, and when he returned my flour tin, he also gave me some rhubarb cake that he'd made. Yum! A talented bunch, these apprentices.

Wow. That's a lot of talking just to get sort of up to date on this farm. And to think, I haven't even started talking about the garden that has become my obsession! But if I were to start there, my server would probably groan and grind to a halt, so I'd better save that for another day.