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.

A farm is born: Fat Chance

When Josh and I pulled in to Kingston almost a year ago, we knew this would happen. It was just a matter of when and how. Finding ourselves a home in the summer was step one, but our yard wasn't quite big enough to do what we wanted to do.

For three months we hunted for land to rent. We started by asking neighbours with vacant land: 'have you got 1 acre to spare?' Each day after work we would clean ourselves up, and approach one of our target land owners, usually by knocking on their door. We were bubbling and excited, and we had our speech down pat. I thought it would be easy. It wasn't. It was rejection after referral after rejection. And some funny conversations along the way:

'Sorry, I don't think so' -90 year old owner of a 100-acre farm
'Ok, well thanks anyways' - me, dressed in overalls and pigtails (no, I wasn't that cute)
'You can come back and ask me again next year.....but I'll probably say no again'

'We've got 20 acres right back there that I would let you use if I hadn't drained out the well 10 years ago. Did you know that Farm Boy is hiring? Corrections is also a great employer' -neighbour and dog-rescuer. Not too supportive of our chosen career path

'You should definitely talk to Andrea Cumpson' -everyone else (we did.)

In the end it was a friendly couple who own a 4-acre plot of land 5 minutes north of us who saved us from land-hunting and farm-creation failure. We heard about them through a friend of a friend. They shared our excitement (what little we had left) and offered the rental of their land and well. Finally! A contract was drawn, and a farm was born: Fat Chance Farmstead. www.fatchancefarmstead.com


Here is our brand spanking new website. What do you think?