post # 1.5

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Hello all!

This is post number 1 ½, as last week I wrote out a whole long letter and then accidentally closed the window and lost it. I was so disheartened that I couldn’t get down to writing again until today. You know how it goes.

So I have been at the farm now for a month! That means seven more to go. I’m feeling pretty settled-in here now, but it did take a couple of weeks. It’s a beautiful place, and I love being rural. All I can hear at night is the sound of what seems like a million frogs, and on a clear night I can see so many stars! Such a far cry from the traffic noise and light pollution of the city. Let me describe the place and people a bit here. Bill and I are the apprentices, he is living in the cute little cob house, and I in the big farm house. Mary, who owns the farm, lives down the road and houses most of the seed company (called Full Circle Seeds) stuff there. Marika, who came to the farm as and apprentice six years ago and is now Mary’s business partner, lives in a tiny house on the farm with her partner Clay. The four of us work here, then there are a few other people who come on a semi-regular basis to do other work; Holger does a lot of the construction work on the farm, and Steve might be trying out a field of grains this year and helps out in other areas. I’m sure that there will be other people coming around too. There were renters in the farm house, but they’ve just moved out, so now it’s just me here. Right now we’re working Monday to Friday, 9 – 5, apart from our own daily chores. I’m responsible for A.M. chicken duty, which involves letting them out of the chicken houses and feeding them and bringing fresh water and scratch.

I feel like I’ve learned so much in this first month that I’m excited to think about how much I will have learned come November. That being said, my learning curve right now is very steep. Lately we’ve been doing a lot of seed starting; things that come to mind are tomatoes, peppers, fennel, beets, chard, kale, onions, leeks, lettuce, broccoli, Chinese cabbage, mustard greens… others I can’t remember. We’ve been transplanting hundreds of tomatoes into 4” pots, some for sale and others to grow at the farm. We’ve direct-seeded broad beans, carrots, peas into the greenhouses, and been transplanting oriental greens, green onions, rob, and lotsa lettuce into greenhouses. I think that the biggest thing I’ve been learning about has been the seed propagation. It’s tricky, getting good germination then making sure that the little seedlings stay alive and grow well. It’s pretty interesting though.

So, what about the heavy manual labour, hey Sasha? Aren’t you working on a farm?? So, last week I wouldn’t have been able to tell you much about that, but woohoo, after this week… On Wednesday, Mary went and cleaned out a nearby chicken farmer’s barn (her yoga teacher’s, actually) of 500 chickens’ worth of shit. That turned out to be about 8 - 10 pickup truckloads of manure to shovel into a nice long compost furrow that now rests in one of the fields. Then five or so more down by where they keep the pigs, and another three or four the next morning to put around the fruit trees. That was a shitty couple of days, and on the Wednesday it just poured. I felt pretty good about it afterwards though, and it’s nice to look at that huge long pile of compost and know that that was a day’s hard work.

Soon we’ll be planning out exactly what we’re going to be growing in the fields, and getting ready to start going to the farmer’s markets in Victoria and Sooke. I’m really excited about the markets, I think I’m going to like that a lot.

Well I wrote quite a bit more than this last week, but it’s a sunny day, and I’d rather be outside, so I’m going to leave the rest for another post.

I hope that all is well with all of you.

With love,

Sasha

Ps- here’s my mailing address for those who’d like it:

3680 Otter Point Road,

Sooke, BC

V9Z 0K1