Spring is here with new life and new growth. When we work with nature there’s always the typical seasonal work cycle. But there are also constant changes and adaptations on a diverse family farm, as we keep discovering better ways to work with our natural resources, or find ways to market our products.

I’ve been pruning all our trees and shrubs lately. One of my favourite jobs! For some reason I just like to work with trees and plants. I guess I’m Adam’s descendant—Adam had the job of dressing and keeping the garden of Eden. I assume that included pruning—trimming overgrowth and cutting out dead branches. And opening up trees for sunlight to get in. Sunlight helps reduce fungal diseases and it also makes more photosynthesis possible, which means more sugars and minerals in the plant and fruit.

The first thing to flower and fruit is the haskap bushes. The flowers look like they might be opening any day now, which is exciting! This spring we have invested in bird netting, so we’re hopeful that we might get a decent harvest. We don’t mind sharing a few berries with the birds; but since we’re the ones who put in all the work I think it’s fair that we get the bulk of the harvest!

We’ll let you know if we have enough haskap berries to sell this year.

Projects

During the winter the boys have been cutting out dead wood, balsam firs and excess undergrowth in the pig savanna. Lately they began chipping the piles of branches. Since we had a hard time finding enough organic straw to bed the cows, we’re using the resulting wood chips to get us through until pasture season. It will be much easier to put up the electric netting temporary fences in the pig pasture without snagging on so much brush. However, there’s still days of chipping ahead. Which means more bedding and mulch.

Ever since we moved here, we’ve been thinking of building a small on-farm market, and we have now made the decision to go ahead with that. We cleared the mud off a spot next to our driveway, close to the road. We had a load of gravel dumped there, and now we’ve just begun framing the building. It won’t be large, just enough space to hold a small freezer, some shelves for vegetables, and a cooler for perishable things.

We’ll be working at the building project whenever we get a chance this spring. After having to sell products out of the freezers and coolers in our old truck box storage space, we’re looking forward to having a better place to display everything that’s available at the time.

Critters

We have a couple of litters of baby piglets again! They are happy with the warmer weather that’s coming on now. Caleb moved most of the pigs back into the woods again after they spent the winter in paddocks closer to the barn.

The cows will be moving to pasture in a couple of weeks, we hope. The grass is starting to green up, but it’s not ready for grazing yet. Since the grass plants are just trying to re-start after a winter of dormancy, they need to build their carbohydrate levels from the sun’s energy. If we allow the cows to graze too soon, we’re depleting their meagre root reserves.

We’ve started incubating eggs for our first hatch of chicks that will be the next generation of laying hens. Jesse is the technical guy around here so he enjoys looking after the incubator. He has to make sure everything is working correctly and that the eggs have the proper temperature and moisture. The temperature is the most critical. I sometimes wonder how hens manage to keep a constant temperature by sitting on their eggs, if it’s so easy to get it wrong in the incubator! Getting it wrong means less of the eggs will hatch.

Of course, you might wonder why we don’t just let the hens do the job. One reason is that today’s hens often don’t know how to sit on eggs and hatch them. It takes time and effort to get that “broodiness” back. Another problem is that it would require a lot of time and also more space and nests to do that, and we haven’t made that investment. We have to be careful how we spend our funds..

Today we got our first meat chicks for this pasture season. They’re cute as ever, running, scratching and pecking at the wood shavings in their brooder; but it won’t be long before they’ll have grown enough to be outside and nibbling on grass. Looking forward to that… we need some warmer weather for that to happen.

Gardening

The girls have started all the plants that we normally grow in the greenhouse for transplanting outside later. We also planted some seeds outside in the garden–one evening before a rain. It’s mostly things such as beets, peas, radishes and lettuce which can tolerate some cooler weather. We did cover everything with some row cover fabric, which will make them more comfortable in today’s cold rain.

Just recently I joined an online course that teaches “Landrace Gardening”. A landrace is a diverse mix of genetics that is adapted to an area. It is not as uniform as an “heirloom” variety. There could be a mix of colours and sizes showing up, but there are also some distinctive traits that make it uniquely suited to local conditions.

Landraces can be selected for better nutrition as well, which is one of the main reasons I want to get into this. It’s something I’ve been curious about for years but never really got started before. As soon as I found out about this course I knew I wanted to begin breeding some of our own varieties this year.

This summer Jesse will be testing nutrient density with our nutrient meter, which gives a relative reading of overall nutrition. Will our home grown varieties prove to be more flavorful and nutritious than the inbred heirlooms and the modern hybrids? I think it will take several years of selection before we’ll be able to show that.

I’m hoping to write more about our experiments with landraces some time. In the meantime, for the best information on growing landraces in your own garden, I recommend you check out Julia Dakin’s course platform: https://growingmodernlandraces.thinkific.com/ where you can become a member of the landrace course taught by Joseph Lofthouse. Membership includes other related courses. There’s a course that teaches how we can allow microbes to help plants adapt to their surroundings; and an indigenous farming course will be added soon. There’s also a forum for seed sharing and interaction with other gardeners who are doing similar projects. This is normally a paid course but I just now saw there’s also a free trial version on that page.

More Coming Soon

We haven’t been posting much content lately so I hope this will help you connect with what’s going on here. Our daughter Rebecca has been perfecting some great pork recipes that we also hope to share. Watch for more posts soon!