Happy Canada Day tomorrow!

Hello again friends and family!
I’m sorry that it has been so long since I have posted anything. As I said, I have moved into my little house and so I am no longer sleeping in the computer room of their house (which means that I tend to go on the computer less often). It is very nice to have my own space and I am enjoying my house very much. I want to take pictures of it for you so you can see a little of my living conditions (which are, by the way, much nicer than sleeping in a tent as I did while I was tree planting) but it has been rather wet lately and I have been busy so my room is both messy and full of dirty, wet clothes hanging everywhere so that they dry a bit before I have to wear them again. So, perhaps this week I will get to cleaning up a bit and take some pictures. I’ve had a couple people ask me if I have running water and electricity. Well, I have no running water. My house is on skids so that it can be pulled by a tractor (thus we were able to move it onto the yard) and that makes it pretty unlikely to have running water. I do have electricity though (an extension cord that leads to the house) which is nice for in the evenings and I have a couple of lamps and can also plug in my laptop. (Now you are thinking, why does she need a laptop while she is farming? Well, I brought it so that I could work on my few assignments that I do need to do while on practicum and also so that I can write blog posts and emails without being on their computer all the time. I will just write this blog post, save it to my memory stick and then transfer it to the computer.) To get back on topic, I have a bed, a sofa chair, a little table and chair, a cupboard, my own hotplate and kettle and some tea, some hooks, and I may yet be getting a bookshelf for the extensive reading I will be doing this summer (and I’m not kidding about that. I have quite a number of books to read. If any of you want books to read on alternative eating and living or even about butchering techniques and having a family call, let me know and I can give you a good list!).

So I mentioned that it has been rather wet. The nicest thing about the wet days right now is that they are a bit cooler because there is no sun out. This past weekend was pretty sunny and it was so hot and humid that I just felt sticky all the time. We are all hoping that the rain will let up soon so that things can dry out and so that the humidity goes down. Fortunately evenings cool off a bit so the nights are not unbearable. I hope that all of you who read this have summer weather already and are enjoying the sun and the heat. I still have to do chores on the wet days and so I often end up with pants that are wet from mid thigh to almost my ankle because some water always seeps into the tops of my boots from walking through all the tall grass. The nice thing is that I don’t have to wear those clothes all day on rainy days because there is stuff that I can do inside (such as washing eggs)

Another thing that we have been trying out, and which has been something I work on during rainy days, is making garlic powder. Terry and Monique grow organic garlic and they have a bunch left over from last year that they didn’t end up planting. It was starting to go soft and so something needed to be done. So I peeled a bunch of it and we chopped it in a food processor and then dried it in the oven for a couple hours. After that it was nice and brittle and we ground it up in a spice grinder. It turned out really well with the first bit that we tried so now if there is nothing else to do on a rainy day, I peel garlic. That’s what I did yesterday and my hands smelled and tasted like garlic for a while. It is kind of strange to be eating something sweet (like the pancakes we had for lunch) and every now and then have a whiff or taste of garlic with it. But it certainly is wonderful to have the smell of it all around when it is roasting in the oven.

Another thing that I have gotten to try this past week is milking! It was really exciting because this is something that I really want to learn while I am here. I am still pretty slow and I don’t do it every day but Terry says that I am doing fine and that it is kind of like riding a bike in that once you know how to do it, you wonder how you ever didn’t know. So I’m hoping to get to that level this summer. In some ways, milking puts into perspective how odd it is that humans drink the milk of another animal. It would be like some alien race coming and taking human females and milking them… maybe that is too weird to think about but it is something that I have started to think about. Humans have mutated in order to be able to digest lactose as adults so really, all those people out there who are lactose intolerant are really the non-mutants. But it is fun to milk and to know the cows that my milk comes from.

I have now gone to the Sussex market by myself a couple times and at first I was nervous but now I am getting used to it and I am enjoying it. It is very interesting being the vendor at a market rather than a customer and I think it will give me a new way of approaching markets in the future. Being a vendor on my own has also made me think more about what I know and have learnt about the farm and also what my own perspective of food is, particularly of our food. This past weekend we brought our first produce to market which was really exciting since mostly we sell pork right now. The lettuce is getting really big after all this rain and so Monique and Terry decided it was time and so we brought lots of heads of it to both the Sussex and the Kingston market (I went to both of them this week). They sold really well and I think that people were exited to finally see green things at the market. The garden is starting to grow fast and so are the weeds. So I think I’ll be doing lots of weeding in the near future if it dries out a bit.

There is one more thing that I want to share with you about what I have learnt. It may disturb you a bit and in some ways I hope it doesn’t but the other half of my mind thinks that occasionally these disturbances are a good thing because they are what can bring changes to people’s habits of eating and living. So here it is, you may take what you want from it. The chickens that we get to raise for meat are the conventional Meat King breed of chicken that are used by the big chicken barns. Terry and Monique would like to get into heritage breeds, which are breeds that have been saved from when people didn’t raise chickens in such giant quantities and raised them as a part of their family farm, but right now the chicks for that are too expensive for them to be worth it. It is in their future plans though. Anyway, the Meat Kings are bred to put on lots of meat fast and also to have a double breast, which is not usual in chickens. Unfortunately, this means that they have many health complications. Some chickens grow so top heavy because of the double breast that they can’t hold their own weight up on their legs and so cannot stand or walk. Another complication, and this is the one that really bothers me, is that these chickens risk heart attacks in the last week or two of life. We have already lost a few to what Terry thinks are heart attacks and could lose more yet before we get to butchering. This makes me wonder what we are creating out of our massive industrial desire for certain foods and prices. Why would we want to eat something that has a high risk of heart attack? What does this say about our own health if the meat we are eating is not healthy while it lives?

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of information that I am beginning to absorb about food issues and everything that is wrong with our industrial food system…

Well, this is rather long now (over 1500 words) and perhaps a bit depressing now, but I hope that it hasn’t been too overwhelming or dragged out and I hope that you do think about the food you eat a bit more now and where it comes from.