Prior to leaving for Asia, we did have the opportunity to do some farm work even though Winter was in full swing.
We've learned that working in the cold is not that bad as long as you are properly dressed. In fact, you rapidly heat up while working and having layers that you easily can peel off helps a lot. The most difficult thing to overcome is the snow. It constrains your movements and certainly slows you down, where a task that may have taken an hour can rapidly turn into an hour and a half.
Our task prior to our trip was the "stringing" of raspberry canes. If not restrained between cables or ropes, these canes will rapidly fall or fold to the ground. Although we had attempted various methods in the past, we were searching for a clean, efficient and flexible way to do this. In the past, the previous farmer had used everything from nylon rope to telephone cable.
Our new solution was based on the Polyamide cable we used for our Kiwi trellises. Again, this material is easy to deploy over very long runs; it maintains tension under varying temperature conditions; and, it does not weather. It also ties and unties rather neatly.
In order to hold the cable to our old metal T-bars, we bought some pre-shaped anchors from our favourite on-line supplier Dubois. They basically come in two parts.
We encountered two problems with these. The first is the packaging. Pulling them out of the box reminded us of the old "Barrel of Monkeys" game....although in this case we did not want to pull out 50 tangled pieces at a time.
The second problem was actually tying the anchors to our posts. It really took two persons to mount these to the T-bars because of the difficulty in bending the metal.
In any case, the final result was more than satisfactory.
In the end we managed to cleanly "string" all of our raspberries. We were so pleased with the results, we decided to also tackle our very tall blackberry canes.
When we returned from Asia, we were rather surprised that all the snow on the farm had melted. The region had gone through an abnormal warm spell (with temperatures reaching 15 deg. C the day before our arrival).
This gave us an opportunity to finish our second row of Kiwi trellises. We now have a slope that seems equipped for a ski lift!
We have some 11 rows to complete now and we've decided to take it a year at a time. The reason is that the next step is pruning and then slowly training our vines onto these "arbors". We want to do this while maintaining some fruit production and I fear that once radically pruned, we will stop fruit production on the newly trellised vines.
What was most surprising this week is that Tristan was still able to harvest (in mid-January no less!) the remainder of his spinach. I would have never thought we could do this in Canada.
We also had the time to clear the dead pine trees and Wisteria vines that we cut down from our ridge during the Christmas break. This of course required some significant fires.
The thing to note about dead Wisteria vines is that the wood burns rapidly, quickly turning to ash, but it does not go into flame. This makes for an unsustainable burn. With our large mass of dead Wisteria, we had to resort to some dramatic solution: basically using petrol to get the fire started and then stocking it with pine branches.
We were thrilled to finally get rid of these aggressive and invasive vines.
I leave our readers this week with a quick update on renovations. Construction on the property has not stopped. This month showed great progress on the barn and the new country store is really starting to look like a professional commercial space.
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