Pulling the ripcord. Major life change

Mulched peas today, planted a bed of broccoli and a bed of zucchini before the rain started.

Did some grocery shopping and picked up the chicken fence I had ordered at the co-op.

We have about a 50/50 mix of hens and roosters, this will lead to problems with fighting and too many roos harassing the hens. 

We have lots of ticks this year, I figured why not give the surplus roos a bachelor pad, supposedly they won't fight if there's no hens to fight over. Might as well put them to work keeping the bugs down, rather than send them to the stew pot.

Behold, the rooster frat house:

Their flight feathers are trimmed and once they figure out where home is, I will take the fence out and let them have run of the yard.

There's lots of trees for them to hide under and Barred Rocks have camouflage so they should do OK outside.

Even if we lose a few, they were surplus anyway and there will be more next year.

Farmers market yesterday, flea market today, made a couple hundred bucks this weekend. 

Got home this afternoon and transplanted cabbage, broccoli, spring onions, two kinds of cucumbers and tomatillos.

I'm starting to figure out the best way to get plants in the ground and it's going much faster. I also need to plant stuff much more densely than I have been.

Pests are showing up now.

This is what flea beetles do to radishes:

I don't want to spray for them so I'm going to let thing be and see what happens. They say that whatever pest you have, if you can wait it out, whatever predates on the pest should arrive a week or so after the pest arrives.

It's also just radishes. They grow so quickly and the beetles are just eating the leaves so hopefully it won't bother the eating part.

Also, wife unit made a new friend in the local arts community who invited us over to her house for a visit.

I only brought up the pineapple on her front porch when we were on the drive home. 

Wife didn't find it as funny as I did.

Been busy, markets have sucked, nobody wants to open their wallets right now.

Farming like mad. I fertilized and mulched the potatoes this morning

Hand weeded two beds of Garlic. Still have to do two more. Fertilized and mulched them too.

I'm only getting about 50% germination on the garlic and a ton of grass growing with it. I think it's because I didn't have the big tiller to break ground adequately last year. Hoping that pulling the grass out and covering what's left will keep the weed pressure down.

I also pulled the row cover off a bed of carrots and a bed of dill.

The idea is that the row cover protects the seedlings until they're strong enough to resist bugs and wildlife. 

It also protects the weeds that germinate. I won't be using it again.

I have to hand weed all of this:

I also transplanted 50 Roma tomato plants with radishes, beets and basil to fill in the empty space.

Tomorrow is checking on the bees and fixing a bunch of broken stuff that's been piling up.

Checked bees this morning, colony is getting big and strong.... and a little angry. 

Replaced light bulbs in the barn with leds so we can see better.

Replaced the front tires on the wife unit's garden tractor because she had a blowout. 

Nearly finished construction on our walk-in cooler. Door is on and ac unit is installed. I just have to seal it up now.

The room is 11' x 6' x 7' and I've got a 5000btu air conditioner rigged out to be a cooling unit.

There are two temperature controllers, the left one controls a 5 watt LED bulb which acts as a heater and is attached to the ac unit's temp sender. This makes the ac unit think the room is warmer than it really is. It will cool the room until it reaches the temp set by the controller and the bulb goes off.

The controller on the right reads the temperature of the ac unit cooling fins. If they freeze, it shuts down the left controller which allows the ac unit to go into fan only mode and defrost.

It might seem hokey but if my cooler goes down, I can replace an air conditioner for less money than a commercial refrigeration service call.

Excuse the mess, I still have work to do.

The room isn't sealed up and there's no weatherstripping on the door but it seems to be working.

It's +28c outside and +13c inside. The temperature is still dropping.

I may need a larger ac unit so I've made the hole big enough to accept a 10,000 btu unit. 

I'm using the 5,000 btu unit because I was given three of them for free.

After dinner I have to go mow a pasture that I'm digging a trench in for a water line. I have the location guys coming in a few days 

Mowed:

Sky is beautiful this evening:

Almost forgot. I grew a thing!

You should look into the cost of a CoolBot.  Lots of professional brewers use them for the exact purpose you're building, and IIRC they're pretty inexpensive.  I know several brewers with LARGE cold rooms run off residential AC's and a coolbot for the exact same reason you mention. 

Just make sure your condensate drain/runoff is plumbed away, because with the increased duty cycle there will be a lot more effluent. 

In reply to golfduke :

We looked at a Coolbot initially. Coolbots are $650 in Canada. Inkbird controllers are $45 each and do the same thing.

If this doesn't work, we will step up to a coolbot. 

The condensate in this unit get sprayed on the evaporator to help cool it down. I imagine others will have a hose.

Well, this week has been spent snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Market went well, had some decent sales and put some money in our pocket.

My tender for the 2-post lift in the local co-op auto shop was not accepted. I'm going to pour a concrete floor in my shop and put in a lift. If this whole thing doesn't work, I'll just go back to wrenching. There's money for an honest mechanic around here. 

Lots of these guys around, that makes me happy.

I fertilized and mulched more beds today:

Potatoes are doing great, we're going to put in more next year.

Harvested radishes and spinach today. Radishes look nice, right?

Inside they look like this:

That's radish root maggot damage. 

Going to try again in some raised beds.

It's pointless to take loose leaf lettuce to market, it's wilty within half an hour, tried in water with roots attached and on ice, no luck.

And, to top it off, something got into the rooster encampment last night and made off with all of them.

I think we need a guard dog outside.

Did a human steal your roosters?

AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:

Did a human steal your roosters?

I doubt it. We found some feathers but not much else.

There's coyotes, foxes and badgers in the area. I'm betting on coyotes. 

Going to start looking for a Newfoundland or Bernese pup.

In reply to ShawnG :

I buy packaged spinach all the time and it's usually marked "organic" so there must be a way to get it to market without it wilting. 

In reply to Ian F (Forum Supporter) :

Spinach yes, loose leaf lettuce not so much.

I'm not going to bother with spinach except growing some for us. It's hard to compete with the price on that stuff.

What do you mean by your "tender" of the local co-ops lift? 

I always thought if I had a lot of space and free time that I'd totally be wrenching. Or at the very least, doing tires. 

In reply to pheller :

My bid for the lift they were selling. 

I've been turning wrenches my whole life. I loved my job but it turned into just a job.

I've earned myself a bad back, a compressed nerve in my left arm that makes my pinky and ring finger go numb at times and carpal tunnel in both wrists.

It's been a year today since we arrived at the farm and my hands are finally starting to work properly again.

I need to do something different for a while. For my mental and physical health.

Tender is an offer to purchase. Is that just Canadianese?

I bought some romaine lettuce yesterday and it looked like it had been used as a football. My brother has a fresh market vegetable company and he has a flash freezer. Don't really know what that is and I expect it's really pricey but I think that's what they use to get fresh vegetables to the store looking like they have just been picked.

In reply to bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) :

I think it's Saskatchewanian.

In reply to ShawnG :

The answer might be more land and lentils.

In reply to Rons :

We're only in our first year. I'm sure there's a market for produce grown without pesticides and herbicides. 

If I can't be efficient with 1/2 acre cultivated, I don't see how more is going to help. It just means going into debt for more land and ever bigger equipment. 

I'm not a long haired, duck squeezing hippie (OK maybe long hair) but monoculture, industrial farming just isn't sustainable in the long run.

Every year farmers are having to apply more synthetic fertilizer and getting less yield, there has to be a reason for that.

We started eating better and paying attention to where our food comes from a few years ago and our health has improved a lot. 

On the lettuce thing. Part of it is a poor choice of variety on my part.

Iceberg and Romaine are in all the stores because they ship well. They've been bred for that. The tradeoff is very little flavor, they're a receptacle for salad dressing.

Bibb lettuce or loose leaf lettuce doesn't travel as well, you can buy yourself some time by keeping it cool after harvest but it's really meant to be picked and eaten right away.

I have a row of Romaine that should be ready in a week or so, we will see how it goes.

Finished mulching today, did some weeding, cut down a bed of onions that I had put row cover on because the grass has taken over. Tomorrow I'll till it and start onions again.

I planted some radish, spinach, lettuce and salad turnip transplants in the raised beds.

Mowed the lawn.

Lost a plug from my irrigation pump so I made a quick trip to town.

Put up our farm sign:

Did some trading for a set of pallet forks for my tractor:

Tomorrow I'm going to check the bees and transplant some rhubarb, raspberries and Saskatoon berries. 

Bees are doing well. Going to reduce inspections to once a month.

I started putting in our fruit transplants today. 30 raspberry plants and 30 Saskatoons. I stuck some extra nasturtiums I had in between the Saskatoons, hoping to keep the gophers and voles away. Nana always said "critters hate 'sturchums".

I replaced some rhubarb plants that didn't make it with fresh ones.

I'm impressed with the difference that the straw mulch has made. The soil in this bed was like concrete last year. Now it's soft and black and there's earthworms.

I tilled and replanted the onion bed that had gotten away from me, pruned and tied up the cherry tomatoes.

Jenn and I loaded our motorcycles into the truck, tomorrow morning they go for a safety inspection so we can insure them in Sask.

Happy Herd?  Or Happy Hero?

In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :

Herd.

It's clearer in person

Got the motorcycles inspected today, insurance tomorrow. 

Drained my wallet some more at the irrigation store.

Came home and split the bee colony into two. Hopefully I'll have two strong colonies at the end of summer. No honey this year but, with any luck, next year we will have honey from one colony and a second colony to split again. 

Zucchini is blooming:

Made the most expensive salad I've ever eaten.
All from our own garden. Two kinds of lettuce, spinach, peppers, green onions, salad turnips and cilantro.
Tasty.

Been a while, sorry.

Had a great weekend, two good markets, about $500 in sales between the two.

Finished the walk in cooler and it's working great.

Wife unit is handling the social media for our local market now and people are actually hearing about it.

Last of the garden finally went in on Monday. We were gifted many bags of nearly past due seed potatoes so we decided to plant them to at least give us seed potatoes for next year. We're planning on donating a bunch of potatoes to the local food bank if we get enough. 

We're harvesting lettuce, spinach and Snap Peas right now. Should have zucchini for this weekend.

Our house cat had kittens so we have some ragdoll kittens that will be barn cats in future.

Wife units best friend has been visiting us for our birthdays this week so that has been a great morale boost.

I've been having problems with deer coming in the yard and I discovered foxes in our pasture so I know where our chickens went.

The local solution seems to be shooting them but I'd rather they just moved on.

To help with these issues we picked up a guardian dog for the property. 

Say hello to Oscar.

Oscar is a three month old Maremma and he's been stuck to me like glue.

He's got a nice house outside in the yard that he likes and should be toasty in winter.