A Brief Discourse On Our Friend Urtica Diocia
    
   Last weekend on the farm a festival was held honouring the stinging nettle. Yes, that plant that grows in the wild which you may have been stung by at some point in your life. Here's a little refresher on what it looks like: 

     It is highly nutritious; healing for a variety of ailments such as colds, arthritis and enlarged prostate; can be used as a fibre for rope or what have you; and it's culinary incarnations are just as varied. At the festival, the cafe was serving up stinging nettle pizza, stinging nettle pesto with pasta, stinging nettle spanakopita and there was even a workshop on making it into wine. The best part about this nutritious healing plant is that grows freely for you! It's in season right now and if you feel inclined to try it out here are some tips: wear gloves when harvesting, snip off the top 2 inches of the plant since this is where the tastiest, freshest part of the plant is, and look for it in farm pastures at the edges and roadsides (use your own judgement here). If you're in Mission, there's a little patch growing beside the dyke along the Fraser going east about 5 minutes from the parking lot.
    The festival was a lot of fun. I gave tractor rides to kids in the neighbouring field. Those over 2 years old were slightly unimpressed with the 2 km/h speed I was going at, hopping on and off it and yelling at me to go faster the whole time. Here's a picture of what I probably looked like, driving in the field next door (the guy driving here is named Mike, we split driving duties, he is
also a very cool individual) :

    There's more I'd like to write about, but sleep beckons me, so I'll just post a picture. This one is of the bull and his lady friend the day after she gave birth to a beautiful black calf who's camouflaged by the grass:

Catch Up

Well I wouldn't say I'm the first person to start a blog then fail to update it regularly. And it's not even for lack of time or inspiration; there's been plenty of both. I usually find inspiration at the start of my day by gazing out into the beauty of this landscape whilst doing my morning stretches:

 I start every morning after breakfast by feeding those two cows in the forefront a generous portion of hay. The one on the left, who fails to have a name, I tried milking for about a week. It was five weeks since she had given birth and we were already sorta pushing it in trying to get good milk production. So it wasn't to surprising when she failed to produce any more milk after the first week. The last day attempting to get milk from her was essentially just a 20 minute teet massage. She'd only been  milked for a short period in the past, so she wasn't yet completely broken in to the whole routine of walking to the stanchion to stand still while I fumbled around trying to get milk out of her. Getting her to follow me from her pasture to the milking station required basic classical conditioning: hold a bowl of tasty food in front of her face to lead her out, keep said bowl in front of her face till she is locked in her stanchion, then pour more tasty food in her trough to keep her occupied while I plunder her udder! Hopefully over enough time, the bowl won't be necessary and she will follow me willingly to her milking station. I didn't quite achieve that behaviour, but things did go smoother after this week of breaking her in, so to speak. I milked her for four days and in those four days I probably got the equivalent of half a cup of milk. I sipped some of it, it was kinda salty, and the rest went to Friskers and Bailey, the housecat and loveable family dog. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with this cow though. They are very peaceful animals to be around. Here's a photo of Blacky, for lack of a better name:

A lot of my time on the farm has been spent inside of a greenhouse preparing beds, harvesting salad greens, sowing seeds, watering seedlings, thinning seedlings, mulching pea beds and watering. To till the beds we use a light, easy to maneuver small Japanese rototiller that operates at a low rpm, so it's gentle on the soil. I sowed somewhere in the vicinity of 6000 seeds over 6 weeks into many styrofoam trays. Transplanting tomatoes into bigger pots was a nice experience; the aroma of many very fresh tomato plants wafting through your nostrils as you give them a better home is quite rewarding. All the sowing for spring crops is finished, now its the waiting game. Well, its been and continues to be the waiting game. A lot of the seedlings are nearing their date with the mechanical transplanter where they'll be planted outdoors in big fields. At the moment we're waiting for a nice break in the weather to get out in to the fields for said transplanting.