Moving Farms, Barn Plans & Finding Windows…

Cucumber Seedling

We are going into our fourth season here at the farm on 41B and things have never been so exciting, stressful, and in flux.

Over the course of this growing season we’ll be moving over to our new farm. We’re moving to a 50 acre farm on Westham Island, an island at the mouth of the Fraser River and roughly a 5 minute drive from our current location in Ladner. The property has an old house and a small barn on it, so we are, all but starting from scratch.

After four years of renting land temporarily we are relieved to finally settle down and be able to put down some roots and up some infrastructure. The barn is first in line, but there is seeding a pasture for the chickens, building a propagation greenhouse, putting in tile drainage (an almost must in our rich, fertile yet, at times, wet Delta soils) and a few more projects that will be finished by summers end.

The barn design

We’ve been busy figuring out how big, given our budget, the barn can be and the simple task (or not so simple as we’ve discovered…) of laying out ‘what goes where’ inside. And by we, it is mostly John, Rachel’s husband, who, with his drafting and construction experience, has been tinkering, almost nightly, with the latest revisions. Walk-in coolers (yep that’s plural! Each vegetable has its own temperature and humidity preference and usually fall within one of two categories so we are building two coolers), a maintenance shop, an open post-harvest/washing area, room for the tractors and other equipment, and the list grows ever longer…

While the planning for the new farm continues, this growing year has started for us at the farm. April turned out to be a wet and frustrating one. And finding windows of opportunity is something we are learning to do. Talking to a few older farmers, windows or timing, often come up, how the better farmers would be able to find those tight windows and get whatever need to

Carrots, with dry soil! Only because we rolled the hoophouse away from them today. Planted in the hoophouse in March.

get done, done. That meant having everything ready for when it was ‘go time’. Supplies ready, people ready, equipment ready, everything ready. So after a few years we are becoming better at finding and working hard in those windows of opportunities when the sun shines and the westerlies come.

And so in early to mid April we found a few dry days to get on and do some field work and seed our first crops and transplant a few crops from the greenhouse out. And thank goodness we did. It has rained on and off ever since and we haven’t been able to get the tractors back on and with 20mm of rain forecasted for Thursday, it looks like we need our patience for a little longer.

Peas Popping Up

So the best we can do for now is to have everything ready for that next window and go once more until it rains again, but best if it comes soon, markets start in late May.

We’ll post some pictures of the new farm later in the week, until then here’s to hoping for brighter skies ahead.

Kate Petrusa wrote a great article about our farm and has featured us along with lots of other great, young farmers in the Fraser Valley. Thanks Kate and UBC Farm!

A few photos of the farm in early spring.

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2012 CSA Application

Here is our 2012 application form for our Community Supported Agriculture program. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Two Box Options:

Regular Box: $25.00/week over 20 weeks : $500 a share

*Small Box: $15.00/week over 20 weeks: $330 a share*

WHY SUPPORT A CSA?

•  Put a face to your food. Direct connection between the members and us, your local farmers.

• Expand your culinary horizons. Try things that you typically wouldn’t buy. But don’t worry we will send out recipes for things like salsa verde made with Tomatillos.

• TASTE! Everything is fresh, in season and at its peak.

• You support the local economy. Your membership keeps your food dollars in the community.

• You support local, small scale, sustainable agriculture.

• Your food miles are reduced and you are contributing to regional food security.

• You can come visit the farm and get your hands dirty…if you want! We welcome members to visit to get a hands on look at their food production.

In Ladner, being on the Pacific Flyway, we are lucky to have seasonal visitors like Sandhill Cranes, Night Herons, Snow Geese, all sorts of waterfowl and of course an array of birds of prey.

While we enjoy seeing these birds out in the fields (and the free manure they provide!), there are certainly some extra management that we have to do to ensure fall and winter harvests. Overnight hundreds of ducks can easily decimate any overwintering crops such as carrots, broccoli and leeks and most cover crops we plant. For crops we want to protect we put floating row cover over the crop to prevent access, it works well but it does take more time harvesting as we have to remove the row cover every time we need to harvest. Potatoes are one of the geese’s favourite foods, digging their bills into the mucky soil just for any remaining potatoes left in the fields. They make quite the holes in the ground.

Many farms in Delta work with Delta Farm and Wildlife Trust to plant winter cover crops specifically for the migrating birds as well as providing grassland set-asides.

At our scale of farming our crop losses due to waterfowl are relatively low, but for many other farmers there is a noticeable economic reality to all the birds migrating and stopping though Ladner on their way down south.

Our last farmers market for the 2011 growing year was last Saturday. THANK YOU to all our wonderful customers who came out rain, sun, sleet and snow (all of which occurred this year!). We’ll be back at the markets in early April with greens and roots again.

Planning and ordering have taken over from harvesting at the farm. We just ordered another wheel hoe from Valley Oak in California. We were so impressed with the one we purchased last season we know this new one will be put to good use in no time.

Most of our seed orders are complete. Every year a shipment or two ends up sitting at the boarder for a few days but this year was almost without issue. All is left now is ordering potatoes, along with our standard spuds we will try some fingerlings this year.

Of course there is always a few sunny days to spend weeding the hoophouse this time of year (instead of the computer). The solar energy can quickly make for 20 degree difference between outside and in so it is rather enjoyable to be weeding in t-shirts this time of year!

Have you seen these new articles featuring our farm?

Vancouver is Awesome

Western Producer  Page 77

One of the best things about working alongside a sibling is that one can take off on vacation knowing things are covered at the farm. Rachel and her family stayed at the farm, harvesting and going to market, while I was able to get away for a couple of weeks.

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Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alberta and back into BC made for a 3556 KM roadtrip. I travelled through the largest potato producing county in America, caught a glimpse from the highway of the large amounts of hay in storage that is grown all across the Columbia Basin, viewed the rolling ranchland turned into forest in Idaho,and saw the views of the Flathead Valley as prairie turns to mountains in Northwestern Montana (albeit from a chairlift with skis strapped to my feet). I travelled across the Hi-Line in Montana where energy development and ranching seems to coincide, passing through dusty farming towns on the way to the Alberta border.

Two stops on the trip were the most memeroable.

The first was at a friends ranch bordering the Sweet Grass Hills and the Milk River in Southern Alberta. Ranching is an extensive process, rather than the intensive way in which grow at our farm, the goal is to grow grass which in turn grows cows for market. The native prairie has never been broken with a plough and the wildlife, such as antelope, jack rabbits, grouse, white tailed deer, interact and work alongside ranchers. While checking cows across the range one can easily get lost in the vastness of the land. The harsh landscape and the economic realities of farming have taken their toll. Abandoned century old  farmhouses, skeletal remains of a calf born in a cold snap, for sale signs along a gravel road, but ranchers, with their pioneering spirit, seem to keep on turning native grass into slim profit margins which is a way of life that I have the utmost respect for.

The second highlight was visiting friends in the Kootenays at their farm in Johnson’s Landing. Colleen and Patrick run Stellar Seeds, a small scaled organic seed company, as well as their farm Kootenay Joe Farm. From just four acres they grow food for their local community as well as seed for farmers such as myself. Johnson’s Landing is remote, an hours drive from Kaslo, much of it on a winding gravel road. Goats, chickens and ducks provide a great source of companionship and, of course, fertility for them. Their water comes from the creek up the mountain and wildlife is abound. Deer fences is the only way to secure any sort of harvest in these parts. Both, Colleen and Patrick, are passionate farmers, involved in seed security and sovereignty and local food. They partake in many ‘Seedy Saturdays’ across the province, a seed swapping event that allows farmers and gardeners to exchange their own local and diverse seed with one another. They live simply and honestly and it was a treat to be able to visit their farm. Stellar Seeds can be found at www.stellarseeds.com

After leaving the Kootenays, the trip took me to Kamloops, through the ginseng in Walhachin, the feedlots at Cache Creek, through the Duffy Lake road onto a quick jaunt into the Pemberton Meadows and then back to the coast. Pulling up to the farm, Rachel, with Addie on her back, had just finished harvesting for the morning. Things have been in good hands while I’ve been away. Now for the 46 emails that have escaped me in a fortnight…