Tuesday 17 December 2013

Holly Jolly Christmas!

We have an announcement:  The Birds and the Beans have one last market before we take a break for a week (or maybe two)!

We’ve sold most of our fresh produce for this season, but still have lots of squash and peas and beans and chickens!  So because these things store equally well at our house as they do in yours, we are encouraging you to fill your pantry (and garage and freezer)! 

We are offering bulk prices on both squash and chicken.  

Squash 
25 lbs for $30
100 lbs for $100

Chicken
Less than 5 chickens, $5.50/lb
5-10 chickens, $5.25/lb                 
10+ chickens, $5.00/lb

We know that the holidays are times to feed a lot of people, so what better thing to feed them than curried squash soup, roast chicken, and pumpkin pie to finish!  Food baskets also make great gifts, since everyone needs food, but not everyone needs a new sweater. 

And if you have no room in your pantry, garage, or freezer for now, talk to us after the holidays, we’ll still be here.  :)

A gem from our Christmas photo shoot.
So happy holidays from the Birds and the Beans; we hope they are filled with people you love! 


The mulching worked! Our leeks are still good!

Thursday 14 November 2013

Visioning in November


What has the Birds and the Beans team been up to lately?  Well, we are still harvesting and selling for the Comox Valley Farmer's Market, with lots of veggies and chickens to sell!  (And I mean, LOTS of chickens, and we've adjusted our price to $5.50/lb, so contact us to get some!)

Other than that, our last big field project was planting garlic.  We planted nearly 8,000 cloves of garlic of a couple different varieties.  We are excited to see how garlic will grow on the peat soil, and suspect it will be big and beautiful since our other alliums did so well. We also planted a few rows of fava beans and mulched a few crops we want to keep growing through the winter and spring.  Otherwise, the cover crops are all in place, protecting the soil for the winter.

Now we are planning more seriously for next season.  We are excited to research about organic soil, to make sure we are managing it in a sustainable way.  That is, not depleting nutrients and causing too much decomposition.  We are thinking of ways to better integrate an animal component to our production plan to help with nutrient cycling and all the other benefits of having animals within a field rotation plan.  We are figuring out what kind of enterprises and at what scale will suit us best, and how we can both be financially and ecologically stable (sound familiar, LFS students?).  This is challenging as we are unsure of where  we (both as individuals and as a business) will be beyond the next season.  But boy, it's great to be thinking of solutions to problems we had this year, and thinking of how much better it will be next season, and also gearing up for a whole new set of mistakes (I mean, things to learn) in our second round.  :)

In summary, lots of "what if"s are floating around over cups of tea and dark, rainy evenings, but the Birds and the Beans are excited to be dreaming of what next year will bring!

P.S. I promise to put a few more exciting pictures up soon...

Saturday 5 October 2013

Oh hello, October.

It seems like just yesterday I was baffled that it was already September first, and here we are, one week away from Thanksgiving.

Come celebrate the bounty with locally grown vegetables and chicken for Thanksgiving dinner!  We have larger chickens that make a great substitute for turkey.  And if you’re having lots of people – we have lots of chickens!

September was a blur of markets and getting our grains and staple crops out of the field.  Cut and hauled and threshed by hand, we now have bags upon bags of wheat and barley stacked in the living room and windrows of beans drying in the barn.  

Growing staples was a great learning experience.  We had an unexpected challenge growing staples on peat soil-- too fertile!  What a problem to have!  Staple crops, like dry beans, wheat, flint corn, and sunflower seeds, need a bit of stress in the later season to make their seeds mature.  But our plants just kept growing and growing because the soil is very fertile and stays nice and moist, so lots of the seeds didn't mature before this season’s early rain came.   The same nutrients and moisture also made the weeds grow great – it’s called smartweed for a reason – which kept lots of the beans from drying properly.  Another challenge was getting things out of the field before the rains came, and we were stalled a few times when we had to wait for things to dry after unexpected showers.  However, our popcorn did unexpectedly well.  We’re just waiting for the moisture content to be right for it to pop.  So this year we learned that peat soil grows vegetables beautifully, and we've got loads of ideas of how to grow staples even better next year! 

It feels as though the season should be winding down, with our staples out of the field, the winter squash curing in the basement, and our last batch of chickens being sent to the abattoir this week, but we are far from slowing down.  We've got winter crops to sell until January, garlic to plant, freezers full of chickens to sell, not to mention book keeping and planning for next season...  will there ever be an off-season?  Probably not, but like my mother always says, “a change is as good as a break," so bring on the rubber rain suits and office work! 


Wednesday 31 July 2013

The abundance begins!

So I guess it’s true—time flies when you’re having fun—especially when you’re farming!  Where did July go?  We are busy as ever harvesting and finding places to sell our products, while also trying to get our winter plantings in the ground and tending to two batches of chickens. 

Our field is producing the best-looking and tastiest produce I have ever experienced.  I know you may think my opinion is biased, but it is true.  The sunflowers and mustards are taller than I can reach, our beans, peas, and squash have made quite the jungle, and the zucchinis are pumping out enough squash to feed an army.  A good problem for farmers to have, I suppose. 

Our second batch of birds are only a week or two away from the abattoir, and we’ve got another batch on the go.  And let me tell you, they make great beer-can chicken for summer barbeques! 

We are looking for interested restaurants, stores and caterers to take some of this wonderful food off our hands!  Visit the “Products” page for details. 



Ooo Delalay Ooo Dalia!

Dill and Cilantro


Big kohlrabis 


What can I say, we are happy farmers



Thursday 4 July 2013

Suddenly Summer

Well it seems that summer has arrived! After a rather grey - but reasonably mild - June, the sun is making up for lost time! The result for us has been the sudden explosion of of both our crops and their weedy companions. We've been keeping busy finishing up the majority of our planting, getting a handle on those inevitable weeds, and tending our chickens, the first of whom made the trip to the abattoir just yesterday.

So if you were waiting anxiously for some organically raised and well pastured chickens, we've got a freezer full!

Speaking of birds, our beans are coming along nice as well! Although it'll be a couple months yet before they're ready for the soup pot.


Most everything else is growing along nicely as well. So much so that we've decided on making our first trip to the Comox Valley Farmers' Market on July 13th! We're very excited for the opportunity to meet everyone in this wonderful community that supports local food producers.

Hopefully we'll see you there - we'll be on the lookout for you!




Tuesday 11 June 2013

Staple Seeds and Bigger Birds

Whew! It has been a busy, busy few weeks!  Our apologies for the trickle of blog updates.  Rest assured, it means more farming is being done. 

So what have we been up to at The Birds and the Beans?  Lots of planting! As this is our first year farming, we were a bit late getting our spades into the ground-- trying to figure out where exactly we can put our spades.  As a result, we missed the early planting season, so we decided to make up for lost time by planting the majority of our staple crops in the last three weeks. We’ve seeded wheat, barley, peas, oats, lentils, quinoa, buckwheat, beans, popcorn, and potatoes.  We also transplanted some seedlings: mainly winter squash, onions, and leeks so far, with many more to come. 

With regards to the chickens, they are now three weeks old.  We have now moved them from the brooding barn to the great outdoors.  We’ve had to assemble a sort of ‘intermediate accommodation’ to ensure they don’t freeze in the chilly June nights, since some of them still don’t have feathers on their rumps.  (A big thanks to our neighbour for lending us an old coop to use.)  We’re excited to have our quickly growing chicks out foraging on pasture.  Many pasture poultry producers won’t introduce the chickens to pasture until they are older, but we want to maximise the portion of their lives they spend on pasture.  

Check out our Products page for details about ordering meat birds.  They’ll be ready July 3.


Stay tuned for more updates –if all goes well we’ll be seeing you at the market in July!

One of our more handsome birds.

Saturday 18 May 2013

We have birds and beans!


Things have really been picking up here at the farm.  We can now officially call ourselves The Birds and the Beans, as both of our commodities (that is, birds and beans) arrived this week.  

Our lovely chicks arrived two days ago--120 peeping fluff balls in a cardboard box.  They arrive when they are only a day old and have not yet had any food or water, so we rushed them home to our newly built brooding space.  We stuck close by for the first 24 hours, making sure they figure out the whole eating and drinking business, since that’s what we need them to do for the next eight odd weeks.  Which reminds me-- we have to book them an appointment at the abattoir… Yikes!  But before then, they’ll be happily running about their moveable, open-air pens, eating freely and enjoying the lush pasture.  

Bean seeds also arrived this week.  We have been working on a plan of how much and where to plant the plethora of beans, lentils, peas, grains, quinoa, and seeds we’ve collected from our various homes and bought from different producers.  It’s exciting to know all these bags and jars and boxes of seeds on the kitchen table will be in the ground within the week.

And as for the vegetables, they are virtually exploding out of their transplant trays and are ready to get in the ground.  But we have to finish putting up the deer fence before planting; otherwise, the deer will munch the top off everything we’ve grown over the last two months. 

If you’d like to buy some happy chickens in six weeks, please call or email us (information on Products page)! 

The brooding pen

Little chicken


Little chickens eating
Beans and peas and lentils, oh my!

Just a fraction of what needs to go outside

Wednesday 24 April 2013

Starting from the beginning


This is the beginning of The Birds and the Beans.  Although the four of us have experience in working for many types of farms and growing plenty of plants and animals, starting our own farm has been nothing but new experiences--from creating a business to ploughing up new ground to starting transplants.  It seems that every task is loaded with uncertainty, and there is little more to do than put our best guess forward.  Thankfully (or hopefully), the cumulative knowledge of four intelligent agriculturalists is a very good guess. 
Up until now, it has been a lot of planning—planning how much money we can spend, how many squash to plant, how many chickens to raise, and the like.  But thankfully the weather is warming up, and we are glad to have fewer meetings and get outside to do some work.  We’ve ploughed a portion of the field, started some transplants, and are eagerly waiting for the arrival of our first batch of chicks. 

This is John, ploughing the field.
 
This is the field after ploughing.  It doesn't look like much right now, but can you see the potential?  It should be about a month or so until we can make beds and get our transplants in the ground.