She won “Gold!”
    We are pleased as can be over Rachel Brighton’s Atlantic Journalism Gold Award (Business Reporting: Any Medium) for her in-depth feature on the milk processing industry, “Big dairy comes east: Consolidation makes ‘local' elusive,” published in our June 2014, issue. Here’s a photo of Rachel with her three boys, (from left) Rupert, Harry, and Jesse Lillford-Brighton, shortly after receiving the award May 9 in Halifax at the annual AJA gala. (The complete list of Gold and Silver winners can be found by following the Atlantic Journalism Awards link at RuralLife.ca.)

NFU on the March, and other stuff

    Out on snowshoes for the first time in years I came across tracks I took to have been left behind by the cow and calf. The tracks came to a four-foot high pagewire fence – and continued on. Cow and calf maybe, of the endangered Mainland moose variety.
    Earlier this week our five miles of road in from the highway melted free of ice, iceholes, and ruts for the first time in six weeks. The blizzard now forecast for later today should make short work of the reprieve. 
    The Atlantic Farm Mechanization Show held every two years is behind us, Prince Edward Island’s annual Easter Beef Show and Sale is on, and the Nappan Test Station bull sale is just around the corner April 4. These are all signs that the winter of 2014-15 is behind. Gone but not soon to be forgotten. 

Dirty business
    We are one month into the United Nation’s proclaimed International Year of Soils. “Soil, where food begins,” is the rallying cry. I’ve two books to suggest for a soils reading list, one new, one old. The new or relatively new book (2007) is “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations” by MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award winner David Montgomery. In his book, the star attraction at Horticulture Nova Scotia’s annual gathering three years ago wrote that, “Throughout history, societies grew and prospered as long as there was new land to plow or the soil remained productive. Things eventually fell apart when neither remained possible.” So, how are we doing? 
    The other book is “Soils and Men,” the 1938 Yearbook of Agriculture from the USDA. The chapter, “Soils and Society,” by then Chief of the Soil Survey Division, Charles Kellogg, is a treasure chest of insights into things we’ve had these 75 years since to get right, but have not. 
    “The art of agriculture is inseparable from the art of homemaking,” Kellogg wrote. 

Wrestling with seeds

    It is a beautiful Saturday morning after a hard cold night. I stuff the outdoor boiler with wood and wonder where the truck that was going to deliver several cords of maple and birch disappeared to.
    The sun shines bright on the bay and only a gentle wind stirs the water. We don’t want white caps this day that’s set aside for the sixth annual bird count in the Port Joli Migratory Water Fowl Sanctuary and surrounding inlets. The count is organized by provincial chapters of Bird Studies Canada and the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

About ACORNs and shooting first
    It’s deer season. The height of fall color is already a memory with the most brilliant red and blaze-orange maples having shed their capes. Yellow birch and bronze oak now punctuate dark evergreens that dominate forests here on the shore. 
    We have been blessed by a warm fall season. While there have been pockets of frost, nothing like a killer found its way here. Still picking raspberries, tomatoes that the chickens missed (they’ve gained entry to the garden while a new and larger gate is being readied) will be plenty to eat around here at least through January. I’ve yet to bring in carrots and beets, and to plant garlic.

There’s a nip in the air
    It is a cold morning, approaching zero, and the garden needs tending. In anticipation of a frost I covered tomatoes and peppers last evening, left squash to fend for itself, and uprooted basil that now I must strip and will process with olive oil and refrigerate until the week coming when there will be time to whip up some pesto. 

Gardens, gas, and Gaza
    The garden flourishes. I freeze and pickle, dry stuff, and give stuff away. The squash, three varieties, are doing well, unlike last year when for some reason the crop was meager. 
    My own gardening and food storage efforts are feeble compared to those of Bill and Linda Rose whose story is told by Sandra Phinney in this issue of RD.

Oh happy day
    The sun is shining, the air is warm, a breeze is blowing – and the garden, slowly recovering from hurricane Arthur (which brought no rain this side of the vortex) is drying out. Arthur’s powerful blasts from every point of the compass over 24 hours flattened some vegetables and even twisted a few cabbage and broccoli plants off at ground level. How fortunate that unlike so many of you farmers in Arthur’s path I’m not trying to make a living off the land; only growing enough to feed myself and guests. 

Jack, we hardly knew ye
    It’s Saturday morning, sun up before six and a bright morning at that here on Nova Scotia’s western South Shore. Stan Carew is on the bedside radio telling his CBC listeners that most face another gray, cloudy day. 
    Stan’s also relating the sad news that writer (and so much more) Jack MacAndrew died in hospital yesterday morning. 81. Cancer. That was quick.

Security begins at home
    As I grub in the greenhouse planting lettuce, tomatoes, some cole crops, I’m realizing food security begins at home. It is not a new or brilliant thought, but one we might keep in the forefront of our minds as we putter along here in the country.

Now hiring
    No, it’s not an April Fool’s joke. The hunt is on again for an editor, a person with a way with words and manure on his or her boots. One without the other doesn’t seem to work. Finding the individual with the combination of skills and background needed to run with the tasks at DvL Publishing Inc. is becoming a full time and tedious job. 

Don’t spread that pig virus!
    Some cold, you. And white, too, here on the shore where my snow shovel never left the garage for two years running. Not so this winter. The skis came out too, briefly. While no one likes having to travel in this weather we have had two or three storms that left the world outstandingly beautiful. But oh how the furnace is gobbling wood!

Kicking the inuksuk
    There is a heavy wet snow falling tonight, pulling down trees and the power along with them. We’ve candles and a kerosene lamp and LED flashlights of various configurations to keep us going. My only concern is for the bread rising and ready to bake in a gas oven that is electrically lit and controlled. I could fire the wood range but it would be a week or two before I had the oven up to a temperature to melt a snowball.