Tag Archives: friends

a farm feast fundraiser

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All photos by the lovely and talented TraceyJ.

This past weekend, I hosted an outdoor feast and bonfire at the farm to raise funds and awareness for Opportunity International Canada, a fantastic non-profit organization that provides microcredit loans, savings accounts, insurance and training to poor entrepreneurs around the world. As someone with an academic background in international development, I’ve been aware of microcredit development projects for a long time and always been a big fan of the model they follow (very community-oriented, providing empowerment instead of charity). I actually work part time for Opportunity, managing some of their website and social networking projects, but it was fun to do something a little different by volunteering my time (and the farm!) to participate in their Dine for Dignity campaign.

A great crew of adults, children and pets came out to enjoy good company and locally-grown, organic food, while chipping in to help me raise my fundraising goal (we did it!). The sun was out, the farm animals loved the attention and a variety of mini-farm adventures took place, including pulling a guest’s car out of the ditch with the tractor, electric shocks from the pig fence, bunny cuddling, and enjoying a gift of home-brewed beer.

Huge thank you to everyone who came out to help make the event a success and a VERY BIG thank you to my friend Tracey who took some absolutely beautiful photos of the farm. She’s captured some very special images for us.

If you’re interested in learning more about Opportunity International Canada, I encourage you to check out their website. Although I’ve reached my own personal fundraising goal, the overall campaign is still very much in swing and my fundraising page would happily accept additional donations that continue to come in :)

To see more (informal) photos of the event, visit my album on flickr.

 

kids & baby bunnies

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Our friends Pete and Sara and their four awesome kids came to the farm this morning for a visit. We watched the pigs poo (they do a lot of that), chased chickens, and held one of our new baby bunnies for the first time. Kids on a farm and baby bunnies – doesn’t get much better than that. CUTE OVERLOAD. Photos and video say it all. Happy Easter everyone!

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farm work party: brambles & swales

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Here on the farm we have a back field that has pretty much been left to its own devices. Aside from some digging work that Chris put in to help drain the area, the field really isn’t being used for anything yet (other than the access point to our farm for local coyotes). Of course, given that it makes up a decent portion of our 2.5 acres, we’d like to make better use of it so we assigned some less-than-fun jobs to some eager friends at our work party.

Chris and some of his classmates from his gardening course took up the prickly challenge of cutting down overgrown blackberry brambles. They worked their way through one whole length of the field. We can see our fence now! Thank for taking on the scratches for us guys – it looks great!

Later in the day, Ryan and Travis began work on a system of swales in the field. Because our land is SO wet, we have to practice permaculture methods that make the most of our water runoff while doing what we can to dry out areas for planting. A swale is a low tract of land that catches water, holds water and slowly disseminates it into raised mounds of earth between it and the next swale. It can be used for both dry lands (storing water) and wetlands like ours (organizing and directing water rather than letting it settle everywhere). Our hope is that by building swales across our back field, we’ll be able to create a successful growing area (as opposed to it existing as the marshy land it is now).

Read about the basics of swales on wikipedia or check out this more detailed blog post on a swale-building project in Australia. I’m posting one of their photos below because it provides a great visual of what swales should look like. We plan on planting things on the raised mounds between the swales – plants that will hopefully flourish in a way that they never would if we planted them directly into the un-swaled land.

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