Fall 2012
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Our Nature is Organic
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Winter is on its way... Dealing with Frost Year Round Cold Frames Growing Garlic in the North
Herd & Flock Health–Preventing Problems!
COG Canadian Organic Growers Cultivons Biologique Canada
2 – Fall 2012
The Canadian Organic Grower
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The
Canadian Organic Grower D EPARTMENTS
F EATURES
Editor’s Corner ..................... 4 A fond farewell
Garlic growing in the Yukon ....................................... 6 Yes, it can be done, according to Ruth Lera who has developed a system through trial and error at her home in Whitehorse.
Letter to the Editor ............... 5
A year in the life of my cold frames .......................... 10 In memory of ... ................... 12 COG Publications ................ 22
Niki Jabbour describes when and how her cold frames are put to best use throughout the year.
Classifieds ........................... 29
The snake eats its tail ................................................. 13
Worm’s Eye View ................. 30
By Jordan Marr: Six alumni of Canadian farm internships reflect on hosting interns themselves.
Herd and flock health ................................................ 18 Dr. Ryan Ridgway shows how working with your veterinarian can help maximize profits.
Dealing with frost ....................................................... 24 Dr. Ed Brotak explains the impact frost and freezing can have on your crops and what you can do to minimize the damage.
New & Exciting News! After many months of hard work, we’re pleased to announce that The Canadian Organic Grower (TCOG) is now online! You will now be able to search for your favourite articles and authors easily, comment, and share them with others. Please take a look, bookmark, and help us get the word out: magazine.cog.ca
This project was funded with help from the Organic Sector Development Program (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the Canadian Agriculture Adaption Program). E-magazine update Starting with this issue, all donors to COG will
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now receive the full TCOG as an e-magazine! We appreciate every supporter—no matter what the amount donated—and our e-magazine is a perfect way to give back. For those donors who would like receive the hard editions, COG is charging $18/yr (+HST) for three issues to cover printing and postage. It is important to note that we will be eliminating the summer issue for 2013, which we realize is a busy time for most of you and that you aren’t getting a lot of free time to read! It’s also a way for COG to cut some costs and put more resources into our meaningful charitable work. New COG logo Finally, we are thrilled to announce our new COG logo. This simplified look is meant to reflect the diversity of our supporters and champions, those who are growers, as well as eaters, parents, gardeners and more. If you have any questions about these changes, or matters relating to COG and the magazine, contact us at office@cog.ca or 613-216-0741.
Our Nature is Organic
Fall 2012 – 3
A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF MY COLD FRAMES Excerpt from The Year Round Vegetable Gardener by Niki Jabbour. Published by Storey Publishing.
Late Winter The first seeding of the year begins in mid- to late February when the harshest part of winter has passed and the amount of daylight is steadily increasing. At this time, I scratch some compost or worm manure into the top few inches of soil and seed any empty areas of the frames with bunching onions, spinach, arugula, tatsoi, endive, mâche and other cold tolerant salad greens. At this point, we’re still harvesting from the clumps of thyme and parsley that I planted in the cold frames back in September. With a bit of shredded leaves or straw tucked around the crowns for insulation, these hardy herbs winter over quite well.
Spring As the weeks progress into March and spring beckons, we sow seed of more cold-tolerant vegetables into the shelter of the frames—hardy lettuces, pak choi and mizuna, for example. All of these plantings will provide salads just in time for Easter. Even a few potatoes can be tucked into the frames for a late May harvest of tender tubers.
A few potatoes can be tucked into the frames for a late May harvest of tender tubers. Many gardeners use their cold frames as early spring seeding beds to start vegetables that will eventually be moved into the garden. I prefer to start my seedlings indoors under my grow lights and use the frames for late-winter / early-spring vegetable production. A lovely variety of hardy and semi-hardy crops thrive within the simple shelter of the wooden frames and caring for the young plants requires minimal work.
10 – Fall 2012
Summer We continue to harvest through April and May, and once the baby potatoes are dug in late May, the cold frames are taken out of production for two months. June and July are allocated for soil building; this is when we incorporate generous amounts of chopped leaves and 3 to 4 inches of our homemade compost. It’s crawling with worms, which will happily break down the shredded leaves. If the soil pH has dropped, I add powdered lime. We also seed a quick growing green manure crop, which we’ll dig under after about 6 weeks, to boost soil health. In early August, it’s time to start thinking about fall and winter crops. I begin the process by trans-
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planting several dozen leek seedlings at the back of one of the frames. This slow-growing member of the onion family is an essential ingredient in autumn and winter soups, and is so cold tolerant that it can be harvested from the cold frames all winter long. We also sow seed for the winter carrots in the ‘carrot cold frame’ during the first and second week of August. We eat so many carrots that we dedicate an entire cold frame to carrot production, and it’s still hard to grow enough of them. As the temperatures drop in late autumn, the long roots get sweeter and sweeter; everyone in our family loves them. In late December, I add a 6-inch layer of straw or shredded leaves to the carrot frame to further insulate the crop. August is also a good time to make sure that I have enough seed for all of the hardy salad crops that we like to grow. If not, a lastminute order goes out to our favourite seed companies. Once the summer heat has ended and the nights are cooler, I also move several mature parsley and thyme plants from the garden into the inside corners of the frames. Parsley isn’t so fond of being moved and it starts to wilt within minutes. After about a week, though, new sprouts emerge from the centers of the plants.
Fall In late August and early September, winter lettuces, mâche, claytonia, endive, tatsoi, pak choi, spinach, Swiss chard and bunching onions are direct seeded or transplanted into the frames. If the summer is hot and dry, I often start many of these indoors under my grow lights to boost ger-
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mination rates and decrease the amount of watering that directseeding in the frames requires. The August and early-September plantings will need to be watered every few days if there has been no rain. At this point, the lids of the frames are left open to the elements and won’t have to be closed until the hard fall frosts threaten, around mid-October. Because deer and rabbits can be a problem, I keep some sheets of chicken wire or concrete reinforcing mesh handy to cover the tops of the frames. The mesh will discourage the deer from munching on the maturing carrots and salad greens. At the end of September, all the crops for fall and winter have been seeded or transplanted into the cold frames. I continue to water if the soil is dry, and once the night temperatures begin dropping to 4OC, I start closing the sashes in the early evening. I still open the frames in the morning—all the way if the temperatures are mild (8OC), or only partially if they are cooler.
tops of the frames with a broom or push shovel. On extremely cold nights we toss an old carpet over the sashes, but remove it by midmorning the next day to allow the solar energy to warm the frames. If a deep freeze is forecast to last for a few days, the extra insulation (even a layer of snow) is left in place until it passes. At this point, all is tucked in for the winter, and whenever we want a fresh salad, some aromatic herbs or snips of fresh green onions for omelets, we put on our winter boots and trudge up to the frozen garden, knowing that when we lift the sashes of the cold frames, we’ll be greeted by the scents and sights of spring. TCOG
Winter Once the cold weather of late October arrives, the frames are closed every night and vented during the day. We surround the north side of each frame with bags of shredded leaves or bales of straw—we typically rake about 40 to 50 bags of shredded leaves each autumn, eventually composting or digging them into the garden beds. Come December, it’s time to think about snow removal. After a storm, we lightly brush or shovel the snow from the
Our Nature is Organic
Fall 2012 – 11
IN MEMORY OF ...
John Wilcox of Duck Creek Farm, Salt Spring Island, B.C.
Clark Phillips of Whaelghinbran Farm, N.B.
n the month of June 2012, we lost two passionate organic farmers—one on the West Coast and the other on the East Coast. Each man provided tremendous inspiration to aspiring growers, fellow farmers, community members, policy makers, and all who had the privilege to exchange words and ideas with them.
COG recognizes the tremendous contributions of John Wilcox and Clark Phillips within our organic community and we extend our condolences to their family and friends—they are deeply missed. A commemoration to each of these men is at http://magazine.cog.ca/remembering-johnwilcox/ and http://magazine.cog.ca/clark-phillips/
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Our Nature is Organic
Fall 2012 – 29
WORM’S EYE VIEW One step forward and two back In my early career I was fortunate to spend some time in Egypt. This extraordinary country is, as everyone knows, the Child of the Nile. The longest river in the world flows through the biggest hot desert in the world, and for thousands of years it has carried silt from the heart of Africa. Every year the river flooded, spreading fertile silt into the surrounding desert, and creating at its mouth a gigantic delta. Very early in history, farmers learned how to handle the floods, creating irrigation channels and dams. Egypt became a great empire because of the immense amount of food that could be grown due to this natural irrigation and fertilization. Every farmer could grow three times as much food as he needed for his own family, so it was easy to feed the thousands of workers needed to build the pyramids and other great monuments. In the course of history, the Roman Empire arose and Egypt became a Roman province (the last pharaoh was Cleopatra). Egypt became the “breadbasket of Rome,” sending great quantities of wheat and many other foodstuffs to the new empire. Now let’s move to the modern era, with all the wonderful improvements that science has brought. The first major change to the shape of Egypt came in the 1960s, when the crazy Cold War was raging between the USA and the Soviet Union, and Egypt’s canny president Nasser was playing the two sides off against each other, asking them to help build a
great dam across the Nile. The Russians were the successful bidder and constructed the great Aswan Dam. To this day controversy rages about this dam, as it does about many others throughout the world. Is it a good thing or not? It produces electricity, and certainly electric light is a genuine modern blessing. But the main object, in man’s tireless efforts to control nature, was to regulate the flow of the Nile, which previously often flooded too much or too little. The dam has created a gigantic lake behind it (Lake Nasser), and the silt that used to fertilize Egypt is now being deposited uselessly in the bottom of the lake.
It was easy to feed the thousands of workers needed to build the pyramids. So, is Egypt the great exporter of food that it once was? Well, hardly. In the 1960s, when the dam was being built, Egypt was self-sufficient for food. But by 2008, the people were starving; serious food riots were convulsing the country, which is now the world’s largest importer of wheat. The reason for this is not primarily the change brought about by the dam, but much more by a new policy introduced by the IMF in the 1990s, which transformed Egypt’s farming sector from domestic supplier to competitive exporter. Farmers had no say in the decision, because their unions were banned under the dictatorship, whose policy was steered by the US
by Robin Guard Agency for International Development. Travel through the great delta today and you will see megafarms producing exotic fruit for export to Europe, irrigated by water diverted from the original fields and consuming vast quantities of artificial fertilizer. You can be sure that the people who actually work on the land do not see much of the money that these farms earn. Egypt today is still under a military dictatorship, which has arrested the Minister for Agriculture for corruption, and which claims to be preparing the country for a move to a democracy, like many other Arab countries. Unfortunately, a move to democracy does not necessarily mean a move to a sane way of living. Egypt’s recent history is just one of many horror stories from the developing world. Forests in A frica and South America are still being cleared to make room for crops like soya and palm oil, destined to satisfy the West’s demand for cheap beef. A handful of giant agri-businesses is behind most of these projects, and national governments everywhere see no reason to control them. Governments do not want to rock the boat, because the system works; it enables hamburgers to be sold at a ridiculously cheap price. And, what can be better than to settle down in front of the TV with a double burger? The Roman emperors found that the best way to control the masses was to give them “bread and circuses” – in other words, cheap food and mindless entertainment – and it doesn’t seem as if things have changed all that much. TCOG
30 – Fall 2012
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