Real Time Climate Change: Farm Diaries and Phenology in Prince Edward Island

(A guest article posted by Joshua MacFadyen on www.activehistory.ca)

It is 24 April, and although some Canadians have been mowing grass for weeks the spring plants on Prince Edward Island are only beginning to overcome the cold nights and occasional flurries that visit this island in April. Still, this is an early spring by historical accounts. On this day in 1879, John MacEachern recorded the following diary entry in Rice Point:

“Ice drifting out of Harbour and Nine Mile Creek, boats can get to Town now, a Ltr [boat] from East Point [arrived] back at Governors Island Tuesday.”

The day before he had recorded a similar view from the farm:

“pulverizing lea land today & yesterday, ice still unbroken outside harbour & inside St Peters Island.”

Thirteen years earlier the ice was more fluid, moving along the South Shore of the Island on 18-19 April until there was finally “no ice in sight” on the 23rd.  This did not mean winter had passed; MacEachern noted “frosty ground, hard all day,” on 24 April, and frost deep enough to prevent stumping and ploughing all that week.  Usually we think of historical weather reports and almanacs as about as exciting as reading the phone book, but diary entries like these reveal dramatic changes in our environment and our climate when we read them in real time.[click to continue…]

Mud Isle: Mussel Mud Digging on PEI

This morning I wrote an article for NiCHE Canada’s blog on the use of mussel mud fertilizer. The extraction and spreading of mussel mud on Prince Edward Island’s frozen fields was a winter activity recorded by all of the 19th century contributors to Real Time Farming. I argued that PEI farmers improved food security and the productivity of mixed farming through the innovative use of mussel mud, a local, organic fertilizer extracted from estuaries. However, mud digging quickly became unsustainable as commercial and Provincial outfits exhausted the mud in several rivers and destroyed some of the world’s best oyster habitats. Farmers clashed with fishermen over rights to shell beds, and Federal officials ultimately encouraged farmers to adopt chemical fertilizers.

In this Real Time Farming post I have collected the mud-digging updates of the farmers, mapped some of their journeys from estuaries to upland fields, and shown how farmers adapted to new work patterns and a new resource. Farmers like the Andersons and the MacEacherns began to rely more heavily on nearby sea manure in this period, whereas farmers like Roderick Munn bought completely new farms in part, it seems, for their access to mussel mud.

York Point

Robert Harris Mussel Mud Digging, Undated, Source: Confederation Centre Art Gallery

In the winter of 1866, Francis Bain mentioned only that he was “at work on the ice,” but he did not explain exactly what he was doing. It is quite possible that he was digging some sort of sea manure for fertilizing his farmland in spring. The West (Eliot) River and North River were the most important mud digging locations in Prince Edward Island, and Bain would have been very familiar with the sight of dozens of sleighs crossing the ice to haul the rich fertilizer to their fields. Bain’s prolific journals rarely indicated who he was with or what they were doing; his focus was on wildlife. But by 1886, we know that Bain brought samples of mussel mud to a farm exhibit, and he described the natural history of mussel mud for readers of the Prince Edward Island Agriculturalist (March 11, 1886):

Every lowly tribe of the deep has brought its tribute of the store-house of manurial wealth. Oysters, mussels, quahogs, clams, the showy valved petracola and the ebony littorina, the delicate cuminia and the great rugged spired urosalpinx, corraline and starfish, sponge and protozoa lived on and were entombed in its mass, while a thousand harvests of algae added their varied foliage to swell its riches.

Rice Point

The journals of John MacEachern are a useful indicator of the shift in PEI agricultural history in the 1860s and 1870s, a shift that occurred as farmers realized the benefit of applying mussel mud to hay fields. High acidity in the soil caused a shortage in food and fodder, and Island farmers began to spread calcareous mussel mud in the period as a solution. In 1866, the winter months were quiet in Rice Point, and the MacEachern family hauled firewood across the ice for consumers in Charlottetown. By 1879, a new activity had made the winter months busier than ever. MacEachern was near the end of his life at this point, and it appears that he did not go with his sons to the mud diggers.

Continue reading “Mud Isle: Mussel Mud Digging on PEI”