Last days at Amarosia

Today is my last full day on the farm. I plan to head out to BC to start my Wwoofing adventure by the end of next week. Here are some of my last photos of a place that has been my life for the last 6 years.

Arugula and Ruby Streaks Mustard planted for the Farm Share that never happened...

Dave will be saving this garlic and replanting as seed stock for his Garlic Farm

Microgreenhouse nestled among the trees behind the house. Contains all of the seedlings ready to be collected this evening and tomorrow at the Dieppe Market by local organic gardeners.

Beautiful Rye! Ready to be mowed and planted through as a perfect mulch for tomatoes

Spinach updates

This Spinach was seeded by Carolyn and Colleen using the Earthway seeder 3 weeks ago. To make things more interesting Colleen applied compost to her bed and Carolyn applied crab meal to hers as a side by side comparison. So how are they performing 3 weeks later?

Well ladies the spinach is up, but whose is fairing better?

Carolyn’s Spinach in the crab meal bed looks happy and healthy

And so does Colleen’s in the compost bed

Its hard to see any difference after only a few weeks. Maybe once it reaches maturity there will be more of a difference. You’ll have to check in with Dave and ask. The only significant difference between the two beds is the amount of weeds in Colleen’s bed, but that is due to the bed being allowed to get more weedy last year and has nothing to do with the compost.

Fabulous Fava Beans – a slide show

Half-fill a bucket with Fava beans

Add water to the bucket to cover the beans

Quickly drain off the water leaving the fava beans wet but not soaked

Ideally do this while balancing a fava bean on your top lip

Bacterial Inoculant, purchased from the Farmers Co-op

Add a couple of tablespoons full and stir in well

Weed your planting bed well

Fava beans get jammed up in the Earthway seeder so make 2 furrows using a long handled E-Z digger

Place the fava beans into the furrows at a 6 inch spacing

Cover the seed using the E-Z digger

Celebrate having planted exactly 1234 row foot of fava beans!

Three weeks later and they are up

Potatoes in a Barrel

Growing potatoes in a potato growing area is a real challenge because of the high risk of blight and the shear number of Colorado potato beetles to contend with. The best way to ensure you actually get a crop is to shelter them from the risk factors and feed them really well, so we have decided to experiment with growing potatoes in a barrel this year as well as growing them the usual way.

I won’t be around to see the results unfortunately but here is how you set the system up.

1. A couple of weeks before you plan on planting your potatoes, place them in the basement in the dark with a little bit of light for their sprouts to grow towards. Any large potatoes can be cut into smaller pieces (chitted), just make sure that you have at least one eye on each piece. ‘Green Sprouting’ gives the potatoes a headstart when you plant them… though you will lose this advantage if you accidentally knock the sprouts off when you plant them. 
   

   'Chitted' potatoes

    

2. Take your barrels and drill holes in the bottom of it for drainage in rainy conditions (for this reason if you have a choice of barrels, choose the ones that already leak!) 
   

   Rain barrels

    

3. Put a 6 inch layer of good quality compost in the bottom of the barrels and then place your potatoes on top of the compost allowing 6 inches in all directions. 
   

   'no-dig' planting

    

4. Cover with a layer of compost, leaves, peat etc (whatever you have to hand). I think that compost would be overkill given that they are already sitting on pure compost so we are using leaves.
5. As the potato stalks start to poke up through the leaves cover them again and keep covering them until they start to flower. Once they are done flowering wait a couple of weeks and then tip your barrel over to harvest your potatoes.
   

Signs

Bad luck or a 'sign'?

Some people believe in signs. I think I’m agnostic.

In my opinion there are three kinds of ‘signs’

1. Road signs telling you how far you need to travel and in which direction.

2. Things that other people decide are signs. For example my mother believes that dropping cutlery means getting a visitor. Some people have suggested that our 90ft greenhouse blowing away was truly an ‘Act of God’ and not just in the language of insurance policies.

3. Things that we decide are signs. Meeting particular people at a time of need. The persistent driving wind from the South. Other people making changes in their own lives.

I think that we see things that we want to see. Having spent a long time looking for a ‘sign’ and not having found one I was feeling pretty jaded about the whole thing. It’s very possible that there were a whole lot of signs out there but I was either blind to them or chose not to see them. It’s equally possible that there are no such things as signs, just people making decisions based on random acts of nature.

I suppose that it doesn’t really matter whether the universe is trying to communicate with us or whether stuff just happens, provided that we make sound decisions as a result. I do wonder whether the loss of our greenhouse was Mother Nature’s way of grabbing me by the shoulders and screaming ‘Why don’t you ever listen to a damn thing I say?’ or whether it was just Climate Change. Whatever the case, the outcome is the same, I’m going Wwoofing!

p.s. now if someone could tell me what it means when someone keeps knocking the skin off her left elbow I’d be really grateful;-)