Friday, April 27, 2007

A Post School Post.

Well it's the time of the year in Fredericton, where all the for rent signs start popping up in the windows of shady looking houses. Yes it is the end of the school year for those that aren't taking intersession. I have to say I fully enjoyed my time here, I had a great landlady and the fact that my cousin was going to school as well, I was able to hang out with him and his engineering friends. Now you may think that why would CS (computer science) student hang out with engineers, well it is easy CS students are an anti-social kinda crowd.

So all in all this semester can be summed up as a good time. I just got some of my grades back this morning and I am quite sure I am off academic probation, which I was put on because I dropped out of sfu with a sub-par gpa. I think it was a good call to go back to the school, my grades definitely show I can handle it. So my future academic plans are to possibly get an education degree along with my CS (which supposedly only takes another year), and maybe become a teacher and farm in the summers.

As for some current farm news: On earth day we all joined in for an early morning bed race accompanied by our vegan friend Cedar Sky. Basically a bed race is a race where you push a bed like cart with one person sitting in it and four people pushing.



Our Bed sadly didn't have steering and it took a long while to figure out how to do it without someone getting maimed. Cedar got caught up in our steering rope and ended up getting run over by the cart in the process. That is when the rope was retired. All in all i realized i was extremely out of shape. After the bed race Katherine headed back to the farm to do some baking and farm maintenance work while Mike Luke and I stayed back and picked up trash in town.



I got some good sun that weekend and before i headed back to Freddie for my last week here. Katherine, Bailey and I joined some others for a walk in Ganong park with a bit of a tour of future plans there, and also to get a look at the "Great Scar" aka the bayside Quarry.



Well Soon enough you will be getting some good quality farm updates things have been very busy this past week and a lot of things in the mix. Not just peat sand and soil :P

Brad

Friday, April 13, 2007

Winter, Spring, Winter, Spring...

Well, despite the 4 inches of snow outside, year 2 of Project Organic Farm is under way. We've had more snow in the last 2 weeks than we did all of November, December and January combined(and possibly February too). It's a little bit maddening at times, as we go from having a beautiful clear sunny 10 degree day to having a blanket of snow when you wake up the next morning. I've just been looking at the forecast for the next days and it looks like cold, rain, snow and a symbol I've never seen before labelled as 'ice pellets'. Yippee.

Despite the non-cooperation of the weather, things are moving along nicely here. We've got all our materials and are ready to start building our glass greenhouse once the snow melts. The idea is that we will build this greenhouse quite air tight and then place our transplants in it in the spring. We'll heat this greenhouse with propane most likely, which actually ends up being more environmentally friendly then using electric heat(which is very inefficient). The need for this greenhouse is threefold. For starters, our house is currently holding our transplants, but it is simply not big enough to hold them all(we will probably have nearly 60 2ft x 1ft trays by the end of it). The other major problem is that none of our plants inside, even the ones in the best spots, get enough light for optimum growth. Lastly, our other 2 greenhouses are either too small or too poorly sealed to make heating them a smart move. Here are some pics of what our living room currently looks like.






We have about another 8 trays or so in our living room since I took these pics. Check out the poor plants craning towards the window for light, the sooner we build our glass greenhouse the better :)





We're ready to get started on some serious farming out here, but it seems we'll need to wait a few more weeks before we can get really started up. Hope things are well with all of you.