Another Photo Update

-Lancashire Lad pea

-Leek flower

- My home glistening in the fading evening sun

-Arugula flowers (we're going to have a ton of arugula seed this year)

- These are pretty special: Crown Peas. They're the most unusual pea I've ever grown, formerly considered a separate sub-species of the common pea they have huge clusters of spectacular flowers, forming a "crown" at the top of each plant. The pods are short but tasty. It's almost like a cross between a sweet pea and an edible pea.

-Phacelia is a great nectar crop as well as a cool season cover crop. Bees are currently being drawn to it from seemingly miles around.

Spring Farm Updates

Spring is sure arriving in full force now! Despite that extremely early start (the daffodils were in bloom in early April) things seem to have slowed down a bit and everything seems to be a little bit closer to average right now. There are a ton of farm projects that I'll tell you about as I get the chance, the biggest ones are the new greenhouse, the new yurt and of course all the seed expansion. I'm planting a bigger area than ever for seeds this year, two of the three garden areas on the farm have been greatly expanded. I just came in from seeding all 16 cereal grain varieties for this year, and the 35 new lettuces we planted last week are all sprouting in the loamy Nictaux soil (lettuce seeds were big this year so I'm growing as many as I can for 2011). The peas are all in now too, I've got almost 100 varieties on the go including some extremely rare ones like Monster, Prince Edward and Gravedigger. Now we just need some rain...

The other week we tilled, leveled, seeded and rolled two new hay meadows. One was seeded last year but the ground was so lumpy from the plowing work that we had to re-do it this spring (otherwise mowing would be nearly impossible), we had a tractor in to have it tilled then by hand we raked flat all the furrows and rolled the seeds in with a borrowed push-roller (thanks to our wwoofer Greg for the many hours of rolling!). It's looking nice and primed to start sprouting now, I really can't wait until we can start scything up there.

The house is full of seedlings in various states of growth and the new greenhouse is slowly coming along to provide some much needed extra space. The anchor posts are all set but I haven't had the time yet to move on to assembling the frame, updates to come!

As you can see from the photos the yurt frame is totally finished now too. I've just spent a couple of days over at Little Foot Yurts getting all the angles and dimensions right, it's so exciting to see it finally coming together! The canvas will be ready for it on Sunday, I'll have more photos and details real soon...

Yurt Update pt. 2 (building the wheel)

Last month I finally got the long awaited yurt wheel built! It was the final piece of the frame, and by far the most complicated to construct. It took 2 and 1/2 days of work with some generous guidance from Alex Cole (www.lfy.ca) and lots of help from Rabanus (who was wwoofing with Alex) to turn our initial ash log into the beautiful and structurally crucial crown of my yurt-to-be.

After selecting a knot-free ash tree that was about 5" across and as staight grained as possible (there's always some variability) I cut an eight foot length to be cleaved. Cleaving with a froe is definitely a valueable skill, and a process that's inspiringly easy. You secure your log in a brake, pound the froe blade into the end of the log (as close to centre as possible), and then use the levering effect of the froe to almost effortlessly split the log. The going is so easy you really have to keep a careful eye on the split, and to guide it back towards centre if it begins to go off. Having multiple people on hand was really helpful at this stage, the log wasn't quite as straight grained as it could have been but Alex was able to guide the split towards centre by pulling down on the log, against the direction of the split. The split wants to go in the direction of the pulling force, so it can guided either up or down this way. Even with all this shuffling around of people the cleaving only took a few minutes to accomplish.

Much more time consuming (and harder on the arms!) was the step of shaving down these two halves into flat planks. Because we essentially ended up with two semi-circles I had to shave the bottom sides flat with a drawknife. A pretty intense upper body workout!

Next was the process of steaming the plank and bending it into the wheel. After a couple hours in the steambox (quite a simple contraption of plywood and plastic liner, with a pipe attached to a boiler) the planks were taken out and while still flexible were quickly clamped around a metal cartwheel (although any other similar frame would work). Time was of the essence here, we had about 30 seconds to get them in place and clamped before the wood cooled too much to bend and risks cracking. So out of the steambox they came and with almost military precision we wrestled them around the frame one by one. Between the three of us and our prerehersed roles it went fairly smoothly. We now had a wheel!

We let it set for a few days before attempting the last major step; drilling and burning the holes for the roof poles. This is where quite a bit of math and geometry came into play, we had to decide the angles and to mark and drill each hole. Although a round hole (and therefore a round roof pole) could work, there would be no way of keeping the roof poles from sliding around once in place. It's way better to have square holes and to square off the poles to fit, that way you can select the "top" side of the pole (the straightest side and the side that just feels right being the top) and have it stay there. Chiseling is possible here but burning the hole with a red-hot steel rod is far easier and produces a much nicer edge. We heated the rod in the forge (seen below next to Rabanus there) before driving it steadily into the round (soon to be square) hole. As this work went on it developed an almost intoxicating rythme... The fire, the glowing hot steel, the dense smoke from the wheel, and then back to the fire again... there was some pretty intense energy involved.

Update, Jan. 21:

It's finished! I just added the dome made from whippy ash sticks, the purpose of which is to support the canvas (otherwise there would be an indent at the top of the yurt, quickly becoming a birdbath in our climate!). The next step now is finishing the roof poles by draw knifing the top ends into tapered squares, and afterwards drilling and attaching a twine bridle to the lower ends (to connect to the wall). To be continued...

Yurt Updates

Now that I have the garden reasonably under control I've been working on stringing together the yurt poles into the wall sections. The poles are attached simply by drilling holes spaced exactly 12" apart and tying a short length of twine through the holes. The plan for my 14' yurt calls for three wall sections, two of which I've completed while the third is under construction. After the leaves fall in October I'll cut a nice, straight ash tree in the forest for the tono wheel. I'll cleave it into two planks with a froe which will then be steamed to form the wheel. The roof poles are now oiled and finished, they just need to be cut to length and have their taper made once the tono wheel is complete (the wheel has to come first). I'm hoping the whole thing will be finished sometime this fall, maybe late-October or November.

An interesting concept that I'm building into the yurt is to have at least one pole representing every hardwood species in our forest (minus the rare ones which I wouldn't want to cut and weaker woods like aspen). So far I have red maple, sugar maple, striped maple, white ash, red oak, white oak, paper birch, grey birch, american beech, american elm, linden, speckled alder and black cherry, though the bulk of the poles are ash and maple. It's kind of a symbolic gesture that celebrates the unique diversity of the Acadian forest. When you think about it, a yurt is just about the lowest impact form of shelter when it comes to materials needed from the ecosystem. In all it takes just a few big armloads of biomass (biological wealth) taken out of the forest to fashion a warm, dry shelter (human wealth). Contrast that to a new house. And when the organic based yurt has finally reached the end of its life it can be wholly returned to the earth, the atoms and minerals of which may continue their cycle in a tree, another yurt, a salamander or a human being...

More to come...

Carrying a folded wall section. It folds like an accordion into an easily managed size.

The roof poles (right) spread out while their linseed oil coating dries. Note the smaller diameter wall poles (left) that have been shaped while they were curing to be permanently bent.

Lots to update on

I'm finally able to do some writing again after a solid month of garden and farm work. With the help of our WWOOFer Bjoern I got both the seed and food gardens planted weeks ahead of schedule. This year we've got over 60 bean varieties on the go, 40 peas and about 40 tomatoes, among many others. A few of the beans are my own strains that I'm working towards stabilizing. My most promising of these is a striped variation of the pole bean McGrath's Africa. Two years ago in our McGrath's Africa patch I discovered a plant that produced black and white striped seeds in striped green pods, rather than the usual white seeds in leathery purple pods. Last year I grew them out and 95 percent stayed true to type (which is a great rate). If I can stabilize it for a few more years I might even be able to release it as new variety, any name suggestions?


We also planted an acre of Sorghum x Sudangrass in the newly cleared upper field as a green manure crop. Without the ideal equipment of a harrow and some power source to pull it (animal or machine) I ended up broadcast seeding it and then zipping over the field with the rototiller set to it's fastest speed. I set the tines very shallow so that it only mixed the top two inches or so of soil, it worked almost like a rake. A small corner of the upper field we've enriched with tons of manure and we've planted sunflowers, tomatoes, peppers, adzuki beans, chickpeas, millet and corn, as well as a huge patch of squash planted on mounds of manure. We're experimanting with these mounds as a way to stretch what little valuable manure we have. The roots of the squash will be growing in almost pure manure while the vines can sprawl over the less fertile soil around the mounds. We'll see how well it works.














Now that the garden is planted and Bjoern's keeping the weeds under control I'm starting to put some more time into the yurt. Last January I took a great yurt-building workshop held by Alex and Selene Cole of Little Foot Yurts over in the Gaspereau Valley. Over the winter I cut, peeled, shaped and cured the poles for the yurt, and starting now I'm trying (emphasis on trying) to get it assembled. If I'm sucessful, updates to follow...


The yurt poles after we carried them in from the woods. Note the frames used for shaping the khana poles (wall poles).