Wow - it's hard to believe that it's been four weeks since my last posting! My apologies. It's been a blur of harvesting around here, made even more hectic by the fact that our summer students have returned to school, leaving us a little short-handed on harvest days. Actually, the harvest has now stretched out to include pretty much the whole week - crops like tomatoes and squash don't really lose much in terms of quality and freshness over a day or two, so for the market, we harvest these crops on Thursday and leave the tender crops like lettuce and other greens for Friday morning. They get cut in the cool of the morning (and mornings lately have definitely been cooler!), rinsed, and refrigerated immediately, so they arrive at the market in the best possible condition. 

As the title suggests, our market offerings are starting to come full circle now that our fall plantings are ready to harvest. We've got fresh plantings of arugula, mild spring mix, baby lettuce, beta mix, and baby spinach ready to cut - they really enjoy the cooler days and nights of late summer. Peas will be making there return to market this week, too: snow peas are ready this week, with shell and snap peas to follow over the next couple of weeks. 

I had the first taste of our last planting of beans today, too, and they are superb. We'll have lots of green, yellow, purple, and dragon tongue beans  from now until frost strikes. 

Tomatoes, of course, are coming out of the field by the crate full. Our big red and orange beefsteak tomatoes make excellent slicers; the red and yellow paste tomatoes are great in sauces; and there's a motley crew of unusually shaped and coloured heirloom tomatoes guaranteed to provoke conversation as well as your taste buds. Cherry and grape tomatoes are in abundance, too. If you like to preserve tomatoes for winter enjoyment, please contact us about bulk orders - we offer a discount on tomatoes that are beautiful and tasty on the inside, but a little blemished on the outside. 

For the more adventurous, check out our sunberries, ground cherries, and tomatilloes.

Zucchini, patipan squash, and cucumbers  all start to slow down at this time of year, although with our staggered planting schedule, we've still got a really nice supply of these items: the baby zucchini in particular have been a big hit at the market this year, and once people try our lemon cucumbers, they're usually back for more.

We're just starting to harvest one of the farm's biggest crops: winter squash. The dark green acorn squash and the orange, white, and green striped "Celebration" squash have been the first to ripen. I suspect that I'll find some spaghetti squash in the field tomorrow, and the other half dozen or so varieties will be along shortly. 

For all the details, and to avoid missing out on anything, check out our on-line store!

Here's hoping that everyone has had a great summer and that the transition back to school and work has gone smoothly. Hope to see you at the market soon!

The bounty has begun! From now until the first frost, we'll be in full harvest mode here on the farm. We've enjoyed the first ripe tomatoes from the field this week, and we're ready to share them with you at the market starting Saturday. Some of the more interesting heirloom varieties will take another week or two to start ripening, but we'll be harvesting both red and orange tomatoes tomorrow. The first few pints of cherry tomatoes flew off the table last week, but we'll be back with even more this time. We actually grow 11 different varieties of cherry tomatoes and 8 different varieties of grape tomatoes to create a unique blend of colours, shapes, sizes, and textures for each basket. The colours range from bright reds and deep pink to light yellows and dark oranges, even "black" and "white" if the variety descriptions are to be believed! Last week, we brought them to the market in one big bin, and Jasmine and Gabriel took great pride and joy in filling with a rainbow of fruit, one by one into the pint baskets (also a great way to keep the kids busy while we rushed about setting up the rest of the stand!)

Another unique fruit that we're really enjoying this year are "lemon cucumbers". As you can see in photo at the right, they probably gained the name from their size, shape, and colouring. They are a heirloom variety with tender skin, tiny seeds, and a mild-flavoured flesh that is supposed to agree with even those who have difficulty digesting regular cucumbers. Check them out! Of course, we'll also have regular field cucumbers available too!

While we're on the topic of fruit, it's worth noting that we'll be picking the first sunberries of the year for Saturday's market, too. These little dark purple fruit are related to tomatoes but have a flavour similar to huckleberries - a tart, fruity taste that we enjoy in yogurt  and mixed berry compotes.

As I noted on our Facebook page last week, the kids ate the few green sweet peppers as soon as we found them in the field last week, but we'll have green and yellow sweet peppers at market, as well as yellow Hungarian hot wax  and dark, glossy green jalapeno peppers to spice up your cooking. Our greenhouse is also yielding some gorgeous dark purple, pink, and striped eggplant, too.

Pattypan squash continue to sell like hotcakes, too. One customer reported her horror at running out of them mid-week last week, insisting that they were as addictive as narcotics. Baby zucchini are something else that people just can't seem to get enough of - there's something about the size and tenderness of these little summer squash that gives them a delicate, complex flavour that sets them apart from their larger, more mature siblings. 

But if zucchini grilled on the BBQ, stuffed and baked in oven, or grated into muffins, cakes, breads or sauces is your fancy, never fear - we have bins of medium and large zucchini to satisfy your needs! 

One brave customer has pledged to consume 10 zucchini per week for the duration of the season. When he checked in last week, he hadn't made it all the way through 10 yet, but he gamely purchased 10 more, in hopes of being able to catch up before this Saturday rolled around. We'll see!

Speaking of yellow and green fruit, we'll be back with both yellow and green beans this week. Plus, we'll have a few purple beans to add to the mix. These are great on veggie trays or as an enticing snack. Or, amaze small children with your magical skills as you turn them from purple to green as they cook!

Moving away from fruit, we continue to offer three kinds of baby kale. Kale, if you haven't heard, is the new arugula, according to some - the Globe & Mail even recently published suggested wine pairings for kale in a recent issue! Of course, we'll continue to offer arugula, too, for those not quite ready to make the switch!

Our head lettuce is one crop appreciating this cooler, wetter weather, although I have to say that I was very impressed with how both our red and green Batavian lettuces stood up to the heat. We've also got some really nice heads of romaine, too. The mesclun is another fan of more moderate weather, and it will make it's return to market soon - tomorrow morning's quality check will determine its presence at the market this week.

Don't forget to check out our on-line store if you don't want to miss out on anything! Julie has posted some mouth-watering photos this week, so you'll have a better idea of what will be waiting for you if you order in advance!

It may seem a little odd to title this post "Changing Seasons." It's the peak of summer, after all, and the midst of a heat wave no less. Yet here on the farm, there is a very real sense of something turning. With the first frost about six weeks away (give or take a week or two), the days growing shorter and the nights cooler (soon we hope!), there are very few crops that could be planted now and expected to mature before a killing frost. And so, with the exception of a couple things we may try to squeeze in over the next couple of days, seeding is done for the year.

Our successes and failures this year will depend on what we make of the crops that are in the ground now (with the notable exception of the cover crops that we'll use to prepare the ground for next year). Although we've been harvesting crops since the first week of May, now is when we really start to literally see the "fruits" of our labour (rahter than just the leaves!). So the focus of our efforts now shifts almost entirely to harvesting, irrigation, weed control, and pest and disease monitoring and control. "Control" being a relative term, of course - there are often things on a farm that are beyond our control.

The weather, for example. Heat (which was largely responsible for the absence of a blog post last week), torrential rains (which has flooded out portions of our crops this year), and sometimes even worse. The thunderstorms that struck the area two weeks ago this coming Sunday had several lasting impacts on the farm. A large white pine tree just up the road from our barn, which often offers shade to our cows, came down across the road just before dark. Our home telephone went dead, and stayed that way for 8 days (making a phone call or checking messages meant driving down to the corner where cell reception is reliable!). And when we went to the field to harvest Tuesday morning, most of the zucchini and cucumbers had a couple jagged round pits in them, about the diameter of a marble. At first, I couldn't fathom what they were - some strange curcubit-munching insect? Peckish birds? Then my mind went back two previous nights to the drumming sound on our roof - hail. The holes in our zukes and cukes were craters left by hailstones. Here's a photo:

Fortunately, it was a bountiful harvest and we were able to find enough unblemished fruit to fill our orders. And we also found a few restaurants and caterers willing to accept some damaged zukes at a "scratch and dent" price. As for the rest - did you know that cows love zucchini? Our cows do, anyway - they'll fight over anything that's too large or too ugly to sell.

The other great thing about zucchini, of course, is that they just keep on growing! By the time we were harvesting for market on Friday, there was a whole new batch of new, pockmark-free fruit ripe for the picking. By now, it's like the storm never happened (for the zucchini and our phone line, anyway, not for the pine tree, or any one of the hundreds of other trees brought down by the storm).

Speaking of zucchini, we'll have a good supply for market again this week. Many people really appreciate our baby zucchini while other prefer the larger ones - for the real fans, we offer a stand full of all shapes and sizes of green and yellow zucchini to choose from: pick one, three, or even ten! Pattypan squash are also very popular. They tend to be sweeter in flavour than zucchini, and who can resist the flying saucer-esque shape of them!

We'll also be bringing lots of field cucumbers of various sizes, and a few more of our greenhouse tomatoes. Cherry and grape tomatoes are starting to ripen now, too -- we'll have to see if we can resist the temptation to keep the first few all to ourselves! Of course, you can't have tomatoes without basil, and we'll be offering small packages or large bags of basil tops at the market again this week.

Our second planting of beans is starting to produce now, too. The green beans are one of my favourite varieties - a slim, dark green bean called Valentino. Yellow, purple, and "dragon tongue" beans are coming soon, too, but they'll probably need another week before they're ready to pick. 

On the leafy side, we've got some beautiful heads of green leaf lettuce ready to cut, as well as the ever-popular baby kale and arugula (be warned, though, this hot weather makes the arugula extra spicy!). Pea and sunflower shoots always add a refreshing splash to summer salads and sandwiches, and we're not offering smaller packages for those who like to keep them fresh, or to make it easier to take one of each!

The big question tonight is: will there be raspberries? The crop was showing signs of coming to a close earlier this week, but we're still hoping to be able to find a few half-pints to reward the early birds on Saturday. Check back here, or on our Facebook page, tomorrow for the latest news.

Thanks for reading, and hope to see you at the market!

This week's market selection will look much like last week's, if you managed to make it there before our new items sold out! There will be more of those this week, so don't despair!

Patipan (or pattypan, if you prefer) squash are one of our favourite summer treats. At the baby size, they are tender enough to eat raw, and a light steaming or grilling makes them melt in your mouth.

We'll also have lots of zucchini, both green  and yellow, including some at the baby stage as well - another summer staple.

Nothing says summer, though, like the smell of fresh basil and at this time of year, we're only harvesting the tops of the plants, meaning you get lots of leaf with hardly any stem.

Green beans are back again this week, with more bean variety due to arrive in the weeks ahead. This may be the last week until fall, however, for our snow peas, though we'll probably be able to coax another week or two from the shell peas and sugar snap peas.

To fill your salad bowls, we'll be bringing arugula, baby lettuce, "teen" lettuce (these larger leaves are great on sandwiches or in a salad where you're looking for something to stand up to a rich dressing), head lettuce, and to top it off pea shoots and sunflower shoots. Oh, and don't forget the green onions (though you can cook with them, too!)

Baby kale continues to be popular for those who want to use if either raw or cooked - the biggest challenge is deciding between green, red, and black! And for something a little different, check out our summer turnips  and kohlrabi.

On the berry front, I'm sad to report that our strawberries are finished for the year. Happily, our raspberry patch continues to surprise us with plump, beautiful berries, so we're hoping to be able to meet demand for these gems this week.

Worried that you may miss out on something? We now have the perfect answer for you! On-line ordering is now available from this very website. Click on the link in the menu to the left, select your items, and we'll have them ready for you at the market on Saturday. Or, if you live up here in the Pontiac, we can make other arrangements. You even have the option to pay using your PayPal account, or by cash or cheque when you receive your order. 

Have a great weekend!

It's not very often that the weather catches us off-guard here on the farm, but Wednesday was one of those days. The day started off innocently enough - a mix of sun and cloud, a nice breeze from the west. I was out seeding a fall crop of beans, carrots, peas, and beets, in hopes that the frost will hold off long enough for them to mature. Julie and Ashley, one of our workers, were up in the raspberry patch, filling an order for afternoon delivery. After getting another order for yet more raspberries, I headed over to deliver the good news and more container, just as a few drops of rain began to fall.

Glancing up, I noticed a dark band of clouds moving down the valley to the north and heard the distant rumble of thunder. The skies overhead and to the south and west were still mostly blue, so I assumed that the storm would pass to the north - in the little valley that shelters our farm, we often observe storms passing on the other side of the ridge to the north, or sailing down the Ottawa River to the south, often missing us entirely. Within minutes, however, the rain intensified and any traces of blue sky were swallowed by a wall of gray.

I grabbed a tray of full berry containers and headed toward the tractor and trailer on the other side of the field, where I could put the berries under cover. As the rain came down harder and harder I moved faster and faster, not wanting to see the fragile berries soaked and ruined. It wasn't until I reached the trailer that I remembered all the seed packets spread out and the trays of beans set out to dry after receiving a coating of beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacteria. At the point, the beans were now practically afloat and the seed packets soaked. I quickly slid the berries under cover, then frantically stuffed the seed packets back into their plastic bin.

At this point, the raspberry plants and the berries on them were too wet to consider picking, so we abandoned that mission, and Julie, who had cleverly protected the remaining full containers with an intricate leaf "roof" headed back across the farm to the house to bring them to safety. Still believing that the storm would pass momentarily, and reassured by the long gaps between lightning flashes and thunder rumbles that told us the storm was safely distant, Ashley went to finish picking green beans and I started cutting zucchini - we were already soaking wet at this point, and the vegetables had to be harvested for delivery, so carrying on seemed like the best option.

Almost an hour later, the rain finally relented, but sections of the field were flooded once again. And what had started as a warm breeze had turned decidedly chilly - I was shivering and covered in goosebumps by the time Julie returned with raincoats - not to keep us dry, but to trap body heat and warm us up! 

It was another hour before everything was washed, packed, loaded into the van, and headed to Ottawa with Julie. I treated myself to a hot shower and a late lunch before heading back outside, under blue skies once again, to continue working. Days like this, an office job looks almost attractive. Almost, but not really.

Well, this week was almost, dare I say it, normal. Not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry. And very busy. We've still got some seeding and transplanting left to do, lots of tomatoes and cucumbers to trellis, and the weeds never stop, but we're slowly catching up. Our vegetables are catching up too - at this point, most crops are only about a week behind where they were last year, which is great considering we were three to four weeks later getting started this spring!

But what everybody seems to want to know about recently are berries - strawberries to be precise. As one of the only sources of local organic strawberries in the Ottawa area, we are inundated with requests every year for organic strawberries. A couple of years, we've even managed to pull off a decent crop, but it never comes close to meeting the demand. And in the majority of recent years, well, let's just say disappointment would be an accurate term. 

A lot of it comes down to management, frankly. If you look around, many strawberry farms focus exclusively on that one crop, with the possible addition of a few others that ripen at different times of the year. They know that strawberry production is a management-intensive activity, requiring careful timing and close observation. They're smarter than us. We try to grow strawberries along with about 30 other crops, many of which require transplanting, weeding, trellising, or harvesting during strawberry season. There's no doubt that our strawberry crop can never be as large as a result, and our losses to disease and insect pressure are probably greater, too. The advantage, of course, is that all of our "berries" are not in one basket - if they don't work out, chances are some other crop will, and we'll still be able to keep the bills paid! 

Strawberries are also very sensitive to the weather. A year ago, we thought we had done everything right: over an acre of berry plants in their third year, lush and healthy, mostly ahead of the weeds, covered by protective row cover. Then came a couple days of windy weather followed by two nights when the temperature dipped to minus 7 for an extended period. Goodbye row cover, hello frost! At that temperature, even the unopened buds underneath the row cover that remained on the plants were frozen. Our prize strawberry field yielded enough berries for a winter's supply of jam, and that was it (although "it" was mighty tasty!). All in all, over the past seven years, we've had profitable crops in less than half of them. To put it more bluntly, to date we've probably lost money trying to grow strawberries.

So why do we persist? Stubborness, mostly. I'm inspired by the history of this land as a strawberry farm, by the handful of other organic farmers across the country who are growing organic strawberries successfully, by the challenge of trying to figure out something that few others manage to do, and by all the people who are so eager to enjoy the pure deliciousness of an organic strawberry. So we keep trying. Our latest attempt is a very small patch of 1000 plants transplanted into biodegradable plastic mulch (to combat the weeds without invoking the horror that is black plastic) on a field sloped to help prevent frost damage. They're making a very small crop of berries this year, but we have high hopes of a larger crop next year, and of learning lessons that will allow us to increase the amount of berries we can produce without "betting the farm."  

Raspberries, on the other hand, are a different story. This farm once also featured a hillside field of raspberries that created a waiting list of people wanting to come and pick them. The field was abandoned years before we bought the place, and although a few lonely canes would poke through early winter snows, grass overtook the field. Or so we thought. But in the wake of last year's strawberry disaster, a chance walk across the hillside in early July revealed rejuvenated patches of raspberry canes bearing heavy clusters of ripe fruit. Compared to all the time and money invested in the strawberries, here was a crop we had completely ignored, but it was the one offering us a harvest of fruit. Because the field had not been tended in any way for well over a decade, harvesting was a very labour-intensive process, but Julie braved the wilds to bring some to market for a few weeks. Now it looks like the miracle may repeat itself again this year! 

What else can you expect to see at market this week? An excellent question, and one I won't be able to answer until I complete my pre-harvest scouting tomorrow morning. A number of crops are coming on so fast, it's hard to keep up. What I know for sure are sugar snap, snow, and shell peas. Head lettuce, "teen" lettuce, and baby lettuce (mesclun). Old favourites like arugula, mild spring mix, and Beta mix. Lots of the ever-popular baby kale. More green onions  and summer turnips. And, as always, pea & sunflowers shoots and wheatgrass.

As for the rest, check back tomorrow afternoon, and I'll post the rest of the list in the comments section. Now it's time for a few hours of pre-harvest sleep! 

OK, so I shouldn't have even mentioned it in last week's blog. The start of another rainy cycle that is. Little did I know that Thursday evening's deluge (an inch in less than 30 minutes) would only be the beginning of what has amounted to over 5 inches of rain in the past week! The first few inches soaked into the parched earth relatively quickly, but the last couple resulted in some flooding that has definitely had an impact on some plants in some areas of the field. It has also delayed planting our fall crops, but it was nice to have some time inside to clear the desk and the in-box!

Despite the saturated soils, we're still counting ourselves lucky. Farmers to the east of us received almost 12 inches, and the highway into Ottawa is now broken by two washouts, adding about 30 minutes to the drive into town. Things could be much worse, and actually, to tell the truth, they're starting to look better every day.

This is the beginning of "blossom season" on the farm -- it seems like every day, new rows of plants are coming into blossom -- last week we enjoyed the delicate whites of the peas; now we're seeing the little bells of bean blossoms hanging heavy and the first hints of the brash orange-yellows of the summer squash. Several varieties of tomatoes are sporting their star-like yellow blossoms, and the cucumbers are getting in on the act, too, with melons not far behind. 

What it means for our faithful customers, of course, is a greater variety of vegetables arriving at the markets and at our retail outlets each week. (We started our mid-week deliveries on Wednesday with a trip to the Herb & Spice on Bank St., and Life Organic - watch our Facebook page or Twitter feed for updates.) Here's the rundown of what we'll be bringing to the Main Market this week:

Strawberries  - yes, our plants have finally started producing! Supply will be extremely limited this week, but hopefully we'll have a few more next week - because it is the plants' first year, it will be a small crop.

Peas - all three types this week - snow, snap, and shell - and more of them.

Baby kale - red, green, or "dinosaur" - this remains one of our most popular items.

Arugula - a customer commented last week that we had the nicest arugula on the market -- always nice to hear things like that!

Mild Mesclun - a tasty salad mix with not too much heat

Baby Lettuce - a crop that appreciates cooler, wetter weather!

Leaf Lettuce - we'll have a couple different varieties of full-size heads available

Hakurei Turnips - sweet, mild summer turnips that have been much-anticipated

Kohlrabi - mixed bunches of purple and white - probably the last of these for a while

Garlic Scapes - real garlic flavour, and no cloves to peel!

Green Onions - another new item this week

Shoots, pea & sunflower - we had a couple of requests last week to buy them by the tray - let us know if you're interested in this option, too!

Wheat grass - a confession here - I had them packed and ready to go last week, then drove off without them. Our pigs and chickens enjoyed them, however, and there's a fresh batch ready to package up on Saturday again -- and I rarely forget the same thing twice!

There may be a couple of other things I'm forgetting to mention here -- we'll have to see what the next 30 hours brings! I'll be heading out at sunrise tomorrow to gather greens before the heat strikes, and hopefully to wrap up harvest and packing early enough to leave some time to celebrate with family and friends. Happy Canada Day to you, and enjoy the long weekend! 

Farm News

My apologies for the delay in publishing this post – our internet connection went down during last night’s heavy rains. But other than this technical inconvenience, it is certainly a welcome rain – after an extremely wet spring, the pendulum swung the other way for most of June and our fields were getting very dry.

As I mentioned last week, the upside to the sunny weather was the ability to get lots of fieldwork done, and we were very fortunate to be able to finish transplanting our main crops this week – the last of the winter squash and pumpkins went into the ground on Wednesday as a light rain fell. Our second planting of cucumbers and summer squash is still in the greenhouse, but they’ll be OK till next week, and that’s when we’ll aim to put in more plantings of beans, peas, corn, and carrots for late summer and fall harvests. This all assumes, of course, that this isn’t the beginning of another continually rainy cycle – surely we must be due for a little moderation by now!

Market News

It’s pea season! It’s a sure sign that the harvest season is gearing up once our peas are ready. This week we kick off with the first shell peas and snow peas of the year. The shell peas are an early variety, so the pods are a little shorter with fewer peas inside, but they are well worth a bit of extra work – nothing compares to the flavour of the first fresh peas of the year. Our sugar snap peas aren’t far behind either.

A luck few enjoyed the flavour of our first kohlrabi last week, and we hope to have enough for everyone this week at market. The literal translation of this word from the German is “cabbage turnip” and this aptly describes their flavour. We aim to harvest our kohlrabi a little smaller than some, in order to maximize the tender sweetness of the juicy flesh – they are great raw or lightly steamed at this stage.

Baby kale  was a big seller at market last week, and we were smart enough this time to save a few bags for ourselves. Julie put together an incredible marinated kale salad that we enjoyed for dinner on Sunday – it’s my new favourite way to enjoy kale, and being raw, it’s also the most nutritious way to eat it! We’ll also have our standard salad fare: baby lettuce, mild mesclun, arugula, Beta mix, and maybe even some baby spinach. And to top off the salad (or a sandwich, or simply as a snack), try some pea shoots or sunflower shoots. We also got lots of positive comments on our new method of packaging wheat grass with the root system still intact in order to preserve all the enzymes.

The other much-anticipated arrival this week will be garlic scapes. These decorative and tasty curlicues add real garlic flavour to dishes both cooked and raw – just chop them up like green onions. They also make a delicious pesto. Although they’ll have a remarkably long shelf life inside your fridge, if you want to keep a bunch for the long haul, try putting them through a blender then freezing them in ice cube trays for a quick and easy way to add garlic flavour to any dish – in our house, these cubes get used up faster than real garlic cloves!

The power just flashed off for a few moments here – I guess that’s my cue to wrap this up and head to bed! Hope to see you at the market on Saturday, even if it is a little on the wet side. And we always welcome feedback here, or on our Facebook page, too!

Farm News

It's that awkward time of year again: the dry weather is great for getting the last of our main crops seeded and transplanted, but at the same time, the seeds and plants that are already in the ground could really benefit from a good soaking. And so I check the weather forecast each day (or several times a day!) with some ambivalence - as each day passes, more and more gets planted, but the need to set up the irrigation system moves steadily higher on the priority list. 

Our winter squash crop has been the focus of a lot of effort this week. Yesterday, I counted roughly 7,000 squash and pumpkin seedlings in the greenhouse, and by the end of the day today, over half of them were in the field. That's meant a couple of early mornings in the field laying the bio-plastic mulch in the coolest part of the day and some hot afternoons on the tractor and transplanter. 

The rest of the crop is now waiting for another field to be ready - we harvested hay from it at the end of last week (here's a photo of Jasmine and Gabriel helping to bring in the last load of bales). The next task is to work it up, till beds, and lay bio-plastic to prepare it for transplanting - hopefully I'll be able to report that job done by this time next week!

Market News

As I predicted last week, the rhubarb and spinach have succumbed to this hot, dry weather. We're hoping to have spinach again in the fall, but you'll have to wait until next spring for fresh rhubarb. However, the arugula, baby lettuce, and mild mesclun mix continue to hang in there. An early bird or two will be able to snap up some Beta mix, and there's a fresh seeding of that on the way for future weeks. We were short on sunflower seed last week, so we're limited to pea shoots and wheatgrass this week on the shoots and sprouts front - the good news is that our seed order beat the postal strike, so we'll be back in the sunflower shoot business next week!

Boy, was our baby kale ever popular last week! We bagged each of the red, green, and lacianto (or dinosaur) leaves separately, but a number of customers just couldn't make up their mind and took one of each! We'll have more this week, for those who missed out last time. New this week from the fields are oriental greens, including the dark-green tatsoi and some lovely little heads of pak choy. These really shine in stir-fries. Our kohlrabi is right on the verge of being ready to harvest - I probably won't be able to resist harvesting a few bunches for market, too.

Our heirloom tomato, pepper, and cucumber seedlings continued to sell well last week, so we'll give everyone one last chance to fill that last corner of the garden, or a large empty pot. The cherry tomato hanging baskets are really starting to blossom now, so you'll have a real sense of just how productive these will be in the weeks to come!

Looking ahead, expect to see our summer turnips make their long-anticipated arrival next week, along with some shell peas. I wouldn't be surprised if the first of the garlic scapes are ready by then, too, as well as some heads of lettuce.

World News

A couple of news items have caught my attention this week: the first, of course, is the tragic e. coli outbreak in Germany that is being linked to bean sprouts produced on an organic farm in northern Germany. The second is the annual release of the Environmental Working Group's "Dirty Dozen" list of the fruits and vegetables with the highest levels of pesticide contamination. Have either of these stories had an impact on your food shopping habits? Please leave a comment below and let me know!

Thanks for reading...hope to see you at market or hear from you soon!

After complaining for the past couple of months about all the moisture, we're now at the stage where a bit of rain would be most welcome! Fortunately, we avoided the heavy storms that struck Ottawa and areas further south on Wednesday evening - there were some ominous clouds, a few flashes of lightning, and enough thunder to make the dogs nervous, but that was about it.

The upside to the long stretch of dry weather is that we've been able to continue to move transplants from the greenhouse into the field. This week saw our first plantings of zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, and melons head into the field, as well as a few trays of winter squash. Thanks to our mechanical waterwheel transplanter and the 100% biodegradable and compostable plastic mulch (made from non-GMO corn starch), these plants settle into a pretty cozy environment, where they can withstand a bit of dry, windy weather (though without some rain in the next few days, we'll be looking at hooking up our drip irrigation system to give everything a drink). We've also been planting potatoes this week: it's a little late by some standards, but we always find that by waiting until June, our battles with the bugs are greatly reduced. It means you may need to wait a little longer for a taste of them, but hopefully it also means that there will be lots more of them!

I also spent a rare day off the farm this week, going back to highschool. Well, not really. As part of the Canadian Organic Grower's Growing Up Organic project, I was invited to speak to three classes of grade 10 students at a school in Kanata. By giving them a "virtual tour" of the farm, we discussed several important aspects of organic farming, as well as touching on issues related to food security and food sovereignity. It was lots of fun, and a real eye-opener. The students had some great questions about food and farms and were obviously thirsty for more information. Interestingly, less than about a quarter of them had any direct connection to a farm.

In other news, the crew from Wooden Shoe Timberframes (headed by Julie's brother), finished erecting our new packing shed last Friday. Here's a photo of the (almost) completed structure - now it's up to us to complete the interior and put it to use! I promise to publish a full report and lots of photos of the whole process soon!

We're hoping that it won't be long before we'll be needing to make use of all this new space: this week will mark the first real harvest from our early field crops. The star of this coming market is sure to be our baby kale. One of our regular customers declared this the best kale on the market last year, and we hope that we can live up to that reputation. These bite-sized leaves of green, purple, and "dinosaur" kale are tender and sweet enough to be eaten raw in salads, though they also stand up to a light steaming. Spinach and rhubarb will be with us for another week, too, although the heat of the early week has certainly taken its toll on these spring crops. Our baby lettuce, mild mesclun, Beta mix, and arugula are still producing well, though. We were pleased with the response to our wheatgrass last week, so this week we'll be bringing more - we'll also be experimenting with packaging in a way that conserves all of the valuable enzymes found in the growing plant. And of course there will be pea shoots and sunflower shoots for your snacking and salad-topping pleasure. 

We bid a fond farewell to the garlic greens and the stinging nettle this past week, although garlic scapes are probably only another couple of weeks away. We're also eagerly anticipating the first harvest of our very popular summer turnips, which may arrive as early as next week, as well as peas, which are now in blossom. Our experimental strawberry patch is also now beginning to blossom, so there should be a taste of those coming in a few weeks.

If you've got any room left in your garden, we'll be bringing the last of our heirloom tomato , pepper, and cucumber seedlings. And if you're out of room but still craving your own supply of fresh tomatoes, check out our hanging baskets of red cherry tomatoes - decorative and delicious!

If you have any questions about the farm, our products, or would like to leave some feedback, please feel free to post a comment here, send us an email, or drop by the market Saturday morning.