Homestead and Folly

I love Tomatoes. They were the first thing I ever grew as an adult in my garden and they come in so many different flavours and colours. They are the star of my garden. This year I had only a small garden while trying to sell our family homestead. I grew 4 varieties of cherry tomatoes, beef steaks,Roma's and some weird black heirloom tomato that stays crunchy when ripe. Not a huge fan. I did an experiment (something I find myself saying often!). I started, indoors,7 year old  Roma tomato seeds straight out of the package. In the second batch I planted saved Roma seeds which were two years old and were the offspring from the store bought plum tomatoes, saved, but not according to the experts. I know, I am living on the edge but having just gone through a hideous winter and coming out of February, perhaps a little shack happy, I was itching to do something garden-y. The experts have this method whereby you put the saved seeds from a fresh tomato in a bit of water in a s

We have been raising rabbits for meat for almost a year and having gone through a long, cold winter now, I have tallied the costs and they don't look good. When it comes down to it, the way we raise rabbits in wood shavings in a hutch, with a tractor for access to fresh weeds and grass is too expensive. Either they have to go or we have to find a better way. Sometimes when we ran out of bedding last winter, we would use some of the rabbit's food hay as bedding for them,and it worked fine. We ran out of hay but I got to thinking about the insulating properties. You drop a glob of hay in and the rabbits break it up, chew some and stand on some. They make a nest out of it and sleep in it. Rabbits are very clean animals and I have read if you keep them clean they will not have problems or parasites. We need to cut out the wood shavings and switch to hay. Hay is $4.00 a bale and wood shavings are $8.00 a bag. The hay is half the cost and lasts twice as long. My next probl

After a few false starts where I thought my zucchini looked like it was producing only to discover the small zukes had rotted from being unfertilized, I took matters into my own hands...literally. I began taking pollen from the male flower and gently placing it in the female flower with the tip of my finger and tho this made me feel slightly dirty, it produced some very nice zucchinis. Stalled, sick pole beans My pole beans were off to a promising start and then they stalled out, turned yellow and then got red edges. They have not grown in weeks and I am fairly certain they have a virus or bacteria. I have always planted pole beans and they have always done well. Well, they are dead. Fail.  Luckily I also planted bush beans in the hoop house so I will still have a few green beans to eat but not the haul I usually get around my bean tee-pee. The Mini-hoop house experiment has shown me just how much further along heat-loving plants get while sheltered from th

When I was four, my mom nicknamed me "Sarah Strawberry". It may have been my strawberry blond hair but more likely it was my love of strawberries that won me this name. We ate the last jar of homemade jam at the end of May and I have been counting the days, jealous of my pals in America and their mouth watering photos of strawberries that come to them much earlier than we have them! We were going to go picking last weekend but figured that they probably wouldn't let us on account of Hurricane Arthur knocking on their door. I held off buying a single grocery store berry, holding out. Finally picking day arrived. We woke up at 7 and hit the road before it got too hot. We drove for a little over an hour, my son getting more and more excited. We have been taking him to U-picks since he could walk and have trained him as a rather skilled picker. We took most of our own baskets and wooden holders having learnt in the past that they can cost quite a bit. We walked to our

The apples stayed on the tree, even if the tree tipped over After we gathered emergency supplies such as water, food for our family, BBQ fuel, batteries and flashlights, a trip to the library and cleaned up the yard, I set my attention to  protecting the animals and the gardens. After figuring out the prevailing winds would be from the South and the South West, we turned the rabbit tractors into the wind so they wouldn't flip, locked the animals all inside securely and set our sites to the plants. I opened up the hoop house figuring nothing was going to keep that plastic shut anyway. I added a few more tomato cages and tied them together and then to the hoop house frame. My cukes had just sprouted their first tiny cucumbers the day before the hurricane so I tied the vines down low to the ground to a post. I like to use pipe cleaners because we always have them laying around after children have finished craft projects and because their soft padding doesn't dig into

As I awaited a root canal at the dentist recently in the city, I was asked "what would you be doing on a sunny day like today if you weren't here?" I laughed nervously and decided to answer honestly "I would be putting up fences and a gate for my meat chickens, weeding the garden and sexing rabbits". Much to my surprise she did not look at me like I was speaking in tongues, but instead this prompted a whole discussion on chickens. My partner had the great idea to fence a corner of our lot and move an existing coop there in the small forested area, under the birch trees, in an unused portion of the yard. They would be let out into the bigger yard to free range  but this would act as their coop area and supply many bugs and plants to munch. I begrudgingly removed my hammock from the area and the family stood looking on, brainstorming ideas about where to situate the gate, the fence and the coop. As we already had a main metal farm fence running the ed

Look closely near the centre of the picture and you can see a deer munching happily away I sprinkled lettuce, kale, pok choi, spinach and romaine lettuce seeds very early this year while it was still chilly. I was too lazy to plant them in rows and so, carelessly mixed the tiny seeds, and sprinkled them in the garden bed. Even though many of the packets said that these greens like the cold, nothing really started taking off until last month when everything came up and the lettuce has been growing like crazy. I confess I cannot say the same for the spinach. I have never successfully grown spinach on this property. There I said it. I have tried different soil, different pots and garden beds. I don't know if it is pests or just lack of green thumb. It is supposed to be very easy to grow. Well, I can't. The kale was quickly eaten by bugs as was the pok choi. The lettuce, however, is perfectly untouched by pests. Normally slugs and leaf eaters like lettuce but not one

It has been a long time since my last post and that is because as I was about to post my latest about our house closing, shopping for a new homestead and preparing to move all of the animals and some of the plants, the deal came crashing down. My family was devastated. Everything was signed and ready to close when the buyer's bank pulled their financing. We are now back on the market but still going forward with this year's garden, animal preparations and firewood processing. After all, if we don't manage to sell our house this year, winter will still come and we will still want good, fresh food and wood to keep us warm. The day the deal fell through, I made a list and when my Farmer's market opened on Saturday I went in and bought eight more tomato plants. As I hadn't started many seedlings indoors this year, I had to buy a great deal. I also bought cucumber plants, basil and Jalapeno for the hoop house This is my favourite time of year becau

Not much but the grass is turning green and it makes me happy This week we have been busy getting our little homestead ready to sell. We have been trying to make our rather weather-beaten little animal tractors and hutches look more charming and less like wrecked heaps all over the lawn. The ice and snow have melted and we were finally able to move the animals around and spread them out so that only two are visible in the corner of the front lawn/field. The pregnant Doe, Floppsy has been relocated to near the wood shelter and she has been gleefully digging for days. Every evening I go out to feed and water her and thwart her digging advancements by placing large rocks in the holes she has dug to escape. The Buck, Jack, is beside the house but we will move him to the back yard as soon as we get rid of the big pile of brush we cut down and placed there last fall. The other Doe, Jill and all of her babies are in two tractors on the front lawn and are currently running and

We are raising our second batch of bunnies having eaten all of the previous batch and having learned a lot. We have learned to keep better records and to sex the rabbit offspring earlier, before they begin mating! We have learned some mother rabbits do not automatically know how to care for their offspring and that we were lucky and spoiled by Jill who seems to be an expert even during this very challenging winter. She birthed 7 rabbits in minus 18 degree Celsius (around 0 F) weather and all of her babies are thriving! We have learned that rabbits you raise yourself are more difficult, emotionally,  to kill because they try and cuddle you and they are so cute and soft but that they are physically easier to kill and their skin comes off easily once you know how. In fact much easier than plucking a chicken. We have learned how to prepare rabbit dishes and that in general, people are turned off from eating anything cute, which seems shallow and warped but whether I blame cute Disney

It is one thing to read that rabbit meat is the most efficient source of protein and makes the most sense to raise, it is another thing to chomp down on a piece of rabbit meat. It is a challenge to eat something new and a challenge to eat something I found cute and cuddly. We didn't try to eat our rabbit meat right away but instead got some emotional distance from it by keeping it in the freezer for a few weeks. Try as we might, we couldn't help but get attached to these animals, we know they will be food, but we can't help interacting, talking to them and getting to know the ones that stand out. I was determined to get used to rabbit meat, never having tried it. I took some out of the freezer and figured I would make something that would be so yummy, I wouldn't even know the rabbit was there, rather than focusing right off on it's unique qualities. It was my husband's turn to cook and we decided on our favourite curry recipe.  It tasted wonderful but I

 A few years ago I ordered slips for sweet potatoes from a seed catalogue. They came on time and with a warning that said not to plant them right away but to get them used to the air and the light gradually. I did that and then planted them one warm evening. They grew and I thought I had successfully planted sweet potatoes but then over the next few days I watched as every single one of them died. After testing the soil and re-thinking all of the steps, and receiving some advice, I realized I hadn't let them adjust long enough. I ran across an Internet article on starting your own sweet potato vine indoors and after reading that, I can't believe it hadn't occurred to me before. This year I am determined to do it and as I wait for spring, I have started a sweet potato growing indoors. I read several blogs on how to accomplish this and it sounded so easy. Most people said it is "so easy a child could do it" and that many people remember starting vines

  Chicken Pinata We finally got rid of that trouble-making rooster, Thomson. He was terrorizing the hens and they didn't want to go lay eggs in their nesting boxes. They would cower in the corner. He wouldn't just mount them but would stand on them at length while he ate supper, until our head rooster would chase him off. He is now a six pound roasting chicken in our freezer.  Today the chickens seem much more comfortable, even if it it was 14 below freezing this morning.  I brought them some kale and hung it from a rope. They all gathered around and munched it up, making it swing back and forth, playing chicken pinata and buck-bucking, glad to have some greens. Surely our egg production will go up without the "hell in a feather boa" rooster to terrorize them. Like Earl, Thomson had to die.

Pile of baby bunnies I wish I could proclaim "spring has sprung!" like some of my twitter followers, but the best I can do is "surely winter can't last forever, right?!"  I am clinging to the small things like the time changing and being able to do a few extra chores in the evening, baby bunnies, an occasional sunny day when the temperature hovers around freezing instead of twenty below, and the sound of the woodpeckers that have started to return. The signs are subtle but they are there if you look for them. I have a lot of outdoor projects and plans but I am waiting until the weather turns warmer,even a little. It isn't that I couldn't build a window box right now outside but when the weather gets nice I will enjoy it. I could go fix the flapping plastic that mostly blew off of one of my hoop houses in the last big storm, but lately it is all I can do, to do just the necessary chores, and that is it. There are some days I spend all day outsid

A winter sun rises on a difficult day We bought some breeding rabbits, housed them, fed them, cared for them and then it was time to kill and eat them. They went from squiggly little grub-like babies to cute fuzzy bunnies hopping about, to fully grown rabbits. The day was cloudy but not cold with plenty of snow on the ground. We had decided today was the day as the rabbits were big enough to eat now and the weather lately had meant that it was taking more and more work to care for them, not to mention, we were going through expensive feed like crazy. The mother rabbits were due to kindle in a week and there simply was no longer room for these grown rabbits. Just getting over a cold, I joined my husband outside after he had killed the five rabbits and he had them laying in a row in the snow to keep them cool. After a failed attempt at trying to gut them on a table, which was really hard on the ol' back, I got some rope, and using the wood beams of the wood shelter, we