Category Archives: Blog

Bad News Arrives by Text Message – Warning – Unpleasant Photo

Posted on January 17, 2014 | 14 comments

Yesterday I was extolling the virtues of always having a smartphone handy at all times… But today, I’m kind of wishing it wasn’t quite so easy to share info [heads up – if you are squeamish, maybe you should skip this post].

My neighbour just sent me this image, snapped on her phone:

Formerly Known as a DuckMost likely, this is was one of my adventurous ducks…  Hard to say what got her – eagle? Hawk? Owl? Raccoon? When this happens it makes me question just how good an idea it is to allow my birds as much freedom to roam as they get. This is the harsh downside of free range poultry. Some stick close to home, but some venture out into the open areas (like over at C’s place, in the field) where they are pretty vulnerable to overhead attacks.

I also have a few that have taken to roosting on the barn roof at night and have now, in the wake of this loss, moved ‘re-clip duck wings’ up to the top of the To-Do list. This will help keep the ducks closer to the ground, which makes them easier to herd into their shelters at night. Clipping wings does, though, make it harder for them to get away from ground-based trouble-makers like dogs and raccoons.

It is tempting, when confronted with a pile of feathers and birds that just don’t listen to my suggestion that they stay close to tree cover, to say – That’s it! Confinement in pens for all of you! 

What do you think? Is the occasional loss of a roaming bird worth the trade-off? Confinement certainly keeps them safer, but keeping birds in a small space can lead to other issues – stress, disease spreading, and a more restricted diet. For now, I will clip wings to try to keep everyone closer to home where they can take advantage of all the trees at our place, but if the local hawks decide our place is a handy drive-in snack bar, I may need to re-think my strategy…

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Social Media and the Modern Farmer

Posted on January 16, 2014 | 1 comment
Looking for farm fresh eggs? Turns out we have some... If you are in the Greater Victoria area send me a message on Facebook (Alderley Grange) and we can coordinate a pick-up...

Looking for farm fresh eggs? Turns out we have some… If you are in the Greater Victoria area send me a message on Facebook (Alderley Grange) and we can coordinate a pick-up…

Back in the day (like, five years ago) if you wanted to buy some local eggs or fresh strawberries you hopped in your car and drove around some promising country roads looking for farm stands. Some were pretty simple serve yourself affairs where you dropped cash in an honesty box after helping yourself to a bit of whatever happened to be in season. Some were pretty decent-sized stores where you could get a whole range of produce pretty well all year round. Finding local produce also meant reading the local farm guide (put out by organizations like the Vancouver Island Direct Farm Market Association – DFMA), word of mouth, or just plain luck.

Farmers’ markets have enjoyed a surge in popularity over the past couple of decades, and that was another way for those living in town to connect with local growers.

Fast forward to 2014 and more and more farmers connect with their customers via social media. Put a group of farmers around a table and it doesn’t take long for the conversation to switch from corn varieties, weather reports, planting times and harvest dates to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Pinterest, and Instagram. The times, they are a-changing!

Local marketing groups are not only invaluable in terms of bringing farmers and customers together, they also help bring farmers together - no small feat given that getting farmers together is a bit like herding cats.

The most recent addition to this arsenal of virtual tools is the almighty app. We are developing one for our CSA (subscription food box) customers and working with the DFMA to figure out how best to use an app to allow people to access all the information on the website and in the printed farm guide from a smartphone.

All of this handy portable technology has made it possible for a tiny farm like ours to find customers even though we are on a dead-end street and only open our farm stand for very limited hours each week during the growing season. We love going to farmers’ markets, but we often put the word out via various social media outlets to let our regular customers know where we will be and what we will have available.

Though at first it seemed to me that being chained to my phone even when I was out on the farm doing earthy things was just plain wrong, I have totally changed my tune. I love the way I can keep in touch, have access to so much information at the touch of a screen, and can play music, audiobooks, or podcasts while I wash eggs, weed beds, or muck paddocks.

I’m always on the lookout for cool farm- gardening- or food-related apps. I don’t know where I’d be without my allrecipes.com app! What are your favourites? Do you use an app to track how many pounds of rutabagas you harvest? How much milk each of your goats produce? Is there a good app out there for egg producers?

So many seeds!

So many seeds! There must be a really good app for keeping track of them all…

I’ll let you know as soon as our new app is ready to go – which had better be soon because now that we have moved into the new year, spring is heading this way like a runaway freight train! I’m thinking of starting some asparagus from seed in the greenhouse this year and need to get cracking! The perfect app would already have sent me a push notification or two to remind me! Then, of course, I’ll need another app to help me relax and deal with all the pressure from the endless stream of push notifications…

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Tireless – the Movie

Posted on January 15, 2014 | 7 comments

Those rotten dogs… cute and all, but a tad rambunctious!

Don’t worry. Nobody was seriously injured…

[With thanks to Kevin MacLeod – incompetech.com for the music… great website, if you ever need some royalty free music for a project…]

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Days So Dark and Dreary – Guest Post by Longfellow

Posted on January 14, 2014 | 9 comments
Rain on Pond

How is it possible that the pond by the sheep fields can look so glorious when the sun is shining and so… so… yeah, wet when it’s raining?

I could try to describe how I feel after several days of miserable rain, but when Longfellow sums it up quite nicely, why not just let him take center stage?

The Rainy Day, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

DCF Soggy Dogs in Rain

Marilyn’s comment after yesterday’s post was bang on when she said, “”It’s all depressingly sodden.” Apparently, her dogs are about as impressed with this sort of weather as mine!

If you’ve been reading the blog recently you’ll know what I mean when I say the cow refused to come out of my pocket. Just how wet was it? I very nearly needed to bury my phone in a bowl of rice after risking its circuit boards (or whatever is actually inside a phone these days) by snapping a few photos.

Yuck. Enough already. According to the forecast on the same phone, three days of mostly sun are heading our way. Bring it on because I can tell you I am well and truly weary of these days so dark and dreary…

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Posted in Blog, Photography, Poetry, Uncategorized

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Rain, Aggie AgVentures Cow, and Hugelkultur

Posted on January 13, 2014 | 5 comments

It’s astonishing how much water can land on this small farm during a wet winter storm. The hog pen? A river runs through it… The seasonal springs? All full to overflowing. The goats are miserable and won’t come out of the goat barn. The hogs have been complaining no end. The barn cat spots me and starts whining and looking skyward as if there is some way for me to turn off the taps.

DCF Aggie in mud

For the past couple of days I’ve been slopping around in the wet, building dams and dredging channels to try to divert the water away from the animal shelters so everyone has somewhere to get under cover and stand with dry feet. The dogs sulk in the cab of the truck while I get steadily soggier.

Only the ducks are truly happy. They dive into all the newly formed puddles and ponds and lakes and rivers, flapping and splashing, preening and chuckling. The drakes strut back and forth as the ladies bathe, occasionally knocking one another around a bit just to show who is the most handsome and virile. All this water can only mean that spring is just around the corner, and you know what that means when you are a male whatever living on a farm.

DCF Aggie and Iago

The other things that are working amazingly well are the hugelkultur beds we put in a couple of years ago. Built on top of mounds of brush, branches, and logs, the beds soak up a phenomenal amount of water with nothing much seeping out below where they have been built (more or less following the contour lines of our sloping property). Where there are no beds (just grass, the driveway, or even the area under the trees where the hogs have been merrily rooting around through the fall) there is running water everywhere. Any place that has a dip or hollow is full of water. Except those hugel beds.

I was amazed how well they performed during the hot, dry weeks of the last two summers. As advertised, all the water they had soaked up during the winter was slowly released back to the plants and I barely had to irrigate at all, even when properties around me were watering like mad. I had my doubts as to how well big branches were going to break down, but already when I dig into the beds, there’s lots of lovely soft organic matter and not so many sticks and twigs. The biggest branches are still findable, but even they are well on their way to Rotsville.

I am impressed enough with how they have worked that I’m going to retro-build my existing raised beds in the same way. No more burn piles! I’ve always thought it was wasteful and unnecessarily polluting to burn branches and sticks. How cool to have found such a simple and useful thing to do with all that garden debris!

For more information about hugelkultur, check out the richsoil website.

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