When you ain't no Spring chicken, it's time to start delegating

It is the 21st of March, one day after the Spring Equinox. Yippee! Officially Spring is here and it has felt surprisingly glorious here the past week or so, with many days of bright sunshine, clear skies and yesterday what must have been a record-breaking warm temperature for this time of year in this place, somewhere around 17C at We Are One Farm. Certainly a shirt-sleeves kind of day. I have been blinking my eyes like a mole coming out of a hole lately, adjusting to the sun, realizing in retrospect how cloudy and dull it has been most of this winter.

March is rarely a pleasant month in these parts, at least in my recollection. Usually there is rain, freezing rain, another good snowfall or two and some more rain, but here we are three weeks in, with mostly bare ground, the frost pushing out of the earth in sunny spots, some tulips peeking through, even an odd crocus blooming next to the house (transplanted by some squirrel I suspect...I know I didn't put it there!)

People along Rt. 325 have been raking the roadside gravel from their front lawns that had been pushed over by the snow plows. We need to do that ourselves on our own lawn....there's a great pile of our newly-resurfaced gravel driveway resting just below where we park our cars, scraped over by my very thorough tractor-man Edward. He's pretty skilled on our little red Massey-Ferguson, but there's a fine line between plowing low enough to avoid packing the snow into ice on the driveway and gouging out the surface itself. This year we had much less ice. ‘Nuff said.

Speaking of which, we were well into April last year I think before the longer driveway was ice-free and driveable. This has been a benign winter in comparison, and much better for the lavender so far. It looks much healthier, last year's plantings seem to be holding fast, some still have slightly green leaves at the bottom instead of dessicated grey, which suggests it was not as cold. And while temperatures are supposed to go down again this week to more normal average readings, below freezing at night, overall it seems we have survived the season much better (knock wood) and may have a robust harvest yet!

In that vein, that is, the lavender department, I have enlisted help. Feeling somewhat overwhelmed last year by the extent of the garden chores required to maintain all our plantings in good health, I received the "guidance" one day, if you will, that "You don't need to do it all yourself". I think that message may have come after I had already broken down and called on Beau, former gardener to the stars, to come and pull weeds in my lavender patch last Spring. At that point I needed no guidance other than the frightful observation that the weeds between the rows were higher than the lavender shrubs on the raised beds. HELP!

Beau to the rescue, at a fee I can only presume was far less than what he must have charged the movie stars he gardened for in Los Angeles before moving, with his lovely partner, to the backwoods of Lunenburg County of all places. Digging the weeds out here was no doubt somewhat beneath his expertise and might have been mind-numbing, had I not joined him in the work and engaged in some delightfully eclectic conversations. The work was, however, body-numbing, but we "got ‘er done" as they say, rows cleared, weed-matted and mulched to see if we could deter their regrowth. So far so good.

But the recent decision I have made regarding the lavender and delegating tasks was to seek out the help of a seamstress to help create the lavender-stuffed products I sell. I have realized that my passion and perhaps forte is in the garden, being outdoors tending, even weeding, selecting the varieties, harvesting and drying. And I do like deciding what products I wish to make with the dried buds and choosing fabrics for each.

But as the winter passed and I was out of eye pillows and had planned for months to make flax and lavender neck pillows and was getting no closer to the dust-covered sewing machine upstairs, I remembered the advice, "You don't have to do it all yourself..." So I got the name of a good seamstress who has done work for an artist friend for years sewing tiny clothes for sculptural puppets, and emailed her about doing or recommending someone to sew my products as piecework, hopefully affordably enough that there would still be some compensation for me for growing all this lavender and stuffing them!

We had an enthusiastic meeting, she is doing up a batch of samples for me now and is skilled at costing it all out so I can conceivably deal with this like it's a real business...wow! I have had to realize that I am not making these products as a personal expression of a craft, but as a way to use the lavender I grow, which is more truly my craft. So I can relinquish control of the actual sewing to someone else. Turns out she's an expert, with far more experience than I'd imagined and is keen to be involved! It has been an incredibly freeing experience, lifting a huge weight off my mind.

My block had been in having to pay for the help, as in, "how can I afford this if I am not selling much?" But if it is done more efficiently, both more quickly and with less waste, and frees me up for other kinds of work, then presumably it's well worth it, especially if we can then make more, of higher quality and sell more. I know, it's not rocket science, but sometimes it takes me a while to "let go".

I am anticipating a much better harvest this year after the milder winter and drier weather right now.The famer's almanac with the grey hair, that font of folksy wisdom that I call "my husband", has been forecasting a "hot dry summer" since Groundhog Day, drawing on some kind of magical foresight gleaned from his upbringing on a northern Alberta homestead. Probably been reading the wattles on the chickens again.

Speaking of which, I entered the coop the other day to find to my horror, a blood-spattered water dispenser on the roosters' side, although anyone with more than one rooster in a pen would probably roll their eyes. ‘Seems two of them got into a little spat on their own and wattles and combs were picked and pecked. The large Silver Lace Wyandott was not a pretty sight, his lovely neck and shoulders stained a dirty red. No doubt he was trying to overthrow the authority of Sargeant Major, the previous head of the coop, whose extensive wattles are now scarred. It will soon be time to ship the rooster gang off to the butcher. Roosters are sort of useless as a group. One is good for keeping an eye on the hens in the yard, not to mention making new ones, but too many are a nuisance, prone to scrapping, or wearing the feathers off the backs of the hens if allowed to intermingle.

We "did in" our own roosters the last two times. It's do-able, but hard on the nerves. We did it with ceremony, smudging and giving thanks, but at the end we still felt as if we had been beaten ourselves, and that's only doing about seven at one go. Perhaps if we had a team of people to be more production-line about it, it might be less stressful. Maybe.

But this year we decided to delegate in this department too, and hand the duties off to a pro. When we factor in the high cost of having fed them all winter on organic feed we figure an extra $3 or so per bird is worth relieving us of the task. Now I know why free-range organic chickens cost so much. And bigger producers must be getting a better deal on feed! Now if we just have mainly hens left we can perhaps recoup the cost of their feed from egg sales. We only have about four and a half dozen per week with 8-10 laying.

Tonight I am actually simmering some "rooster soup" on the stove, featuring broth from the last two roosters we had in the freezer (Rhode Island Reds I think) which were fricasseed recently. These fellows had free-ranged all last summer, and while deliciously wholesome and "happy chickens" (as several of my friends would say who now only eat "happy meat"), they were extremely lean with skin like leather. All that running around, hormone-free and not bred for heavy breast development like those Franken-bird "Meat Kings", produces a tougher bird. (You can't grow a Meat King past a certain time as they will literally fall over from over-development of the breast. That's the price of masses of boneless chicken breasts in restaurants and supermarkets.)

No, in our roosters, under all those fluffy feathers was a small-breasted 4 or 5-pounder, with stewing the most successful culinary option. A little wine, some "herbes de Provence" concocted from the herbs grown in our garden, and mmmmmmm. Dee-lish. That was the fricasee. The bits and bones I didn't stew were turned into the broth that is the base for tonight's soup, carrots, turnip, onions, garlic, celery, white beans and rice pasta shells. It's a cure-all, I am hoping, for the nasty Spring cold my hubby is suffering from, the first I've witnessed in the past four years.

Well, time to stir the soup, and then closer to dark, shut the hens back in the coop who have been out to play today in the field. They have been enjoying the sunshine lately, digging and scratching in the dirt, taking dust baths and likely appreciating some distance from the nine noisy roosters who each think he's Pavarotti in a crow-off.

Nine roosters in the freezer is not enough to get us through a year by any means, but it's a start. More and more we work to be aware of where our food comes from and how it was raised. It's very challenging and I know everyone can't have their own chicken coop or even vegetable garden, but conscious consumerism is a good start.

For your edification I propose two films, which we had already seen but which have just been presented publicly this weekend for free in Mahone Bay (not far from here) at a mini film festival sponsored by the Council of Canadians. One film is "Food Inc.", which is still in the new releases at your video store, a captivating look at where our "farm fresh" food mostly comes from, and where it can, with conscious effort, come from. It features author Michael Pollan (of "The Ominivore's Dilemma") among others.

The other film is a 20-minute amazingly concise take on how we function as a consumer culture, called "The Story of Stuff". We found it on the internet a couple of years ago and have been recommending it since then. You can get a free download of that short film here .

Happy Spring! Lush may your garden grow, loud may your roosters crow!