Adult Snow Day

So, the phone rings this morning, about 45 minutes before I would normally head to the farm for the day. Turns out there was enough snowfall over night, combined with drifting, that my little 2 wheel drive truck would likely not make it down the road from the highway. So I am having my first day "off" in a few months.

Now while this did make me smile, it was a very guilty smile and I do not really like the time off because it means most of what I normally do has to be done by my should-be-retired parents...plus using the snow-blower to open the paths and road up so that these chores can be done. Not only that, but its still pretty cold here at -27 C. But at least its not windy like yesterday where the windchill had the temperature down around -37 C (although I swear it felt colder at times).

Still, I must say that I feel an exhilaration being outside even in those conditions, an exhilaration that I do not recall in my youth. Back then it would have been hard to get me outside at all, never mind enjoying it so much. Now, I must point out that in a lot ways we are operating little more than a hobby farm at this point. We are tending to less than 20 head of cattle, 6 hogs, and around 130 chickens. This can still be a fair amount of work though, when real winter returns like this. For example, it will have taken at least 2 hours to clear the driving areas of snow today. This must be done whenever there is enough snowfall or drifting, such has been the case twice this week. I know this kind of thing is faced by farmers all over the north, and I am not complaining, merely pointing out that at this time of year the smaller amount of animals we have does not necessarily mean a lot less work.

From a certain perspective though, I still have things pretty easy. I'm generally only out there for 5 or 6 hours a day during the winter. I was doing just 2 or 3 as that was enough to do the lion's share of the work that needed doing, but when I realized that putting the calves and their mothers back in at night was taking dad around an hour...when it just takes me minutes...I decided to find ways to fill in the couple of hours until the early evening when they need to go back in. So now, to fill in that extra time, I have been building a fire in the wood stove in the old house that I grew up in. I then "cook" up some rolled barley for mom's chickens, giving them a warm meal for their gizzards once a day. This seems to be really helping them to lay more regularly during what is becoming a bit of a cold winter. We have our two male barn cats in the old house while a stray female is around, and they just love it when that fire gets stoked up. One of them sits on the oven door, basking in the direct heat from the oven. The fatter one sits on top of the stove until it gets too hot for his feet, then he gets up on the adjacent pantry, laying up there snoozing and absorbing the less intense heat. I must remember to take some pictures of these handsome, if nosy, young fellows, though I have been meaning to do so for months.

But back to my snow day, after a bit of a guilty nap, I figured I should take advantage of the time home to catch up on some cleaning in the kitchen and general tidying. Nowhere near all that should be done, but some of the blatant tasks. I also had the chance to have a look at my one operating worm bin here at the condo. The few worms I brought out from the farm seem to be doing quite well but I see I must bring some more. I also rooted through the one finished bin, loosening the wet castings up so that some of the moisture can evaporate, as well as fishing out 5 or 6 worms that still remained. It never ceases to amaze me how long worms can survive with very little attention, even in finished castings.

I'm quite excited about the amount of castings that I have for the next growing season. All together I must gave enough to fill one large Rubbermaid tub, although it is all quite wet so could be mashed into quite a dense little clump if that is what I wanted...which I do not. Suffice it to say, there is easily 3 times as much as we had last year, which yielded a very nice tomato patch. In addition, I found a naturally occurring deposit of worm castings in one of our old barns late this fall. These worms had been protected by a thick pile of plywood which had been forgotten and left laying flat over a thick layer of cow manure. So before the snow fell I was able to gather about 6 large sacks of dry fluffy worm castings...just perfect and ready for the garden come spring. This should mean one kick ass garden this year. I'm kind of excited.

Back to my day off. Peace and comfort, brothers and sisters.

Accidental But Welcome Red Worm Propagation

Back in late November, I potted a few plants into buckets. My soil was barnyard dirt, containing LOTS of well broken down cow manure, and vermicompost from my first condo worm bin. I had tried to harvest as many worms as possible out of the VC before using it as potting soil but I knew that there might be the odd baby worm or worm cocoon remaining. I figured that these would just perish in the dirt since they are not the deep burrowing type of earthworm.

Well I was wrong. Very wrong.

Some weeks back I was watering one of the plants with a spray bottle and I noticed that as I sprayed water on the soil...the soil was moving! This kind of freaked me out until I remembered that I had used VC so perhaps these were worms wiggling under the dirt. Sure enough, moving some of the dirt around revealed a fat adult red worm, thick and juicy, obviously well nourished. Then I found another, and another and another. That day I must have dug 30 fat adult red worms from the top couple inches of soil. Since then I would say I have dug out easily another 50 adult worms. Then, for certain reasons, today was the end of the plant`s life cycle and as I was removing it from the soil and breaking up the rooting in the soil (so that it can be used again as it remains rich) I discovered another 30 or 40 adult worms AND at least 40 cocoons. There were likely still a few worms and I know I didn't get all the cocoons.

So, bearing in mind that my initial worm purchase was around 150 worms, this bucket basically returned my investment in worms, all on its own. That`s pretty cool as far as I`m concerned.

I also wanted to share a picture that I captured awhile shortly after my last worm update post:


You can see a group of worms gathered around a chunk of cow manure. The picture is from about 30 seconds to a minute after I lifted the lid. Had I had the camera ready, this picture would show the whole mass of worms that was covering this chunk of cow shite. They moved pretty fast to get away from the sudden brightness of the overhead light to which they are so sensitive. I wanted to share the picture since it shows what I had been explaining about what great bedding and food manure makes.

So I`m not totally crazy for bringing shite into the house after all.