Our most recent visiting volunteers left just over a week ago and the next one isn’t scheduled to arrive for another two weeks. While it is nice to have a break and enjoy the house to ourselves for a spell, to be honest, it’s a little eerie, all this quiet.

(As I typed that, our three year old sent a stack of blocks cascading onto the floor next to me. Quiet, like so many things, is relative.)

Since our membership as WWOOF hosts started in January of this year we have had something like 25 weeks of help between all our visitors.

We’ve had two people from Korea, two from Japan, two from the US and one from England. Our next guest will be from the US.

For my part, I’m taking some of this down time to reflect on how we’ve done as hosts so far. There is a responsibility to create an enjoyable environment for people who are volunteering on your farm, after all.

How could we improve the accommodations, the work environment?  How well have we managed the energy of our home where the pressures of farming, working full time, parenting and relationships can cause tension?

How well have we balanced getting all the farm work done with showing our visitors what a great part of the country we live in?  Because, that is a big part of why a lot of people join the WWOOF program in the first place.  It is a great way to travel without a lot of expense.

So, with thanks for all the help and company we’ve had; and with appreciation for getting to travel vicariously to the places our guests have been, I am reveling in the quiet and knowing I’ll be happy when it’s back to a crowed mealtime.  And making notes about what worked so I can do more of it.

Think it’s not possible?  I mean, Foie Gras.  Come on.  It’s the most inhumane foodstuff available, right? Well, it can be. Most times it is.

Take the time to watch this video and you’ll get your dose of sustainable agriculture inspiration, that’s for sure.

Almost makes me want to get some geese.

This month, I’ve chosen Chili for the pork recipe.  Reason?  I was inspired by the beans!  I’ve been shelling dry beans for next year’s seed and fresh beans for eating this week and wanted to share some of my beany-ness with you.

This is more of a concept than an actually recipe.  For those of you who have a favourite Chili recipe already, you could simply experiment with some of the following ideas:

Add Pork

• Cut your favourite (or least favourite, as it will take on the chili flavour) cut of pork into one inch cubes.
• Season with salt and pepper before browning in hot oil in small batches.  Add to chili before simmering.
• Also, cook bacon till crisp and crumble into chili.  How much bacon, you ask?  It’s up to you.  How much do you like bacon?
• Use the left over  oil to saute your onions, peppers, garlic or other veggie additions.

  

Make Kickin’ Chili

The next suggestion sounded a little odd to me the first time I read it, but then I remembered experimenting with dark chocolate in my chili once upon a time.  Suddenly, coffee doesn’t sound so strange.

• If you’re using your own chili recipe, simply replace some of the liquid with good quality coffee.  Substitute about 1/8 cup of coffee per serving of chili.
• If you like the sound of caffeine in your food , but don’t have a favourite chili recipe click on the picture above for a somewhat complex version from Epicurious.com.

Beef and Broccoli Stir Fry

This is one of my favourite, easy stir fry recipes.  With luck, there will still be some local broccoli around to use in it!

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup dry Sherry
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 tablespoon (packed) chopped garlic
• 2 teaspoons grated orange peel
• 1 pound flank steak, cut diagonally across grain into thin strips
• 1 large head broccoli, cut into florets
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• Cooked rice of your choice

Preparation:

Whisk first 5 ingredients in large bowl. Add meat; toss to coat. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour and up to 4 hours.

Blanch broccoli in large pot of boiling salted water 2 minutes. Drain. Rinse under cold water; drain well.

Heat oil in heavy large wok or skillet over high heat. Drain meat well, reserving marinade. Add cornstarch to reserved marinade and mix until smooth; set aside. Add meat to wok and stir-fry until almost cooked through, about 2 minutes. Add broccoli and stir-fry until crisp-tender, about 2 minutes. Add reserved marinade mixture and boil until sauce thickens and coats meat and broccoli, stirring constantly, about 2 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve over rice.

Serves 4.

I say this is a basic recipe because it doesn’t contain any strange ingredients.  However, I’m interested in hearing from anyone who has a similar recipe that can be done without the 1 to 4 hour wait on the beef.

As usual, I love to hear about your kitchen adventures whether you’re using these recipe ideas or not!

For some comedic relief to start and to show that I don’t only read about farms, check out this great daily comic.  Today’s strip is about ear wax.  How does that entice ya? 

Here’s meat – or rather the veggies – of my reading, though.  And oh!  The inspiration to be had in the gardening department!

Click here for Winter Planting Plans on the Observer Organic Allotment Blog

• Check out the beautiful produce pictures at one of my favourite blogs, Throwback at Trapper Creek.
• If you’re interested in extended season gardening specifically, click on the winter garden plan picture to read about this piece of useful art.

• For those of you who get a little overwhelmed with the task of gardening to sustain a family,  (we’re just starting to attempt to grow enough to avoid the grocery store), I found this great resource.  It’s a gardening calendar specifically for hardiness zone 5b but I’ve got to think there are more helpful bloggers out there in other zones.  (Potential future post: compilation of gardening calendars?)

On the livestock front, I had the pleasure of reading about a shockingly smooth pig loading session at Tylerfarm Homestead’s blog.  Yes, it is that time of year.  The cold weather meat producing animals have reached full size.  The freezer will be full soon.

Our pigs are not yet ready for the freezer as they are on the slow, mainly grass-fed plan. Here John is enticing them back to the barn after a successful attempt to escape. Our three year old sounded the alarm while I was cooking lunch: "Mom! The pigs are on the road!"

My pig loading experience stems from long ago and was not that smooth.  When my sister and I were small, our family lived on a small farm near on Blue Mountain.  My mother has been known to tell the story of one loading day when a somewhat coarse talking neighbour came over to help out.  I would have been 3 or 4 years old with my sister a couple of years older.

I guess my sister, Gena, and I sat on the edge of the log enclosure the pigs lived in and observed the proceedings.  Later in the day, the weather had turned and we went in to play in our living room while mom worked down the hall in the kitchen.

As she tells it, her ‘mom-sense’ went off and she started listening more closely to us playing.  Finally, certain that she was hearing our attempts at some of the worst language you can think of, she came in to ask us what we were doing.  My sister, always bold and sure of her right to do as she pleased piped up:

“We’re playing ‘load the pigs’, Mom!”

Neighbours.  You take the good with the bad.

On the topic of pigs, click on this lovely Large Black to visit the site of a great little farm that I have recently

Click on the photo to check out Upper Canada Heritage Meat.

discovered not too far from us.  I have yet to approach them about it but I’m dreaming of some of these beauties for our farm next year.

For anyone yearning to hold onto summer just a bit longer, here is the one and only flower on our new hydrangea bush from this year.  It took all summer to brew.

I took this picture two days ago and it is still sitting there, though slightly less fresh.

On a final note of what has been, for me, a leisurely, random post, our co-op student, Kenley, was here on Saturday for what was her last full day.  We did some puttering around in the garden, shelling dry beans, taking down the pea trellis, bundling the last of the herbs for drying and generally enjoying the beautiful day. 

We have enjoyed having her here and are thrilled that our local highschool has seen fit to run an agricultural co-op program that actually give the students the chance to learn from experience.  What a novel concept!

Kenley’s last few hours will be spent next Saturday, preparing our meat CSA packages for delivery.  After that, we’ll be back on our own and richer for having had her with us.

Now, I can cross ‘Sanity saving’ off my to-do list and move on to the marketing. Happily, that is a task that I enjoy, not only because I know that a small farm like ours would never fly if someone didn’t SELL IT!

Yes, there are a few acorns in there for good measure!

Now, the walkway to the house is guarded by tons of big butternut and acorn squash, and there are still more to be picked so that we can make them lunch before the bugs do.  Apple peeling was interesting as well, as I don’t generally peel apples , so it took a little while before I figured out that going around the apples and getting one long peel, instead of going up and down and getting a dozen, was preferable. After much apple peeling, coring and slicing, we had a nice large pot of apple sauce to be canned.
It would seem the chickens are feeling particularly frisky these days,  as a few of them decided to go for a run when I opened their enclosure to give them some food, luckily they quickly realized that they would much rather be in with the other chickens and let themselves be easily caught and deposited back with their friends. I guess they aren’t quite born to be wild. All the other animals seem to be doing well. The pigs are still oinking, the sheep are still baaing and the steers are still doing whatever it is that baby bulls do. Prince, the lovely backyard horse, is still fulfilling his duties, and conversing with visitors who pull up in their cars. I’m sure his demeanour has nothing to do with the apple scraps and ears of corn he’s been getting over the fence in the morning. Don’t forget to pet him  if you come by for a visit! I’m definitely looking forward to spending the next week with the Nyman’s and their crazy critters!

- Kenley

I do realize that those who have sought us out and bought memberships to a Meat CSA are probably foodies to some degree and have plenty of great recipe resources.  I like to send them anyway, though, because it means I have an excuse to spend time searching for new ways to make delicious dinners.  And, it seems that the more I send out recipes, the more recipes get sent to me.

And what’s better than searching around the net and the cookbooks at the library and finding something good to make?  Why, having something mouthwatering arrive directly to you inbox, that’s what.  (Hmm… You know what I mean.  The recipes arrive in my inbox.  Although… Having, say, the Garlicky Roast Beef below come fully prepared via email would be pretty Awesome-Sauce.  In case you’re interested, I didn’t make up the very descriptive term Awesome-Sauce.  Here‘s where it comes from.  Funny.)

Alright.  What say we get to said recipes before I get too carried away about email delivery food and funny comics.

This beef recipe has a great rub for almost any type of meat.  Here it’s specifically for a meat platter but it makes me think of the best darn brown bag lunch around.

Garlicky Roast Beef

(as stolen from the Canadian Living website)

A 3-lb (1.5 kg) eye of round oven roast will yield the pound of beautiful slices you need for the platter, plus plenty of leftovers to enjoy on another occasion.

Servings: 36 slices

Ingredients:

9 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup (75 mL) minced fresh parsley
3 tbsp (50 mL) grainy mustard
1-1/2 tsp (7 mL) each salt and pepper
1 eye of round oven roast (3 lb/1.5 kg)

Preparation:

Note the capsized wheelbarrow.  That is about halfway down the garden.  The wheelbarrow is mired in leafy, green, food-free plants.  Native plants, as my sister insist.  Weeds.

In the forefront, though, we have Detroit red beets, basil, a few late planted carrots, the spot where the onions were, the corner of a tripod for the peas (now drying for seed collection), yellow beets, parsley and some dried poppies which blew over from the flower bed.  I didn’t have the heart to treat them as weeds and they were quite a lovely addition to the garden.

Past the wheel barrow, you can see the dying squash and zucchini vines.  We have a gazillion squash.  If you’re a member of our CSA or live near here, contact me about squash.  Make me an offer.  I’m dealing acorns and butternut.

(Notice the unmowed lawn?  Come on.  We do have priorities.)

This pic shows that I was panicing during bean planting time.  ‘Will I have enough time before I go away in late May to get all the beans in that I want to plant?!  Plant them all RIGHT NOW, just in case!!‘

As a result, I spent a few weeks harvesting my body weight in beans everyday.  Sure hope we want to eat frozen, pickled and canned beans come winter.  (In this pic, I have already gone through and pulled a bunch of bean plants to feed the pigs.  Pigs love beans.)

To the rigth of the beans are a few random basil plants and the parsley etc from the previous pic.  There is also a little stone wall full of weeds.  As I mentioned, this is a new garden plot.  You never can tell how many rocks there will be until you turn the soil.  Here, there are a lot.  To the left of the beans there is a whole large square of a rare crop known as foxtail.  Very useful for… looking a bit like a fox’s tail and… tickling toddlers’ necks… umm… covering up A LOT of rocks that didn’t get picked.  In fact, I was afraid there would be a huge hole in the Earth if I picked all those rocks.  I will tackle that spot next year.

Finally, behind the beans/foxtail we have 7 messy tomato plants that are doing wonderfully despite my hatred for the removal of tomato horn worms.  I did most of the extermination with much squirming and ‘Oh Gross!’ comments.  Once I caved and begged Johnny to do it for me.  And he did.  What are husbands for?

(Just a note:  I’m ordinarily not a wimp.  Maggots and tomato horn worms do it to me.  And, I am able to handle them.  Or rather deal with them.  But to see me do it, you’d think they were actually in my underwear.  What a thought!)

For the last picture, you get a better shot of the foxtail along with a shot of the carrots (front right) that I planted where ever there was sand from the hydro trench.  On the very left, there is a lot of rhubarb (that I think I planted too close together), followed by invisible asparagus and sunflowers.  (There are turnips hiding under the sunflowers.  They did remarkably well for being smothered.)

The reason I included this picture is because the sunflowers deserve special mention.  When I told our three year old sun that he could help plant them and then enter one in the fall fair, I could not have guessed that they’d grow large enough to swallow him whole.  I felt a little silly saying that he was entering these giants in the grains category of the Picton Fall Fair when he couldn’t even carry one!

And, of course, he won.  Does that make me kind of like the mom who does her kid’s science project?  Oh, please.  Not that.  For next year, is there such thing as a miniature sunflower?

So, even if you’re not farming vegetables, one of the best things about being on the farm day in and day out is the ability to work a garden into your reality.

Our garden doesn’t look as pretty as that of our friends who run a 5 acre market garden and veggie CSA.  We definitely have more weeds and more random plantings as a result of trying to balance my limited knowledge of biodyanmics with the weather and how much time I have to plant before a toddler needs something.  I will include some current pictures of the garden in the coming days.  Anyone who is feeling bad about not weeding enough is welcome to post my garden pics on their fridge to help them feel better. 

I did apply a great heap of mulch in the spring, though, so the vegetables won out over the weeds and have produced a bumper crop of everything except peppers.  (My first foray into pepper growing was not terribly successful.)  Todays picture of a pail of our delicious yellow heirloom tomatoes will be the first of a handful to come this week.

We are eating really well here these days.  That in itself is a good enough reason to farm.

- Sustainable Agriculture as defined by Wikipedia

Today, John and I were interviewed for a short video profile about our farm.  Hopefully, it will introduce us to more people who are looking for animal friendly, sustainable meat.

While Jennifer, our interviewer, was setting up her camera, we got to talking about sustainability.  We were trying to decide if our farm could truly be considered sustainable.

Pasture Buffet - Hard to see, I know, but on that wagon is freshly cut clover and grass. Everyday, we bring it to the sheep and pigs so they can eat fresh without being eaten themselves.

Obviously, there is a point where a farm can clearly not be considered sustainable.  Genetically modified plants, chemical application with wild abandon, confinement housing for animals.  These are all pretty much unsustainable.  But there is a middle ground that is hard to pin down.

For example, there are farms that are widely celebrated for their sustainable farming practices where the farmers feed conventionally grown grain (in small quantities).

So, the farms feeding the grain are considered sustainable due to their animal welfare practices among other things but the farms growing the grain – spraying pesticides, herbicides etc… – are clearly not.

Where does that leave a farm like us?  We grow our own grain in a not completely organic fashion and feed it to our nature-imitating animals.

Speaking of nature-imitating, animal welfare issues surrounding housing are another a part of sustainability (or not).

Here at J. & C. Nyman Farms, we endeavour to raise pastured animals.  Our chickens are definitely pastured and we have yet (knock on wood) to have any threatened by wild life.  The sheep are another matter.

While we would love to have our sheep roaming the range in a truly pastured, nature-imitating way, it simply isn’t realistic considering the predator pressure in our area.  This spring, we even had to start closing the sheep in the barn at night, not just keeping them in the barnyard.  We lost 4 ewes, including our best mother hands down, right at the backdoor of the barn.

One could argue that being a coyote’s lunch is what would happen in nature and they’d be right.  This is where the grey area in sustainability can be clarified a little.

When thinking about whether we’re sustainable-enough (my neurosis about ‘not enough’, I know!), I often forget the second part of the definition.  We, as the people running the farm, have to be able to sustain ourselves so we can keep running the farm.  Otherwise, it won’t be sustainable, will it?  So, if the animals that we raise to sell are coyote food instead or if we choose to buy feed that is too expensive to recover the cost when selling the meat, we’re going to go out of business.  Not sustainable.  There needs to be a balance.

So, Jennifer, while standing next to our wagonload of green chop (read: pasture on a buffet), came up with a great equation.

Ideals + Reality = Sustainability

That made perfect sense to me at the time.  Since having pondered and writen about it here, I’d have to add something.

Ideals + Current Reality = Sustainability

I added the word ‘current’ because, as an example, we may not always have the predator pressure we do now.  We will also, one day, finish building superior sheep pasture fencing, best the steep learning curve regarding growing organic but not budget breaking crops and be done with the many capital expenditures that have kept John working off the farm to fund the farm.

Reality is always changing but if you strive for the ideal within the confines of the current reality, you’re likely to come out with something like sustainability.

So, are we a sustainable farm?  Absolutely.  More and more everyday, in fact.

(I’ve combined the wonderful idea of a One Sentence Journal, where you commit to writing just one sentence about each day, and a Gratitude journal, where you make a short – or long – list of things that you’re grateful for each day.)

It seems, though, that in my busy-ness, I have been stressing moderately about getting everything done. But, thinking about the Gratitude portion of my journal has made me realize that I have not been grateful for what we have gotten done! (Seems to me I’ve been hard on my husband about being hard on himself for not getting enough done, too. Double anti-gratitude whammy.)

In my experience, the less gratitude I show about getting things done, the less I accomplish.

So, in the name of being prepared to deliver food to all those we’ve committed to, here is an expanded and public entry to my Gratitude Journal:

• All the oats and barley are planted. Shea and Daddy had a great time planting together.
• I actually got to run the tractor for a few hours for the first time since our son was born! (From this I realized why John arrives from his hours of solitary tractor work in such a good mood. Once or twice, as I pulled the cultivator from the ground to start another row, I wondered how much fun John was having trying to run the seed cleaning set up while entertaining our 2 1/2 year old. Mostly, I enjoyed the relative silence of the diesel tractor, though. )
• Our laying hens are up to speed, laying almost 40 eggs per day.
• Our broiler chicks have survived in less than perfect housing to start loosing feathers and start looking far less cute than when they arrived.
• Our sheep are so happy with their new barn that they stay in it even when they could go out!! (This is partly because the pasture fencing is about a day away from being ready. The grass was ready last week but the containment devices will be ‘a go’ this weekend.)
• Our vegetable garden, which somehow grew from ‘Enough salad greens and beets to take for dinner each night’ into ‘Please don’t let all of this be ripe at the same time!’, is 75% planted and looks pretty darn good. We may even be able to afford a wheel hoe before too long to make the maintenance of a large garden easier.
• The pole peas that the kids planted are coming up and Shea, who is 2 1/2, started jumping up and down, yelling: “Mom! Come see! Come see!” When he noticed them poking their light green heads out of the dirt.
• I finally might have found a Canadian source of Fertrell products so we can get our poor chickens on to some decent food that we can actually afford to give to them. (Around here, you’d have to charge about $7 per dozen eggs if organic feed costs were to be recouped.)
• I have relaxed my sense of what is important enough that the foot high lawn in front of the house is not bothering me.
• Yeah for being hicks! My sense of what is ‘too hick’ has also been relaxed. Not only do we have a truck cap sitting in the yard, but our 7 week old Barred Rock laying hens live in it surrounded by a temporary fence! (Photo potentially to come, though actually adding this task to my to-do list seems just a tad counter productive, no?)

And, last but not least, I am grateful that I forced myself to take the time to write here. Because, whether or not people read it; whether or not this blog brings any of our customers more insight into how their food is raised and by whom; whether or not people agree with all I write, the writing of it is worth the effort. Putting my thoughts into written – okay, typed – words is soothing like nothing else that I do. And so, thanks to me, for taking the time to do something that, though it might be solely for my own good, is absolutely worth it.

Happy Eating!