Reflection on the 2010 Hobby Farm

Well, I slacked off on my blogging, which should be no surprise to anyone, but we did keep farming and gardening!

Reflecting on last year, I learned A LOT about farming and gardening. Some things went well, other things sucked for a variety of reasons, but overall we had tonnes of fun. (note: that's metric tonnes, not imperial)

The pigs were a blast, and they taste delicious. I sold half a pig to each of two teachers at my school, and we kept one for the freezer. It's rewarding and satisfying to have healthy food on the table.

Jen's chickens are still going strong, we get about 7-8 eggs everyday and I have been selling them at school as well as giving them away to all our friends and family. I'm going to make a quiche this week! We'll see how that turns out.

The garden enjoyed only limited success. We ate radishes, corn, zucchini, lettuce and a few tomatoes.

Oink Oink Oink

Well, the Hobby Farm is working it's way up to REAL Hobby Farm status. That's right, there are two new members of our family.






Hamhuis and Schweinsteiger


Of course, we are going to eat these members of our family, which you are not allowed to do with any human members, and society frowns upon dogs and cats as well, but that's a whole different blog.

The two new pigs gained their names from the newest Canucks defenseman, Dan Hamhuis, and German midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger, man of the match vs Argentina. I don't love or hate the German team, but this name fits perfectly, and Schweinsteiger is also considered the "Rockstar" of the German team. He loves the media, note the smile on his little pig face, and see the confidence in his little pig eyes.


The Hamhuis hotel.






More pics of the pigs, along with our piglets coming soon!

Zucchini!

Another warm weather crop is zucchini.



I planted these guys ages ago, and they have just kept getting bigger. Slowly at first, then much quicker lately. They are ready to go outside, but it has been cold this week, so I have kept them in.

Hopefully they can withstand the change when they do go outside.

More tomatoes

My largest tomato plant got so big it needed to be staked, even though the variety isn't supposed to need staking!

They have been kind of stagnant because of the cold weather and general lack of sunshine, but as soon as it got sunny today, the plant exploded!




In this photo there are several tomatoes planted at different times, and there are also several pepper plants.

This weekend should be great since the weather is supposed to warm up.

It was like a Thanksgiving feast!!!

Well, that's exaggeration. Gross hyperbole if you will.

Anyways, I picked and ate two radishes.




I left some dirt on them so you know they aren't fakes.
I don't like radishes, and they were very small.

I know they were premature, but considering the high likelihood that my dogs will soon ruin them, and considering also that I really have been working hard on this garden with very limited success, I needed to pick and eat something.

Radishes were ready, radishes got eaten. Yum.

Cabbage, Dogs - Dogs, Cabbage

You can probably guess from the title.

Of course the dogs ate all my cabbage plants.








Rest in Peace little Cabbage.



This is very frustrating, as cabbage was one of the few thriving crops so far. At least they left me one plant, and I have more inside as seedlings. I should still be able to get some cabbage.

Knee-High by the first of July

That's what they say about corn.

Corn wants full sun and doesn't require much love.

For a long harvest, you can plant early and late harvesting corn at the same time. Also you must do succession planting to ensure success! Plant new plants every two weeks for a month or so, that way you will have plants maturing every two weeks in the summer.

As I said earlier, I plant radishes in between, because corn takes a long time and radishes will come up well before they are in the way of the corn.