This week in the pack, we expect to have carrots, beans, tomatoes, herbs, green peppers, hot peppers, leeks/onions, summer squash, tomatillos, garlic, beets/chard/kale, and more blueberries too.  If you are interested in freezing blueberries for your winter supply, let Jen know and we’ll start organizing ourselves to pick and bring in flats.  The berries are getting sweet!

This week on the farm, we had a lot of visitors!  They all were pretty impressed with the food growing here and how much there was.  The first group was mostly immigrants/refugees who have little gardens in Halifax.  Did they ever appreciate what we were doing, and when I said they could pick beans and keep them for free, they were super excited!  I’ve never seen people pick beans so fast!  They filled purses, saris, whatever, with beans.  I also said they could collect grape leaves, and crab apples.  They had uses for everything!  We had lunch together under the oak trees, and a spontaneous market of eggplant, hot peppers, and other things we had in our cold room got set up.  Alice and I ran to get more eggplant and hot peppers, and those disappeared too.  It was truly a beautiful thing to see the younger women helping to get food for the older women, the translating, the sign language, the smiles.  These people have all lost their homeland.  We just can’t take anything for granted.  Our hearts were filled with their collective spirit!

The crew worked super-hard this week to do a critical job: In addition to all the weekly harvesting jobs, they were preparing land for next spring.  They made raised beds, shovelled the composting horse manure we got in the spring on to them, and then covered them with black silage tarp.  It was very hot work, especially this week!  These beds will be ready to plant first thing next spring.  Soil life will be busy for the rest of the season processing and incorporating the manure so we have a nice bed of ‘chocolate cake’ soil free of weeds.

This will be our last week with Alice and Bernard before they go back to Montreal at the end of August.  They have worked so hard and we are grateful.  Alice has an amazing ‘get ‘er done’ attitude.  She is full of joy, and strength, and speed, and is so nurturing to everyone around her.  She’s also smart and innovative, humble, twinkly, fun, and beautiful inside and out.  We really appreciate Bernard for his strategic organization, honest feedback, drive to connect people, yummy pastries, and all his friends who have come to pitch in on the farm.  He’s also strong and can get a lot done when he sets his mind to do a job.  Did I mention the guy can write?  We can’t thank you both enough!