Kricklewood Farm

It’s a blustery afternoon here in eastern Ontario and at this time it helps to focus on Spring and all the good things to come.   For me, Spring is all about new life:  hatching chickens and ducks, sprouting seeds and my favourite: baby goats!   The baby goats should start arriving at the end of March and soon after we’ll have hens and ducks sitting on eggs too.

We have a lot planned for 2012.  Our big project is (knock wood) our production of cold-pressed Sunflower Oil.  There are a lot of things to sort out but we have a field ready to go in May with oil to follow in the Fall.  We are sourcing an oil press  and  looking into all the other aspects beginning with planting and ending with ‘tastes like sunshine’ oil in a bottle.

We’re also planning to set up a couple of beehives for honey and wax production.   This will be a joint effort with some friends of ours from town.    We’re thinking to expand our workshop program too to include goat and chicken keeping 101.  And of course we’re always thinking of new varieties of goat milk soap and new flavours of goat milk fudge.   So, check back often to see what we’re up to or sign up for our email newsletter  to get regular updates from Kricklewood Farm.  All the best for 2012 from us to you!

At least that’s what I keep telling myself as I look outside at the thermometer.  For now I’ll have to get by on memories of what the garden looked like a few months ago and will look like again soon! Seeing these photos again is an inspiration for planning the garden for the coming season.  Luckily the seed catalogs are starting to arrive:  William Dam Seeds, Terra Edibles,  Mapple Farm,  The Cottage Gardener and of course Eagle Creek Seed Potatoes are all ones we’ll be looking at.  On that note I think I’ll find a comfy chair and big mug of something hot for the evening and start planning for 2011.

Spring and summer have been up and down with regards to temperature and precipitation.    We had an early hot and dry spell which resulted in bolting of the Spinach and lettuces.   Then we had a cool wet spell which held back the peppers, tomatoes, basil and other heat-loving crops.   Now we are fairly dry but not a lot of heat.  The good news - we were spared the hail that hit some areas.   We’ve been publishing a list of availability week by week and can send out emails the first of the week, visit our weekly harvest page for more details.

It’s been one of those warm lazy days of summer and everything that mother nature has to offer is being enjoyed.  If only these moments could last all year…

This time last year we were moving in and trying not to miss the growing season.  We had this one plot about 25 x 40 feet and crammed everything we could into it, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, sunflowers, herbs, etc  and I put in some Nasturtiums for colour and to attract bees.  Simply put, harvesting was a challenge.

We now have 4 plots of the same size plus a couple of strawberry bed and a mixed herb and perennial bed. We kept the original plot for root crops, greens, peas and beans.  One of the new plots is devoted to potatoes, (next one over) the next to peppers and tomatoes (next one up) and the last for cucumbers, squash, and pumpkins.  We’ve had an interesting Spring so far with the temperature on March 28th being the same in this area as it was in Miami.  The maple syrup ‘sugar shack’ visitors were going out in shorts and flip flops for the first time.  The next little while went up and down in temperature but not much in the way of rain.

The tomatoes are pretty scrawny and going into June things didn’t look too promising but with recent rains (1.5 inches in 24 hours according to my gauge) and now some heat, things should pick up.  At the moment we have lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale, radishes as well as greens from the beets and rutabagas.  Farm gate sales (fresh picked) by chance or by appointment:   613-275-9901.

Summer is in the air and we’re officially open for farm gate sales complete with a fresh coat of paint on our sign!   We’re offering free range eggs, goat milk soap, bee’s wax candles and artwork.    In the weeks to come we’ll also have produce, herbs and cut flowers.   We’re a bit behind in the season as the kitchen garden was accessible to the chickens until a couple of weeks ago so none of the early season greens and other crops were planted on time. Now that we have proper fencing and the seeds are in the ground we should be good to go in a few weeks.  For farm gate sales we’re open “by chance or by appointment” so drop in or call 613-275-9901 to see what is available when you are planning to visit.

This past winter has been a mild one but I for one am sure glad Spring is finally here.  It’s not so much the cold as is it the short days and long nights.  It’s nice to have a few hours extra in the afternoon but the bad news is that the chickens don’t want to go to bed!

One hen has gone broody on us – we’ve never gone through this and I think she’ll pretty much take care of things herself but we’ll see how many hatch and whether or not she has any ducklings in the group.   She’s been on the eggs 24/7 for a week or two now and only gets off to eat and drink and do her other business.

I managed to snap a photo a few days ago when she was off the nest, she has a variety of sizes and colours under her care so we’ll end up with an interesting menagerie when the time comes.  We have chick-sized waterers and feeders so we’ll have to sort out what to do with her and them when the time comes.

Once in a while another hen decides she wants to get in on things.  It gets a
little cramped but the broody one is very patient,  she’ll be a good mother!

One of the projects  for Spring was to build another nest box, we used the existing as a model and found enough old barn wood to make it happen.   For the moment it’s outside next to the coop until we find the best spot for it and we’ve already had one hen use it.   This was a project of my brother and I and it went quite well considering we’re both pretty much all thumbs. Thanks Barry!

We’ve also added to the flock with the acquisition of another 8 assorted young hens:  a couple of Barred Plymouth Rocks, Ameraucanas, a Buff Orpington, Golden Laced Wyandotte and 2 Black sex-linked.   We were told that the Buff Orpington was the queen of her flock and she showed that pretty quickly with our  hens, she is now in charge!   The roosters noticed her right away, she is a pretty buff/blond and was quickly named Blondie, on the right, above.  We’ve actually avoided naming the birds – once it’s named it’s pretty hard to make any rational decisions about harvesting or culling but occasionally one will break the rule.

We’ve also developed a very high tech solution to keeping track of egg production.  Friends from Atlanta sent us a chicken calendar which has some great photos of chickens.    It’s now hanging in the coop and every time we get an egg, we mark it on the calendar.  We’re up to almost a dozen a day and as it warms up and the hens from last year mature, we should get almost double that.  We also have another 25 or so day old chicks set to arrive at the end of April.  By this time next year we should double again to four dozen a day.  Eggs are easy to sell and since each dozen contains a nice mix of white, shades of brown and green, people keep coming back for more.

On the garden front, we got our initial seed starting going a few weeks ago and now it’s time to start thinning things out.    We went with about a dozen different tomatoes, mostly heritage varieties with interesting names like ‘Mortgage Lifter’, ‘Chadwicks Cherry’ and ‘Yellow Brandywine’.   We also started some peppers: ‘Black Hungarian Hot’, ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Marconi Red’ among them, Eggplants some Spinach and Rosemary cuttings.  Most of the seeds come from The Cottage Gardener, a small company specializing in heirloom varieties.

One new thing is to start onions from seed versus sets.  We now have three varieties going, one red ‘Greek Salad’ a Spanish ‘Candy’ and for green onions ‘Summer Isle’.  We’ll do some sets too so we don’t run out next winter.  I’ve been following the guidelines written for our climate by an author near Kingston.  The book is titled  From Seed to Table, A Practical Guide to Eating and Growing Green by Janette Haase.    It’s a month by month format and has garden plans small and larger families so it’s been very helpful.

With it warming up, Pitou and Ty really enjoy the weather,
especially with a little extra scratch behind the ear…

or a rub of the belly!  (and what a belly he is getting – he’s not being fattened up for his bacon though so requests will not be taken…).

This photo was taken this morning:

This photo was taken  last July:

From more or less the same perspective.  What
a difference a few months make! Luckily we have
seed catalogs and seed-starting projects to
keep us going.    We’re ordering from William Dam
an Ontario company well known for good untreated
seed.   We also ordered from The Cottage Gardener,
who specialize in organic seeds of heirloom vegetables
and flowers.    We also ordered potatoes from a company
in Alberta,  Eagle Creek, which is  well-known for a
variety of seed potatoes,  including some heirlooms
you won’t find anywhere  else.

It’s the first year I’ll be starting tomatoes,
peppers, eggplants, onions and a few other
things inside.  On the advice of some more
seasoned market gardeners, we made a small
investment in flats, lights and shelving to get
started.  It  all came from CDN Tire, no need to
spend hundreds on fancy grow lights.   Shelving,
light fixtures, bulbs and chain is pretty much all and
we’ll have room for several hundred transplants.

I too was surprised at how little it all cost!
Now we’ll be watching the mailbox
closely so we can get planting! We’ll keep
track of our progress here as we go along.

This is a first for me, planting garlic at the same time as the other fall bulbs (300 or so Daffodils and about 100 tulips) and I’m looking forward to the harvest next August!  I bought some bulbs about a month ago from David McGreery of Riverside Gardens.  He was hosting a workshop sponsored by Just Food, an organization in support of growers, locavores  and foodies in the Ottawa area. ‘Working toward a just and sustainable food system in Ottawa’ is their mission. 

After consulting with David regarding the best varieties for a beginner to start out with, I settled with four:  Music, Italian, Czech and German Red.   David does many of the local garlic festivals and often sells out so I was lucky with the assortment he had to offer me.  

The first job was to separate the bulbs into individual cloves for planting, luckily I had Buddy to help out and keep an eye on things.

Next was choosing a good spot and making sure the bed was well prepped for the bulbs.  I settled on the southern most portion of the bed to give good exposure and also to minimize any chance of disturbance next Spring when we plant the rest of the garden.

We had mulched the beds with hay pretty heavily during the growing season and I was amazed at the degree to which the hay had broken down into little tiny bits, giving the soil a nice airy hand.  We also added copious amounts of rotted goat manure and the soil seems in much better shape than it was.

We planted the cloves about 4 inches apart and about 4 inches deep; unfortunately the first row came out not quite as straight as I’d hoped and hopefully nobody will notice. 

The last thing we did was to mulch heavily with leaves.  We’ll keep adding over the next month so that there is good coverage for the winter.  We’ve been getting steady rain now too so hopefully they will break down a fair bit before the first snowfall.    We’ll probably add a layer of hay before it gets really cold though and pull that off in the Spring, just in time for the baby garlics to start poking their heads out of the soil.  Then we wait for the basil and start making one of my favorite foods, garlic pesto!

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.
It’s what sunflowers do.” – Helen Keller

“ Every friend is to the other a sun, and a sunflower also.
He attracts and follows.”  - Jean Paul Richter.

“I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers.” – Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo.

 * with thanks to others for words more expressive than mine  to describe them.