The title of our blog hasn’t really reflected the reality of our trip so far. COVID has meant that we’ve stayed put longer than we intended. After two months on this farm, we will be moving on Sunday. We are grateful for our time here and have lots of stories to tell our kids (big assumption made by Rosie here!) when they ask about the pandemic! Instead of COVID-19, we have caught the gardening bug and now have the opportunity to stay with a couple who make a living solely from growing veg. Hopefully we should not only enhance our growing skills, but also gain an understanding for how a small scale vegetable growing business operates to make a profit.

We won’t be moving far, the new place is still on Gabriola Island, just down the road from where we currently are. British Columbia is recovering well from the COVID pandemic, but unessential travel is still not recommended. Time will tell whether their cautious approach was the best one. We should be entering Phase 3 of the reopening plan in July, if not late June, which would mean province wide travel. See the graphic below to see how the province has faired.

As mentioned in the video last week we have started to put together vegetable boxes for a few families. On Fridays we have been harvesting and washing crops for the boxes (this week: two types of turnips, kale, salad greens, swiss chard, garlic scapes and herbs). Growing veg is not the primary focus of this farm and they are not yet set up for cleaning and drying lots of produce. Today work began on building some equipment for this purpose, see the photos below. Eventually the bathtub will be used for washing and the mesh table for drying. Our next destination will likely have a pretty slick operation for this process and we are excited to see it.

We also had to spend a day clearing up some felled trees from in front of the barn, they were in the way for an extension that will be built over the summer. This is slightly off topic, but Rosie made a time-lapse so it had to be shoehorned in somewhere.

Finally, we went on an epic walk to the far western side of the Island yesterday to visit Descanso Bay Regional Park. It was a bit rainy so we didn’t take many pictures, but the forest and coastline were beautiful. We had a picnic, did a crossword and watched a heron fishing. The bird in the tree is the dark-eyed junco whose nest featured in our Creatures in Peril post (after a couple of weeks, the eggs are still there with no parents to be seen…) The beast on the beach is Ollie; Rosie is enjoying the new beard growth and looks forward to it getting thicker over the coming weeks and months.

We look forward to telling you all about our new place to stay next week. Happy Saturday everyone!

Our travels, for now, have turned into a gardening bonanza! Not something we initially envisaged, but we have enjoyed it and learnt lots. It’s been an exciting week for us because we have started to harvest some of the crops we planted in April, mostly leafy greens, and thought we would take the opportunity to show you what we have got so far.

This week Ollie rescued a dumdum sheep who got stuck in a hay bag.

We had to weed around half of the 12000 bulbs of garlic growing on the farm. Someone had been down with a strimmer to clear the paths, then we picked out the big weeds from between the garlic plants by hand. Half way through, Rosie spotted a birds nest in the middle of the path. We assume it was made after the strimming was done, otherwise it had a very lucky escape from stomping boots!

The owner is most likely a dark-eyed junco, a bird as common as the house sparrow back home. In fact, it’s so common even Rosie hasn’t bothered taking a photo of one! We will keep an eye on the nest (from a safe distance) and hopefully the parents will come back and sit on the eggs.

We’ve done lots more gardening this week, filling nearly all of the space. Perhaps we will do a garden tour for next week’s blog, but for now, here is a clip of us transplanting lettuce and tomatoes in the greenhouse.

Finally, a few pictures taken on our walks and a cycle trip to Drumbeg provincial park (which has just re-opened after being closed thanks to a pandemic or something.)

Happy Saturday everyone!

Whilst travelling and volunteering through Workaway, we were hoping to find time to learn some new skills. Although we’ve been quite busy with work, Rosie has tried her hand at making a wildlife documentary. We hope you find it both educational and enjoyable. Until next week!

It has been raining and then sunny this week on the farm, which has been great for the vegetables! Lots of our seed babies are starting to emerge.

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We’ve been learning about different gardening techniques by reading a lot and watching YouTube videos. We tried an efficient method to prepare beds to transplant baby onions. We learned the importance of getting your potting soil moist enough before sewing seeds. We also learned that weeds are a pain in the butt and you should try to avoid them appearing at all!

As well as gardening, we’ve been let loose with power tools again. This time we are attempting to build a big composter, consisting of three walls made from off-cuts of wood. Our host didn’t want to use any nails or screws, as the walls will eventually decompose (and nails are bad for tractor tyres). Instead, we sandwiched vertical planks between sets of horizontal planks, drilled holes and “sewed” some wire through them. We haven’t tried to lift them up yet as they weigh a tonne, but hopefully the half-lapped joints will stop the whole thing falling apart. The walls will be attached to posts made from some cedar trees removed from near the barn. We had to remove all of the bark from these before they can be used, which was a satisfying job.

The sheep have had three new friends arrive. Well, actually they are old friends who are returning to the farm. They have been kept as pets by a family who can unfortunately no longer look after them. They are well fed and pampered compared to the farm sheep, so hopefully they won’t get bullied (the big fat fatties).

We have been enjoying the sunshine with walks to the beach and relaxing evenings in the garden. There are lots of insects appearing, which means lots of birds. Our host thinks they have purple martins nesting in the barn, but thanks to the expert bird identification skills of our readers, I’m not so sure. They look like barn swallows in the barn (duh) and there are also lots of violet-green swallows around too. I’ve not seen any purple martins yet.

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Hopefully we will have photos of a finished composter and even bigger vegetables next week!

After the viral success of our video last week (well, some people said they liked it), we thought we would do another one. This vlog is based on our potential need to learn foraging to keep well fed on Gabriola Island.

We also realise that some of you are missing the nature photographs, the birds in particular, so these are for the twitchers (happy birthday Stefan!):

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We can only apologise for being a day late with this vital blogging service. We’ve been quite busy with a variety of things, but we won’t make excuses. Hopefully, however, the following video of our morning routine will make up for it. Enjoy!

“Just give me one fine day of plain sailing weather and I can f**k up anything, anything.” Frank Turner, 2013

We’ve made our fair share of ‘mistakes’ this week on the farm, from putting the wrong mulch along the potato rows to leaving an oily rag indoors (apparently they can spontaneously combust, who knew!). All small mistakes, but a bit demoralising nonetheless. At least it shows we are learning. On the up side, we also had some good weather for sailing and went with our hosts to Ruxton Island, we assume named after their son Ruxton (…or maybe the other way around), to enjoy the views around the gulf islands.

One of our more successful tasks this week was cleaning the trailer with a pressure washer. It was looking a little worse for wear when we moved in, but now it looks sparkly clean and is a good place to hang out and hide from the kids when needed.

Another Rollie success was fixing the electric fences that were failing to contain the horses on a daily basis (they weren’t getting shocked so could lift it up with their teeth and sneak under). We repaired some of the weaker posts and completely overhauled the existing wire. The horses haven’t escaped yet and we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

We’ve learned this week that water on Gabriola Island can be extremely limited over the summer. Most properties have their own well system, so once the ground water dries up the taps stop running. Showers are rationed in the household, so we are going to be smelly pretty soon! They have previously constructed a pond at the bottom of their property in the best location to collect more water. The only problem is that it’s quite far from where the water is needed. So we set up a system with a pump and firehoses to move the water to a big paddling pool outside one of the gardens.

The following day this set-up resulted in the pond water working its way into the drinking taps when an isolation valve was opened (not by us!! hoorah!). Luckily no dodgy stomachs so far, but perhaps we have worms. We will report back next week.

We’re hoping for more plain sailing weather this week, so we can venture out again on the boat. We’re also hoping to learn some carpentry skills over the weekend when we help to prepare one of their woodworking shops. That probably means there are more mistakes in store!

Hello readers, we’ve been quite busy with getting the garden set up for the year and babysitting, as well as exploring Gabriola Island. Therefore this week we have decided to go for a different approach to the blog and do a quick video tour around the farm. We hope you enjoy it!

Social Distanced Exploration Highlights

We’ve been out to explore the island on our time off, borrowing some mountain bikes one day. Unfortunately cycling didn’t agree with Rosie’s ankle, so we might have to wait a while before we try that again. There is a 707-acre park on our doorstep with so many trails that we’ve hardly seen any other people. Also, our hosts took us to see some sandstone formations known as the Malaspina Galleries and to a couple of beaches with views of the mainland mountains and the Entrance Island lighthouse. Please click on the photos below to view in gallery mode.

Bird Watching Corner

For the bird nerds out there, here are some pictures for you to peruse. Identifications in the comments please.

Hopefully we will get to do some sailing this weekend on our host’s boat. We hope you are all keeping safe and sane wherever you are. Lots of love, Ollie and Rosie.

You may remember that we were planning to change locations this week. On Monday we packed up our bags, tidied our room and put the bedsheets in the wash. Pretty soon after starting the washing cycle we were rung by our next hosts and told that they were getting tested for COVID-19 and that we would need to delay our move by at least a couple of days. Great news to hear at the start of a week! After a minor panic, we went to tell our Nanaimo hosts who were probably looking forward to some privacy later that day. Fortunately, they were very supportive and said they could tolerate us for a little while longer. We duly put our work gear back on and did what we now do best – clearing out animal poop. This week’s variety was chicken. The farm uses the deep litter technique, basically a laissez faire method, which involves building up the droppings and occasionally topping it up with wood shavings to stop the smell! However, it should make some good compost. We also picked up a lot of rocks and levelled out some mounds of mud to turn into pasture.

Before this drama we had a nice relaxing weekend with highlights including another mountain bike ride around Westwood Lakes for Ollie and having a video call with our old pub quiz team. We were jealous of everyone relaxing with wine, it was only midday for us at the start, but at least we had the luxury of 7 acres of land that we could walk around afterwards! 

The following morning, Rosie was a bit late for Skype with the Tomlinsons, as two new lambs were born! This was a bit of a surprise, we had assumed their mum wasn’t pregnant as she didn’t look large enough. They are both doing much better than Finn and were feeding straight away. Rosie trimmed the umbilical cords and treated them with iodine. The largest has been named Bubbles and the scrawniest has been named Rosy, as you could see the pink of her skin through her fur. You’re not the cutest anymore Finn!

We finally received a message on Wednesday saying that the COVID-19 test had come back negative, it was just a kid cough, and so we could arrive whenever we liked! On Thursday we repeated Monday morning’s routine and made our way down to the ferry terminal. The 25 minute ferry ride was very strange for us. Most passengers were in cars and remained sat in them, whilst we and the 2 other foot passengers stood quite a distance apart from each other in the queues. This was our first experience of the new social distancing measures in public and we found it quite unnerving. 

We were picked up and driven to our new home, where we met the couple hosting us, their two kids (3 and 1) plus a cousin who is staying with them and also working on the farm. Oh, also 30 chickens, 7 icelandic sheep, 2 horses and 3 dogs. We were optimistic about not catching the viral cough, but within minutes we had toddler hands in our pockets, had been sneezed on and were being used as ladders! They are very cute though, so we will forgive them.

That evening, to Ollie’s delight, we learnt that they produced their own pear cider, and lots of it! It’s like good traditional British Perry, not the usual sickeningly sweet Canadian stuff you can buy in liquor stores. For dinner, we had some wild stinging nettle spanakopitas – neither of us have ever eaten stinging nettles before and it was great. 

We’ve been making lots of vegetable beds (18 so far) and planted beets, radishes and carrots for the apocalypse. We’re not sure how long we will stay here given the current situation, but we imagine it might be for quite awhile. We should be able to learn a lot though. Plus there are plenty of beaches, cycling trails around the island and the couple often go out sailing on the weekend. 

We hope you are all OK, wherever you are. Here’s another hummingbird to keep the bird fans happy…