A month on Quadra Island

It's been a month since I updated.  Quadra Island has internet access at a few places (the HBI pub, a coffee shop...) but it's incredibly spotty even at those locations.  Allegedly there is cell reception out on Rebecca Spit, but I never actually checked.


View British Columbia in a larger map
(Click the icons on the map for details.)


Quadra is a fairly large island, sandwiched between big Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland in Discovery Passage, which I assume is named after the ship belonging to Captain Vancouver.

Of all the Discovery Islands (Quadra, Cortes, West and East Redonda, Read, and some others), Quadra is the closest to being civilization.  It has several paved roads, an RCMP office, community center, and schools up to grade 10.  There are two towns worth calling such--Q. Cove, where the ferry lands from Vancouver Island, and Heriot Bay, where the ferry takes you to Cortes Island.  We're staying in Granite Bay, which I think is the third-largest town on the island for loose definitions of towns.  It's logging territory, where the public lands on Quadra have been leased to logging companies.  A good number of people I've met have once been tree-planters.  Logging companies need to replant trees after logging, and so people set off with a pack full of trees and a shovel and get paid by the tree.  Tree-planting camps seem to be overrun by hippies and dogs, because all of the dogs I've met have also come from tree-planting camps.

We were staying with Emily and Sam.  Emily runs around doing permaculture landscaping and all sorts of things largely in other peoples' yards.  Sam is a carpenter and cabinetmaker who's making an addition onto his shop.  Sam makes a great host because he's crazier and friendlier than most other people you'll run into, and Emily does the responsible things to make sure that the farm doesn't collapse, god bless her.

Permaculture!  What is it?  Uhhhhh... people sort of pause here, but let me just take some examples from the farm and you'll see.  Permaculture seems to involve two things to me:  (a) making the land and animals work for you instead of having to utilize excessive time, effort, and machinery and (b) making closed systems so that you do not have to bring in outside products such as chemical fertilizers.

Emily and Sam have (did have, when they are carved up into delicious bacon in two days) three pigs that they keep penned in with an electric fence.  The electric fence can easily be moved, and the pigs are taken over to garden beds to root through them after the harvest is done in that area.  (There are three garden areas for spring, summer, and fall crops.)  Instead of having to till up the soil, the pigs do it for them with astounding thoroughness.  Pigs also can be used to clear land.  When we collected bruised and bug-gnawed apples, we would hurl them into the blackberry patches for the pigs to dig into and trample.  Go, pig tractors, go!

You can also have chicken tractors (chickenwire boxes on skids that will allow chickens to nibble bugs and grass below them).  Anyone who's seen a crowded chicken coop knows that the ground beneath the chickens turns into a grassless, muddy slop after a while.  Sam and Emily don't have this problem because their chicken coop covers an area the size of the average suburban lot, including little bits of different areas--the swampy wetlands, the forest underbrush, and some nice grassy areas around the chicken coop.  The only place that the chickens have dug up all the foliage is right next to the gate, where they drop the chicken food.

Permaculture would suggest that you would send a series of animals through your land to make a forest viable farmland.  Maybe (I'm speculating here), you'd start with the pigs, who can even knock down trees if you put some tasty food treats into holes around the roots, then put in some goats to take care of most of the remaining foliage, and then the chickens to run clean-up.  Each of the animals deposits manure, which fertilizes the soil for better crop-growing later.

After the pigs ran through their summer garden, we went through to make sure it was done.  (Domesticated pigs do not really like to eat cooch grass rhizomes, which are Emily's invasive public enemy number one, so we removed a number by hand.  She is thinking about getting a wild boar to solve this problem.)  We piled the rhizomes into a big compost pile, then put five or six wheelbarrows full of seaweed put on top for the proper nitrogen and carbon ratios.  (These ratios are some of the tricky, science-y stuff that Emily had to study at permaculture school.)  Then we sowed fall rye onto the ground and spent a few days chasing blue jays off from the seeds.  (The dogs know the command "bad birds!  go get bad birds!" which makes it a lot easier than running into the field from the house every two minutes.  I threw dirt at them all day while digging up potatoes.)  The fall rye is an excellent crop because it can live through the British Columbian winter into the spring.  At this point, instead of being harvested, the soil is going to be turned over to return the rye to the earth.  The rye processes the nitrogen in the soil left behind by the pig manure, adding its own nitrogen content, and prevents the nitrogen from leeching out over the winter.  The winter, which is very wet and rainy, would otherwise wash away all the valuable nutrients left by the pigs before the garden is re-planted the following spring.

Another component of permaculture.  I am now at the Farmhouse in Vancouver reading The Humanure Handbook, which is the big treatise on composting toilets.  Composting toilets are pretty normal to me now, but it'd be nice to know more about them.  You can read the book to read about the horrors wrought by modern sewage systems, but composting toilets are a good option because:

1.  Properly run, they barely have any smell, unlike a traditional outhouse, which is pretttty unpleasant to get used to.
2.  They convert sewage into usable compost over time.

At its simplest, a composting toilet is a five gallon bucket with a toilet seat attached.  It can also get a bit fancier, as you can see from these guys.  The important thing is layering the fecal matter between layers of another medium to add carbon content, since feces are almost entirely nitrogen.  Melissa in Virginia dug humus from the forest floor; Sam on Quadra used wood shavings from his shop's planer; the Farmhouse in Vancouver uses used coffee grounds from one housemate's job as a barista.  After a day or so of usage, the bucket is dumped into a designated compost pile outside, which also surprisingly has no noticeable smell.  (It's technically illegal to do in the city of Vancouver, but out of all the things that the Farmhouse's neighbors complain about, no one has noticed it yet.)  If anyone cares, I'll report back more once I actually finish reading the book instead of just the first twenty pages.

Chickens

Tomatoes and chickens have been everywhere we went, except there were no chickens on the homestead at Refuge Cove.   So here's what I know and have learned about them so far.

Chickens are gross and dumb.  They will eat basically anything, so if you keep chickens you can keep two types of compost:  One with egg shells and other things that chickens shouldn't eat, and one that isn't actually compost because the chickens will eat it--rotten tomatoes, y'know, whatever you have.  Besides that, they need store-bought type food:  scratch, for throwing out into their pen and having them peck at it, and a grain mixture called mash.  The type of mash depends on the age of the birdies, e.g., laying hens should be fed "lay mash", and early babies should be fed "starter mash."  For hens that are laying eggs, we would throw in crushed oyster shells, which would increase the strength of their eggs.

Some chickens are nice.  Some chickens peck.  Some chickens are pissed off all the time.  According to rumour, there is a positive correlation between how much space they have and how nice they are, which would make sense, but even then you are going to have easily irritated ones who peck your hand when you try to reach under them for eggs.  In this case, stick something over their head.  A largish yogurt container works pretty well.

More on chickens being gross.  Chickens will poop all over everything, including their eggs, even if you try to collect them every 12 hours.  You have to do this because otherwise the chickens will attack their or each others' eggs, I'm not exactly clear on this.  Also, once one chicken starts laying eggs somewhere, all the rest of the chickens jump on the egg-laying bandwagon and try to lay their eggs there, even if it is a really filthy corner behind their feed barrels.  This is why you'll find a bunch of eggs under one hen in the evening--she didn't lay all those in the last twelve hours, she just was the most recent one to jump onto the eggs and start laying there.

After you collect the eggs, they are covered in dirt and chicken poop and who knows what else. However, they have some sort of magical air-tight coating that will keep them sterile for three weeks, unrefrigerated.  This is because a chicken wants to have a whole bunch of chicks at the same time, but isn't going to lay all the eggs in one day.  She'll lay eggs, then wander off, peck at food, lay some more, etc... and then when she decides that she has enough egg, she'll actually sit on them and heat them up to the point that (a) the air-tight coating will disappear and (b) they'll start incubating into chicken-babies.  (This is also why you want to take the eggs away from her every 12 hours, before she does this.)  So once you collect the eggs, they can sit out in their basket for a few days before you wash them with no ill effects.

Then you wash them in warm water and allow them to dry.  If they aren't dry before they go into the egg cartons, then they'll stick and crack when you try to take them out.  Then you have a carton of eggs!  Horray!

Chickens are still gross.

The way that I've been told to deal with the baby chicklets is "feed them and leave them alone," more or less.  So I don't know much, but I do know:  You can order day-old chicken babies in the mail.  In the mail!  For like $1.50/each or something.  Turkey babies are more expensive, like $4/bird because turkeys are so retardedly inbred that they do not know how to mate and must be artificially inseminated.  (At this point, the species should just die.  Seriously, them and pandas too.)

Herbwise Farm

We've been here for a few days.

Routine as such:  We wake up in the morning and water all of the plants.  Everything in the greenhouse, every potted plant around the property, and about a million tomatoes.  Water the tomatoes again because after the first time it just doesn't seem like you watered them properly.  Get a basket from the kitchen; harvest green beans.  Check everything else.  Turn on the sprinkler in the small garden.  Move to the bigger garden.  Add more beans to the basket; add cucumbers; add zucchini.  Water lettuce, water tomatoes, water potatoes, and remember to water the other tomatoes.  Get another basket from the kitchen, use it to pick strawberries.  Pick blueberries and raspberries; take all the baskets to the kitchen and leave them there for Karla to deal with.  Turn on the sprinkler in the larger garden.

Then we hang out and ask Karla what to do.  Two days a week, Carmen takes off work and so we get to monitor the chickens, steal their eggs, and shovel out the sheep barn.  We set up solar lights around the garden shed and garden.  We move things and do dishes and cook.  I am sure we will do other things too.

We hang out with Sam, Karla's nineteen-year old nephew who has endless stories to tell.  There were two Brits staying here, but they left this morning.  We took over their cabin.  Our cabin that we were first put in was a single room with a roof, no weatherproofing, but a cute covered porch with a sunburst railing.  Now we will be somewhat warmer because the wind can't reach us, and this cabin adjoins the camp kitchen so we are right next to the food all of the time.  Sam has a nice two-story cabin weatherproofed properly for year-round residency.  Carmen has a trailer a little further out in the woods than all the rest of us.

We can walk down to the creek, which is very nice.

Also we have internet access, apparently!  If we go up near the house, at least; not around the camp.  I am currently sitting in the woodshop in what is now the dark.  I should be getting back to the cabin so that Tomko, Sam and I can watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.