Cedar Down Farm

Phew! We’re two weeks into the CSA and it feels great to be harvesting food and bringing it to our members.  The garden is really producing well so far – the first two pickups were abundant and the next couple seem set to follow suit.  We took a walk in the garden, just looking, over the past couple days and almost everything looks amazing. We’ve been keeping an eye on our bean and zucchini crops because we have a bit of a hunch on a possible potassium deficiency, but, for the most part, everything seems to be really taking off, despite a little too much rain and too little sunshine.

It’s been so incredible to see things mature. It always seems a miracle that the tiny seeds or baby seedlings that we put in the big big field will become big, juicy crops that will feed 75 CSA members and ourselves.  But every year it happens and it’s never less amazing.  The lettuce heads are a great example of this.  The first planting we put in – the seedlings were less than vigorous and got a hard frost just days after going into the ground.  We’d go out and look at them and shake our heads.  But now, ready for harvesting this week, they are big, fluffy, tender-looking heads that will probably make 2 or 3 salads each!

We have bee eating so well! We just sit at the dinner table and shake our heads at the way that food can taste and the incredible abundance that we have each day.  We made this incredible stir-fry with our peas, bok choy, kohlrabi and Ahren Hughes’ absolutely mouth-watering shitake mushrooms  and it was literally baffling how good it tasted. There was hardly anything on the vegetables but they just vibrated with flavour.  If only everyone could experience that, the world would be a different place. Okay, enough gushing.

As for some practical bits – our wash station (really a bathtub on legs!) is performing pretty well. Not the most efficient set up yet but functional.  The walk-in cooler (made from a modified air conditioner using the Cool Bot) is keeping things nice and chilly and our awesome garden cart! Well, it’s awesome.  Jeff and I refurbished an old home-made garden cart that we bought from a farmer for a few bucks to be a rickshaw-style cart and it’s really great – so fun to load it with vegetables and bring them in to the wash-station!

That’s all for now…I’m beginning to ramble…

Yes, despite some ups and downs in temperature, weather and, well, moods, the CSA is here! Next week we will start pickups. A little earlier than we had anticipated and totally great.  We’re so excited that what has been in our minds for so long is finally going to happen. And the vegetables look (and taste!) amazing.

It definitely was an up and down week. We had more rain, a bit of frost and now it looks like we’re going to get some sun.  The rain has been challenging as we still had crops that needed planting and lots of weeding to do this week and it’s always stressful when you have to rush rush rush to get a huge amount done in one day because the rain is coming.  Not to mention we had to throw row cover (a fabric covering we use for pest and temperature control) over the peppers, eggplants and tomatoes in a hurry to protect them from frost. But we managed to get tons done this week nonetheless.  What did we do?

Well, we planted more cucumbers, zucchini and melons, beans, dry beans, flowers (yay!) and potatoes. We got the winter squash all out from it’s row cover and weeded the little guys, got some baby chicks to keep us happily tending livestock and, did I mention?, finished the moveable greenhouse!!! Yes, that was the icing on the cake for sure. A 90′ moveable greenhouse which we will tomorrow pack with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and basil and later cram full of yummy greens. With a little help from our friends, neighbours (and a cameraman!?!?!) the thing is up, beautiful and going to produce lots of food. Hooray!

This past week has been pretty great. We managed to get most of the crops in that we wanted to before the rain came and then came some more and then, well, it’s still coming. We haven’t seen this much rain for awhile.  I might have have asked for a gentler, more subdued style of rain, but I shouldn’t complain, it’s great to have the moisture and it’s kicking our first crops up a notch just in time for the CSA to start. I just ran out to the garden and the first CSA share is shaping up beautifully – lettuce mix and spinach, turnips, kohlrabi, radishes – they all look great and the peas are flowering too!

We got a super early head-start this week on some of our hot crops. We managed to get the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and some melons in and the winter squash, cukes and zucchini have come up and look fat and healthy. We had the help of Prapti, a volunteer coming for the month of June, to get our wash station set-up. Jeff is just banging a whole in the concrete for a drain and then we can get it all rigged up. I’ll be in touch with everyone in a few days and let you know when the first pickup will be!