Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

Mid-January, 5pm and still light out. This is the view to the west, standing just beside the big barn to my left, looking past the loafing barn yard to the second, 11-acre pasture—the 9-acre field where the market garden lives is directly to the right—and then the trees. At the end of the rail fence is the gate where the cows come home at night. It’s bitterly cold, my fingers are going numb after only a couple of minutes on the camera, but I’m enjoying the sunset, out here in the deep freeze, thinking about all the work ahead for the new-start market garden season. It’s crazy. Cool!

In comparison with just about everything else, tiny farming is so…basic. A friend sent me a link to Graze with the only comment: “Remember our chat about healthy food + convenience?” So I clicked it. I don’t know what to say. After reading through the site, I was kinda, literally, almost speechless. The UK service is based on the British National Health Service’s 5-a-day campaign that says you should eat five servings of fruit and veggies daily. Graze aims to help.

This is seamlessly intense green marketing. Every base is covered. Probably my favorite piece on the whole site is their description of how precisely-sized servings are shipped to you:  Our box is thin, strong & uses the least material possible. What’s more, it’s from a sustainable forest, biodegradable & 100% recyclable. We source our food locally wherever possible, and prepare everything in our own kitchen, keeping food miles to a minimum. We hate waste so we buy all our fresh produce on the day we send it, and any leftovers go to our local farm. And best of all, the postman delivers it, so we don’t need any vans or energy guzzling shops. We are always seeking ways to be even greener.

Fascinating!

A fairly productive Saturday of building out the new seedling room in the freezing cold (-15°C/5°F), with Michael and Bob (he dropped by to help for the day). By sundown, we had about half of the framing done, slow going with the cold, and the joists in the ceiling to work around. The propane space heater I used to use for emergency greenhouse heat barely made a difference with all of the drafts around the old barn doors and windows.  This winter work is nowhere near as fun as rough carpentry in warm weather, but it felt good to get stuff done.  And we’re still on schedule—seedlings soon have to start!

Sammy the Steer, born at 4am in the freezing cold barn last January, is healthy and hefty at around 800lbs (360kg), and approaching the end of his arc as a provider of tasty, mainly grass-fed beef. He and his three pals will likely go off to auction in March. They’re heavier than they’d normally be on a mostly grass diet (supplemented with some grain), because Bob didn’t wean them from their mothers for an extra couple of months. Mother’s milk is good. I’ll miss cows on the new farm. Although I’ve never been involved in their day-to-day, they’ve been close neighbors. My real connection with them is through MANURE, tons and tons of 6- to 12-month-old, air-dried, partially-composted, nutrient-rich goodness in a constant, convenient heap, there for the taking. I don’t see cattle in my near farming future. I hope to get to them eventually, meanwhile, putting some animals in the new tiny farm food chain sooner than later is on my mind. Perhaps goats?

I’ve been keeping the eight guys indoors most days lately, opening up their door only when the sun is out. They still seem little worse for the wear after weeks of roaming around in the sub-zero cold. They’ve suffered a little frostbite to the tips of their combs, likely from the severest cold nights in the coop, and there’s no sure way around that short of insulating and heating the chickenhouse (Bob said that happened even with 300 layers sharing body heat). Some days, they seem to like just standing around in the snow, even when there’s feed, warm water once or twice a day, and comfy dry litter at home. They often stand on one leg at a time, keeping the other one warm…

Momentum is slowly building at the new farm. The trusty Kubota compact tractor is on site, there to help out wherever it can. Today, we just about finished the demolition in the barn, which included a small room on the upper level (pounded together with a million 3″ nails), and a stall area in the lower level that looked good maybe for goats. Below, Michael uses a sawzall  (reciprocating saw) to cut things up. The sawzall is my favorite power tool of the moment. With a heavy duty demo blade, it sails through wood and nails no problem (you can see the stall poles sawed just above where they’re set in concrete). Sometimes, you have to tear down in order to build—with the right tools, that can be fun. We’re moving along—the new seedling room is on its way!

It’s a new day rising in a new year, perfect timing for Tiny Farm Blog to officially become a tale of TWO (tiny) farms: where I started out on this surprise growing adventure six seasons ago, and what comes next. There’s a long and complicated story here, not without its drama and prickly points, but luckily, all that is really beyond what TFB is about, so I don’t have to go into it here! Yay. The new situation is as much of an unusual and unlikely set-up as the current one was unexpected, a more or less instant meeting of minds. There were more, well, logical options, but this feels right. It’s very real tiny farming, with all of the hard (though fun!) work and financial challenges to face, PLUS, the prospect of a whole new start-up in the field…which is the really exciting, critical part.

The new farm is just down the road, only about 30km (19mi) away, but with the many lakes in between, getting there by road doubles the distance. I won’t lose touch with the PEOPLE I’ve come to know and the friends I’ve made, but it means a complete change in my I-don’t-drive local. The garden and facilities are also nearly starting from scratch. I’m going from a farm refined over several generations for this one purpose—a fantastically practical agricultural infrastructure, you could say, with Bob a living part of it, carrying forward a couple of centuries of classic farm maintenance skills—to loosely tended hay fields and a small, bare barn.

I guess for me it comes down to challenge, perseverance and a self-test (although I really don’t like…testing!!): How transferable is the “tiny” spirit, how much have I REALLY learned, and how far can tiny farming go, without becoming just another small business (let alone, just another mortgage payment)? I’ll include more details of the old and the new, as they fit. In any case, this should make for interesting times on the blog. As I understand it so far, tiny farming is about growing, about people as much as crops, and it’s about change… Let’s see what happens! :)

This is my winter desk. It’s the same year-round, but for most of the year, the warmer, outdoors part, it’s just a chair in front of a computer where I pop in to check stuff. In the winter, it becomes a mildly monkish workstation, a place to be a bit of a modern DIY scholar and scribe… To someone who’s loved books and reading from way early on, the Web is a completely over-the-top place. Billions of people surf around, but I wonder how many have a first-hand inkling of HOW MUCH STUFF IS REALLY IN THERE. It has EVERYTHING, just kinda piled up, like an endless, fantastically-stocked, 24/7 garage sale of ideas to put in your head. I don’t know if it’s ultimately a good thing, this type of extreme abundance, but it sure is interesting. And great for looking into things. So, I spend a good deal of winter time online, much of it related to farming. I bookmark a lot, and save (as in, download) pages that I think I should have around if the Net somehow went away. I seldom print, or take many notes on the computer, steno pads are perfect for all that, writing things out helps keep the volume manageable. And that’s about it, the modern, simple (but tech-entangled), tiny farming research station. Handy…! (Bonus game: What makes this not just any computer station, but a GARDEN station? Can you spot the soil thermometer? :)