Monthly Archives: April 2011

farm work party: painting the pig pen

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My good friend Aram and I spent a portion of the work party day painting our new pig pen. I don’t have a completed pig pen photo yet (I just finished the white trim today), but we got the majority of the pen painted ‘rustic red’ (or as Chantalle put it, ‘bad lipstick red’) to match our barn and chicken coop.

While we were painting, our neighbour Kerri-Jo came riding by on her horse to check out what we were up to. I’ve gotta say – the community aspect to our project really hit home at this point. In addition to having a wide variety of people come out to help us, having neighbours come by on horseback to say hi and see what we’re doing is seriously cool. Rural living at it’s finest! While we were painting, Kerri-Jo’s husband Michael and their two kids were helping out with the deep bed part of the project too. Gotta love community!

farm work party: feasting table platform

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We have plans to build an outdoor feasting table next to our deep beds beneath an arched trellis that will hold our kiwi vines. We LOVE daydreaming about having meals at this feasting table in the summer, eating fresh food straight from the garden.

To prepare the feasting table area, we dug out the space where the table will sit and laid down bricks as a solid platform slab (we found the bricks free on craigslist). Once all the bricks are in place (we ran out one or two rows short), we’ll plant fine moss around it, letting in grow in to fill in the spaces between the bricks.

It was a solid group effort lugging all the bricks over to the area, but biggest kudos go out to Jordan who spearheaded the project and did the majority of the heavy digging, lifting and laying :)

farm work party: the deep beds

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We had our first farm work party of the year this past weekend! Despite the on-and-off-again rain, a solid crew of old and new friends came out to help us get some important work done. A lot of tasks were accomplished and a lot of photographs were taken, so instead of plugging everything into one blog post, I’ll break the activites down into smaller, bite-sized chunks.

I’ll highlight the work we did on and around the deep beds first. This was the first ‘job’ of the day and involved turning over the earth in our last unprepared deep bed, adding composted manure to the bed, digging a path along the ditch side of the beds, laying bark mulch along the pathways between and around the beds, and planting wildflower seeds along the ridge of earth between the north pathway and the ditch.

TIP: when laying bark mulch down for paths, make sure you lay down layers of newspaper first, then add the bark mulch. This will help keep weeds from growing up through the bark mulch. We learned this the hard way and had to redo some of the paths that we had started a few days before the work party. Special thanks to Chris’ Gaia College instructor for the helpful tip!

Thanks to everyone who pitched in on this job. Helpers included old high school friends and their children, neighbours, community members we’ve connected with through the CEED Centre, fellow students of Chris’ from his Master Organic Gardening course, our local Green Party candidate and family members. The deep bed area is looking so much better now – we can’t wait to get our seedlings planted and watch that part of the garden develop into an abundant food provider!