WEEK #25: Pest Pressures, Pressure Canners & Solar Power

Our first heat wave of the year was this weekend.  Temperatures were up to 31 degrees Celsius with the humidex reaching near 40 degrees. While outside during the day, the chickens often hung out in the shade underneath thire coop.  Every night they still retire inside the coop, except for the odd hen that prefers to roost in the cedar tree......Every night we have to go fetch her and bring her inside.

Most of our vegetables that are now up are doing fairly well, those that didn't come up have been replaced.  Aaron filled these empty spots with more carrots, lettuce, and some sweet corn seeds. 

Our potatoes, all in blossom.  Photo by Marianne Balkwill

We made some markers to identify the crops and placed them out in the gardens this week as well. 

Of course with all these succulent vegetables, we are going to get some insect pests.  Right now the main pest are Leaf Miners in our beet leaves.  Though the leaves are edible to us, the leaf miners only do attack the leaves not the root. 

For those who don't know, Leaf Miners are true flies (order Diptera). They are small yellow and black coloured flies whose larvae tunnel while they feed (creating mines) in the leaves of plants.  If you ever observe light coloured trails on the leaves of your flowers, you may in fact have a Leaf Miner larva in them.

There aren't too many good chemicals out there to combat these pests, so we are just removing the leaves (a cheaper and more practical approach) that have these little blobs in them and feed them to the chickens.

 A beet leaf with Leaf Miner damage.  The larva (or larvae) inside make little mines as they feed inside to the leaf.  Photo by Marianne Balkwill

 



Detail of the leaf with 3 Leaf Miner larvae feeding inside.

Another pest we have right now are aphids in our goldenrod surrounding a few garden plots. These "Goldenrod Aphids" a large and red.  They seem to only favour the goldenrod and nothing else.  We are pulling out a lot of goldenrod so it doesn't take over the back field as we want to plant some indigenous wildflowers in the future.  Some of these goldenrod patches have created banker plant areas attracting beneficial insects such as ladybugs and lacewings that feed on many species of aphids that may infest our crops. We will leave these patches for now.

Bright red aphids cover the stalk of this goldenrod while two adult ladybugs feed on them.  A ladybug larva, which looks nothing like the adult, is near the top of the plant looking for prey as well.  Photo by Marianne Balkwill.

Since we got back from vacation, Aaron ordered a pressure cooker/canner online.  It came this week and it is huge!  Unlike traditional canning, a pressure cooker/canner provides the only safe means for canning non-acidic foods like vegetables, fish, meat, and chicken.

All American Pressure Cooker/Canner 930

Unfortunately, the word from Hydro One is that there is not enough capacity on the grid out our way to supply hydro via solar panels, so we won't be able to sign up with the government MicroFIT program.  I guess we may have to do it our own way in the future by purchasing the occasional solar panel and battery while we slowly work our way towards off grid independence.

WEEK 24: Back home from Vacation: Garden, and Chicken Run

We attempted a back country camping trip in the Chinguchi region this week which is between Sudbury and Temagami.  Unfortunately, it has been an exceptional year for blackflies and mosquitoes, and in the end we were only out for two and a half days instead of the original seven.  When we came home a few days early we noticed that our garden looked exceptionally well!  Our romas grew at least three times their size, and everything else looks great except for our edamame with only three plants showing.  While we were gone we had around 4 inches of rain that fell which is great for our plants, and great for Marianne's Mom who was taking care of the garden while we were away.

HERE ARE SOME SAMPLE PICS:

Cabbage

 Peas and Tomatoes

 



 Peppers and Onions



 Potatoes

Beets

 

 Tomatoes

Squash

The chickens were happy to get outside again and forage.  However, they are getting bolder by the day and wander further away from their home.  One night, one of them didn't go into the coop and stayed outside all night! Time to build the run.

It was easy to construct our chicken run with some pressure treated fours by fours, used corn crib wire, and miscellaneous used fencing from Marianne's Dad. A 5/8th inch piece of plywood was used for the door.  The chickens seemed happy with it, and so are we now that we don't have to keep a constant eye on them. 

Chicken run with the gate 

 Another angle of the chicken run

 



 Our rooster starting to look like a BOSS

 

In other news, strawberries are now in season.  None of our strawberries made it due to the frost, so a trip to the local u-pick is coming up in the not to distant future.  One of our favourite places to pick strawberries and raspberries is Pardos Berrie Farm near Blenheim along Highway #3.  Next year, we will try to grow raspberries along with strawberries.  Our neighbour has blueberries, so hopefully we can doing some berry bartering.

WEEK 22/23: Creepy Chickens and Mesclun Mix

After the Chickens moved into the coop, we noticed that instead of using their perches, they preferred to roost on the ledges next to the window and anywhere else where they can get as high as possible.  It is quite a site as they jockey for position with much pushing and shoving each other aside and in the end some even loose their footing and fall into the bedding.  Aaron opened up the side of the coop one night and there were even 2 chickens trying to sleep on the heat bulb shield!

A somewhat creepy photo photo of inside the coop at night.  Notice the chickens on the ledges and 2 trying to sleep on the heat bulb shield!

Later in the week the weather finally warmed up and the heat bulb was taken out.  We let the chickens out once in a while to forage.  They stay close to their home which is comforting. 

We ate our first vegetables from the garden today.  It is a Mesclun Mix that includes arugula, radicchio, red romaine, and spinach. We will be harvesting it probably every other day for a while. 

Mesclun mix.  Just gotta wash off the mud and it's ready for eating :D :D

 

Next week we will be going back country camping. It will be interesting to see how our garden is coming along when we get back.

 



WEEK #21: Small Succeses

As if it wasn't bad enough that we planted the tomatoes when they were already too tall, but on top of that we had two nights late this week that had frost.  The potatoes clearly showed signs of damage, along with our tomatoes, and as for our squash...well.....it's dead.  The strawberries also got damaged with loss of flowers.  We may not have any strawberries this year.

Potato plants showing frost damage.

 

The potatoes had only minor frost damage, and will probably grow out of it.  The squash were completely destroyed, so Aaron planted seeds in the ground on each mound to start over.  Our tomatoes that went out sickly clearly got hit hard.  All of the roma tomatoes were dead, with a few beef and cherry tomatoes still lingering.  Luckily, our neighbour, George Clark, who gave tomato plants to Marianne's Gramma and Mom last year, dropped off some beef tomatoes for us :D Marianne's Dad may even know someone who might have romas as well.  We are keeping our fingers crossed.

We decided this week to plant the rest of our seeds outside.  We planted a row of yellow beans, a row of green beans and a row of edename (soybeans), two more rows of cabbage, two rows of rutabaga, a row each of spinach, leaf lettuce and Boston head lettuce.  Now everything is planted in the beds.  Next year, we are going to have everything out by the first week of June, or get something big enough to cover our crops at night in case of a lingering late May frost.

Other happenings this week was creating a shelf and stacking the rain barrels on it to collect water in the future. The location is on the south side of the shed.  The only thing left to do is to run an extension from the eaves trough to the barrels themselves, hook all the barrels together and add a tap.

Recycled 55 gallon drums turned into rain barrels

 

 

Rain barrels next to the chicken coop for scale, and so you can see where it has to be connected from the eaves trough.

The chickens are now full time residence of their new chicken coop.  They are doing really well, and when they are let outside they stay very close to the coop.  They are so fun to watch as they jump around and make short runs and even shorter flights in the air.  We have been very fortunate thus far to still have all 16.  We are not sure what to do with the one rooster, but for now he remains with the flock.

The chickens getting adjusted to their new digs.  So far they seem to be loving it!

Inside their new pad.....POSH!