The Accidental FarmerLearning how to farm on the fly

Pearl Crebbin’s old farm had a good sized orchard combined with other farm activities. I can only find apples but she may have had others. Many of our neighbours have trees that were part of her orchard, most sadly neglected.

Time for some tough lovin'

We have 20 old trees. They have a lot of funky character and can produce a lot of apples with the right conditions. The previous owner had pruned 4 trees from their wild state and they looked okay but the rest had long been abandoned.

I love trees and always have; looking at trees, climbing trees, falling trees, planting trees and my favourite, skiing trees. Pruning trees beyond removing the lower branches of plantations, spacing them or cutting firewood was beyond me.

I discovered that what the last 16 trees needed was some tough lovin’ otherwise known as a chainsaw. They were too tall to pick, ugly as hell and produced few apples. The previous owner had told me to be ruthless and roughly described what he had done. He told me some of the best apples came off trees that needed work but he hadn’t wanted to forgo apples from them for a few years.

There was an amazing amount of wood. Anything larger than my wrist got bucked up for firewood and the rest was burnt in piles. The trees looked like dead stumps. I left only the strong branches and cut out anything that pointed up or crossed other branches. There wasn’t much left. Within 2 years, it is tough to tell I spent hours on each tree. I get to do it all over again and still have not made it to some trees at all.

Of the trees that were here when I arrived only 2 are gone and 5 require some lovin’. One wobbled so badly when I climbed it with a chainsaw that I climbed down and pushed it over with the bobcat although a good body check would have worked.

The other doomed tree ended up in the middle of the garden. What I used to refer to as a garden grew into a food production center with a greenhouse, berry patch and vegetables I had heard of but never seen. When I left the farm for a few days my partner, the gardener, had “Nick the Wonder WWoofer” severely limb the tree. When I got home, I hooked up to the stump, pulled it out, put it on the burn pile and cursed myself for poor planning. Shit happens but I hate to take a tree that is older than me and part of the farm.

Most of our apples aren’t great eaters. We eat some, juice more and feed the rest to the livestock.

A grand old tree that produced a pickup load of apples last year

I rattle the branches with a 2×4 and collect the fallen apples in a 5 gallon bucket. The sound of apples thundering down the slope into the pasture as I dump them over the fence will bring sheep or steers running for miles. It makes for tasty meat, efficient use of our fruit and none is left to attract bears that also like to snack on farm critters.

While our home and infrastructure are relatively new, these trees, miles of fallen barbed wire and buckets of old horseshoes remind us that at one time, farming was a more productive and acceptable way to make a living while feeding yourself and your neighbours with healthy local food.

I like words. They help me to understand.

When I pay my Vet thousands of dollars, it is important I phrase good questions and understand the answers to get good value. When I find a technical document that may solve my animal’s problems, I have to be able to understand most of it.

As a city kid, I hung out in the library often. Whether the school or city library, I knew the stacks. I could ride my bike to both and my parents paid taxes with others to make that possible.

Now I pay taxes and live in the country with two daughters who are voracious readers. They were read to every night as youngsters and the books in our house could sink a small trawler. Still, it isn’t enough books for them. They can get lost in the stacks of a good library just like their mother and I both did.

Reading allows us to understand a lot of things but every so often, something happens that is beyond comprehension. It makes no sense.

What's next?

Prominent citizens of our community have turned literacy into a political football. The two I have spoken to previously seem sharp enough and I can’t understand why Josh Smienk or Al Dawson would oppose anything that would assist our region and strengthen it as a whole. Josh is a founder of CBT and Al has served the area tirelessly for many years. These are smart guys and I find it hard to believe they are founding members of the Kootenay Coalition for Illiteracy. Perhaps it was these bullying tactics and questionable judgement that cost Mr. Smienk a job on the big island.

At recent public meetings related to regional library funding, The Coalition arrived and stacked meetings in Taghum and Slocan Park. They managed to distract all from any rational discourse and compared libraries with entertainment and questioned why they should have to pay for another’s entertainment. If Josh and Al pay to sit on the couch and watch satellite TV, why should they pay for libraries? If they happen to run businesses that thrive on minimum wage earners and consumers who can’t unravel the complicated web they weave, a marginally literate population is perfect.

As rural residents of the West Kootenays, we don’t pay our fair share of library costs. A paltry user fee comes nowhere near covering the true cost of service.

I am not a big fan of the RDCK or their tactics either and would rather see a regional solution that encompasses the whole area and all public libraries within it. At the same time, I feel strongly that literacy is too important to play politics with and for that reason alone, I support libraries unconditionally.

A recent article in Wired Magazine argues that high stress jobs like those that Josh and Al might complain about are not the kind of stress that kills you unless you have a medical condition or eat a lot of bad food and don’t exercise. What kills most people is the stress of a low paying, dead end job where they have no control and are treated as commodities with little hope of getting ahead.

On October 16th, vote YES for libraries.

Show that you care about reading and the power it gives our region to prosper as a whole.

Rise above political squabbling for an important cause.

If you try some times, you just might find.....

I started the Accidental Farmer blog for fun while the farm and my life today truly are blessed accidents. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

I laugh and cry as a green-horn/green-neck farmer and new parent to two girls, partially grown. I screw up. I get it right. Such is life. Either way, it is a valuable experience and something I have become passionate about. I’ve learned more about life talking to our daughters, standing vigil in a cold, dark barn or tending critters in a lush, green pasture than I have most intentional studies.

Blog on Baby

Chances are, you feel passionate about something too and know more than you might think. Why not blog about it?

Its gotta be fun

It can be anything. Factual, poetic, brief, fantasy, a novel in bits, experiential, weird, and completely unclassified or something totally off the top that nobody else has conceived. If you enjoy your subject matter, you will probably enjoy blogging about it and folks will enjoy reading it. You won’t knock off Google but you can still have fun and provide relevant bytes of what you enjoy.

Perhaps you are headed out on a real adventure that a lot of people wish they could take but can’t or won’t. Reading about your journey gives readers ideas and something to search on Google Earth. Where the hell is Sam again?

Maybe you are a Publisher with a love for gardening who can say more with 300 words than many could with a 1000.

You feel passionate about where people live and the fact that fewer and fewer people can afford a home. That is some great blog content. I tell you love, sister, it’s just a click away. Its just a click away.

Who cares. Me get the idea. Me like good content.

Several of my favourite blogs, forums and websites on the internet are the simplest in terms of the writers’ ability to tell the difference between there and their or to and too. They are factually rich and paint a picture but aren’t flashy. They give me insights and understanding I could not attain elsewhere. I enjoy reading them and that is the most important thing.

Who cares if the semicolon comes before or after the large intestine?

I did okay in English in high school, well enough to provide useful comment on our daughters’ works when they ask. Verbally, I love language and play with it often but have never done so in writing. I suspect this is the case with a lot of people. I’m no linguistics expert. I use online dictionaries and thesauruses regularly to help refine my thoughts and choose simpler words to convey them. The more I read and write with a critical eye, the more I learn about it.

If you are not a ‘geek’, fret not. The webpage you use to create your blog can be as simple or as complicated as you want. The interface is pretty simple and you can play around and mess it up without causing serious injury. No blogger, administrator or reader will be harmed irreparably in the process. While pictures, videos and text formatting provide lots of bling, useful and interesting content is what matters, whatever form it may take.

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Living in the Kootenays can be challenging and we each face different obstacles and enjoy different things but when we reach out, we find that others know more or less than us and we all learn from that process.

If it wasn’t for neighbours helping neighbours and people doing things just because they need doing, the world would be a far different place today.

I moved onto The Accidental Farm on December 21^st, 2005 with my Blue Heeler, Marley.

Marley loved the animals, chasing them in particular. The donkey, she developed a playful relationship with. We got familiar with the animals we had inherited. There wasn’t much to do but plough snow, feed animals and ski. No matter how I organized my 3 rooms of furniture in the 4 bedroom house, it still looked as stark as an IKEA advertisement.

I met the neighbours and quickly became interested in the person who had owned the orchard and farm which our property was part of. The previous owners had built the barn on the location of the original old barn. I kept digging up crude horse shoes, big ones. I sensed there was a story.

When the road first came through Slocan Park, it detoured to the northeast because the existing location was a swampy slough in many places. The original road came right past our home on Upper Slocan Park Road and joined with what is now a dead end road called Crebbin Road.

Pearl Crebbin owned the property and also operated the local post office from the front of her log home. It appears that Pearl ran the farm alone. She was a slight woman but was tenacious.

Bob, my neighbour, grew up in the area with his 2 brothers. Their father often sent the boys up to check on ‘Old Lady Crebbin’. Bob tells a story about chatting with Pearl as she drew a 30-06 onto her shoulder, released the safety, aimed above and to the left of his head, and shot a black bear out of an apple tree. She put the rifle down and continued the conversation as if she had just sneezed.

Rumour has it that Pearl had a romance with a wealthy married local business tycoon and lived out her days pining for him, sure that he would leave his wife for her. She never did marry.

When the local volunteer fire department got the call that there was a fire at Old Lady Crebbin’s, they responded to find 5-10,000 rounds of ammunition going off in a fire they presume was caused by a tipped gas lantern, but didn’t get close enough to find the cause. They dove for cover and the fire raged.

We don’t know more than that about Pearl. We have a large collection of her horse-shoes, some old ploughing implements and a two wagon assemblies that are quickly turning to dust. We tend a dozen 50+ year old apple trees that she likely planted and cared for. Perhaps there is a black bear buried near one of them.

Bob tells a story of asking Pearl if she wanted one old wagon, which she did not. He and his buddies pushed it down the hill until it got flat and then went and got their dad to help them drag it home. It sat there for decades until the previous owner of my property spotted it, paid $500 for it and paid a truck to haul it home, where it still sits.

Dave's next project

We gave a bunch of old wagon wheel parts to Dave in Fruitvale who makes wagon wheels and wagons as a hobby. His work is showcased at Fort Steele with their beautiful work horses. Apparently, some of our parts are perfect for building wheels to support the large water/fire wagon the horses haul. Before Pearl’s old wagon is unrecognizable, we will give that to him too.

We hope that would make Pearl happy.

Thank You

The best advice I can give with regards to Vets and small farms is to develop that relationship before you have an emergency. You want them to be familiar with you and your animals. You don’t want to call every Vet in the book.

This afternoon I discovered once again why this is good practice and is often the difference between a serious mishap and a positive outcome.

I am fortunate to have a twenty plus year relationship with my Vets that started long before I thought about raising livestock. I feel comfortable with them and trust them explicitly to help me make good decisions.

At 1:30 pm, I heard a call from the house in a tone I don’t like to hear. “Jim, come now!”

Our Blue Heeler, Pip, has just birthed a dead pup and is in obvious distress. Things smell bad, literally.

I dial the Vet immediately and track him down on his day off. The general consensus is that I need to make a quick trip to Nelson; this isn’t something we can fix alone. Five minutes later, Pip and I are on the road.

When we arrive, Dr. Chris Chart and Stephanie appear from behind the closed sign and go to work. First a shot to contract her uterus; second a shot of calcium. She’s been worked, hard. We wait. Another still born pup arrives and we decide to ultra-sound to see if any pups are even alive. It is tough to tell but there appears to be a heart beating on the screen.

As staff prep for an emergency c-section, a head appears and it looks to be alive, barely. With help from Chris, the pup is birthed but in rough shape. He works the small animal vigorously to try and stimulate it and clear its lungs of fluid. Amazingly, there is life and squealing. Back onto the ultra-sound table, but this time, we see two hearts beating.

I help prep Pip for surgery until she is out, check the live puppy and leave to buy turkey feed and get some air. Chris’s wife Birgit (also a Vet) arrives to help and with 2 great Vet Assistants, Pip could not be in better hands.

When I return, I see 4 squirming puppies in a box. Birgit says that all remaining pups are alive and huge. It is highly unlikely that Pip could have birthed without help. “They are the size of Labrador puppies!” exclaims Birgit as Chris spays Pip and finishes up.

Four hours later, I am home with a box of pups, a very groggy Pip and a lot of work ahead for our family.

A long day for Pip

While Pip is a pet, she is also a farm animal with a job. At 37 pounds she chases off critters much larger than herself and mingles with our livestock, licking lamb’s bums and ears clean and watching over her flock. We have other dogs but none like her. She is truly on a mission.

We appreciate our Vets, not just because they fix our animals, but because of the advice we receive from them. Chris also has extensive experience with livestock and while his back no longer allows farm visits, he knows these beasts well and we rely on him to see that all our animals are healthy, and don’t suffer unnecessarily.

Thank you Selkirk Veterinary Hospital.

A lot of things scare me.

For those that don’t know me, I am 6’ tall and 200 lbs and I am not afraid of a little tussle, here and there. I’m not supposed to be scared. I’m big enough and handy. Twenty plus years as a ski bum has left me with cat like reflexes for an old guy and a love for life, whatever form it may take.

Sonja and her climbing antics scare me. I feel for buddy who barfed and shite himself when his knee got stuck. It could be that I have lost several good friends in climbing accidents but I have also lost good friends while skiing and I have no trouble doing that. Hell, I’ve even had my ass handed to me on a platter while skiing, several times. It still doesn’t scare me. It makes little sense.

A ram once put me in physiotherapy for 2 months (sausage!). I am scared of climbing into a pen to deal with an ill steer that seems ornery. One errant kick and I could be a hurting unit, but I still do it. It is not a paralyzing fear.

Death scares me. Death I have no control over scares me most. It can easily paralyze me, both emotionally and physically, if I allow it to.

I’m not used to killing things and have been known to choke up when a ewe, lamb or calf dies unexpectedly, but it is a reality on the farm. I have to go to a cold, steely place when slaughtering day comes. I become a robot. I ask someone else to put a bullet in my favourite animals, but I still help clean up. I hunt predators that kill my animals, but I am not a cold blooded killer. I take no pleasure in it.

Being scared and nervous doesn’t help when slaughtering animals, particularly large ones. They pick up on it and things can go pear shaped in a hurry. I seem to start the process of planning, grounding and centering about 2 days beforehand. This isn’t like shooting some deer that you have never seen before. I know these animals well and it is important to me that they remain calm, happy and unsuspecting, right up to their last breath. I have a job to do, but I can still be respectful.

Seeing the life go out of an animal and knowing you did it is a solemn experience and with it comes a huge responsibility to make sure it is done humanely.

Raising them humanely is only the start of the process.

Grandma speaks for all the ewes and sometimes the cows and pigs too. When a gate needs opening so they can access greener pastures, she lets us know. When the grain portions are skimpy, we hear about it.

The Lead Hand

When moving sheep, you only need to get the ‘Sheep Steward’ moving in the right direction. Grandma is that sheep. When they escape the fences or gates, neighbours are amazed that I can call her by name and she charges up like a big woolly dog with everyone in tow. Sheep have great facial recognition and I use my got-something-good voice which is likely why she comes. I don’t know that she actually knows her name but I keep up the charade. The Accidental Farmer/Sheep Whisperer.

As her name implies, Grandma is the oldest ewe on the farm. She came with two other ewes, Cousin and Auntie, that were stock from an old time sheep farmer, John Braun. John had decided to get out of the sheep business in his 80’s after over 50 years of raising sheep. John’s ewes and their ewe lambs form the basis of our small flock and one other in the Winlaw area.

We were told Grandma was “about 9”, 3 years ago so for a ewe, she is old. She is still the first one to the grain or spent plants and weeds that get tossed out of the garden. She is the largest sheep I have ever seen and is very close to our ram is size. Grandma’s lambs are the largest on our farm weighing between 60-80 pounds, hanging weight. We have not had a ewe lamb from Grandma yet which would be nice.

We know she is old so we watch her closely. As my sheep farmer friend Brian says, “If she is eating, keeping weight on and not moving stiffly, she’s a keeper.” Brian says that ewes can lamb into their mid teens if they are healthy but Grandma is the exception.

We were fortunate to have a recent farm visit from Crystal Klym, Coordinator for the Central Kootenay Invasive Plant Committee. (CKIPC) After 5 years of battling weeds on our own, it was time to call in the expert.

I became aware of CKIPC when I attended one of their guided field trips and talks at Fort Sheppard, south of Trail. These trips are well worth attending with information about invasive plants, things NOT to plant in your garden and methods of controlling different species. We saw how dumping a load of weeds off the side of the road can require a backhoe and dump trucks to eradicate years later.

Yellow Hawkweed, spreading by root

There are three general ways weeds spread. Some do so by seed alone, some by root alone, and some by seed and root. It was one of the latter that caught Crystal’s attention first, Yellow Hawkweed. She explained that if you cut it as we do, it sends runners sideways, creating a solid mat of greenery that kills everything else. Allowing it to seed only makes it spread further and faster.

I was unhappy to hear that the  recommended treatment for Hawkweed is a so called ‘short-acting’ herbicide. We have worked hard to avoid such things by hand pulling, cutting and ploughing. We will think about that one and see if we can find an alternate treatment. The longer you wait the less choice you have so we need to figure it out soon.

In general, Crystal gives us the thumbs up for effort with some words of caution. “Deal with that Hawkweed, Sulphur Cinquefoil and Creeping Buttercup.” is her first recommendation. She gives me a wealth of material and we sit down to browse through it and discuss the nasty’s that lurk on our property.

Crystal encourages me to come up with a plan. Apparently, I have been shooting from the hip until now.

This plan involves mapping and classifying of your invasive plants, finding control techniques for each and then prioritizing. We go over our problems species and how to handle them. She walks me through the steps and shows me how to fill in the worksheet before our conversation turns to mountain biking, home renovations and how she came to live in the West Kootenays. I love those conversations.

We are now attacking the weeds that will do the most damage first. The plan involves continued monitoring and Crystal encourages me to take pictures to document it. Comparing photos is far easier than trying to remember what things looked like last year. I don’t have a photographic memory.

Creeping Buttercup thrives on poor grazing management

The list of weeds on our property is long. Plantain, Hawkweed, Burdock, Canadian and Bull Thistle, Yellow Bog Iris, Common Knotweed, Mallow, Chicory, Shepherd’s Purse, Knapweed, Creeping Buttercup, Mullein, Chickweed, Cudweed, Curled Dock, Oxeye Daisy, Pineapple Weed, Sulphur Cinquefoil and Yarrow. Some are native but most were imported from Eurasia as garden ornamentals or medicinal herbs.

Some are beautiful in full bloom. The deep purple-blue of the Chicory flower is one of my favourite wild colours. Invasive plants won’t feed our animals though and certain plants can kill them or taint their meat so it is less than ideal.

Time to get back to work on that plan.

Speaking of plans, the next weed post will contain some great resources I have found and what we have done to control weeds. In the meantime, why not check out the CKIPC website by clicking the link at the right side of the page.

I am not a ‘cat guy’. When I pet them and rub my eyes, they swell up and turn red. I don’t dislike cats, but they would not be my first choice as a pet.

When I moved in, there was this large orange cat that seemed to really like the place, like it was her home.

I moved in on December 21^st, and on the 23^rd, TELUS got my phone hooked up. It rang for the first time and I went inside to answer it, leaving my coffee and Caroline’s on the deck railing where I had been standing enjoying a fresh snowfall and wondering what the hell I had just done.

When I returned, half my cup of coffee was gone and ‘this cat’ was finishing off the rest. I dubbed it Caroline and went to make a second cup of coffee. I had a large new bottle of Caroline’s, she was friendly, so all was well.

I didn’t want to steal a neighbour’s cat and thought Caroline was a great way to meet the neighbours. I packed her from house to house. All told me this cat was bad, fought with their cats and ate their cat food. Some exhibited obvious disdain. Maybe it was me as I found her adorable?

I quickly discovered Caroline was a sprayer and figure somebody dropped her off on the side of the road. She probably struggled until I showed up and didn’t chase her off. I started feeding her. A friend pointed out that Caroline was actually Carlos. I had just assumed he was a she. I never checked. Some farmer I was.

Carlos is an evil mouser that also kills packrats. He lives outside as he is a sprayer. He is cheeky and plays with our Red Heeler, coaxing her to play by grabbing her around the neck with both front legs and biting her. When it is snowing sideways and the dogs stay at the house, Carlos follows me to the barn to check on animals. If I have a calf or sheep down in a pen to doctor it, he’s right there. If you are within 10’ of him, he purrs, just because you are there. While he spends a lot of time out and about, he has never killed or shown any interest in young chicks, turkeys or puppies he could easily kill or hurt bad. He is big, friendly and kind. I’ve never seen him start a fight with anything, including my partner’s male cat that showed up after he did.

As he sits purring beside me in the shop, I have to wonder who would do something as cruel as drop him off at the side of the road to fend for himself in an area where he would likely end up as a meal for wildlife or die a slow, miserable death. A bullet would be kinder.

He seems pretty happy right now.

Carlos and Kipper

We burn wood on the farm for heat, lots of it.

We’d love a buried heat pump system but that will have to wait until our ship comes in, as my partner is fond of saying.

I just finished processing a logging truck load of birch firewood.  It showed up almost by accident. I still have to move it and stack it but we have firewood for 3 or 4 years, after it has dried. We already had two years worth of firewood so we are good for 5 years, at a minimum.

Everyone else on the farm appreciates firewood but for me, this feels like Mardi Gras. I want to swill grog, throw beads and bare my chest. I feel festive. Fortunately, for our tweenage daughters, it is too cold to bare my chest.

The Accidental Farmer and Bob the buster

Most of our firewood comes off the property, but I have had to hunt it down in the bush occasionally. Buying by the logging truck load makes a lot of sense, for many reasons. You don’t have to fall trees, the most dangerous part of getting firewood. You don’t have to spend money driving around in the bush looking for firewood and hauling it home. Your truck lasts longer. You use less fuel. You don’t pull the bumper off your truck skidding logs. We put off insuring and driving our truck off the farm for another 3 months.

I cut 12-14 cords of wood with less than 10 litres of mixed chainsaw gas, 4 litres of chain oil and $30 worth of diesel to run my splitter. I spent about $4 on ibuprofen.

As I approached the end of the job, my neighbour showed up to pass me the last 50 rounds at the splitter. It doesn’t sound like much but when you are at the end of a logging truck load of firewood, it means a lot. He also had some cold beer, which I gladly guzzled. He took a picture of me in front of the finished job after watching me toil for 4 days. You have to love neighbours like that.

There is no time to gloat though. We have a barn that needs filling with hay, lambs and turkeys to slaughter and butcher, grain to source, fences to mend, meat calves and winter piglets to find and a litter of Blue Heeler pups to raise that will be born any day.