Janus Season

Now is a time of year when it’s hard to say whether it’s winter or spring.  The weather certainly varies from day to day.  On the winter side of things, the crops we’re harvesting (and the weeds we’re pulling) are those that sprouted last autumn and grew through the winter.  On the other hand, we’ve started our weekly cycle of seed planting.  The frogs have begun their evening chorus and the weed seeds are beginning to poke through the soil–a little reminder of the very big amount of work that is soon to come.  

 

However, the time of spring crops and spring weeds is not yet really here.  Much of my attention is still focused on things other than crop management.  Alot of the organization work I’d hoped to do this winter is now done, and I’m turning my attention to greenhouse repair, knowing that once the crops–and the new crop of weeds–are in full swing, there won’t be time for much else.  

1910 Praise of Local Food

Published in 1910, this little essay on cheese is a beautiful ode to local food.  (Sorry, it expresses in passing certain opinions which I expect most including myself find offensive.  But please enjoy what it does have to offer.)

http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/cheese.html

 

Eating from the garden

Things are getting busy at the farm now.  The actual work of weeding, planting and harvesting is still not that much right now, but  it’s gradually gearing up, and there’s alot to do to organize things around the farm so that our work is more efficient in that time of year when we don’t have time to spare.  

 

I’ve been meaning to write about some thoughts from a conversation I had during my winter vacation.  A friend and I had a great chat about her community garden plot, but she told me one thing I was sad to hear: many of her friends refused to eat her veggies!  They felt her veggies were not as hygienic as those sold in the supermarket.  Too much bugs, too much dirt?  Something like that.  

 

To be fair, said friends grew up under the most urban of urban conditions, so growing your own vegetables is not something that’s normal for them.  Whatever isn’t normal for you usually isn’t something you are inclined to put in your mouth, whatever the facts may be.  So I’m not blaming them.  

 

What I do want to say, though, is this: there is a lack of basic factual information if people assume that their friends’ organically grown veggies are unhygenic.  Shouldn’t our education systems be giving us enough basic information for us to know that it’s OK for food plants to grow in dirt without chemicals?  

 

To be fair, there is one reason why non-commercially grown veggies could be unhygienic.  Commercial farms (organic or not) have to follow strict rules about spreading manure, to avoid having the wrong kind of microbes on veggies.  Home gardeners have no such restrictions, so if someone doesn’t know what they’re doing (or understands and is willing to take the risk), the veggies could carry unwanted microbes.  But think about supermarket veggies: how many people sneezed on them before you got them home?

 

But again, shouldn’t basic education, even for city dwellers, especially for city dwellers, include a basic understanding of that?  

Winter

Since mid-November, I’ve been enjoying winter slowness.  After the last farmers market of the year, there is still work to do, but very little.  We still have crop residues to clean up, and there are plenty of weeds to pull from around our young overwintering crops.  Winter weeding is quite a chore: the soil is wet and sticky, so it’s hard to removed the weeds without taking big chunks of soil with them, and we have to remove the weeds completely because they’ll just grow new roots if we leave them on the ground.  At times I do long for summer weeding, when a simple hoe-down is usually enough to dispatch weed seedlings, but I remind myself that in winter we have lots of time, in summer we don’t.

I decided to make winter extra slow by not doing the Moss Street Winter Market.  It was fun to take part in it the last couple years, but also fun this year to spend that weekend relaxing with friends.  I did poke my head in at the market, though, and enjoyed the taste of market buzz.

So for now it’s sleepy time, but if we get a forecast for extreme frost, we’ll have to kick things into high gear to protect the crops from freezing.  Even inside the greenhouse, they’ll need a protective layer of row cover fabric, and our stored apples and potatoes will need a protective layer of insulation too.  Cabbages will have to be brought from the field into storage, and two weeks worth of vegetable sales will need to be harvested just in case.

But to tell the truth, I’m not at the farm at all right now.  I’m off enjoying my yearly vacation with friends and family, visiting other people’s gardens when I get the chance.

Thanks to all who have followed my blog in 2012!  All the best to all of you in 2013.

Snakes

We have more snakes than usual at the farm this year.  I have no data to prove it, but I see at least three or four every day, whereas in the last two years I saw snakes only occasionally.  Snakes are great!  Our snakes here are just little grass snakes, harmless to humans and eaters of slugs (which is always a welcome trait).  Their abundance suggests that the farm is functioning as a healthy agro-ecosystem.  

I was sad today when I went to roll up a floating row cover (aka Remay) and found five snakes trapped inside.  The row cover we usually use is just a plain poly-something fabric, but this one was reinforced with light netting, and the snakes had gotten caught in the net where the net had pulled away from the fabric of the row cover.  Four were dead, one living.  

I did my best to free the live one, and was happy to watch it slither away despite its injuries.  That was the only good point of the episode.  Permeated with the stench of rotting snake-flesh, the experience of removing the dead snakes was macabre at best.  

From now on, I intend to use net-reinforced row cover only during the winter (for frost protection) since the snakes aren’t as active then.  

The Ways of the Melons

“And you must learn the ways of the melons if you are to come with me to harvest them…”

~ It’s a good thing Obi Wan Kenobi wasn’t a farmer, otherwise he would have said things like that.  Seriously!

I was quite honoured this year when my boss asked me to harvest melons, because it’s not so simple.  Every evening (and morning sometimes too) we walk through three greenhouses of melons and watermelons checking to see which ones are ripe.  I check to see if the leaf nearest the melon is dead–that’t the first sign.  I look at the colour; for most  varieties, the melon turns slightly yellow or orange when it’s ready.  I look at the place where the stem joins the melon: when the melon is immature, there is a smooth join, but later, a separation appears and a sticky liquid may ooze out.  And most of all, I smell them.  When a melon is ready, it smells beautiful. 

For watermelons, the procedure is a little simpler.  We also look for the tendril and leaf nearest the watermelon to turn brown, but with watermelons the change in smell and colour don’t occur.  If I’m not sure, I tap the watermelon.  From its earliest stages, the pitch of the sound you hear on tapping the watermelon gradually rises, and then goes flat and dull again when the watermelon is ready.  That is, most of the time it does that.  The real indicator is the tendril, brown down to where it joins the main stem. 

At the market, customers sometimes ask which melon is ready to eat today.  I tell them, they all are.  The melons you buy in the store have usually been harvested well in advance of being ripe, so you may need to wait awhile to let them ripen after buying them.  But when we harvest them as I’ve just described, it is nearly always the case that the melon will be great to eat right away. 

Besides harvesting, I’ve also been responsible for watering and pollinating the melons.  Melons don’t actually need that much water, and we’ve actually stopped watering them altogether at this point.  After transplanting, I gave them plenty of water to get them established and see them through the setting of their fruits, but now that they’re established they can explore for water as needed on their own, particularly as our soil here is good at holding moisture. 

I tried my hand at pollinating melons at the beginning of their growing season, since I was worried that not enough bees were finding their way into the greenhouse.  It wasn’t as hard as I expected; the male and female flowers look the same at first, but the females have a little bulge that will later become the melon.  You just pick a few male flowers, take off the petals, and brush the stamens over the female flower to transfer the pollen.  But when you have more than a few melon plants, this takes alot of time–time that could profitably be spent doing something else.  I was very happy when I saw bees visiting the melon flowers, and left them to take care of that job with their characteristic diligence. 

A word about bees.  Across Canada, and elsewhere as well, bees have been experiencing a startling population decline.  We really can’t affod to see that happen.  I’m glad I could learn the ways of the melons well enough to pollinate them myself, but I don’t think anyone wants to pay the price for food when we don’t have bees doing that kind of work for us. 

Summer Solstice 2012

Summer solstice is a busy time.  We finished transplanting peppers but the eggplants are still waiting.  We are in the midst of sowing between one and two thousand cabbages, broccolis, cauliflowers and so on.  Dry beans went into the ground yesterday, but our second crop of peas still needs to go in.  On top of this is the regular cycle of planting our Asian Greens mix, harvesting, selling at the market and preparing for our weekly box program.  

Some crops are doing very well.  The daikon is gorgeous (if you have never seen gorgeous daikon, it’s a pity).  Cucumbers are in their main production now and the snow peas are still doing OK.  Snap peas weren’t so hot this year, though.  

Speaking of hot, it’s been rather cold lately.  In the last few days we reached 22 degrees or so, but for a month before that our temperatures were no higher than 19 and as low as 3.  We aren’t expecting it to get very warm this year, just as things have stayed cool the last couple summers.  This cool weather worries me.  How do you grow tomatoes and eggplants in weather like this?  One answer, of course, is the greenhouse.  The other is crop diversity.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and don’t count on eggplants for your profit.  By growing many crops, we make the best of whatever weather comes.  But we’re still planting more cool-weather plants and less hot-weather plants to be on the safe side.  

Beginning of Bright Quarter 2012

Now is the time of apple blossoms.  Our overwintered crops are all but finished.  The same nature-signals that cue the flowering of apples and cherries also let the kale and overwintered carrots know it’s time to flower.  We had to cull about half our overwintered carrots because they were bolting (sending up flower stalks) and the roots were too tough as a result.  As for the overwintered kale and kakina and such, we’re still harvesting their tasty flower-shoots for sale at the market and to eat at home. 

Now is just past the half-way point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice.  I call this time the Bright Quarter, from a month and a half before til a month and a half after the longest day of the year.  I believe Elliot Coleman refers to the same period as Solar Summer.  Whatever you call it, it’s already light when my alarm rings at 5:30 and still nearly-light at 9 pm. 

I’ve had the pleasure of learning to use the tractor recently.  It’s great.  Not that I really love machines per se, but there’s a real thrill in being able to do your work efficiently and independently.

Never use bad fat

I learned a lesson today: never use bad fat.  I had in my fridge a block of something called ‘Fluffo’ left over from a pastry-making experiment last fall.  The ingredients included hydrogenated palm oil and something called TBHQ.  I thought of throwing it out (it felt mildly like plastic in my mouth), but I don’t like letting things go to waste.  So, for our church lunch today, I made a big batch of that pineapple ginger oatmeal bake that I mentioned in a recent post.  It smelled and tasted great!  But eating it lacked the satisfaction of my earlier batch, and it felt heavy in my stomach.  At last, about a fifth of it went into our compost since it seemed that was a better place for the leftovers than my stomach. 

So, a double waste–of the organic oatmeal and so on that I put into it, and of my effort in making it.  The lesson learned?  ALWAYS use good ingredients, especially when it comes to fats and oils.  And don’t buy Fluffo again. 

Pineapple Ginger Baked Oatmeal

This was an experiment, but it worked!  I didn’t measure precisely, but it went something like this:

• 2 mugs of old fashioned rolled oats
• 1 cup oil
• 1 tbsp dried ginger powder (or so)
• roughly 1/3 cup brown sugar
• salt, perhaps about 1 tsp
• 1 can pineapple chunks with juice

I mixed the oats and oil first, then added the salt and ginger, then the pineapple and sugar.  I put it in an 8″x8″ greased glass baking dish and baked it at 350 F for 30 minutes or so until the top was just a little brown.  Definitely worth repeating!  I used sunflower oil this time but coconut oil might be even better.  Candied ginger is also something I’d like to add next time.