I Smell the Garden in Your Hair

Hello, readers! It's been a while since we last wrote--we suffered an overall shortage of internet/computers. But we're back on the interwebs and ready to bombard you with photos, videos, and experiential anecdotes from the past month!

Let's begin with a quick recap: we have now WWOOFed at small family farms and forests, and at a larger scale co-op. From Golden Ears in B.C.’s interior, we moved onto newer things, deciding to try our hand at urban permaculture on a homestead.

We’re not sure how much you all know about urban homesteading, so we’ll give you a quick rundown. It is a grassroots movement that is based around agriculture and sustainable living practises in a metropolitan setting, like, for example, a 1/3 acre suburban property.

Unfortunately, some twit has made an effort at monopolising and capitalising on urban homesteading by trademarking the name; however, the movement itself is widespread through urban areas in North America (and probably several other continents). Its influences are visible in other, subsidiary movements, such as rooftop gardening (here is a guide from Chicago, and here you'll find a post from one of Steff's favourite permaculture blogs), Lose Your Lawn and decentralised urban farming. There are also entire organisations like the Institute of Urban Homesteading in Oakland, CA, dedicated to the dissemination of homesteading skills and practises.

Urban homesteading typically involves gardening, raising livestock (for instance, chickens, rabbits, or goats), food preservation, beekeeping, cheesemaking, preparing one’s own cleaning products, living simply, and generally working towards a self-reliant, sustainable lifestyle. We are very much enamoured with the idea of urban homesteading, and will most likely be working on creating our own homestead when we return home to Auckland.

Building community is all in the spirit of the homesteading movement. We found this postcard in a cafe in Revelstoke, BC.

And then there’s permaculture. If you are unfamiliar with this term, but you know Steff, you should be ashamed of yourself. 


Steff: There are infininte ways to define permaculture. To me, the concepts of permaculture involve a paradigm shift and this new way of thinking can be applied to almost any area, but I really like the way that Kirsten from Milkwood Permaculture sumarises an aspect of it:


"Permaculture is a system of design principles for building and cultivating sustainable human habitats, drawing inspiration from patterns in natural systems. And in this case, ‘habitats’ means whatever you call home – apartment, farm, terrace, suburb or even houseboat. A functioning Permaculture system is a habitat that takes into consideration as many of its inputs and outputs as it possibly can, and aims to become as efficient and sustainable as possible for the sake and comfort of its inhabitants."

...So we headed to Olds, Alberta in order to practice permaculture on a homestead in a metropolitan area.

Let us first document our troublesome drive through the Rockies. It wasn’t so much that it was days and days of driving through mountains in a 30-year-old vehicle which struggles to summit small hills. It was more than we were doing this on single-laned highway, tailed by approximately 70, 000 Mack trucks and sundry other angry drivers. But on the bright side, it was beautiful. See for yourself:

Some rugged mountains!

We came upon a sign along the road that read "CAUTION: NATURAL BLOWDOWN AREA AHEAD". As neither of us knew what this was, we drove on, unsuspecting. We turned a corner, and approached what appeared to be a great, black wall ahead. Very suddenly and without warning, it began to rain torrentially. We couldn't see three feet ahead of the van. It lasted around five minutes, then (again) very suddenly and without warning, the rain stopped, and we regained full visibility on the road. There was literally a line on the road, one side of which was saturated, the other dry but for the tyre tracks from the wet side. Blog bonus points to anyone who can explain this geographical phenomenon to us.

You may notice that there's no traffic ahead of us. What you can't see is the multitude of vehicles behind.

After a full, exhausting day of driving, we pulled into the town of Field to bunker down for the night. 

Emerald Lake, just outside of Field. We did not take this photo (however, we don't know who did. Thanks, anonymous photographer).

Having endured much stress during the day, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner. We had eaten only vegetarian food for almost a month, and, seeing buffalo ribs on the menu, we leapt at the chance to eat meat. It nearly killed us. In the future, a gentle re-introduction to the carnivorous lifestyle might be more appropriate...

Ready for more driving the next morning. Field, BC.

Entering Alberta

This is a wildlife corridor. If you look closely, it's a bridge designed to look like forest, for bears and other animals to cross over the highway and into more forest on the other side. I'm sure we don't have the bears fooled into thinking that cars are some sort of strange endemic species...

After two days of driving through national forests, we very abruptly popped out of the woods and into the suburbs. Hello, Calgary.

And so we arrived in Olds, Alberta. This is what we mean by urban permaculture. Barb and Hendrik, our WWOOF hosts, lost their lawn years ago. Go, them!

Steff weeds carrots in the back yard. 

This is what used to be a lawn:

The front lawn's crops, including: beans, broad beans, peas, carrots, beets, lettuce, cabbage, kale, corn, sea buckthorn berry, apples, cherries, red currants, and Saskatoon berries

Backyard crops: strawberries, raspberries, carrots,  beets, peas, asparagus, broad beans, swiss chard/silverbeet, cabbage, beans

You can find more photos of Barb and Hendrik's property on their website, here.

And, of course, the livestock. How could we pass up the opportunity to post gratuitous photos and videos of cute baby bunnies?

The baby bunnies and Mrs. Rabbit. We named them "Peter". All of them.

The baby chooks in their chicken tractor!

They had two cats (not considered livestock, of course), named Kato (who had six toes on each paw), and Bumble. Bumble had a lion's tale. Rarr.

Steff and Bumble, our midnight visitor. She'd sit outside the van and meow at us until we'd let her in for a visit and a cuddle.

Bumble began to gain weight at an astonishing speed shortly after we arrived. It took us a while to figure out just why, but we did eventually locate the source of the problem:

Bumble, with her head in a bag of noms.

At the farm, our labour was divided into harvesting, food processing, and babysitting. Here is a stack of peas, topped and tailed and ready to be blanched and frozen. It's quite the fortress, wouldn't you say?

While we worked on the garden and in the kitchen, Hendrik industriously began to put together a greenhouse. One morning, Barb gave us a new morning task: dig a trench through the middle of the greenhouse, where the path will eventually go. We did so, with great success.

Steff's tries (and fails) to suppress her pride in our most fabulous trench.

We were pleased with ourselves. When Hendrik came home, he feigned surprised pleasure at the job we had completed, but his face clearly read "What the hell did you do to my greenhouse project?!"

And then there was the babysitting. Barb and Hendrik had two beautiful, smiling children, Sol and Willow. They were a handful, but they were great fun, and we learned some valuable domestics skills in the meantime.

...Then Steff had a baby. Kidding. Steff learned to feed a baby.

The two of us and Sol, 5 years old and with enough energy to power all of North America for at least a week.

But, as we've discovered over and over again in the last six months, we can't stay anywhere forever.  The time soon came for us to move on to Calgary.


We had begun our WWOOFing experience in May. It comprised a huge part of the planning of the trip, and took up a lot of our time in Canada. We had met some incredible people, gained a good deal of farming knowledge, and learned a great many things besides. And now it was over. In a sense, we were ready for some sight-seeing and relaxation, but we were also sad to walk away from the enriching experience we had had in being WWOOFers.


We'd like to thank all of our WWOOF hosts for everything they shared with us. We appreciate your generosity. In continuing with our theme of urban homesteading, the WWOOFing component of our trip was largely experimental: we wanted to try our hand at creating and sustaining a homestead. In a way, we were taking a hesitant step into a great pool of knowledge, while allowing ourselves the opportunity to back out if it all proved disastrous. We wanted to see if it was something we liked, let alone something we were capable of doing. With your help, we have realised that it is definitely something that we're able to aspire towards, and it is our intent to lead our lives in a simpler and more sustainable way when we get back home. All of you have been a role model to us in some way. We thank you earnestly and heartily.

Next up: the WWOOFers become wanderers again!



The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.

Old McDonald Had a Farm

...And from Ken and Shirley's to Jeff and Rachel's.

Jeff and Rachel had a lovely home on several acres, next door to Claire and Jan. Being in an area named McDonald, they had named their farm, aptly, McDonald Farm. And on this farm, they had a dozen chickens (ee-i-ee-i-o). And, having a dozen chickens, they received approximately a dozen fresh eggs daily--the difference between fresh, home-laid eggs is, as Shirley said, "day and night".

The coop that Jeff built

Good morning, ladies!

 And on this farm they had some WWOOFers. We planted corn, butternut squash, peas, beans, leeks, cucumber, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and oooooodles of kale (here a kale, there a kale...).

Rachel and Jeff had a delightfully polite and generous three-year-old son, who rechristened us "Those Guys". After several days, we found ourselves responding only to "Hey, Those Guys!" So, in addition to planting and weeding and tending to the kitchen garden, we spent a good deal of our time fingerpainting, making playdough people, and reading Franklin and Berenstain Bears stories. It is possible that we were more enthralled by these activities (especially Berenstain Bears, just as entertaining as we remembered) than our preschooler accomplice was.

Apparently, our overall dexterity has improved since we last did this.

Our home from the 9th of June to the 17th

On our second or third day, we bonded with our toddler friend over music. He had seen us carrying our guitars in from the van to the cottage on the day we arrived, and tentatively asked if we'd play for him. We obliged, whipping out the hits: "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain", "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and, clearly, "Old McDonald Had a Farm". Our avid listener responded with equal enthusiasm. He cracked out a host of dance moves, tucking his arms into his armpits and flapping his elbows like a bird or a rollicking aircraft. "Play more and more and more forever!" he instructed us, before turning to Rachel and inquiring, incredulous, "How do they know all these songs?!" Halfway through a third chorus of "Yellow Submarine", he announced "Enough!", and departed the concert. A lot of people probably feel that way about "Yellow Submarine".

But we've neglected to mention Taiga, Rachel and Jeff's loyal and fragrant Golden Retriever. Taiga slept on our the front porch of our cottage, valiantly defending us from intruding raccoons.

We had a wonderful time WWOOFing, learned a great many things, and met some incredible people. Leaving Jeff and Rachel's on the 17th signaled the end of our stay on Gabriola, a tiny Gulf Island we had only intended to stay on for 10 days, originally... 

Next up: this mystery animal and more!

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.

On the Farm

The WWOOFing saga continues: from Jan and Claire's on to Ken and Shirley's.

Ken and Shirley lived five or ten minutes down the road from Claire and Jan (nobody's ever more than fifteen minutes from a neighbour on Gabriola). These WWOOF hosts very kindly took us to see a Canucks game, patiently explained the rules to us when we got confused, and pointed our where the puck had gone when we lost sight of it.

The homestead, and Mikey, resident border collie

 On their property were dozens of hummingbird feeders. We saw more hummingbirds in a matter of days than we are likely to see for the rest of our lives.

Ken and Shirley had seven hens and two roosters. Shortly after our arrival, Shirley and Ken drove to Nanaimo to pick up four 2-day-old chicks. Additionally, one of the seven hens had gone broody and was sitting on a clutch of nine eggs. We were unspeakably excited at the notion of working with livestock, so we gladly assumed the unofficial role of Chicken Guardians. Here we document our adventures with the chooks:

We built a new nest box on our first day at the farm. I'm sure you'll all agree that it's beautiful. Sadly, the chooks didn't think so. They chose instead to cram into the existing box and peck each other half to death over the lack of space.

 

Egg collection

The chickens put themselves to bed every night at 6. If we were late to close the door to the roost, the ladies gave us the dirtiest of looks. Like this:

"You're late."

Triumph of triumphs! The splendour of  our nest box finally attracted a laying hen. Either that, or she was bullied into it by all the others. Yeah, that was probably it.

...And then the chicks arrived. As promised, there are plenty of gratuitous shots of naked chicks:

 

 We had barely begun to get the hang of caring for these little guys when the first of the eggs under Mama Hen began to crack open. We thought it would be a quick, tidy affair, but it was 40 minutes before...

The chick pereforates a circle around the tip of the egg, then begins to strain against it and force the crack open.

 

Yechh...

 

Fortunately, they're cuter once they've dried.

Post-hatch examination

Five of the nine hatched and survived.

10 points if you can find the chick.

But it wasn't all fun and games and chickens. On our second day at our second homestead, we were commissioned to produce 100 lamb-burgers. Here, Nancy and Shirley sample the first.

The lamb meat came from a sheep farm at which Shirley volunteered. She brought us with her one day to visit the sheep. You read right; we travelled 11, 000km from a country in which sheep outnumber people ten to one to bottle-feed lambs! This certainly didn't stop us from enjoying ourselves, though.

Nancy fails at bottle-feeding. Try its mouth, Nancy.

Paco the donkey, 55 years old and longtime safekeeper of the sheep

Then, of course, there was the garden work.

Planting squash.

Fraternising with the adopted stray, Perlita.

Finally, a parting anecdote. Ken and Shirley used to have ducks as well as chooks. Once, Shirley put duck eggs in with the chickens in the hopes that they'd hatch. One broody hen, unable to tell the difference, sat on the clutch. However, as soon as the ducklings hatched, they hopped into the water bucket, as they are wont to do. Mother Hen flew into a blind panic, thinking she'd spent nearly a month on her eggs only to watch them drown minutes after hatching.

"What are you doing?!"

Until next time, folks!

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.