We have a name

Before I started blogging about our adventures here at Mucky Boots, I was sending "Farm Updates" to family and friends via email. Here is one of them, from the end of June, 2009.

Hello everyone!

Exciting news here at the farm: we have finally picked a name! We are going to call ourselves Mucky Boots Farm, and in honour of our new name, we have decorated our front gate.

The other big news is that we finished work, and said all our final goodbyes at school. It was a bit intense, and it will take a bit of time to separate our feelings about leaving from the usual end-of-year exhaustion and bad temper. We received a lovely porch swing from the school, which is perfect on the verandah.

The vegetable garden is busting out all over. We picked 1.5-2 litres of strawberries every other day for about 2 weeks, some of which we ate and much of which we froze. It has slowed down somewhat, but with the raspberries which have just started, we're having lovely fruit salads for breakfast.

The peas (snow and sugar snap) were wonderful while they lasted. We'll definitely plant more of those. We still have lots of romaine, which seems to be holding in the heat, but the spinach, arugula and mizuna have all bolted (started flowering) which makes them too bitter to eat. There's a definite art and science to planning succession planting to make sure you always have young and tasty greens - we're learning from our mistakes!

We have been freezing kale by the basket, and have harvested an armload of basil from the greenhouse to make pesto.

I'm realizing that there are things to learn about growing food, and then there are a whole bunch of other things to learn about eating from the garden. No more starting with a recipe and then looking for the ingredients. Rather, it's being creative with what's ready to eat, which can be a challenge when there's a lot of one or two things. The zucchini and pattypan squash have just started, and it looks like we've planted at least 4 times too many plants, so these notoriously high-volume producers are going to challenge us!

Another thing about learning to eat from the garden is reralizing that it's okay to actually eat something you're very proud of, like our fennel. We have a forest of gently waving fennel fronds, with fennel that has actually bulbed beautifully (which doesn't always happen, according to Nick our neighbour). I realized last week that I was subconsciously saving it for something, because I like fennel so much and it's always so expensive in the stores. I'm not sure WHAT I was saving it for, but the risk is that if I leave it much longer, it will be get old and woody. So fennel is now on the eat-every-day list.

Our beets are just starting to be ready to eat, and they're beautiful! We planted golden beets and chioggia beets, which are bright pink and striped. We definitely will need to plant more of those next year, too.

And we harvested our garlic, which we planted in October. The photo shows it freshly pulled, but it's now nicely dried, and ready to use. It was quite interesting to watch it approach readiness-to-pick: each plant developed a funny pointy appendage that curled around more and more. I think it's called a scape. Nick said when it curled totally around in a full circle our garlic would be ready to eat.

I think that's it on the vegetable front! We have a busy summer in front of us - as well as managing the vegetable garden and planning for the winter growing we will do, we have a few projects that need doing, like putting a new roof on the wood shed, and finishing up splitting all the wood from when we had the trees taken down in the spring.

But the most important news: we have our name on a waiting list to purchase a snow-blower.

Much love to you all-

Mir

XOXO

Duck news

Before I started blogging about our adventures here at Mucky Boots, I was sending "Farm Updates" to family and friends via email. Here is one of them, from May 2009.

Hello everyone!

It's been a busy time at the farm - too busy to sit down and write an update! So here's some catch-up.

Happy and sad news on Mama Duck and her nest. A few weeks ago Kim called me out to the verandah on a Saturday morning, and there, swimming on the pond, was Mama and 14 wee fuzzy ducklings, all clustered around her tail end as if they were ball bearings and Mama was magnetic. (So sorry for the poor quality of the photo, but I didn't want to risk getting any closer!). That's the happy part. The sad part is that that was the last we saw of them. We don't know if once the ducklings were hatched she decided to take her wee ones away from Frankie and his barking, or if something terrible happened to them that night. Our worst fear is that somehow Petunia got them.

We feel horrible. But Mother Nature may have forgiven us, because we now have a nest full of very vocal baby birds (swallows, we think) in the ceiling of the verandah - there's a ventilation hole that should be screened, but isn't. We'll repair the screen when the babies are grown and flown, but for now it's quite fun to watch the parents flying in and out with snacks for the babies, and to hear the incredibly loud chirping of the brood.

The garden is changing every day. In the perennial beds tulips of a dozen different varieties have come and gone, and the day of the iris, the cornflower, columbines and phlox has arrived. Most showy of all are the poppies - cheerfully modest orange ones, and blowsily luxuriant Oriental red ones.

In the vegetable garden we are learning lots of lessons about how important nitrogen is in the production of leaves and roots (we almost lost some squash plants), and about the benefits of succession planting (planting the same seeds over a few weeks, rather than all at once, so you don't end up with a mountain of spinach all bolting at the same time). We are continuing to eat wonderful salads from the garden, with romaine, Swiss chard, kale, spinach and mizuna. The peas are now about 4 feet tall and flowering. The raspberry bushes sound like some kind of machine, there are so many bees buzzing among the flowers.

Kim has taken charge of the orchard. We are learning there are a million things that can go wrong with fruit trees, but so far we haven't actually killed anything... With some new additions to the orchard we now have 3 apple trees (one is an espaliered tree with grafts of 6 different varieties!), 2 crabapple trees, 3 plum trees, 3 pear trees, 3 cherry trees, and 4 peach trees. We also have some loaded gooseberry bushes, and the blueberry bushes are already loaded with baby berries.

With the new trees in the orchard, and new tools, and new watering wands, we have spent an awful lot... But our favourite purchase by far is our new garden ornament, bought with Dad in mind.

Much love to you all!

Mir