A couple of my blogging friends have asked about farming. Well it's about time I did a farm and garden update I suppose. Our farm is small - just 160 acres or a quarter section of land. The farmer also farms his brother's quarter and his old family farm, another quarter section which is still owned by his mother.
Sixty acres of our land is forest or "bush" as it's called around here. It has a canal running through it and as a result it's a wildlife corridor. 100 acres is under cultivation and usually we grow barley, but nutrients need to be put back into the land so the farmer has one part of the field in clover this year. Usually the clover is cut for hay by neighbours but this year the pickings will be very slim.
In this area we have had "zillions" of grasshoppers this summer. They chewed on our garden and the only vegetables we harvested were the peas, beans, zucchini and the root vegetables. They ate the carrot and beet tops, the peas and bean leaves and mowed down the lettuce and swiss chard. They ate the lilies, pansies, nasturtiums and all the perennials. They've chewed the grass down to crunchy brown carpet. With each step across the grass it seemed fifty or a hundred grasshoppers would jump up. They covered the bottom of the house. You could hear them as they munched through the clover crop. We keep thinking they were dying out but every warm day they spring to life and hop into action. It has resulted in a summer of little gardening and less time spent outside unless we were on the deck. But I've digressed.
The farmer is swathing barley now and while it's drying in the fields he'll be servicing the combine and getting ready to harvest it. The weather has been good for harvest and we've only had frost a couple of nights which is quite unusual. Another year of farming and life goes on here in Northern Alberta. I'll take a few pictures of harvest one of these days but til then I'll show you what the grasshoppers ate this summer...
