Thursday 14 November 2013

Visioning in November


What has the Birds and the Beans team been up to lately?  Well, we are still harvesting and selling for the Comox Valley Farmer's Market, with lots of veggies and chickens to sell!  (And I mean, LOTS of chickens, and we've adjusted our price to $5.50/lb, so contact us to get some!)

Other than that, our last big field project was planting garlic.  We planted nearly 8,000 cloves of garlic of a couple different varieties.  We are excited to see how garlic will grow on the peat soil, and suspect it will be big and beautiful since our other alliums did so well. We also planted a few rows of fava beans and mulched a few crops we want to keep growing through the winter and spring.  Otherwise, the cover crops are all in place, protecting the soil for the winter.

Now we are planning more seriously for next season.  We are excited to research about organic soil, to make sure we are managing it in a sustainable way.  That is, not depleting nutrients and causing too much decomposition.  We are thinking of ways to better integrate an animal component to our production plan to help with nutrient cycling and all the other benefits of having animals within a field rotation plan.  We are figuring out what kind of enterprises and at what scale will suit us best, and how we can both be financially and ecologically stable (sound familiar, LFS students?).  This is challenging as we are unsure of where  we (both as individuals and as a business) will be beyond the next season.  But boy, it's great to be thinking of solutions to problems we had this year, and thinking of how much better it will be next season, and also gearing up for a whole new set of mistakes (I mean, things to learn) in our second round.  :)

In summary, lots of "what if"s are floating around over cups of tea and dark, rainy evenings, but the Birds and the Beans are excited to be dreaming of what next year will bring!

P.S. I promise to put a few more exciting pictures up soon...