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!

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.

In the meant time, to keep the adrenaline coursing through my veins, I ordered the book I’ve heard so much about over the years called Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.

I started reading at the beginning and by page 4 had said “What???”, “No! Not funny!” and, I’ll be blunt, “Holy Shit!” enough times that my husband started to think I was having a mental episode. I’m not prone to this type of episode. Nor am I prone to using profanity without an accompanying profusion of fresh blood.

Like I said, this will be brief. Here are my recommendations so far:

• Do you eat margarine? Stop. It’s disgusting and bad for you.
• Buy the book: Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats or at least get it from the library and judge for yourself.

My, how I was mistaken. The Lada of my youth was never a car in the way a BMW M3 is a car, for example. Similarly (and yet very differently), the Lada’s I have known were not cars the way, say, a ’68 Camero with gold pin striping is a car.

Why, you ask, am I bringing up painful vehicular memories from my family’s sordid car history? It may seem unrelated but to my mind these cars are relevant to the struggle of pricing what we produce here at the farm.

Lost yet? Bear with me.

Very simply put, trying to determine a selling price for our meat gives me a head ache. Any way we do the math, the delicious, healthy SOLE food we produce is a BMW. And high end vehicles cost more to produce. So does high end food. Working a living wage into the equation is the challenge.

We’re working at whittling the cost down as we progress and, not insignificantly, we don’t have to buy grain at the exorbitant prices of late because we produce our own. But, at the end of the day, J. & C. Nyman Farms lamb, for example, is still a BMW of lamb. And that’s where the head aches start.

See, people go car shopping and expect to get what they pay for. If you pay for a Lada, you know what you’re getting yourself into. Something that will be cheap to buy, easy on fuel but cost a lot to maintain and have a short road-life.

If you choose a BMW, you’re expecting – and getting – something that delivers performance, pleasure, fuel efficiency, low emissions and a long driving life ahead.

Unfortunately, when it comes to food it doesn’t matter that the produce cost a top quality dollar to produce and is truly quality food. The average consumer is conditioned to be able to pay a Lada price and believes they’re getting the BMW product. (The fact that they’re not actually getting the quality of the BMW is one of the great crimes of the big food machine, but that’s another story altogether.)

Where does that leave me with my calculator in one hand and my head in the other? It leaves me trying to explain (to people who are open to the idea) that they’re not actually getting the BMW for the Lada price. It leaves me needing to be informed and sincere enough to be able to show them that they’re eating Ladas. Yummy.

Realistically, I’m not going to be able to convince very many people to stop buying their bargain food and pay a lot more for our top of the line variety.

So I’m using my calculator to cut out a large part of that living wage I mentioned. And I’m selling what we produce to the customers who are willing to pay a little bit more for quality food.

And, most importantly, I’m sleeping well (possibly not as well protected as my husband John here, but well) and I’m reveling in my days.

I get to do something that is good for the Earth, my community and my family. And, I love to do it. Living wage? Who needs it!