Odd Jobs

Here are some snapshots of the kind of jobs we keep ourselves busy with here at Wild Roots. WWOOFing isn't ALL humanure and vegetables, you know.

Just mostly.

cleaning out the eavestroughs (fighting a losing battle)

we were tasked with fluffing a hay bale. it ran away but left an easy trail.

Moragh is putting it in its place.

Never leave a Jang alone with a pile of hay.

For the record, one regular round bale of hay, once forked and fluffed, made a hay pile about seven feet tall, nine feet long and two feet deep. Craziness.

3.5 lb turnip we found growing rampant in the brush behind the greenhouse.  Took three days to eat.

cleared the tomato plants our of the greenhouse and were left with  about 18 lbs of these guys for market.

cleared a path down to the brook and went rock hunting (to pave paths in the greenhouse). rubber boots = invincibility

hello, tiny newt. salamander? newt. ...?

sometimes there are skulls. more treasures in a later post! 

yes, we are standing in the middle of the brook. no, we haven't showered in a while.

Besides all that fun stuff, we've been hauling rocks (that activity gets its own special post later on), watering the greenhouse, tending the chickens, harvesting pumpkins and squash, picking raspberries, preparing for and running the market booth, making beer, visiting friends, and doing some activities around the community that we will again be touching on in later posts. We're still having a great time and are looking forward to Halloween tomorrow :) hopefully there will be costumes involved (and squash carving - a new challenge!).  More posts soon!

Sandy, you crazy.

Happy Halloween Eve everyone! Hope those of you possibly affected by hurricane Sandy have made it through with only good stories to remember her by. Here in the Atlantic provinces we're just expecting a lot of rain. We have, however, been following the storm's effects on New York quite closely and have been shocked to see the damage and flooding in areas we visited three weeks ago, including Wall Street, Battery Park and the WTC construction site. Be safe, everybody.

Side-note: Hurricane Sandy, boy or girl??

So, we fell a bit behind on blogging in the last five days. It's not that we haven't been doing anything - quite the opposite, in fact. And as our last few days here promise to be just as busy, we are going to do our best to fill you in on what we've been up to in a succinct yet thorough way. Read: lots of pictures!!

First of all, as promised, we managed to get better pictures of our host farm. It's really difficult to capture the scenery here and have it look as impressive in a picture as it does in real life, but we've given it our best. This is Wild Roots at MacQuarrie Brook.

seriously so pretty.

with Thom and Moragh in the background for size ref

this is the chicken condo, which we recently weather-proofed

sometimes, there are just bathtubs

sorry this is sideways, there is no easy way to rotate pics on here. but, two squirrel nests in the tool shed!

laziest man-cat ever, plus his pile of vomit so thoughtfully left on the back of the couch.

it's common to see oily patches on the top of the soil here. rich in carbons whaaaaat

looking down the Nevada Valley from the back of the property

the front yard, with our wood piles and our poor old car.

There you go. That's where we are, until Friday anyway. More about our next move soon. For now, 5 or 6 more blog posts! Gah...

Baby Garlics

So this post may only really make sense to Emily's mother... If you really want to know, listen to We Are The Battery Human by Stornoway. We really did sing this as we planted the garlic. It was a long day.







what are we doing this fine morning
what are we doing this fine day
we're going to earth to sleep all winter











outside the leaves are slowly falling
but we're going to hibernate 'til spring
and wake up in sunshine when it's warmer
















cause we're the new generation
(gen-er-a-tion)
we are the baby garlics
and we were born to be free range
free-ee-ee-ee-eeee range
wo-o-o-o-oh

we've got the whole world at our root-tips
we've got lots of bad breath left to share
we'll come out at least a few cloves bigger












so join the new revolution
(rev-o-lu-tion)
to plant the baby garlics
cause they were born to be free range

free-ee-ee-ee-eeee range
wo-o-o-o-oh

Apple Cider

It's mid-autumn, and in Cape Breton the apple trees are practically throwing their fruit at you (really, be careful on windy days). What to do with tiny, sour, bruised and probably bug-ridden apples? Smush them. Press them. Make apple cider.

Buddy is supervising, as always.

Emily turning the press to squeeze the smush.

Moragh turning the crank as Sarah threw apples to their doom.

Neither one of us had ever pressed apple cider before, so when wooden spoon-maker Terron and his apprentice/wwoofer Sara(h?) showed up on Sunday (with a car full of apples) to borrow Thom and Jane's cider press, we were eager to help out. The press is hand-made and hand-operated, which means that having a few people to rotate through the working positions is a bonus. The whole process of apple-to-cider is elegantly simple: smush apples, squeeze juice out of apple smush, collect squeezings, enjoy. You can process the cider further to get other products like apple cider vinegar or a hard cider (or even just apple juice, which is apple cider with all the pulp and other cloudy bits filtered out of it). Thom and Jane made a hard cider last year which we were able to try, and it was delicious. The apple smushings made a great addition to the compost piles here, although we wished we had a pig around to enjoy them further.

Cider!

Everything gets tossed into the grinder by the way, including whatever slugs and other bugs that have made their home in the apples. Mmm, protein. Leaving the apples unwashed allows the yeast that lives on the outside of them to naturally ferment the cider once it is pressed, which is an advantage if you plan to make vinegar or a hard cider. We managed to make about 8 litres of  fresh cider with the equivalent of four reusable grocery bags full of apples. Terron and Sarah gave us some to thank us for our help, and it tasted very fresh and a little bit sour which we really enjoyed. Moragh gave the press a good wash and inspected all the parts, which probably means she wants to build one sometime in the future...cider might be our new favourite fall activity. :)

Humanure (Poop in a Bucket)

The label on the shavings bucket says "chocolate peanut butter parfait" 

Welcome to a frank blog discussion about poop. We're not sure how many of you will be familiar with the term humanure, but we're confident you can figure out what it means. On our first day here at Wild Roots we were introduced to the concept of pooping in a bucket, and (surprisingly) it did not take long to get used to. The entire toilet system consists of a large ice cream bucket set inside a wooden box with a toilet seat and lid attached. Before anyone wrinkles their nose though, we must testify that the process of composting human waste is much cleaner and less smelly than we're sure you're imagining. The bucket is lined with a layer of clean wood shavings, and when you are finished your business, if you have anything to cover or if it seems very wet in there, you simply sprinkle in some more shavings. And always put the lid down. The best part of it is all you can ever smell is wood shavings. Seriously. It makes the concept of pooping into water seem filthy. Plus, the toilet can kind of go anywhere, in any room you want to designate as a toilet area. One of the toilets here is in a room we can only equate to the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter, which means we never run out of things to look at and have even started a game of toilet-time I Spy.

We dug out a pile from 2008/2009 yesterday.

Once the bucket is full, it is a matter of taking it outside to a compost pile and dumping it. This is the only part of the process that can be a bit smelly (believe us when we say urine smells much worse than poop) but it's no worse than walking into a dirty public washroom or changing a diaper. Humanure takes a long time to break down/be digested by micro-organisms properly, and so Jane and Thom have a chronological sequence of compost piles that are each allowed to sit for at least two (usually three or four) years before being used in the garden. The compost piles are a mixture of humanure and regular kitchen scrap compost plus layers of hay and dead plants to keep the whole thing tidy and minimize housefly action (which can spread poop particles like nobody's business). After years of decomposing, the whole pile looks very much like soil and can be used just like regular compost. When you think about how much water they're saving, and the fact that this is how the nutrient cycle is supposed to go, and how expensive and potentially harmful the sewage treatment process can be, it makes you wonder why more people aren't pooping into buckets themselves.

Wild Roots

We finally managed to discuss privacy and anonymity with our hosts here at Wild Roots, and with the go ahead from them we can tell you a little bit more about where we are and what life is like here.

Wild Roots is located between Whycocomagh and Mabou, Inverness County, Cape Breton.  Short history lesson: Cape Breton was inhabited first by Mi'kmaq, while the first permanent European settlements were built by the French who named the island Ile Royale. The French also built the Fortress of Louisbourg which is one of Emily's favourite sites in the area. Ile Royale was eventually given to Britain in some treaty or another, and Irish and Scottish settlers began to arrive. The biggest immigration of Scots (50,000) occurred between 1800 and 1850 during the Highland Clearances in Scotland (basically, Scots got kicked off their land so rich people could farm more sheep).

Place names in Cape Breton are a good mix of French (Cheticamp), English (Port Hawkesbury), Mi'kmaq (Eskasoni) and Gaelic (Whycocomagh). Many of the road signs we pass indicate names of communities in both English and Gaelic, the latter of which is still the first language of some of the older generation on the island. At a potluck last night, we were able to listen to Gaelic being spoken around the table and learned that while Gaelic as a first language is dying out, there is an avid community of younger learners who are determined to keep it alive. At the high school in Mabou they even have signage in Gaelic, and when we commented on it everyone responded with pride about the strong link Cape Bretoners have to their roots. We don't think the language or the culture is going to disappear anytime soon.

This is the view from the front yard of Wild Roots (we helped stack those woodpiles, just saying). It's a gorgeous piece of land, and we promise we'll photograph it better soon. The gardens are extensive and include a good sized greenhouse, and there are four chickens who live in a swanky yellow chicken tractor. Keeping us company every day are the two cats, Buddy and Dulcie, who are like yin and yang. Buddy is a big tuxedo-patterned tomcat who purrs like a motorboat and lives for snuggling. Dulcie is a tiny mackerel tabby who is almost always hunting, whether it's flies or the small rodents she leaves on the step every morning. We hardly see Dulcie during the day but Buddy follows us everywhere, supervising our work in the garden, following us on our walks, and pushing his way between us to cuddle wherever we are sitting (or sleeping).

Buddy Big-Paws

Dulcie in her regular spot

We spend our time here helping out in the garden (e.g., digging potatoes, preparing for market, spreading hay) and entertaining Felix, Thom and Jane's 15 month old son. Saturday was one of our busier days, with potato digging in the morning, an hour and a half walk with Felix in the afternoon, then a potluck AND an open house/kitchen party in the evening. The potluck was delicious, with everyone contributing something unique and usually homegrown, including dandelion wine and rose wine. Both were new to us and a real treat :) From Wild Roots we brought a loaf of cornmeal raspberry bread and a honeydew melon. The open house we attended afterwards was for a new B&B in the area...and this being Cape Breton, everyone already knows the owner so the whole community turned up. We met a lot of new people and Moragh experienced her first ever kitchen party style music making (they even had someone on Irish flute)!

Sunday is Mabou Market day, and we loaded up the cars with vegetables and the baby and drove to the high school, where the market is held in the winter time. We're told the winter market is much smaller than it is during the summer but we were still impressed with the variety of tables and wares. We met a wooden spoon maker, a leatherworker, German bakers (we tried the soft pretzel - to die for), knitters, wool spinners, silk dyers, a man selling Garrison beer and Annapolis Valley wine, a jewelry artist, and more. There was even someone selling fancy coffee drinks, and we indulged in a pumpkin spice latte far to superior to any Starbucks we've tried. We were also gifted a CD from a duo performing live music, Andy and Ariana - they sing, beatbox, and play violin, guitar, drum and soprano sax nearly simultaneously. Worth checking out!


I'll leave you with some more pictures of the kitties...because who doesn't love kitties?

Dulcie, waiting for flies.

Buddy sat and cried in the middle of the road  because he wanted to come on our walk.

MAbou, not MaBOU.

Mmm apples. Everywhere in Inverness county, apples are ripening and falling off trees. The green ones are especially delicious. We learned today that the ones that look the best to us also look the best to the bugs and wormies. Corollary: not all bugs and wormies leave marks on the outside. Lesson learned.

Hmm, how do I apple...

We had a day off today and spent most of it exploring the Mabou Rivers Trail, part of the Rail Trail system here (similar to the Confederation Trail system on PEI). Our backpack full of picnic and bird book in hand, we walked for the better part of four hours and ran into locals on ATVs and bikes as well as a car (not sure how kosher that one was) and everybody waved and chatted :)

We saw a multitude of animals as we walked along, including a pair of grouse (lots of thumping as well), an ermine that ran back and forth investigating our feet, squirrels, chipmunks, voles, bluejays, chickadees, geese, ducks, a northern harrier, and some cows.

thought this mushroom had a pattern on it, but it was a shadow

they eventually came over to the fence to investigate but we were boring

We ended our day on West Mabou Beach, which is also surrounded by hiking trails and will definitely be worth further exploration. Emily read her book while Moragh investigated the rocky shoreline.

Back to work tomorrow! And the Mabou Market on Sunday! More farm pictures and wwoofing updates to come. Until next time,

Moragh and Emily

Cape Breton Autumn

We are writing this blog entry from the kitchen of our host home, with a pot of black tea with honey and raspberry cornmeal muffins just out of the oven. Behind us is a woodstove with a cast iron pan drying on top of it, and there's a cat on the couch to our left and another on a chair in front of us. We're sitting at the kitchen table where we played Settlers for 3.5 hours last night with another wwoofer (ended in a draw), waiting for the last of the cornmeal loaf to finish in the oven before we head out to dig potatoes.

When we arrived here Monday evening, we were first greeted by the cats and then by a wwoofer who had been here for a couple of weeks (we'll call her M for anonymity). She's also wwoofing her way around the Maritimes as a way to travel and get to know the area. We had some great times with her talking about Doctor Who and getting a crash course in wwoofing, as well as working outside mulching garlic beds, cleaning up tomato beds, planting spinach and picking raspberries. Sadly, M left today to continue wwoofing on another farm in the area but we are sure we'll see her again, either at the markets or in the future sometime somewhere :)

Our hosts (T and J) here are wonderful and have an adorable baby (F) who is full of character and very involved with everything everyone is doing. He loves to maul the very patient cats, and smack all objects (future percussionist). We've been very well fed here with mostly homegrown, organic, wheat free meals and snacks. It's inspiring to see how self-sustained T and J have managed to become. To give you an idea of the scope of their farm, here is a list of what they grew this year:
Garlic, beans, snow and snap peas, potatoes, kale, zucchini, onions, chard, tomatoes, beets, spinach, asian vegetable, endive, parsnips, squash, grapes, currants, strawberries, cucumber, corn, lettuce, rhubarb, artichoke, raspberries, arctic kiwi, carrots and leeks, plus wild blackberries and apples.

We're learning lots (composting toilets, who knew) and Cape Breton is gorgeous at this time of year. We have a beautiful view of hills covered in multicolored trees and we plan to do some hiking/walking/biking in our downtime. We'll follow up with some pictures later, once we get some work done. Hope everyone is well! Until next time.

New York Tidy-up

We have admittedly fallen behind on the New York posts but those of you with access to our Facebook pages are in luck, as all of our photos are being up loaded there. We wish we had the time to continue to write about the things we saw and learned down there but we are afraid of falling even further behind on current events so we have chosen to let NYC slide by. Very briefly, the rest of our trip was as follows:
More dim-sum, NY Public Library (a three block reading room!), more waiting in line for theatre tickets, Grand Central Station, Lincoln Centre and surrounding artsy West Side areas, War Horse (best thing we've ever seen on stage), Asian fruit experiences, souvenir shopping, more Central Park, crappy crappy Italian food, Disney Store, Toys R Us, Rockefeller Concourse, airport and home :)

Start the WWOOF blog soon!!

A Note on Communication

Forgot to mention, Moragh's cell phone will not have service while we are in Cape Breton. If anyone needs to reach her before November, email is your best bet. Or, text Emily instead. Or email Emily. But don't call Emily, or she will make you pay the roaming charges.
(We're on the ferry!)
Sent wirelessly from my BlackBerry device on the Bell network.
Envoyé sans fil par mon terminal mobile BlackBerry sur le réseau de Bell.

Best Laid Plans

Since we returned from NYC, we've been changing our plans almost every day. On Thursday, what started as an appointment to get our winter tires on turned into a doomsday saga of "don't take your car off the Island" and "$698 to fix". So by Friday evening we had resigned ourselves to delaying our departure from Sunday until Thursday or Friday of this week. We cleared it with our hosts, and even got a bit excited to have more time to prepare and see people before we left. Then on Saturday morning, we took the car in for a second opinion at our most trusted mechanic and he repaired it on the spot for $45. The catch is, it's only repaired as far as a 1999 Camry with 330 000 km on it is worth repairing. So. We'll see. Armed with extra transmission fluid, oil, a pile of car safety/repair equipment from Emily's uncle, and a rudimentary knowledge of good car/bad car, we're leaving today. In about an hour.

For anyone who doesn't know what WWOOFing is, check out their website at wwoof.ca! Our first stop is Cape Breton, and we are so excited. Wish us luck!