Monster veggies and a special visit

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 August 2009.

Hello everyone!

Harvest time has arrived. We are wallowing in a bounty of tomatoes, potatoes, beets, carrots, kale, chard and apples, and we grow 'em big and we grow 'em strange out here at Mucky Boots. Here are pictures of a really big potato we grew, and the oddest 4-legged carrot we have ever seen. And a picture of my bowl of apple cereal illustrating why the apple variety we are currently harvesting is called "Pink Lady."

The best part of the last few weeks, unquestionably, was Kimystree's visit. What a special thing, to have my beloved sister here for almost a week - thanks, Dave, for getting the ball rolling and for holding down the fort at home so she could come. Sister Kim came determined to help with the harvest, so we bought the Rolls Royce of apple pickers and picked the first bushel basket of Pink Ladies. Then we got to work - we made and canned apple butter and applesauce and filled the dehydrator twice to make dried apples, and were we ever grateful for whoever invented the peeling-coring-slicing machine we used and grateful to Dad who gave it to us! With the addition of 15 jars of crabapple jelly made after Kim went home, our cold storage shelves are filling up!

Kimystree is Frankie's new favourite person, and he is moping now that she is gone. He followed her everywhere, and, most tellingly, stopped barking at her every time she moved (which is his normal procedure for house guests).

The other news of note is that Sweetie Kim has added to her stringed family with the purchase of her first (and undoubtedly not last) banjo, on-line from a dealer in North Carolina. When it arrived she looked inside and found "J. Romero Banjos, Cobble Hill, BC." Imagine that! She had been on the maker's website, but didn't realize he was in Cobble Hill, just down the road. Needless to say, she has already been in touch with him, to tell him his banjo (a special one featured on his website) came home to BC to roost. Also needless to say, she learned 3 songs within a day...

Lots of love to you all!

Mir

XOXO

Wildlife adventures

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 August 2009.

Hello everyone!

We have had lots of excitement here at Mucky Boots this week: a cougar was killed on either our property or our neighbour's on Monday night. Both our properties back onto Vaux Road, which was where the conservation officers killed the cougar - but our fences don't go that far, so we don't know which property it was on. Regardless, it was CLOSE! I got a call from Nick around suppertime - he had heard a bunch of dogs barking and went out to investigate, and it turned out he was hearing the five specially trained beagles (yes, beagles) that are used to track cougars. The conservation officers told him to go back home and put his chickens in the barn, which is when he called me to let me know. So I called in the cats and shortly after there was a shot and the cougar had been killed. I don't know why it was killed rather than tranquilized and relocated.

Much less dramatic was the wasps nest I accidentally discovered the day before - it turns out it was a specific species of wasp that build nests under things: decks, floors, and in my case, one of the wooden covers to the septic tank. There I was, cleaning up the dead bamboo leaves in the little flagstone patio, and all of a sudden I got bit, twice. Ouch!

We have just come through a wicked hot spell - 37-39 degrees in the shade every day for a week. Frankie, the smart dog that he is, has fully made the transition to farm dog, and now sleeps under the truck on hot days. The weather has been great for our tomatoes, which are ripening faster than we can eat them. We're using the dehydrator to make sun-dried tomatoes, and are accumulating enough ripe tomatoes to make a big batch of tomato sauce for canning.

It's fun learning how to can - so far I have made pickled beets and pickled beans. The beets were fun: some were golden and some were Chioggia beets, which are striped red and white when raw, but cook to red or pink or even white. So when they were all mixed up, they looked like jewels!

Our perennial garden is a mess - things have been so dry, and we've been unsure how much we can water before we run our well dry. The only things blooming right now are the echinacea and my absolute favourite the globe thistle. Everything else looks brown and ragged. I am remembering the moist, dewy, flower-filled days of May with longing!

Kim and I were out shopping today. New binders: $3.99. Package of pencils: $0.99. New lunch kit: $8.99. Not having to buy any of it: priceless!

Lots of love to you all-

Mir

XOXO

P.S. (Next day) I should have waited until today to send yesterday's farm update! Here is a photo of this morning's encounter with wildlife. Note that the tape measure is in INCHES, not CENTIMETRES!

There's a reason they call it a farmer's tan

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 July 2009.

Hello everyone!

I always suspected this little venture into farming would have much to teach me: about the cyclical nature of growth and decay, and the futility of striving for perfection. Well, here's another one: you can't care what you look like when you spend several hours every day on your hands and knees digging in the dirt...

I wrote in an earlier update about the importance of having clothes that you work in, and clothes that you go out in public in, and that the two should never be confused or your public clothes will soon suffer irreparable harm and consequently become work clothes. My thinking on this critical issue has evolved in the last few months (or my level of dirtiness has increased, or the number of presentable clothes in my closet has reached a critical low). Now I start the day in work clothes, and if I have to go out in public sometime in the day, for example for an urgent trip to Rona for garden hose, or a run to Buckerfields for more alfalfa meal for my ailing squash plants, I just go dirty. Dirty knees, dirty fingernails, dirty face, sweaty hair under a ball cap. If they can't understand at Rona or Buckerfields, then there's something wrong. I've even gone into Tim's for coffee in all my dirty glory, and no one batted an eye. There's an advantage to living in Duncan!

The other lesson in vanity I am learning has to do with the fact that it has been blistering hot and sunny almost every day for the last couple of months. And despite being in daily contact with SPF 50, I have ended up with a brown face and neck, brown arms, and brown knees: a farmer's tan! My honey has one, too, so I don't need to feel embarrassed without my clothes in front of her. But I am going for my first massage in about 6 months tomorrow, and I am really, really hoping the massage therapist keeps her laughter to herself...

In the garden we have finished off the last of the peas, fennel (yes, the fennel I was saving for a special occasion) and strawberries, and are mostly through the raspberries. Our freezer is full of big bags of berries, which feels great! We are starting to eat the beets and carrots, and the lovely Dragon's Tongue beans.

The zucchini and pattypan squash plants suffered a bad bout of blossom-end-rot (the things I am learning...) but seem to have emerged in reasonably good health. It gave us a brief respite from the daily enforced eating of squash... We have planted the additional chard, beets, carrots, rutabagas and greens that we hope will give us crops through the fall and even, for some of them, through the winter.

We have just started eating blueberries, and our winter squash plants (buttercup, butternut and spaghetti) seem to be doing what they're supposed to (thank goodness, because we wouldn't know the difference). The tomatoes are going great guns in the greenhouse (the photo is of one of our heritage Green Zebra tomato plants), and our three big beds of potato plants are starting to keel over and dry up, which we DO know they're supposed to do).

On the flower front, everything is pretty much crispy dried - the poppies are all crunchy seed pods and brown leaves, just like the columbines. Everything else is just crispy from the heat. But the bee balm has just started to flower. We have a great patch of bright red bee balm in front of the house, which we're familiar with, but we were tickled pink (literally) with a batch of purple, pink and white bee balm in the vegetable garden. It's such a cheerful flower - it's impossible to be unhappy looking at bee balm. It is well named, because the bees love it, as you can see if you look closely!

Love to you all!

Mir

XOXO

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