Wandering Where We’ll Be

Well, Dan and I are in Canada on Prince Edward Island, and we’re just a couple days away from the end of our two week stay/working at Maple Hill Farms, an organic farm about 30 minutes west of Charlottetown, P.E.I.  Our staying at the farm is odd in that it is very different from when we were on the road.  Generally, we are working harder during the day at the farm than when we were traveling (except for maybe the two-day backpacking trip in the White Mountains), but our accommodations at night are – shall we say – a step up from our cozy tent.  Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The farm is owned and operated by our hosts, Mike and Paul, who also run an inn business in Charlottetown.  Three years ago, they bought 100 acres first, and then another 50 adjoining acres, of land that hadn’t been farmed in several years.  Their goal was to breathe life back into the farm via organic farming.  They first moved and completely restored the old farmhouse; the place is gorgeous, with wood floors, fireplaces, and a front porch that looks out over a valley of both open and forested areas.  The house is also decorated beautifully.  Then, they built a “shed,” which is really a three-car garage, and a barn.  And, last year they moved a small building and renovated it into a self-sufficient bunkhouse, complete with wood stove, lofted bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.

So, that’s the infrastructure, but what about the fields of vegetables and the animals, you ask.  Well, they began small and are expanding each year.  Southwest of the house, they have what I would call a very large garden, consisting of several vegetable and flower beds.  Beyond the garden is a fruit tree orchard that was planted last year.

And, as for the animals, they have cattle — eight Scottish Highlanders – that they will be breeding this year, and they are boarding two riding horses.  In addition, they just picked up 37 chicks the other day and will be receiving 50 more in a couple weeks.

When Dan and I arrived at the farm last Sunday, Mike and Paul gave us a tour of the place, we met Joe, who is a young, hired hand from England who pretty much runs the farm for them, and we got settled into the guest bedroom in the house.  So, Dan and I are staying in the house, but Jake gets to sleep in the bunkhouse with Joe.  Then, we helped Mike and Joe measure and stake out the new vegetable and flower beds that would essentially double the bed space.

Since then, here are some of the other things we have done or have been working on:

1. Transplanted about 200 tomato seedlings into larger pots.
2. Tilled and raked out the walkways in the garden, where we’ll transplant the turf we take out for the new planting beds.
3. Cut turf from the areas that will become new planting beds.
4. Lay turf in the walkways.
5. Burned a big row of brush and branches that had been trimmed from a treeline (to make way for a new fence).
6. Helped build an electric fence that will hold animals.  The fence is made of timbers and rebar, and strung with wire that will be electrified.
7. Prepared all of the planting beds, which entails weeding the area, tilling the soil (or, as Joe call it – rotovating), measuring out the planting beds and walking paths between the beds, trenching out the paths and, then, raking level the planting beds.
8. Fed the animals.

Paul is the main cook in their household, and has made several excellent dinners for us, including a Lobster/P.E.I. Mussel Dinner, which was a new experience for both me and Dan but also very tasty.  Paul is a great cook, and he has shared a few of his recipes with me.

Joe also seems to know his way around the kitchen, showing me and Dan a very easy method of making excellent homemade bread.  I can’t wait to try to replicate this bread once I get home, which might be tricky because he doesn’t measure any of the ingredients… so, we’ll see.

I made dinner twice for all of us, making Pad Thai one night and Spinach-Potato Pie another.  They seemed to be hits, and I shared the recipes with Paul and Joe.  I also made Cranberry-White Chocolate Scones last Sunday morning, which we ate for our mid-morning break from working on the new fence.

We have been working hard on the farm, and we were both sore the first week, but it has been very rewarding to see the progress we’ve made already in getting the planting beds ready to plant and the cows moved to a newly fenced-in pasture.  And, believe it or not, we’ve also had some time away from the farm to explore the Island. 

One afternoon last week, we went into Charlottetown, where we walked down by the water (Charlottetown Harbour) and around downtown, had dinner at Gahan’s Brewery, and went for a drive west of town along the water (Northumberland Strait).  One day last week, we drove to Cavendish on the north shore and visited Green Gables, the setting for L.M. Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables,” as well as the dunes and beaches of Cavendish Beach.  Friday night we went into Charlottetown to see X-Men III (mostly for Dan, but I indulged him and went along, too).  On Saturday, we went into town again, where we both got haircuts at Fergie’s Barbershop in downtown Charlottetown, bought some souvenir “dirt” shirts that are dyed with the notoriously red, P.E.I. soil, picked up some groceries and went to mass at the Basilica (St. Dunstan’s Parish).  We also drove out south and east of Charlottetown, where we had lunch at Mom’s Diner in Murray River.  And, yesterday we toured more of the north shore (east side) and stayed for the night at Johnson Shores Inn, a beautiful inn owned and operated by good friends of Mike and Paul’s.

Well, I could share more, but after working on this post in bits and pieces over the last several days, I NEED to get it posted.  We’ll leave Maple Hill on Saturday, camp one night somewhere in Nova Scotia and, then, drive to the second farm we’ll be working on, which is on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.  Mike and Paul have been very gracious hosts, and it’s been both a lot of fun and an honor to work with Joe, who knows a great deal about organic farming.  We’ll miss the farm and the folks there, but also know that we have more great experiences ahead of us.

Tim

Tags: U.S. Segment 1

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 1:38 pm and is filed under U.S. Segment 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.