Saturday 5 October 2013

Oh hello, October.

It seems like just yesterday I was baffled that it was already September first, and here we are, one week away from Thanksgiving.

Come celebrate the bounty with locally grown vegetables and chicken for Thanksgiving dinner!  We have larger chickens that make a great substitute for turkey.  And if you’re having lots of people – we have lots of chickens!

September was a blur of markets and getting our grains and staple crops out of the field.  Cut and hauled and threshed by hand, we now have bags upon bags of wheat and barley stacked in the living room and windrows of beans drying in the barn.  

Growing staples was a great learning experience.  We had an unexpected challenge growing staples on peat soil-- too fertile!  What a problem to have!  Staple crops, like dry beans, wheat, flint corn, and sunflower seeds, need a bit of stress in the later season to make their seeds mature.  But our plants just kept growing and growing because the soil is very fertile and stays nice and moist, so lots of the seeds didn't mature before this season’s early rain came.   The same nutrients and moisture also made the weeds grow great – it’s called smartweed for a reason – which kept lots of the beans from drying properly.  Another challenge was getting things out of the field before the rains came, and we were stalled a few times when we had to wait for things to dry after unexpected showers.  However, our popcorn did unexpectedly well.  We’re just waiting for the moisture content to be right for it to pop.  So this year we learned that peat soil grows vegetables beautifully, and we've got loads of ideas of how to grow staples even better next year! 

It feels as though the season should be winding down, with our staples out of the field, the winter squash curing in the basement, and our last batch of chickens being sent to the abattoir this week, but we are far from slowing down.  We've got winter crops to sell until January, garlic to plant, freezers full of chickens to sell, not to mention book keeping and planning for next season...  will there ever be an off-season?  Probably not, but like my mother always says, “a change is as good as a break," so bring on the rubber rain suits and office work!