David preparing back field for vegetables next year.

In the produce pack this week, we plan to have strawberries, salad mix, carrots, green onions, swiss chard (or kale), garlic scapes, beets, peas (Tues), zucchini (Thurs), dill or cilantro, sweet turnip, and eggs.  This list is subject to change, of course.  Smile.

This week’s blog post is brought to you by David.

Happy Canada Day!

Even though summer is just getting going, and the season of the most bountiful harvests has not yet arrived, back at the farm, we are enjoying a sense of accomplishment and completion.  We are over the hump!  With almost all of the large plantings done and the most of the weeds under control, we have some time to step back and take a look at how our plans for the year have worked out so far.

For the most part, we are happy with the progress we’ve made.  The packs started five weeks earlier than last year and we are on course to offer a more abundant selection of summer crops.  The summer greenhouses are looking good; eggplants, peppers, cukes, melons and tomatoes are sizing up.  We have twelve hundred feet of potatoes that will be ready to dig in a few weeks and a huge planting of beans in full flower.  Overall, we are way ahead of last year but we still have lots of ways we can make the packs, especially the early season ones, better.

We would like to have more crunchy, colorful, non-green things in the early packs and the widest possible selection of delicacies throughout the season.  Our plan for next year is to start our spring greenhouse plantings of beets and carrots much earlier, with a goal of harvesting them in the first week of June.

We are also planning to cover half of our strawberry patch in a hoop house for extra-early berries.  If the dreaded strawberry virus spares us and the crop grows well, we could have strawberries for the beginning of the packs in mid-May.

The feedback we received at the end of last year was extremely helpful, for instance, we are not going to subject you to any more fennel!  It will be in the swap box every now and then, but won’t be a main item any more… Promise…

One thing everyone seems to want more of is fruit.  We are making a long-term investment in growing organic fruit for our customers.  This year we prepared land for plantings of seedless grapes, plums, raspberries and Asian pears.  It will be several years before these plantings are ready to harvest, in the meantime, we will continue to buy in the best local fruit we can get.  We also are considering building a large greenhouse for warm climate fruit trees such as apricots, figs and nectarines.

It would be a happy day indeed when luscious, tree ripened figs were in the packs…

Until then, we look forward to continuing to farm with your kind support and appreciate your continuing feedback and suggestions.

See you all soon,

David, Jen and Bruce.

I was amazed how sweet the beets were the other night.

Sungold cherry tomatoes coming along. After the photo, they disappeared. Hmm….

Flame weeding in arugula