What an amazing two weeks it has been!  We happily welcomed the arrival of Bennet Deakin about 2 weeks ago.  He’s the (awesome) third member of our farming team the season and we quickly got down to planting our spring crops – broccoli, spinach, cabbage, lettuce, onions, bok choy, fava beans and more!  Bennet also prepped the ground and sowed 2 acres of spring grain  – trials that he is heading up in preparation for a grain CSA we hope to start in the near future.

After all that – we had a massive tree planting day this past weekend and got about 135 fruit trees planted in what is now, our orchard! We planted apples, pears, plums, cherries and Asian pears as well as some raspberries, blueberries and other small berries.  The orchard will be managed by our great friend Ali English and hopefully will allow us to offer some fruit to the CSA in the near future!

Most of the spring crops are either transplanted and looking great or direct-seeded and beginning to come up! A field walk this weekend saw the tiny spinach and lettuce mix seedlings emerging along with carrot, beets and peas.  The broccoli and cabbage as well as chard, lettuce, bok choy and kohlrabi transplants are looking good and we’ve got almost a quarter acre of tiny onion seedlings swaying in the wind!

Jeff has been tinkering with our Farmall cultivating tractor which we purchased at the end of last summer and we hope to start in-row cultivating (weeding that is!) all these crops this week, if it dries up.  We’re rigging up some trenching equipment on the Farmall as well so that we can plant our potatoes and we’ll plant about 450 feet of early tomatoes in our 90 foot greenhouse this week as well.

All in all a very satisfying couple of weeks with more to come!

Luckily, we had one day this week where we were able to get on the field and we used it to manically spread compost, work the early crop ground and actually seed some crops – carrots, beets, peas and herbs.  But the forecast calls for rain, rain, rain so who knows when we will get in next.  The greenhouse is full and beautiful though and as soon as we can, we’ll be out there planting.  Cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi and bok choy, onions, chard and lots of greens can all go in whenever the soil is dry enough and hopefully the weather will warm up some so that these crops will actually grow!  This wet weather not only can put off planting (and therefore harvesting) but it also creates more favourable conditions for disease – especially in the greenhouse.  The cool, overcast weather means the greenhouse doors and sides have to stay closed more of the time to conserve heat – this means less air flow inside and means the soil in the transplant plugs never dries off – conditions that fungi and disease love!

But! So far, so good. The plants in the greenhouse look great and there’s plenty of them!  One of these days, they’ll go in the ground….

So, lots of big things to think about with some time for cross-country skiing in between!

See you in the spring!

I could say that the only thing to complain about recently is that things are growing TOO fast! We put in our fall brassica crop over the last few weeks (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, chinese cabbage etc.) and I swear if you had sat in the field and watched, you could have seen them growing.  The two kale plantings are pretty much ready to harvest and, though planted three weeks apart, look almost the same size! The chinese cabbage is starting to  head (only a month too soon!) and that whole section of garden looks like it wants to take flight or something, the plants are so huge they are bursting from the ground.

We’ve started to work in some of the summer-planted cover crops and have pretty much mapped out the garden for next year so that we can start to sow fall cover crops and apply compost.  The orchard section is carpeted in a lush rye cover and we’ve got onions curing and garlic cured and stored away.  Despite this past week’s heat, it does feel like fall is coming and we are starting to think about fall harvests and winter storage. The winter squash is taking after the watermelon in being huge and copious and we are excited for that most favourite of harvests – so colourful and leaving you so thankful for the richness and nourishment of that wonderful crop.

The farm is really looking beautiful also because of the huge, plump straw bales that are now sitting in the back fields where Warren Becker (our neighbour) had his oats and barley crop.  The hay that he under-seeded in these grains is coming up green underneath the bales and Jeff and I are eyeing these fields to determine where we will plant our lentil and bean test crops next year.

All in all, things are great, so here’s some photos.

Fall brassicas are looking great as well under their layers of row cover.  The rutabagas, which we transplanted (we normally direct-seed) are huge after only a couple of weeks and the kale, broccoli, chinese cabbage and cauliflower are all looking great. So nice!

Here are some nice farm photos:

We’ve had quite  a bit of rain, some of it torrential, which has been kind of scary. The potatoes are showing signs that they may want some dry weather and the tomatoes have a larger foliage to fruit ratio than I would like but overall things look pretty good for having been so wet over the past couple weeks.  Fruited crops like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons etc. really don’t like such wet and cool-ish weather so it’s always a little nerve racking to have so much rain.  The other downside is just not being able to get any work done!  Our major planting of fall brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, kale etc.) starts going in now and we have to have some dry weather so the soil can be worked.  Weeding has also been on hold for a few days and we’re really itching to get this work done.

Oh well, we really can’t complain. The food that is coming out of the fields is gorgeous and we’re having lots of fun harvesting and bringing it to our CSA members!

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…

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!