Eating Well

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…