The farm share will be starting next week. Wednesday June 1 will be the first day, although farm shares can be picked up at the Warehouse Market on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday (11am to 6pm) or Saturday (9am to 4pm) every week. We’ve been doing our best to get ready. The farm crew has been planning crops, preparing beds, adding compost, growing seedlings, transplanting, and covering them with row cover or netting. The first seeds and transplants have gone in the ground! The crew has also organized and tidied the barn, put new plastic on one of the big greenhouses, and grown all kinds of crops in the field tunnels and greenhouses for harvest and sale at Warehouse Market. We’ve done safety meetings, training, orientation, rose/bud/thorn and bottleneck analysis. We’ve had a few meltdowns, a few fails, some laughs, and many very yummy meals. Four out of nine of us have had COVID. I think the farm team is ready for the challenge of Farm Share ’22.
The farm is evolving, and we’re learning lots! We’re still trying to add another acre to our 6-acre system so we can grow and integrate more cover crops to build soil, and add nitrogen from the atmosphere through nitrogen-fixing crops. We’re going to have 9 people living and working on the farm this summer. It feels like a little wee village! We all have our roles and strengths. We all have our weaknesses. We need each other for support, information, help, advice, rides, experience, and muscle power. A couple of weeks ago we loaned our minivan to Marshall and Hilary next door so they could do flower deliveries, and they brought a load of produce to Warehouse Market for us. I think they were getting their van fixed. I had to go to Windsor and found out our car didn’t work. A neighbour was driving up the driveway and I flagged her down to give me a jump. When that didn’t work, she said I could borrow her van. She had mentioned she was finding high fuel costs challenging, so I put gas in her van. It sure is nice to know you’re not alone when things go awry!
Olivia and Sarah putting netting up on Nina, our first climate battery greenhouse. We had to replace the plastic on Nina, so we took this opportunity to install insect netting for excluding pests, especially cucumber pests. We’ve had a few cucumber challenges over the past two years. Even this year these transplants looked so hard done by. Now things are looking much better and we are hopeful for them.Rachel works at the Warehouse Market and at the farm. Here she is with Bok Choi.Sarah seeding paperpot trays. Sarah’s seedling domaine. We have never had such great seedlings!!Olivia and Kara trellising tomatoes. Kara is in charge of the big climate battery greenhouses. Olivia planting our own rosemary seedlings. Our beautiful rosemary seedlings looked like they were fried and dead for a while, but look at the top of the plant where there is new growth! I think they’re going to make it.Zucchini transplants didn’t do well here. Was it the weather going from very cold to very hot at the beginning of May? Was it irrigation? Was it slugs? Don’t worry. Sarah started a lot of seedlings so we’ll plant again.This spring we grew so much fabulous spinach! It was planted in the fall of 2021 and overwintered. I think we’ll do that again.John Duynisveld (Holdanca Farms) and David Greenberg (Abundant Acres Farm) discussing Market issues. It looks like David is having an idea!Marshall was hired one day per week as the admin and tech wizard. Here he’s troubleshooting the wifi repeater issue with Andrew and OliviaColleen with semposai. They are like collards, but sweeter, and grown during the summer. Everyone is going to love them.Carrot weeding is not a favourite job. We cover crops with insect netting to keep the flea beetles and other pests off. It’s a lot of work to cover them, but it really improves crop qualityLettuce, onions, lettuce, onions, lettuceFriday farm lunch with our pals next door at Fill Yer Boots Farm. David getting the last load of sheep manure spread before the rain. So satisfying! Sarah, Capitu, Kara. That hat Kara!
Abundant Acres Farm 