Playing with the Big Girls

Late this April our farm family briefly expanded by 15. You see, my brother, who is a teacher, thought it would be a great idea if we adopted the chicks that the kindergarten class in his school was hatching. I said yes, talked to Josh about it, then switched my answer to no, then Scott convinced me that this was a good idea, so I said yes again. When adoption week rolled around, I had nightmares about the eventual infrastructure required by a flock of full grown chickens and tried to say no again. It was too late. The adoption papers were signed…so to speak. We were a little unprepared when the 15 chicks arrived (Scott promised only 10), but we made do, putting them in a basin from the dismantled pond that was in our backyard and warming them with the heat lamp that kept our laying chickens just warm enough to not lay eggs in the winter.
 
Day old chicks are cute, and despite Josh’s reluctance to take on the chick project (note that their breed is called Red Cap, which is a ‘mixed’ breed – good for laying, good for meat – which in farmer speak means good for neither) he quickly fell in love. In their first few days of life, Josh insisted that all visitors smell a little chick because “they smell like babies!”
The teen years came on fast. Within a few weeks, the chicks grew their ‘adult feathers’ and recognized that their wings were specifically designed for flying out of the little basin that they called home. Escape #3 prompted the build of the chicken tractor above, a design that Josh had been eager to try since seeing it at a farm on Vancouver Island. At week five, the chicks were moved into the backyard and introduced to grass, bugs, rain and real sun. Every two days they would move from one piece of grass to the next, leaving a little bit of fresh fertilizer for our lawn.

As the chicks grew, so did the frequency of discussion about their fate. Continue reading...

When chickens go on strike

COMMUNITY EDITORIAL BOARD
Kingston Whig Standard

By Jen Valberg

Saturday, May 25, 2013 10:38:44 EDT AM

After two months of laying eggs in the cold of winter, this January, our chickens went on strike. Now I am well aware that it is normal for birds to go through a period of moulting late in the year, when the days are shorter. The birds shed their feathers to make room for new growth, and along with hormonal changes comes a halt to egg production. My research told me that this period could last up to seven weeks, so Josh and I sat tight.
Two and a half months later - that’s 10 weeks sans eggs - the wheels of our new farm business, Fat Chance Farmstead, started to turn. The pace quickened, the to-do lists grew and out of fear that we would soon be running around like chickens with our heads cut off, we decided that a division of labour was in order. Josh was put in charge of the greenhouse, cows and all things plants, and I was put in charge of the mushrooms, bees and chickens.
The ever-extending period of moulting was now my concern and my concern alone. I took this to heart. Except that the more research I did, the more puzzled I became. It was spring, the chickens were warm, and they were now getting plenty of sunlight – an important precursor to egg production.
But perhaps they needed more? The chicken run was small and had shady spots through the day. I started sprinkling food in the sun periodically to encourage the girls to expose themselves to just a bit more sunshine.
Eventually, I noticed two nests formed in the corners of the chicken coop, but still no eggs. Frustrated with their seemingly never-ending appetite and the foolishness of buying bags of organic feed while also paying top dollar for organic eggs at the store, I started rationing.
By limiting their diet to what a chicken actually needs for a day, my hope was that we would come to an agreement. You start laying eggs, and we’ll go back to the bottomless pit of grain you had back in the good old days.
Unfortunately for me, there was no bargaining with these girls. By feeding them less, I was actually prolonging the strike. Instead of calm, happy birds greeting me each morning, opening the chicken coop door was like walking in on four angsty teenagers who were ready to pounce. Clearly, I had ruffled some feathers.
As I struggled for control of the chicken operation, I maintained a glimmer of hope. Every morning, every evening, when I opened that door I believed that I might find an egg. With every visit, my eyes would scan the corners of the coop. Front left, back left, back right, front right. Middle? Perch? Anywhere? Through three months of anticipation, and three months of disappointment, that routine never changed. I knew the eggs would come.
One morning as my eyes ran from front left to back left, I caught a glimpse of a round brown egg. At last! The wave of relief that I felt was quickly replaced with terror. As I leaned in to grab the prized egg, I realized that it was but a shell. The white, yolk and a third of the shell were nowhere to be found. Well, I knew where they were. They were in the chickens’ bellies.
This nasty habit is common among chickens lacking calcium in their diets. Looking to supplement, they resort to eating their own eggs, and it can be the kiss of death for a flock. Once it starts, the rest of the chickens jump on the bandwagon, and the habit is difficult to shake.
As a new farmer who is raising chickens not as pets, but as producers, I was faced with the realization that I may have to cull my flock and start fresh. Despite my good intentions and efforts to encourage egg-laying, I somehow felt responsible for my chickens’ new addiction.
I wasn’t ready to say goodbye, nor was I willing to relinquish control. And so, Josh hopped on board and we put all of our eggs in one basket: rehab. Lacking the funds to send our girls to a posh facility in California, we needed an intervention in our own backyard.
We added crushed oyster shells to the chickens’ diet, thus increasing their calcium intake. We moved their coop to a new part of the yard. Josh increased the size of the run tenfold, giving the chickens access to lush grass and plenty of bugs. We held weekly therapy sessions. I even went back to my old feeding habits, treating the feed tray like a 24-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet.
The chickens must have sensed that change, on their part, was in order. Maybe they overheard me telling a friend that their lives were at stake. Or perhaps we had eliminated the opportunity to dine by checking for eggs on an hourly basis. Maybe it was the combination of changes. Five days into their new life, the chickens went cold turkey, and quit the habit. The strike was over, and the hens let us have their eggs.
It has been a month now, and any poor feelings that were held during the strike have dissipated. The chickens are happy scratching away in the grass and we are collecting three eggs a day. Kitchen conversation has shifted from reminders to buy more eggs at the store to reminders to eat more eggs before we run out of counter space.
The ordeal has forced me to accept a principle that many farmers before me have embraced; one that the wind hinted at in March when it blew over our greenhouse: though you can change some conditions, you are never fully in control. And so it is with a new sense of respect and humility that this spring chicken thanks the hens each morning for sharing their eggs.
Born and raised in Kingston, Jen Valberg is a member of the Whig-Standard's Community Editorial Board and co-owner of Fat Chance Farmstead. When she's not in the garden, you can find her in the kitchen, behind the sewing machine or making noise on the piano.

A greenhouse

A greenhouse. Every small organic farm has at least one. Necessary for giving the tomatoes, peppers and onions the head start they couldn’t otherwise get in our climate. And if you’re me, necessary for relieving your sewing room/home office of soil, grow lights, seed packages and a great big mess.

The slow creep of farm inventory into every nook and cranny of our house felt all too familiar late this winter when it was time to put the miniscule onion seeds (which by the way take about 100 days to grow from seed to full size) into the soil. Back in my Queen’s University days, I started two small clothing enterprises from the bedroom of my house in the student ghetto. I gave up my shelves to excess t-shirt inventory out of necessity. They had to go somewhere. Then my desk started moonlighting as a sewing table. Graphic design software and financial spreadsheets populated my laptop. By the time I was a residence don, during my victory lap, my room looked more like a clothing factory than a place where one might sleep. Little flecks of fabric and bits of cast off thread littered the floor, often making their way onto my clothes. Like a frog in boiling water, I had slowly surrounded myself by my work. Looking back, it’s amazing that I was able to graduate with such a blatant distraction engulfing me.

This time, the work was that of our farm, Fat Chance Farmstead, but the seeds and soil in the house arrived in the same way; through a simple problem. Where else would they go? They needed light and warmth, and the back room offered a south-facing window. Unlike in the past, however, the encroachment was temporary. Josh and I had made plans to build a greenhouse. Once it was up, out the seedlings would go, and back our house would go, to normal....Continue Reading

Open your mouth and say "moo!"

Meet our future cows! In less than two months we will be adopting two of these fine steers into the Fat Chance Family.

A few months ago I found myself at a Farmerspiel (curling tournament for farmers) in Tweed. My attendance didn't have anything to do with the agricultural theme of the event, but rather my ability to replace a player who was out with a knee injury. My calendar was open and I accepted the last-minute request to get up at 6:30am and lug my curling gear way out into Tweed, the land of farms, a mill, a hockey arena, a curling arena and not too much else.

Curling is as much a sport as it is a social occasion. After every game, the winning players buy the losing players a drink and sit together at a table. Faced with making conversation with complete strangers, after each game the conversation would inevitably turn to agriculture, and my team of city folk would eagerly offer me up as their token farmer. When you're awkward like me, it's never easy to be forced into conversation, but I tried my best to engage in farm talk.

There is one particular conversation from that day that I can't shake. It was with one of our opponents, and he seemed to be about my age. At first glance, we had a lot in common. We talked about making maple syrup and shared tips and tricks learned along the way. When he told me about one of his main sources of income, selling hay, he lamented about an organic farmer who recently made a purchase. While he didn't have anything against organic agriculture, he found it hypocritical that this farmer came to him for hay. The city girl in me was stumped. Isn't hay just long grass that is cut down and rolled into bales? How can that not be organic? At the risk of sounding foolish, I took off my "I'm just like you!" mask and I asked.

There is much that I don't know about agriculture - I admit to being a rookie in many aspects of farming, and I'm used to the look that more 'experienced' farmers give me when I ask questions that give away my naivety. I do have experience though, and with the knowledge that I have gained so far, I'm surprised to have glossed over this part. Pasture that is to become hay is often sprayed with chemical fertilizer. That's why the hay is not organic. And when I thought about it, it made perfect sense. In conventional farming, year after year, the same piece of land produces grass. The grass is cut and removed, and next year it's the same thing. It's resource extraction, and we all know that if you keep taking something, it will eventually run out. I suddenly felt like I was sitting across from someone who was in a completely different industry. Not agriculture, but mining. Removing, removing, removing, until there is nothing left. Of course this guy wasn't mining the land, because that's how the chemical fertilizer comes in to play. As the soil's nutrition decreases, synthetic fertilizers (usually made from petroleum) serve the replenishing function. Animals would then eat the hay that was grown with that stuff and up the food chain it goes. When crazy hippies tell you that your food is made with oil, this is what they are talking about.

I won't get any more political, except to say that it was that interaction that solidified my footing in the organic food movement, and the method with which we will be raising our two cows this year. I don't want to contribute to a system that simply takes away without regard to the sustainability of the process - that's not what farming means to me. Our cows will graze on 3.5 acres of pasture from May to October, moving from one small patch to the next, eating everything before they move on. The key is that along the way they'll be fertilizing the land - putting back a little somethin somethin, if you know what I mean. The process is called intensive rotational grazing, and was pioneered by Allan Savoy. Watch his TED talk if you want to learn about the great things this does for the planet.

A year ago I never would have guessed that I would soon be raising two cows. I hope that in a few years I'll be raising a herd, and that I will continue to distinguish myself from that farmer I met in Tweed.

One day at the sugar shack that I won't forget

OMMUNITY EDITORIAL BOARD

One day at the sugar shack that I won't forget

By Jen Valberg

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 6:37:33 EDT PM

I have this stark memory of being six years old, sitting on the school bus, ready to go home. Something catches my eye through the window on my right. I look out and see my mom. What?! Why on earth would my mom be here at school when I am taking the bus home?
As the bus driver turns on the engine, my mom starts miming frantically. First front crawl, then breaststroke. She looks like a fish out of water (literally), and then it hits me. Swimming lessons! I am not supposed to take the bus on Wednesdays, because my mom picks me up and takes me to swimming lessons. My face hot with embarrassment, I spring into action and hop off the bus, just before it pulls away.
I learned a valuable lesson that day: I am forgetful. There is no getting around it – over the course of my life I have proven time and again that no matter how often I am reminded, if it is out of my normal routine, I will forget. I’m sure that my mom told me three times that morning. “Don’t take the bus home after school: you have swimming lessons.”
Had she written it on my forehead, or on the side of the bus, sure, I would have clued in. Instead, I hopped on the bus to go home, just like every other school day. Completely oblivious.
Through the years, I have developed coping mechanisms to hide this affliction. I leave notes in my shoes, put objects in front of the door and write myself emails. These things work, to a moderate degree. Unfortunately, the mechanism that sticks the best – the one thing that is absolutely foolproof - is making a mistake. As my mom will attest, I never forgot a swimming lesson from that awkward-charades-on-the-side-of-the-road day forward.
---
Aside from the Canadian curling championships, there is only one thing on my mind at the end of February and for most of March: Maple syrup.
The backyard sugar shack that I run with my Dad started as a one-tree show five years ago. The end result of our first year of production – a runny, maple-tasting liquid – was not a selling point for continuation. Nor was the process: cooking down 40 litres of sap over the stove turned the house into a sauna. It may have been good for our skin, but the cupboards and walls were not happy.
Making maple syrup is, in theory, quite a basic thing. Gather sap from maple trees as it runs from root to branch for about three weeks in late winter. Boil it for a really long time until you’re left with sweet, thick syrup. Put it in a jar and enjoy all year long.
Our foray into maple syrup production was motivated by this very perception of ease. There are 25 mature trees on my Dad’s property, and the local hardware store sold all of the equipment we needed. Why not?
Over the years we have gradually expanded production, with 24 trees now on the go. In a good year, this will yield 960 litres of sap, which will cook down to 24 litres of syrup. We got primitive, building a fire pit in the yard to boil the sap outside. This not only saves on fuel costs and eliminates in-house condensation, but leaves a lovely roasted marshmallow scent on anyone who stops by to help.
We have mastered the art of when to tap (this involves watching the thermometer) and bought a refractometer, enabling precise measurement of the sugar content, which means thick, crawl-out-of-the-jar syrup. As lessons are learned, new systems are put in place and each year we pat ourselves on the back, saying, “We finally got it right.” At the end of each season, we sit back and marvel at the bottles of sweet goodness that we worked hard to produce, using little more than elbow grease, firewood and the trees out back. It’s a magical feeling.
And then there was the crash of 2010.
Left alone at the sugar shack one weekend, I was in charge of the entire operation. To be clear, the act of solo maple syrup production is not easy; it requires memory and multi-tasking. The fire has to be stoked, firewood split, buckets of sap checked and emptied frequently on a warm day. Most importantly, though, the sap, whose sugar content rises as the water evaporates, has to be monitored and topped up.
This is precisely where the making of syrup became a challenge for me. The multitude of distractions and tasks preyed on my weakness, enticing me to forget.
I knew that things had gone sour when I smelled sweet, burnt candy. I don’t remember what I had been doing, but I was away from the fire long enough for disaster to strike. The sap had gotten very concentrated over the heat of the fire, and gone past the stage of syrup, foaming over the sides and becoming a massive candied explosion. By the time I reached the fire pit, there was nothing I could do. It was a mess.
I lost three litres of maple syrup that day, which represented 25% of our total harvest that year. I ruined a cooking pan, learning that scrubbing burnt sugar off of stainless steel is virtually impossible. Though I am familiar with the sting of having forgotten something important, I suffered second-degree burns to my pride.
But you know what? There is a bright side to my forgetful maple syrup mishap: it won’t happen again.
Born and raised in Kingston, Jen Valberg is co-owner of Fat Chance Farmstead. When she's not in the garden, you can find her in the kitchen, behind the sewing machine or making noise on the piano.

My first article in the Kingston Whig Standard - Introducing the Farm

COMMUNITY EDITORIAL BOARD

So I quit my day job ...

By Jen Valberg

Sunday, February 24, 2013 8:04:31 EST PM

Jen Valberg of Fat Chance Farmstead: 'I was a city girl, and there was a fat chance that I would ever end up in the dirty, low-profit vocation of agriculture.'

It took months of deliberation to name our farm. It was not an easy process, trying to find a name that was both catchy and unique and somehow representative of us: two young people, flying by the seat of our pants, starting a small-scale farm.
My partner, Josh, and I spent many late nights brainstorming. Rather than join a shortlist, one idea after another found itself on the cutting room floor: Food Farm, Full Belly Farm, You Scream Farm! … the list went on. If you’re thinking of starting a farm, call me. I could give you 1,000 names to chew on.
In one fit of desperation, we started cycling through colours with nouns. We settled on “Red Bucket.” For three nights, our farm was to be called Red Bucket Farm. We had hit rock bottom.
Then one day we tried a new approach. If our farm were one of those hip new wineries, what would it be called? That’s when we found it. “Fat Chance Farmstead.” It was fitting, given our trials in getting our farm off the ground, and sarcastic enough for two people who would resort to literary Russian roulette to name their business.
When I think back to the person I was in high school (there was a line under my graduating photo in the yearbook that read something like “Most likely to be a rich businesswoman”), the name of our farm gains even more meaning. I was a city girl, and there was a fat chance that I would ever end up in the dirty, low-profit vocation of agriculture.
My mom kept a vegetable garden throughout my childhood, and she often had to resort to bribery to get any involvement from me. “Will you go pick some carrots from the garden for dinner?” was usually met with a groan. It was with a large chip on my shoulder that every spring I would help to shovel our stinky compost onto the garden.
The first time I really had my hands in the dirt was as at the age of 12, when I struck out on my own and planted a strawberry patch and grapevine in my backyard. I was the sole, proud gardener, and I would eat every last strawberry that the rabbits left for me.
But any gift that I thought I had fizzled the day that I ate my first bunch of home-grown grapes. After waiting two years for fruit, my face seized up at the sour, bitter flavor. I learned the unfortunate difference between grapes that are meant for wine, and grapes that are meant for eating. I lost interest shortly thereafter.
Over a decade later, I participated in a cycling tour from Winnipeg to Sudbury. One stop on the trip was at an organic vegetable farm, and in exchange for a place to pitch our tents, we were thrust into the field to help with “harvest day.” Faced with another opportunity to “connect” with the land, I spent more time posing for photos with a bunch of kale in my hand than actually doing anything productive.
Later in the trip, while visiting another farm, I had the chance to milk a cow. Thirty seconds in, the cow peed on my hands and the bucket of what little milk had come out had to be thrown away. The cow was sending me a message: don’t quit your day job.
And yet there was something that drew me in. I can’t say whether it was a desire to be outside, the possibility of meeting a cute farmer boy or just bragging rights: “I grew that, you know!” I planted my own backyard garden, and things just snowballed from there.
I knew that my life had taken a real turn when two weddings in a row – both as a bridesmaid – I was instructed by the bride to wash my hands thoroughly for the big day. Dirt under my nails had replaced high heels; where I once shed tears over a missed opportunity to visit a Gap Outlet store, I blogged with pride about my once-grey, now-brown farm pants from J. Crew.
Over the past five years, a hobby has developed into a passion. A city girl has found true love in agriculture (and a farmer boy, to boot), against the odds. And after a year of planning for a weekly food box, dreaming about organic berry production, and saving the start-up funds, a farm is born: Fat Chance.
I could go on, but I have to go feed the chickens.
Jen Valberg is a member of the Whig-Standard's community editorial board. Born and raised in Kingston, Jen is co-owner of Fat Chance Farmstead. When she's not in the garden, you can find her in the kitchen, behind the sewing machine or making noise on the piano.

Breaking Ground

The thing that I didn’t mention in the last post about finding land, was that we had $800 worth of seed garlic sitting in our basement, waiting to be put in the ground. As we suffered one rejection after another on the land rental front, it seemed that our early allium order was perhaps more foolish than ambitious. 

Most farmers put garlic in the ground in the fall. You literally crack open the garlic bulbs, stuff individual cloves in the ground 6 inches apart and 1 inch deep and then cover the soil with some kind of mulch to insulate over the winter. Wait until July/August and each individual clove will have transformed into a bulb. This is why I’m into farming: the magic.

Anyways, back to the garlic crisis. It was getting late in the fall, inching towards November. You can’t plant if the ground is frozen. We were starting to worry that we were going to be stuck eating a very expensive lifetime supply of garlic over the winter months. You can plant garlic in the spring, but your yield just won’t be the same. Our offer of land came just in the nick of time, and two weeks into November we were ready to break ground.

By this point our options had narrowed from plough the land with a tractor or cut the sod to: cut the sod. Lacking the time to plough with a tractor, we were forced to literally cut off the top layer of the land, taking the grass off and exposing the soil. Note how the pictures are at the beginning of the day when things were running relatively smoothly. I ran the sod cutter while Josh moved the chunks of grass off to the side. At first this system was fine. Then we learned two things:  
 1. Sod cutters don’t cut the grass into chunks. They make one long strip of sod.
 2. Sod is very HEAVY.

We worked our little hearts out that day, tackling one stumbling block after another. The camera was put away right around when my hands lost feeling from the cold…or maybe it was when Josh started cursing at the broken rototiller that we had rented, frustrated with its inability to run for more than15 seconds at a time.

2500 square feet of sod moved and soil tilled, the ground was finally ready to plant...just as the sun was going down. We stuck as many cloves as we could into the ground, attempting at straight lines, stumbling blindly until we conceded to the darkness and went home. Josh went back the next day, and our garlic was safely in the ground.

There are two icing on the cakes to this story. The first is that upon finding land we were generously gifted two bails of straw to cover our garlic. The timing was perfect, and made our lives tremendously easy at the end of a long struggle. Thank you to Sonset Farm.

The second is the telling scar, a part of which remains on my palm today: the top of a screw that burned my hand as I hunted – using my hands, of course – all over the hot (running) sod cutter to find the OFF switch.

A sign of my clumsy entry into the world of agriculture and a war wound to mark the beginning of a farm.