Where do Americans get their Calories? (Click for an interactive graph)

Cheap food has its price

Summertime…the livin’s easy

Sike!  The days have blended together and I lost track of how long it’s been since the last update.  What with animals getting out twice in as many days a month ago, my she-devil girlfriend Kate, and being in my friends Kevin and Jenn’s wedding last weekend in Sunday, I’ve finally settled back into a good routine and the farm has basically caught up with weeds.  The garden is certainly a sight to be seen.  Right now there are plenty of shell and sugar snap peas, new potatoes, swiss chard, some broccoli and cauliflower, scallions, parsley, basil, and cilantro.  Oh yeah, we have carrots!  How I missed carrots.  They are so sweet, tasty, and worth all the hand-weeding we had done two to three weeks prior to beginning to harvest them.

Let me tell you a thing or two about weeding.  It is hard, hot work since the best time to weed is usually under dry and hot conditions.  The reason is that despite your best efforts to pull and cut weeds, they can and will replant themselves if they still have roots available and are somewhat covered by soil.  This is even easier if it rains the night after you weed.  However, hot and dry conditions severely reduce the chances of weeds replanting because if their roots are exposed, they will quickly wilt and die.  Yes, many plants die in the making of even your veggies.  As Elton John once sang, it’s the ciiiiiircle, the circle of liiiiiife.

Leah and I also trellised the tomatoes this week, back-breaking work if I’ve ever done any.  It isn’t time-consuming but requires a lot of stooping to wrap string around trellis posts and picking up plants lying on the ground.  Glad we’re done with that task.  Enough said.

There hasn’t been much horse work as of late since it’s mostly cultivation and that is generally quick work.  Horses are fly magnets though and I always feel bad for them because they are out on the pasture with no shade and not too much relief from flies.  Carl left which is good because he was the super fly magnet.  Since he was the weakest horse and lowest on the totem pole, he had the most flies on him.  Last week he moved in with his owner Django.  In any case, what is cool is that the horses do have a pretty good adaptation to flies; Bill, Millie, and Perry stand side by side, head to tail so that when they swing their tails, they shoo away the flies on the neighboring horse’s face.  Evolution at its finest.

Sometimes I wish I evolved the ability to stay cool without sweating gallons of water.  Thankfully it has cooled off a little bit today.  This weekend I have to do animal chores instead of working or going to market.  It’s a good arrangement: I plan on hanging out, cleaning up around the yurt, and building a solar heated shower.  I’m excited for the shower!  There is also an ice cream shop in Wiscasset that has the best ice cream I’ve had ever: ginger ice cream.  It is made with real, fresh ginger rather than candied ginger.  Leah and I daydream about eating it after work on a hot day, which has been almost every day the last two weeks.  Speaking of which, I believe I will go have some now.  Adios!

 

Gee Haw!

Can't take credit for the post title; I saw it on some kid's T-shirt.  However, horses have been on my brain every day.  I either daydream about working with them or dream about it.  On an eerie note, I had been talking to another local horse farmer named Donnieabout plowing with horses, got to see his different plows, and learned some of the differences in design, comfort and efficiency of them.  I mentioned that Jeff had told me that our plow's pole was made of pine, which is a soft wood that is light and therefore generally breaks pretty easily under heavy stress.  It's good for building houses and light furniture but not as durable as hardwoods such as oak, maple, ash, or cherry.  In any case, he forewarned me about poles snapping and possible flipping you over as the horses continue to pull the implement.  That was last Sunday.  Monday, I was plowing with Bill and Perry and of course, the pole starts to snap as I was backing them.  Thankfully this is a less dangerous situation and neither I nor the horses were hurt.  I very easily could have gotten hurt if I hadn't been aware.   Thanks Donnie!

Oh yeah, my parents were up here for a week!  We celebrated both their birthdays on the 2nd and 10th for my mom and dad respectively.  Lobster was abound and the Burchsteads were gracious enough to share their house nearby and have my parents as guests for a few nights.  I ate like a king then, and this past weekend when I had 2 and a half days off to visit them at the resort they were staying at for the rest of the week.  I got to fish with my dad on his birthday, eat some locally caught bass and perch, and experience some parts of western Maine.  All in all it was a good week.  My mom took some video of me plowing with them in any case and maybe I'll be able to post it at some point.  Until then, check out this stock video I found in the archives (of Google).

Buckwheat Blossom also has a second apprentice as of this past Wednesday as well.  Her name is Leah (I think that's the right version) and she is a Mainer.  It will definitely be nice to have someone else to help out on the farm even if she's only staying until the end of August.  We will be sharing the kitchen and outhouse at the yurt as well.  I'm excited to be able to switch off cooking meals if possible so that we can sort of come home to a meal rather than getting in at 7:30 or so and trying to hurriedly make a meal that will suffice after working all day.

Next week is the summer solstice, June 20th, officially the longest day of the year!  Go celebrate with some local produce and some friends while you enjoy the sun for hours and hours.  I will hopefully be going back home soon.  Keep you guys posted.  Hasta tarde mis amigos...

It's Only Going to Get Busier

It was a wonderful week spent with my friend Beth.  She got along with the animals, except the Ram that I named Noodles cuz he keeps on Ramen me.  Beth also took lots of cool photos of various things posted on facebook.  Check it out!  She is a great photographer so check out some of her other albums as well.

This past week has involved discing and harrowing soil to prepare beds for the potatoes, winter squash, and onions.  I drove Millie and Karl(?) to do that.  Karl is out of shape and it was a hot day for once so he sweated up a storm.  Karl actually sweat so much that Millie was licking him for moisture and salt.  Sexxxy.  On a related note, the horses and sheep look much, much better after being put out on pasture.

One of these days I will take a picture of the pasture and how we graze them.  It's cool setting up fences and making daily decisions about how much pasture we will give them in order to graze the grass efficiently and evenly while not sacrificing the animals' nutrition.  Talk about intensive management.  Try managing how much an animal eats!

Other work included seeding tons of winter squash by hand and hand-transplanting about 50 trays of onions (about 30,000 individual onion plants).  It took the work of up to 4 people at a time over 3 days to finish the transplanting.  I did a quick calculation and it came out to around 50 hours of labor.  It would have been much longer if we hadn't used this system that Jeff found in a 1930's USDA publication about transplanting onions.  Basically we laid the seedlings in trenches made by a wheel hoe plow and plowed the soil back into the trenches after they were laid down.  As Jeff sang, "Wheel Hoe Power!"

Pow!

Well, that's all she wrote for now.  I must be off to knit for a special someone who is coming to visit for a week in Maine this coming Thursday.  Real men knit. 

We’re already a third through May!?!? Whoa.

As many may guess, it has been a busy month for me.  Needless to say, I am fully engrossed in agriculture of the sustainable variety.  I have learned a lot in the past few weeks about agricultural concepts in general, how hectic farm life can be, and that no matter how happy you are, seasonal allergies don’t give lick.

About 2 weeks ago, Jeff and I took many, many soil samples to send to Cooperative Extension.  This task is so complicated that I will put it in list form:

1.     Use a shovel to dig a profile of the soil 6-8 inches deep.

2.     Dump said profile into a bucket.

3.     Mix this soil with other soil from the same field.

4.     Walk in a zig zag pattern while repeating steps 1-3 until the field is covered.

5.     Put well-mixed soil in a baggie/extension box.

It is actually very monotonous but important to test your soil to determine what nutrients, micronutrients, and minerals it may be lacking.  What is, or isn’t, in your soil can make or break whether you have a good crop or bad crop of any given veggie.  Furthermore, a plant lacking in some nutrients will be less healthy and therefore more susceptible to disease and pests; just like us! 

However monotonous soil testing may be, it did give me an opportunity to get to know the farm better.  I could see which fields and pastures were rocky, which were heavier (have more clay particles), which were lighter (sandier), and which had more or less weeds.  All the information about soil structure, its previous use, and slope will often strongly determine what you should plant in each bed since the character of the soil may suit one crop over another.  For example, you wouldn’t want to plant carrots in rocky soil because they will turn out all crooked and gnarly looking.  They may taste fine, but won’t be marketable.  As a matter of fact, carrots like “muck,” which is a finer soil that is very high in organic matter.

More exciting that soil are the 18 lambs we had born from 10 ewes within a week and a half of each other.  All 18 were born without trouble and are pretty darn cute.  Pictures will be up soon (probably will be up courtesy of my childhood friend Elizabeth who is coming up this weekend and is an excellent photographer).  There are plenty of booster shots, extra vitamins, and supplements that we feed them to make sure they are healthy.  I had the privilege of giving them some shots as well as giving them a single earring.  These earrings are tags we put on them so we can tell each lamb apart and identify them quickly should something happen.

Tomorrow we will be training the lambs to the electric fence so they don’t hurt themselves and shock to death if they get caught in it.  Sound terrible?  That’s why we are training them to a small section of fence and monitoring how they interact with it.  What with how they like to chase each other around and hop in the air, they could easily goof and get caught in the fence.

Jeff and I have also been using the horses to pretty regularly work the soil with either a disc or a harrow.  These implements loosen the top 6-8 inches of the soil while ripping up or pushing aside any weeds growing on the surface and exposing them to the air, stopping their growth and killing them (hopefully).  With this harrowed soil, it’s easy to rake out beds and either seed, or transplant veggies.  I will describe harrowing in greater detail next update.  My allergies are telling me to sleep so that I will do. 

Real Men Wear Suspenders

I’m sitting across the street of Reny’s at the Maine Coast Book Shop in Damariscotta.  Reny’s is a sweet local department store that sells lots of random stuff including Carhartts.  I ended up not getting any pants, which I probably could use, but I did buy a pair of red Carhartt suspenders for myself and also for Jeff so that we can match.  They’re pretty sweet and practical; especially when you have to wear a belt all day and it gets uncomfortable and sweaty.  Plus you get more circulation in your undercarriage.  That is all.

 Update:  Jeff and I have worn our suspenders together on several occassions and people have commented on it.  I've begun the assembly of the official Buckwheat Blossom uniform.