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Muddy Valley Farm

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Muddy Valley Farm

Category Archives: Reduce, reuse, recycle

Phytophthora In My Raspberries

18 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by Jodi in Farm Improvements, Farm Produce, Gardening, Reduce, reuse, recycle

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Phytophthora root rot fungus has been creeping through my poor raspberry patch for the past few years, wreaking its slow motion havoc on first one cane, then another. 

High soil moisture, something we have no shortage of around here, creates an ideal habitat for Phytophthora. It prefers heavy soil and slow drainage and its spores can swim from plant to plant through the soggy ground. In my patch, affected canes grow, set fruit, then wither away, their roots rotten. It really sucks.

I have two means of control, removing infected canes and improving drainage. This helps, but the patch is slowly declining. So this year, I decided to start fresh, and put in a new raspberry patch in a higher spot. I had to buy new canes, since mine are probably all infected, so I chose Phytophthora-resistant varieties, some summer fruiting and some everbearing, ordering them in January to be sure of supply. 

I’m planting them without disturbing the soil underneath, a regenerative gardening technique that we have good success with here. I lay down feed bags, pile RG’s precious compost high on top, and plant straight into it. The feed bags will rot, smothering the weeds and grass I laid them on top of first, and the raspberry roots will grow down into the earth, and all through the delicious compost. I will seed grass on the pathway bare spots, and as the grass grows between my bermed rows, I will mow it and use it as mulch. (I’m imagining broad emerald green pathways between fruit-laden hedges…can’t you just see it!?!)

It’s nice starting from scratch, having the opportunity to change what I don’t like about my old raspberry patch. I made the pathways between the rows good and wide so I can get a lawnmower around easily. This will provide plenty of elbow room for picking at harvest time too, my old patch is crowded and it’s hard to get down the rows and spot all the berries.

Deer and rabbits are plentiful here, so an effective barrier is a must have. I used metal posts that won’t rot in a few years like my old pencil posts did; some recycled from an old rain shelter and some good old t-bars that were lying around. DH kindly chopped the ends off some rusty bed frame rails for me, so I’m using those too. 

Metal hardware cloth or chicken wire works well to deter the bunnies. I went with the cloth this time, folding it so that half lies on the ground, skirting the entire border, and half climbs up the fence. I top this skirt with several feet of deer netting, zip tie it all together, and secure it to the ground with six inch landscape staples. That’ll keep the little buggers out.

The gate is half recycled 2×2 and chicken wire panel and half bent green willow, with zip tie hinges. No need for it to swing freely, it won’t see a lot of traffic. I still need to hang netting or something in the archway.

I planted my new raspberry canes the other day, and picked up two more today to fill the last two spots. If these do well, I shall put in two more rows next year or the year after, planting them up with suckers from whichever of my resistant varieties (Prelude, Nova, Killarney, Joan J and Honey Queen) do best. 

I have a few marionberries and a couple thornless blackberries well established  in my old raspberry patch along with my ailing raspberries, so if the new patch does well, I will let the marions and blacks take over the old one. Phytophthora doesn’t affect them. 

One of the gardening hacks I’ve learned over the years is to flow with the realities rather than struggle to make something thrive where it doesn’t really want to. If my old raspberry patch doesn’t want to grow raspberries any more, I won’t compel it to. In the garden as in life, persuasion is better than force.

The Joy of Mending

21 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Farm Life, Reduce, reuse, recycle

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I visit the barnyard at least four times each day, and never without a pair of gloves on. This habit is so ingrained I feel quite strange without them. 

I find light duty gloves to be indispensable in the barnyard. They warm my hands, have saved me from many cuts and slivers, and keep the poop just that little bit further away from my actual skin. 

They also cost money, get dirty fast, and it’s hard to find comfortable ones. After trying many styles and materials over the years, I have developed a clear favourite; light printed cotton ladies gardening gloves with stretchy cuffs. They are easy to slip on and off and thin enough that my fingers stay nimble. You can’t beat the price, and they sail through the laundry beautifully. 

Lots of people like the stretchy nylon gloves with rubberized fingers and yes, those are comfy, I used to buy Costco packs of the Gardena ones before chickens. But chickens means poop, and poop means more frequent laundering. The rubbery gloves don’t do well in the dryer. After I got chickens, I grew tired of ending up on my knees every laundry day with my head inside the dryer, peeling half melted gloves off the drum walls. So I went all in on the cotton ones.

As all gloves do with such frequent use, mine develop holes from time to time. Curiously, to me anyway, it’s always the right hand that gets the holes, very few on the left, and I’m left handed! You would think it would be the other way round. The holes are often at the fingertips, also a prime danger zone for poop-to-skin contact. But rather than chuck them and pull out a new pair, I like to repair my gloves.

When I have collected a few pairs that need fixing, and they are fresh from the wash, I will sit down with a needle and thread, slide a holey glove on my right hand, and sew up the holes with my left. As noted above, since most holey gloves are right handers, and I am left handed, this works well.

When I have to fix a left hander, I use the same strategy. I have learned it is better to force a glove onto the wrong hand than to wield a sharp needle with one.

It takes only a few minutes to stitch up each glove, and my effort gains me months more use out of each pair. This makes me happy. There is a great deal of joy to be found in mending, if you look for it.

Bits and Bobs

26 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Feminist farmer, Reduce, reuse, recycle

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I have a weakness for vintage sewing thread. Well, ok, I have a weakness for vintage. I scoop my flour and sugar from 1950s Kromex copper canisters, I cook on a 1953 Moffat Coronation stove, we eat from vintage-style Fiestaware dishes at a 1930s oak kitchen table in a humble 1970s farmhouse and when I started making butter, well of course I had to try a vintage butter press.

My romantic brain is drawn to the ‘good old days’ when life was simpler, even as my logical brain reminds me that no, of course it wasn’t. Humankind has always struggled, and today, for all its troubles, the world where I am blessed to be living my quiet little life is truly a wonderful place. I, along with billions of my fellow humans, face much less struggle, toil and suffering than our forebears faced throughout most of history. Yes, even in a pandemic.

I spent much of yesterday sewing masks. I am onto my third pattern now, waylaying various-sized family members and test fitting as I go, weighing the alternatives of elastic ear loops (good for short stints), shoelace or bias tape ties (best fit but complicated to get on), satin linings (sumptuous) and which cotton print for the outsides? Funnily enough, it is the men in my life who are the most worried about fabric colour and pattern. They prefer the somber, serious look.

Much to my delight, I am finally using the many small bits of fabric that I have held onto over thirty-plus years of sewing projects. I knew they would be good for something some day! Even better, I am finishing up some of the bits and bobs of thread of all colours that I have collected.

I have a particular weakness for vintage thread, and am incapable of leaving behind any small plastic bag of wooden thread spools discovered at the local thrift store. Laboriously sorted, packaged and labelled by intellectually challenged workers sifting though long tables of donations in vast charity warehouses (I imagine), these little dollar-or-two bags often include some real treasures.


Pure silk thread from the late 19th century in a rainbow of colours, my best-ever find. Boil fast depression-era thread from back when boiling laundry was what women did, every toilsome laundry day. Heavy duty cotton, for mending thick coveralls and denim. J. & P. Coats, like Mom had. All on solid wood spools and many with their original, delightful labels.

I can’t help thinking these threads are a cut above what I can buy today. Some are a hundred years old, and still sturdy and brightly coloured. Incredible, beautiful, useful talismans of the past that link me, in a chain reaching back through the mists of time, to who knows how many incredible, beautiful, strong women. Women who like me lived their quiet lives, but with probably much less freedom, much less comfort, much less idle time and much less healthcare than I enjoy today. Woman like me who sat sewing for loved ones, listening to the radio, or the rain pattering on the roof, with hot cup of tea at their elbow, mending basket at their feet. Snug, and for the moment, content.

Fortress Blueberry

16 Saturday May 2020

Posted by Jodi in Equines, Farm Improvements, Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Reduce, reuse, recycle, Wildlife

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We all love blueberries around here, so two or three years ago I brought home a couple blueberry plants from the feed store, and planted them out near the pond in the Tarzan Tree field. We wrapped plastic netting around them, and left them to their own devices. They never did much, returning our almost-complete lack of attention with their almost-complete lack of fruit, the ultimate tit-for-tat.

Growing no less fond of blueberries as time went by, this year I doubled down tenfold. When the blueberry man posted his Facebook ad I answered it, and a couple weeks later ten nice blueberry bushes appeared in our driveway. I was going big.

Resident Gardener rolled her eyes a little bit at my folly, but she took half of them out to the Tarzan Tree field and planted them anyway. She had been giving my poor neglected blueberries some love, and a bit of pruning, and this year they actually had some flowers! When the five new ones went in, it seemed we had achieved an actual blueberry patch!

Fast forward a few weeks, and I’m looking for a new project since I now had the raspberry patch sorted. So when RG mentioned the bunnies had been getting at my new blueberry bushes, I went to check it out. Little buggers! Our jury-rigged plastic fence enclosure obviously wasn’t up to the job. The five plants she had set out were now half the size of the five she had transplanted into bigger pots and arranged beside the house until the fall rains came, when we would add them to the patch.

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Well, here was my new project. I couldn’t have asked for a more clear wake-up call. I had a blueberry patch now, dammit. I wasn’t going to let those dang bunnies take out my blueberry patch!

Over the next few weeks, in spare minutes here and there, usually at the ends of long days, I would wander out to the blueberry patch and do a bit of work. I scavenged materials from all over the farm, a part-roll of chicken wire left over from coop construction, some rusty but solid t-posts donated by a generous neighbour, some slender eight-foot bamboo poles harvested last fall from our prized clump of black bamboo, and of course the yards and yards of six-foot plastic deer fencing that had enclosed the blueberries, useless against the bunnies but perfectly suited to stringing from bamboo poles to keep the deer out. I even had all the zip ties I needed. My only purchase was the white plastic t-post fence caps, to prevent clumsy horses impaling themselves.

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Having researched effective bunny fences online, I started my install. Pounding in the posts to form a nice big enclosure was the easiest bit. Rolling out 70 feet of 4-foot chicken wire so I could fold up a border a foot wide all along, then rolling it up again and man-handling it over to where I had installed the t-posts, so I could unroll and fasten it along the fence line, was the trickiest bit.

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Uninstalling and untangling, then reinstalling the plastic deer fencing RG had jury-rigged was the most time-consuming bit. Building the gate was the hardest bit, luckily Dear Husband came along just as I had finished the basic frame, pointed out it’s shortcomings, and pitched in to help correct it. A good teacher as always, DH more facilitated my build than took it over.

One of our big city pandemic refugees, a young man currently furloughed from Vancouver’s film industry, went after the weeds with a vengeance. He had almost the whole patch beautifully weeded in one afternoon. RG mulched along behind him, as I continued work on my fence.

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On Mother’s Day we finished our magnificent blueberry fortress. Almost. We will sheet mulch the grassy areas so they will be broken down and ready for the other five bushes in October. We may need to add some featherlight netting to cover the top before the berries ripen, to save them from the birds. RG thinks not. Her theory is that there are so many wild berries in our valley that ripen in August at the same time as blueberries, we may be ok. Time will tell. One thing for sure, those darned bunnies are going to have to go elsewhere for their blueberry fix now. Unless the little buggers can chew through chicken wire.

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Homemade Butter in 30 Seconds

03 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Preserving, Reduce, reuse, recycle

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Our household went off margarine in August 2012. We had been thinking about it, so when a visiting cousin mentioned the canola processing plants in her area, commenting that one whiff would make us swear off marg forever, I reached my own personal tipping point. Since I am the grocery shopper, our house went margarine-free.

There isn’t much price difference between the two any more. That had been my main reason for buying marg over the years. But these days I can buy a pound of butter for $3.50 at my local big box store. A 2 lb tub of Becel is $6.49. Some say that butter is bad for you, but I would much rather consume butter than a tub of chemically-manipulated faux butter. Hell, it’s all bad for you…everything in moderation.

I have been experimenting lately with making my own butter. But no laborious churning process for me. It’s the 21st century. I can make butter in literally thirty seconds.

I picked up a half pint of whipping cream for under $2 last week, on clearance, best before Oct 28 – in two days time. It didn’t get used for pasta sauce, cream soup or dessert topping, so last night (Nov 2), I took it out of the fridge and set it on the counter overnight to bring it up to room temp, and maybe even get a little fermentation started.

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This morning I dumped it into my mini food processor, half at a time, and whipped it until it “broke”, which took less than 30 seconds. That’s what happens if you whip cream past the point of whipped cream. It separates into butter and buttermilk; and rather suddenly too.

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Once it breaks, you pour off the buttermilk (mmmmm pancakes), scoop the butter into a bowl with your spatula and rinse it under cold water, squishing it in on itself until the water runs clear. Then pour off the water, squish it some more until it stops shedding water, mix in a little salt if you choose (I like pink salt) and refrigerate or freeze.

Today, I got 194 grams of sweet delicious butter – almost half a pound – from my expired whipping cream. Isn’t that cool?!?

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Rubber Fruit Jar Rings

21 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Produce, Reduce, reuse, recycle

≈ 1 Comment

 

A few years ago my sister and I found a box of mason jars with the old-style glass seals and extra-wide silver rings at a garage sale. Enchanted by their vintage charm, we bought ‘em, and split ‘em.

Shortly after we had found our first jars, perusing my local grocery store’s canning section one day, I had noticed and bought a little box of rubber fruit jar rings. Mostly because the box looked cool, and partly because I knew one used them with glass sealers.

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Give me modern metal sealers for REAL canning, but for storing dried foods where a good seal is less important, the glass lids are prettier. We both use them quite a bit in the kitchen.

Since then, we have added to our collections from time to time, and last spring we picked up some glass seals for a very good price at a vintage goods store. We soon found out why; the darned things didn’t fit any of the jars either of us had! I slipped one of them into my purse so it would be handy for trying on mason jars when I found them for sale.

Last weekend in Courtenay we found nine milk crates full of mason jars at the Sally Ann. A few even had glass seals. Then I remembered my odd sized seal, pulled it out and tried it on an old jar (1976) and IT FIT! One whole milk crate had these odd sized jars so we each grabbed enough to fit our lids.

Today I packed up my garlic scape powder into a couple of the vintage jars. I remembered the rubber rings, pulled them out and to my surprise, they perfectly  fit those odd sized glass seals . So my 1976 jars from Courtenay, with their lids from Brentwood, and their rubber rings from Royal Oak, filled with garlic scape powder from this year’s garlic patch in Prospect Lake, are stowed away in my dry goods drawer in my kitchen. It’s funny how things can just all fall into place sometimes isn’t it.

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Another Bit of Detox

29 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Jodi in Equipment, Farm Life, Reduce, reuse, recycle

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Who isn’t more aware these days of toxic chemicals in our environment?  We are lucky to live on an island where the air is fresh and clean. And we make choices like using homemade soap and shampoo bars, eating homegrown, local and organic when we can, repairing rather than replacing, and avoiding buying new when secondhand will do perfectly well.

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Weaning myself off dryer sheets was on my list too, so the other night I sat down to research and then maybe order a set of those wool dryer balls online. Yup, the internet said they would work, especially if I put a couple safety pins in each.  They would shorten drying time, reduce static and pummel the clothes soft – all without coating our clothing and dryer in chemicals. $20 on Amazon, and $15 at Crappy Tire.

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Then I noticed a DIY link, and I was off!

I had a big ball of wool roving yarn in my stash, picked up for $3 at the secondhand store months before. It wasn’t labelled as wool, but a ten inch strand shrunk like crazy in hot water so I was pretty sure. First I rewound it into nine tennis ball sized balls, enough for me and any interested daughters. An old pair of knee highs and some bits of yarn and my balls were set up for felting. Unfelted, they would unravel in the dryer and make a real mess.

I put my wooly nylon caterpillars through our next two or three wash and dry cycles, then deconstructed them and voila. Homemade dryer balls. Pretty ones too, cream shot through with strands of purple and pink.

Well, that was easy. Bring on the next project! Oh, and anyone want a half gone box of dryer sheets?

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