I'm back

Four years later I'm posting an update. Gotta stay true to the photo blog theme so my latest portrait from fall garden work. I tried to revive this blog two years ago but I wasn't feeling it.

Still farting around in gardens and growing food but in Toronto.  Check out Big City Greens.

Hopefully google dosen't delete farm yogi so I'll try and post every now again to keep this shit alive. But I don't think things get deleted from the internet?

The font and colours of this blog are atrocious. But I kind of like how bad it is.  Right now I should be working on my website or looking for a job. Whatever. Is anyone actually reading this? Tell me if you do.

Autumn Update

Fall is here, and it is somewhat rainy but with days and patches of sunlight. There is alot of harvesting happening. Tomatoes, eggplant, string beans, pepper, cucumbers, plenty of steamed greens, steady supply of salad greens.... The meals at the centre are mostly from the garden and are so fresh and delicious! 


Cover crops of buckwheat were scythed, market every Tuesday, seeds are being collected. The seeds shown here are quinoa plants! Hazel made a beautiful farm stand sandwich board as a road advertisement. 

Plaid Attack!

Dry Peas

The soup peas died back and we collected them all, now they are sitting around in large bundles drying out. The problem is the prop house is really old and it has been raining alot lately so there is some major leakage happening. The peas are constantly damp, which is not ideal for harvesting seed. 

Divia, the woman in burgandy helped out for a bit. She is a strong force and also hilarious. 

the worm man

Tuesday Market

I haven't updated in a while, mostly because I am lazy. But also because I don't believe many people are reading this. We are going to market on Tuesdays now. Here are some getting ready and set up photos! Harvesting for market is quite a bit of work. For some reason I thought it was the easiest part of farming, yea right!

Flowers, Hay and Seeds

They hayfields were cut, the hay was bailed by another farmer with fancy equipment, then we collected the bails onto the back of a pickup and stored for next year. Good crew, good times. 

So after bailing the hay I was really tired and it was hot out so Phil gave us ginger root beer. This is me stomping on dried seed pods. The stomping breaks the dried seed pods freeing all the little black seeds.

Then we sift through the seeds getting rid of debris and dirt, but the seeds in paper envelopes and voila! Seeds for next year or to sell! 

Poppyseeeeeeeed

The Projects

We are farmers, not builders. These are the projects, ghetto but they work. (I think)

Solar Dehydration

Haven't been on the farm much because I have been working on a solar food dehydrator with Brandon. Basically it is a glass box that collects heat and you put fruits or greens that you want to dry out in the glass box. i.e. sun dried tomatoes, kale chips, apple chips etc. 


The thing is you can't simply build a box, there needs to be some air flow or else the food will go moldy. I think the design I found will work, at least I hope it does. All week Brandon and I have been piecing this thing together with our combined carpentry skills, which are fairly scrappy, and we spoke in various accents the main ones being british and rastafarian. I learned how to use some power tools which was pretty sweet. 

In the end it didn't work because we didn't use single paned glass we used double paned glass so shit got moist and mouldy. whatever. 

Side note. Went to Maxwell Lake with my visiting buddy Zach. He did the insaneo rope swing. 

Shankar the Great

This is Shankar the director of the Centre. He used to be a race car driver in his youth and is a retired University professor as well as a talented musician.

Saving Seed

These are kale seed pods which we have cut from a bed of kale that has already flowered and gone to seed. They are now drying in the prop house, the pods will eventually open, popping all the tiny black seeds out for collection


Growing for seed is a whole other area of farming which is very interesting. Here are some things I have learned:


-If you the bed you are growing is leafy greens, you should mostly leave it alone so the plants can do their thing and go to flower which will then make seeds. If they are fruit then you then you can eat them but keep the seeds! 


-Make sure that there are no other plants in your field that are in the same family as the plants you are growing for seed. If they cross pollinate the fruit or produce will most likely not be edible or taste funny, I think it is kind of like in-breeding. This is a hard one for me personally, and you have to know your botanical family names or consult a smart plant/farm person


-When selecting the plant you will be harvesting seed from, make sure it has strong attributes and do not collect from plants that have unattractive qualities i.e. lettuce plants that bolt early


-My favorite, you don't really need to fuss over your seed saving bed too too much i.e. fertilize, weed and each plant produces thousands of seeds!

Comfrey Demo

July has mostly slowed down, now that we have managed to get a handle on most of the weeds. The field tomatoes are tied up and are starting to ripen, we have our first eggplant and carrots. Cabbage is plentiful as well as the turnips. The lettuce is also plentiful. I am due for a farm walkabout, which I will probably do soon(ish). Taking pictures for the blog all the time is kind of not my thing I am realizing. 

The plant Yoni is picking is comfrey, grows all over like a weed. After we harvest it and put it in bins weighed down by rocks, it rots for two weeks. We dilute the rotted comfrey in water and it is a really good fertilizer. The nasty rotted mass of the plant can also be used as a fertilizing mulch for tomatoes or whatever needs a good kick in the garden. It smells pretty nasty. I hear it is such a good fertilizer because Comfrey has a really long tap root which draws alot of deep nutrients and retains them.


My question is, who the hell thought of trying this in the first place?

Number one farm cutie

HEAT wave Big Font Edition

Yoni and Hazel were clearing out plants that started to go to seed in our compost pile so that the seeds dont drop and spread further weeds when we apply compost. First off look at the size of this collard, Second, if you look from far away, or not carefully at the photo, doesn't Yoni look like a small gnome standing or growing from the edge of the shurb? I really think so. ha.

Brandon and I harvested lettuce and asian greens in the morning. Here are some things I have learned about harvesting, lettuce and mustards in particular from cheif operator Sofya:

-morning is the best time, if you harvest in the afternoon when 

it is hot the lettuce is bitter in taste

-when storing lettuce or any other leafy green in the fridge it is best to 

rinse it with cool water, Sofya calls it hydro cooling, it keeps longer

-mustard greens and lettuce need to be harvested before they start going to seed or to 'bolt' as they become way to spicy or bitter

It has been way hot outside, Juneary is over. On the first of July we were wearing sweaters, and now its so hot none of us can think properly. Especially Yoni.


I had no idea but in order to have proper produce there needs to be bees pollinating.  It has been so cold that the bees were not doing their thing.  So the zucchini plants were producing these wierd un fertilized deformations, one which I am holding. Such a simple concept that I didn't fully get until now. This worries me for the future of food production if climate shifts and bee populations drop can that happen? I feel like it can. eeeee

Hard Times

It was a week of full days. Them weeds be coming up, and so we spent alot of time killing them with hand tools. And with bare hands. Brandon pounded a bunch of metal poles to hold up the pea fence and tomatoes.  We mulched alot of stuff to prevent weeds. More plantings of cabbage, rutabaga, and lettuce which gets seeded and planted every 2 weeks (ish). The melons are hanging in there as are the cukes, just waiting for warmer weather. We all worked pretty hard, especially chief operator Sofya, who doesn't really take a break not even to go to the washroom.

Yoni rototilled the really weedy paths. The rototiller is kinda shit. I tried using it, equalled much frustration. It stopped working today so Yoni just weed wacked everything, which he really enjoys. 

Some people wear SARS masks when dealing with fertilizer and lime so as not to inhale it. Also advisable when handling wet moldy straw that smells like fungus. Hazel wears these Ray Bans all the time, never realizing how tense the muscles around her eyes were from squinting...until she acquired these sunglasses. Thank you Steph Tran & Vietnam. 

So there is this shed area on the land full of junk that has accumulated over the years. A recent project occurred over the last couple of days of cleaning it all out and reorganizing. What a shit show. Some people were working really hard, cleaning and organizing to loud disco music that reverberated all over the land. That we heard while farming. I thought I liked disco, but I realized I just like the Beegees.

Because of this large scale clean up, I managed to find some beautiful terracotta pots in which I planted some seedling rejects. 

Tofino

Men at Work

 The weather is getting warmer so the shirts are coming off. This week involved a ton of hoeing weeds, transplanting brussel sprouts and broccoli. The green manure fields of buckwheat were turned in.  The melons are not doing so hot from wire worm and cold weather, they need some prayer. There will be no spinach or dill as they do not seem to grow on the land. Basil is looking quite bleak as well. 

On the bright side, there was some man on man wrestling action, more SARS mask wearing and Patrick delivering strawberries to people shirtless. Quite lovely. Lettuce is plentiful and we had our first cabbage and broccoli harvest 

No bird netting

Its up! The nets are in place with tennis balls to prevent rippage from the metal poles. Strawberry harvest is coming up soon!

Haggered Sheep, Tomato Plucking, Comfrey Picking & New Dude

I went for a hike to Ruckle park over the weekend, it was so beautiful and lovely by the ocean etc. but what was really interesting was along the road walk back there was a flock of sheep hanging out eating in their pen. There was this really rough looking one with a bad haircut looking so sad. 

Lovely Sofya garden manager/chief operator, stewarding the farm with her knowledge and intuition. We pruned tomatoes today which involved removing new growth, their getting big! 

My comrades picking comfrey. Comfrey is a plant that grows all over the land. We pick piles of it, squash it into big bins and let in rot. 2 weeks later we open the bin, and dilute the rotted comfrey with water. The dilution is a really nutritious fertilizer for tomatoes and other plants. It smells like ASS when its rotted. 

New guy Brandon (with the hat). Pretty humorous addition to the crew, from the T.dot. He says 'far out' alot.  

Permadirt

The dirt that just dosen't go away

Backup corn

Today was weird. The tractor that was supposed to till in our green manure didn't show up. Also in the bed of quinoa there are weeds called lamb's quarter which look exactly the same as the quinoa, so it was a very interesting weeding session. Spending most of the time differentiating between weeds and quinoa.


We planted corn in the ground and Sofya has a feeling that it might rot or get eaten by animals so we planted some backup corn in trays. It sure looks pretty.


I went silent for just the morning just to try it. I really liked it and felt really calm, but communication was difficult yet interesting.

Wednesday Walkabout

Today Patrizia left which was really sad, I really missed her on the fields today. But she is off on some great road trip adventure which is great! Most of our cucumbers died from wire worm, and some melons too. So we replanted some cucumbers and re seeded more melons and cukes as well.  We also planted many many beans, direct seed into the ground. Winter crops of kale, cabbage and collard greens also went in today. 

Sometimes on Fridays we walk through the farm together and check up on all the crops to see what's doing well, what is dying, what the weed situation is at, what needs watering, what needs posts etc. Today I did my own walkabout. 

The buckwheat is starting to come up. After a couple of months the buckwheat is tilled in and new crops are planted in the improved soil, its called a green manure field. I forget which crops are going in after this one. 

Lettuce is seeded every couple of weeks because of its short life span. These are the babies waiting for transplant. 

The peas are coming up nicely.

The heirloom tomatoes are getting big and all of them survived! 

Yoni setting up netting to protect the strawberries from the Robins. The fruits are starting to grow but not ripened yet so we are starting to protect them!

This is Hazel, another farm yogi. She is lovely and serene.  She occasionally makes funny noises, loves Bjork and is by nature a philosopher. She is the first Iniut friend I have! (she is half Inuit) Hazel brings a really nice balance to the farm team.