Rhubarb -Frugal Starts

Posted on December 17, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

I love rhubarb! In northern zones, this plant can be found tucked away on every old homestead, into a community gardens, tucked behind most churches back doors.

There is a solid reason for the love, its one of the first fresh spring “fruits” you will get, it is the spring filler plant, take the smaller fruits and stretch them out with our amazing rhubarb which grows in great abundance It also worked well on its own as you can see in this lovely stewed rhubarb with fresh dumpling.

Last year we opened up a new garden, a truly massive space, so big i hired someone to twice plow it, add in 18 tons of compost and have a machine build the rows..  WOW, i have never seen such bad soil on our farm.

What we did do very successfully was turn up the seed pack, o that seed bed was ready to go and go it did.. health in the family changed,  and then the drought came.. so much weeds, so much drought, thousands of dollars worth of trees, fruit bushes, whole flower meadows, grape vines and so much more where planted in good faith and i expect to find very little to almost nothing alive this coming spring of 2026..

Anything that did make it, will have had a stunted start and will need extra care, one of things ordered in was new rhubarb starts as we have active strawberry farm up the road from us and i wanted to start offering Rhubarb for sale on the same route or even perhaps picked and delivered daily for sales there.

They were ordered and they arrived in rough shape, I babied them along and planted them, i do not expect they will be alive and i am not putting out that kind of money to redo that row. I have lots of rhubarb for the farm personal use and so as i have the time, space and indoor equipment, i ordered in Canada Ruby Red #1 rhubarb seed.. now it won’t breed true in the same way taking a root will but its going to be very close.

My own rhubarb seeds are quite a bit more variable as i have five kinds of rhubarb in my gardens/food forest and there is just no way to know that they are not cross pollinating and my biggest rhubarbs are unnamed, i got them 21 years ago on the first spring we moved to the farm a women had bought a condo in Orleans and in the back yard the retired elder farmer grandma, had transplanted her families rhubarb with her and it was come and take it all. there were four massive plants, and its a good rhubarb but its more green then most folks are used to

So by buying seed from only a patch for Canada Ruby Red, it will give me a more standard results, two full trays of seeds are done and under lights in the cellar garden area.  They join a tray of lettuce, and the starting of patio cherry tomato’s, cucumbers and zucchini plants.  These will all be well ready to either harvest and eat or transplant into pots for late/winter and early spring eating in time to give their main spaces to garden starts for the spring and summer garden

If you don’t have a rhubarb plant or two yet and you live in a cold enough climate and you have a spot to offer it, its worth adding in..  They want 5.99 or more per pound at the store and i have seen it as high as 9 a pound..  while you can still find that friend that will gift you some for a pie, if you don’t grow your own, you can expect locally (Ottawa Valley) to pay between 4 to 5 dollars a pound for fresh picked good quality rhubarb stalks

What is the going rate in your neck of the woods!

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Ground Turkey Meatballs made with Cornmeal Recipe

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

Turkey Meatballs with Cornmeal instead of bread crumbs

  • 1 Pound of finely ground turkey
  • 1/4 cup of finely ground cornmeal
  • 1 tbsp of herb blend of your choice, in this case i used smoked bacon/maple flavor
  • 1/4 tsp of salt
  • 1 tsp of fresh cracked black pepper
  • 2 tsp of your oil of choice for frying, in my case i used peanut oil

In a bowl mix meat, herbs and cornmeal, you should see a texture change when you work the cornmeal in, it should not be sticky once made, if its still sticky, add a scant teaspoon of cornmeal and work it again.  No need for a egg in this recipe as the pate texture of the ground meat does not need it.  Once you have a rolled ball, pinch off a small ball and round it out, approx. a tablespoon and into your preheated frying pan on med heat with the oil in it. Cook till crisp brown, flip and repeat.

Gravy, pan drippings, two cups of water, 1 tsp of veggie broth powder and 1 heaping tsp of corn starch.

To make your gravy, add in the two cups of water into the pan (you can take the meatball out if you want, i had enough room, i did not) or broth, deglaze the pan and if water add your powdered broth to fully blend, then in a small bowl with cool water, mix just enough water and corn starch till smooth and fluid and slowing pour in, stirring the whole time, blend from the middle outward to bring it all together, turn down to a simmer and simmer for two or three min till cooked clear and thick.

Now for the back story..

A few months back one of the local grocery store had family pack sizes of ground pork and ground pork/beef blend on a super sale of 10 dollars.  I sent a note on my shopping that we were looking for the different meat trays at were the ten dollar sale price.

What came home was ground pork, ground pork/beef blend, a package of crazy fine grind chicken and turkey in a bag with five pound logs. While the ground pork was turned into amazing breakfast patties and the blend was made into sandwich meat and or meat pies

The ultra processed ground was harder for me to figure out how to use, the first one i opened and realized it was pate ground fine, i chopped it up from cooking it flat and used it in a sauce and it was ok. I set it to the side and there they have sat in my freezer.

This way of making them into a meatball is very good, the cornmeal is a pantry staple, and with the amount used its economical, don’t have cornmeal, Cream of wheat porridge can be used in the same amounts and create the same silky but firm texture. I expect if you wanted to fine grind oatmeal it would also work very well

I expect that with the price of meat these days that many people are turning to these lower priced bags of ultra ground meat in one pound portions.  Meatballs are a wonderful way to stretch a smaller amount of meat into a more carb heavy dish.

The home grown and canned young green and yellow bean have a delightful sweetness to them, while the potato’s are leftover from a big pot i cooked up and have in the fridge for use in different ways.  We have already finished our potato harvest from 2025 and are now onto store potato and they are med to poor quality even gotten as fresh as you can in the bag.  If they are held in storage, they seem to go bad so fast so in order to help keep food waste down, i am actively cooking or peeling the whole bag as the cooked potatoes last so long in the fridge smart tubs.

Are you finding fresh foods including staples like potato’s are not holding as well as they used to? Are you buying smaller amounts or are you cooking and fridge holding or freezing or home processing to cut down on food waste?

Side Note, Potato peels are cooked and feed to the chickens as household scraps

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Fall Meat Bird Grow out Stats

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

In Sept 25 White Rock Meat Chicks ordered from Frey’s Hatchery here in Ontario though our local coop arrived on the farm and were cuddled by Miss R an coo’d over indeed.

Dec 10th 24 healthy White Rock Meat Chicks (with a loss of one at a very young age) were delivered to be processed about 20 minutes down the road and then into the freezer they went the next day after they were picked up and brought home

That made them 77 days old or 11 weeks old. I had tried to book them in at the tenth week but i got the 11th, so be it

Per Frey’s Site “Produces a table bird in just 12 weeks. Females will be 5-6 lbs and males 7-8 lbs live weight” I am have the data to break it down per bird from my records given back to me, but I am going to average it out as i did a mix sex run on the chicks, so i had a mix of males and females

Here is a photo of some of them in mid november, another month to go and they are eating and growing!

Other then the loss of the one, they never gave me a moment of trouble, active, healthy, bright birds that grew well, and on the day they went in, the gentleman that came back out with the paperwork, said they were VERY nice birds, great job! i mean i knew that but nice to hear it none the less.

They averaged out at 7.3 pounds per bird for a total of 175 pounds of finished, ready for the freezer dressed weight..

It cost us $23 dollars per bird to buy, shelter/feed/bed and butcher them, this did not include our time or gas to pick them up or take them for butcher. Nor the barn itself, it came with the farm, its been used since.

On the flip side, it also does not account for the compost that they produced that will be used in gardens and not bought next year.

This works out to $3.15 a pound, now these were raised on locally grown produced feed, locally grown straw from down the road, and i know their care since they arrived as day old’s so i really do not like to compare them to store birds in terms of prices.

So lets break it down two ways, locally family raised chicken, pasture raised runs between $5 to $8 per pound, now because i am way into bio at the moment, all my chickens are inside with windows and screens and the garden/bugs and greens comes to them, so they are not truly “pasture raised” but try and find price on a local family that does not market pasture but indoor but treated like pasture otherwise is hard to come by

Now we can look at the store, family pack of legs is 4.99 per pound, Chicken breasts can run between 9 to 11 per pound, other parts range in the 5 to 9 pound per pound..

So i am going to go with the $8 per pound, that means I saved $4.85 per pound or more raising them myself compared to trying to buy something equally raised. We could have saved even more if we had butchered ourselves but for us it was worth sending them out to be done.

If we had done them ourselves here on the farm, they would have come in cost wise at $16 a bird or $2.19 per pound, it would have most likely been closed to 2.25 as i would have needed to buy my own freezer bags and that would have added just a touch more.

We will be getting meat chicks in the spring and we will be enjoying these though the winter/spring. Did you raise meat birds this year? The cost of chicken is going up, up and up at the stores, and to be fair so did the cost of raising these from last time but compared, its still far cheaper to raise our own!

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Dough Maker Review

Posted on March 7, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

I do not make nearly as much bread as i did, as bread is quite limited for Dear Hubby at this point, However as the household grew by one, bread needs have grown again. The price of bread and the ability to control what goes in my bread matters to me.

However it turns out that standing and properly kneading bread currently both for smaller and for sure bigger batches is proven challenging combined with my health issues. While Miss R makes a amazing loaf of bread, i like to continue to make my breads, doughs an even pasta

I didn’t need a bread maker as i want very much to control my bread shapes and bake, but i said to hubby, i sure could use a dough maker and that is just what i got, its big enough to do three standard loafs and it makes dough and proofs it, that’s it!

The rest is still all hands on for me.. While there is a learning curve, its been a easy one for me and i am loving it. There is a very slow rise for sourdough, there is the faster rise times for regular yeast doughs and there is no proof/heat for cold doughs.

I have been using it for a month now, and have made a number of doughs with it, and so far i am giving it a solid 4.5 out of 5

It only gets .5 off because i would like to be able to have more choice on the heat used for the ferment/rise timing. Its very minor indeed and of course the other downside is that it does take power to use, so there is that added cost.

I am thinking of it as a mobility aid and if i need to choose between using a aid to make sure we can control what we eat, how things are made, well worth doing so.

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Do you have Sheep on your farm? Ontario Sheep Support

Posted on March 5, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

If you live in Ontario and have sheep on your farm, then i do hope you have joined your local sub zone group of the province wide system. I didn’t for the first 10 years i had sheep and boy what a amazing difference to access to information after i did.

While i am currently for the first time in over 20 years without sheep here on the farm till i can get the small pasture fencing redone sooner then later, my x-sheep are living within easy drive distance at a girlfriends farm and i saw them all fat and happy this winter, and will head over in the spring for a few things and see them again in April, i am hoping to get back offspring or grand offspring at some point to bring back to the farm in very small personal milking sheep numbers.

Still i have kept my membership up as its has that much value in terms of the email updates, the farm visits, the annual meetings and the training days and camps.

The newest newsletter arrived in the mail and with it came the most amazing book! It will be flipped over into my garden book for 2025 and my chick/ducking breeding, hatching and raising records. It is so well designed and filled with resources for big livestock farmers, small farmers and small holders.

In these times of trial, it is wonderful to see such a useful in hand filled with positivity! If local, reach out, you will not be disappointed. If you are from other provinces in canada, what is yours like?

And if you are outside Canada, does your county have programs, your state, do you have regular day long experts come in for seminars, hands on sheering days, farm visits to see how other do things?

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March coming in like a lion 2025

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

The boxes of peach tree seedlings continue to do well, the average is now 6 inches plus with a few top growers reaching 10 inches already, they will be good size when sale day and pickups happen in may

Today is the first of march and weather wise, the snow storm started last night and has been coming down since, we got three inches of new fresh snow last week and it looks like another three or four or more is coming in. Thankfully the warming snap helped melt off the roofs so they are not carrying a crazy amount of weight.

Others have not been so lucky and have needed to shovel off their roofs in many parts of ontario due to very crazy snow loaded. Clearly this should have been done sooner but still, WOW! In keeping with the snow load, so many folks have been showing their photos of car ports down but none worse then what happened in our capital city this past week..

For whatever reason they decided to pile all the snow off the top of the car parking build onto a single corner and they kept doing so though record breaking snow falls in a very short order.. the weight was to much and it dropped a corner of a four story parking garage onto itself. Thankfully no one was hurt but over 50 folks are without their vehicles due to this.

Today is Dear Hubby’s 53rd Birthday and i expect at least some of it will be spent shoveling snow, yet again!

I was excited to pick up some green onion bulbs to get into the pots this weekend to get them under the grow lights, given the snow pack, i am not in a hurry to get things started, i will be giving some things a bit of a extra week or two before planting the seeds.

I have time to do one more box for winter sowing as the seeds have been in the fridge getting a head start on things and my farm porch greenhouse just had the winds do a bit of damage so will need some new plastic and some shifting of wood, in winter that area gets filled with dry and aged firewood as it allows us to refill the indoor without having to go truly outside, however what is left will need to be shift this month so that space/shelfs and so on will prepped and ready for cool/cold season seed starting and then for lots of in and out warmer seed starting and hardening off etc.

Have you started your early seedlings, or do you live in a zone where you are in full seedling start mode, being in Garden Zone 5a, while spring forward with time change is next weekend and its officially only 20 days till spring, it will be much longer till our last spring frost date.

May you fill your weekend with things that bring you peace and help you connect with the hear and now in the best way possible!

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Blueberry Bush Pruning Setting the Stage for years to come

Posted on February 27, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

What amazing set of pruning with writing that i came across, its just wonderfully clear and so easy to understand.

This could be a self-grown crane cutting, or a bought plug or even a potted plant you got from the garden center, even if bigger, it should be treated the same, never allowed to fruit the year you bought it, if it has fruit on it, take it off when you get it home!

Now is the winter to figure out if you planted it in the right spot, did you have good growth, did it get enough sun, did it get wind burned or did it get planted to close to something that rapidly outgrew it? If you do need to adjust, this is the year to do it.. If not, its a basic clean up and shaping time and if it loved where was at and grew really well, you can even get some fruit.

After three years, you are set to go with your low bush or high bush blueberry for the next 15 to 20 years, these are productive long lived fruit producers.

Got a bush that loves your area and that you adore the fruit on, remember you can keep some of your best trimmings and use them to start new bushes at a fraction of the cost for yourself or to be sold at the end of the farmgate or at the local community garden plant sale or gifted to someone to help build your local community food shed

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Lent 2025

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

Well, i normally do give up something in honor of lent, something small but regular that makes me pause and think a little more deeply on life and how it should be lived, on what i am giving back to my community.

Tomato soup with cheese

However Miss R kindly shared that she will be going meatless for lent, and i am not even sure she is going to allow fish, which with my upbringing was allowed. This is going to be a challenge for me as the main household cook.

40 days of making sure there is a shelf filled with pre-cooked/prepared high quality vegetarian protein sources, thankfully she is open to our farm fresh eggs (and we have 6 new ready to lay hens arriving to increase our flock size, as our older hens are coming three this year) arriving in mid march. The duck hens will start laying in march as the daylight hours get longer!

There is no way that Dear Hubby will go meatless, so i am trying to figure out rules yet, can i make her soups with bone broths or does the bits of meat that comes in them count and no and if not, i will need to make veggie only soup broths.

I have a full grasp on all the amazing ways to add protein to her diet menu, rice and beans, cheese/yogurts, spinach greens, Potato’s and so much more.

My plan at the moment is to create her a shelf in the fridge filled with different things that can be restocked, some homemade and some store gotten, a big salad style bar will be a very good thing indeed.

I do have a few cookbooks but not many that are meatless and i will dig them out, then i just need to decide if i am going to do some larger batch cooking with meat for hubby to make a choice on and or if it makes sense that i batch cook a roast, chicken breasts and so on a heat and add on can easily be done at the main meals.

I am sure the time will pass quickly and yet coming into it 40 days seems like a lot while its staring me in the face as i try and sort things out. With the respect given to this amazing young adult, i will show her my support by making these changes in our household menus.

Got a favorite meatless dish, you just adore? I am open to hearing about it! share the link to your own blogs site, or to a favorite cooking site or recommend a cookbook i just have to get, i am all ears, got a book on lent an meal plans???

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Hedgerow Snow Capture

Posted on February 21, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

Just as my own double hedge rows work in the summer for both food production and shelter, they act as a living snow fence in winter, there is a swale on the far side of them that drops down a solid three feet, excellent for keeping water in place and allowing it to soaking the gardens around it but also means that before the snow can come up and though. The winter winds get cut by the spruce trees, and then trapped again by the hedge in front before coming at the house itself.

Don’t let this photo fool you, you can just make out the pathway in the middle and if my Miss Fancy was using that path you would not even see here, that snow is a solid three feet deep on this side, and a solid five foot plus on the other side. This area is a haven for the small birds like sparrow’s, chickadee’s and junco’s

I remember the first year we moved here being surprised to see so many farmers left these stripes of corn standing but as the snows came i went ah.. then i saw them plant corn sections even when the rest of the fields were in different and went huh.. turns out they are paid to do so if their fields are by the right roads.

“Plant a snow fence

The City encourages landowners who plant corn to participate in the Alternative Snow Fencing Program.

In late summer, participating landowners leave six to 12 rows of standing corn parallel to the road and 20 metres from the road’s right-of-way property line. In December, landowners are paid an amount based on the market value per tonne of the unharvested corn, the yield of tonnes per acre, the actual acres standing and for spring clean-up work

In non-agricultural areas, landowners can plant trees 20 metres from the right-of-way property line.”

Ottawa City

I was very pleased to see that they are expanding the tree shelter belt program to three new areas, so great for land owners!

We have been working on planting hedge rows on the road side frontage, its more tricky on the farm sides as there are legal rights to the farmer due to tree roots and footage required as the land around us is tiled. So we had to do our side hedgerows into further back to keep to the footage required,

When we built our fences, i set them back for a bit of a spray zone protections, but when we redo them for what will be the final time in our lifetime, i am taking that two feet back for a few reasons including full fenced to the property line.

I am still not sure what to do with the large stripe between the cedar hedgerow and the farmers field , i keep thinking it would be lovely in wild flowers or a combo sunflower triple row and then wild flowers. we will see.. we will see.

Do they have living snow fencing in your neck of the woods, do they pay you to put in hedgerows and to keep them year after year.. do you live in a country where hedgerows are normal and expected, do you live in a spot where there are no hedgerows at all.

I grew up in alberta and for me, seeing hedgerows as a child the normal, due to the fact that they had millions and millions of trees and bushes planted into hedgerows after the dirty 30s as a huge province wide project for many years..

Sadly as new farmers came in, they took out the hedgerows and now are starting to see the results of those losses, they will learn they were there for a reason and will be need to be planted again.

Farm Buildings in Vermilion Valley, Alberta, [1920]. This photo shows the use of Caragana bushes as windbreaks around farmyards.
(photo credit: Library and Archives Canada / PA-101669)

What is your personal favorite hedgerow look? I loved Caragana as a child, those dense green big bushes with the pretty yellow flowers with the hint of sweetness and the birds loved the seeds so much.

It was never used as human feed that i remember but the chickens sure loved it and no doubt!

“The seed contains 12.4% of a fatty oil and up to 36% protein and it has been recommended as an emergency food for humans. More than just an emergency food, this species has the potential to become a staple crop in areas with continental climates. Young pods can be cooked and used as a vegetable.”

As a child that natural space under them provided shelter on a hot day and a good book reading spot! Many a game with friends was played under the hedgerows. One of the great things about these bushes is they are self filling and spreading due to the seed dropping and they are of a height that allows them to work under the power lines!

Do you have any on your property?

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Snow and more Snow!

Posted on February 20, 2025 by Just another day on the farm

The work required to keep the driveway and pathways open has been massive on behalf of Dear Hubby in Combo with Miss R a touch.. While we do have a snow blower, Dear Hubby loves to do it by hand and shovel.. each of the storms meant 20, 000 plus on the fit bit with over a hundred plus active minutes each day and there were multiple days and layers of storms, the drifts were brutal. Do you see the little grey commute car, the drift was as high as the car and it had to be dug out including under it.

Because we have such massive amount of land, those banks do not look near as big as they should in this photo, they are not having it as easy in the towns and cities, where they are in major clean up mode as they are running out of room on where to place the snow.

Officially we got just over 70 cm in a matter of days from the back to back storms or 2 and half feet of snow, which means that we just got side swiped by the storm as other areas got double or even triple that over the same time frame. Having said that for our local area, that was the most snow in the same time frame in the past 20 plus years so it feels like a lot.

It was the wind and drifting that made it a issue.. take a look at the back six foot fence line in the small pasture.. about a foot of fence post on some spots and less then six inches on others! Those drifting waves cut into the snow. Thankfully there is nothing out there to draw the horses to want to cut into that kind of snow, they are to be found at the hay feeder, the barn lean to or in front of the big barn taking advantage of the solar heating and the wind break.

The big dog yard is not a safe play zone as they can walk up and hope over the fence like its not even there! The little dog uses the shoveled pathways as her zoom zoom lol. The cats are in the house much more over the past week and or greet the humans in the barn snoozing in the beds that get extra warmth from the cat heat lamp area.

The weather has been amazing for winterfest coming into its 47th year and the canal skating, over 400 000 thousand folks have been out to the different events, the ice sculptures are always worth a stop as are the snow ones!

Otherwise its been a stay in and stay safe and warm, we lost power for a touch but not for long, we stayed off the roads following the orders that unless it was a emergency, to stay home and stay off them, others did not listen and we have upward of 70 car piles ups, on my last drive on the way home from a medical appointment with the snow and the drifting in the days leading up to the big storm, i watched as we came up from clear bare good road to a area that has bad drifting and while i slowed right now, as i drove carefully though this tricky spot, there were five vehicles that had slide out and were in the ditch, everyone waved me on and showed their phones, which was good but still i could not have stopped if i wanted to or i would have just joined them.

Many people were told to come into work and then reported having to turn around and head back home when stopped by four to six foot drifts, the crews worked their hours till they were maxed out and townships had to put out notices that they were shutting down for 8 hours in the night for mandatory rest before starting again at 4am.

We had a number of folks that got sick in their homes due to the wind and snow drifting covering their furnace vents and so on, and they didn’t know they needed to keep them clear and so they had carbon monoxide poisoning, thankfully no one died but over a dozen households needed medical help and treatment.

If you were in the storms path, i hope you came out the other side warm and safe with no issues, still we had to have a little fun with all the fluffy snow coming down..

Game NIGHTs!!!

So if you got caught in the snow, did you bring out the cards! The board games or the D&D night!

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