Although our farm was wet again this spring, making for a late start in the garden, it has now officially warmed up here.. With temperatures in the 30’s almost every day for weeks, we’ve almost forgotten those extremely late frosts in June.

With all this heat, maybe we should consider growing coconuts, to make our own virgin coconut oil! Or bananas…

The two young fig trees have recovered from the freeze in early June, and are now growing well. So are some of the baby American Pawpaw trees that we thought were dead from the frost. We did lose a couple of them, I think. I guess pawpaws are still a little experimental here in this climate. And the figs are definitely just a fun trial.

Anyway, now that it’s summer we are busy, as always at this time of year. Selema and Rebecca are in Ontario right now for a wedding, and visiting friends and relatives. So we have to keep going to take up the slack. They did deserve the vacation, though.

Here’s a little update about what’s going on.

Vegetables

As we had mentioned, the vegetable gardens had a rough start, but many things have recovered from the frosts and are now growing well with all this heat. We’ve had our first hodge-podge for the season – we’re becoming real Nova Scotians! We don’t have many peas left, but we have some hodge-podge ingredients in the farm market stand most days, such as beans, new potatoes, etc.

Our Building Project

For over a year now, we’ve been sourcing organic grains locally and making our own organic feed. That’s how we can offer organically-fed chicken and turkey products for nearly the same price as others which are only free-range or non-GMO. We bought an old tractor powered grinder-mixer mill to make it easier to make our own organic feed. This mill replaces the small hammer mill that we had used for the last year or so.

Now we realized we needed a place to keep the mill and the grains, so we have been working on permits for a small shed. We didn’t realize we needed to go to a lot of trouble to build a small, simple farm building, but it turns out that besides a building permit, we also needed to hire an engineer to make a stamped set of drawings. This ended up costing a bit more than expected, but we are finally starting the actual work as of today. The boys are hard at work digging the holes for the pole foundations as I write this. They’re going to have a lot of fun building this shed, as well as gaining experience. They’ll need to go for a swim soon, though, on such a hot day as this!

Calves

Feeding the calves

We got two little calves at the Truro cattle auction, back in late June. One is a Holstein and the other is a Jersey. We wanted to get baby calves that had never had toxic stuff or grain, so they would be totally grass-fed and antibiotic-free. We are feeding them the extra milk from our Jersey cow; and they are also eating a lot of clover and grass already. We have so much pasture this year, since it keeps improving, that they still can’t nearly keep up. However, they will eat a lot more grass next year. 

The Jersey/Angus cross heifer from our cow last year will be ready for butchering in October. Keep in touch if you’re waiting for grassfed beef..

Turkeys

Can you spot the turkeys hiding in the shade?

Our new neighbor generously allowed us to have the turkeys on his scrubby patch next to our farm. So they are mulching and fertilizing that, as they eat bugs, leaves and grass. It’s mostly roses, goldenrods and rushes at this time, but the grass is already starting to come through where the turkeys had been first. In a year or two, I can imagine this patch of land looking just as lush and green as our farm is starting to become.  We are trying to save the young trees that are growing up in this area, as we hope it will turn into another productive and pretty savanna.

Chickens

We lost a number of chicks to rats all in one night in June. They got under the raised floor and killed the chicks by pulling them down a hole they had chewed in the floor. Another lesson learned! Never have a raised floor that is not thick enough to be rat proof. I guess they have to survive too 😉  but not at the expense of our baby chicks!

However, the remainder of this flock has been enjoying the amazing lush pasture now for weeks, and they will be ready for processing in a week. They’ll be available for pick-up on the 18th. (Place your orders now to get your 10% freezer-filling discount, when you pick up fresh chickens at the farm.) 

Because of the loss, we added another flock of baby chicks a little later, and combined two flocks for one processing date. The Thanksgiving fresh pick-up date is now changed to two weeks earlier, to September 22. However, we may keep a few for a couple of weeks if you want a fresh one at Thanksgiving.

So there you finally have a little update. Hope to see some of you at our Open Farm Day sometime in September. We’ll let you know when the date is finalized.