Hello everyone! Veggie season has begun!
This week we will have the following veggies for CSA:
lettuce, spinach, radish, turnip, pea shoots, bok choi, brocolette, arugula, mizuna, mixed mustard greens, leaf chinese cabbage, and green onions. Sadly we will only have asparagus for the full shares. The last couple years we’ve added the asparagus from Plum ridge farm to our CSA box for the first pick up, but I was just informed that the asparagus has not been producing nearly as much with this cooler spring and he does not have enough for us. So, for half shares we will substitute by adding an extra item – i.e – instead of choosing between something you will get both.
The mustard mix is the spiciest and most colourful one . The bunched loose leaf chinese cabbage( tokyo bekana) is a lighter sweet flavour and makes a good substitute for lettuce. The mizuna is always popular and not very spicy with a nutty flavor and has the serrated edges. They’re all great eaten raw in salad or mixed together and lightly sauteed or braised.
On the farm this week:
This year back on the farm I’m so happy that we have Sarah and Irina again! I think this is year 7 for Sarah and year 4 for Irina. You will see Irina every other week at the CSA pick up again and you’ll see Sarah in pictures of rain gear and long gloves washing veggies.
New this year is Danielle who’ll be working on the farm Mon, Wed, Friday and at the Wolseley market every Tuesday and Thursday so you can say hi to her then! Danielle loves farmers markets and sells her soaps and all kinds of other things at the Lac du bonnet farmers market and Beausejour farmers market on the weekend. I’m hoping she will teach me how she has such a busy schedule and is still always smiling.
And finally we have Nick, Irina’s son helping out for a while. He’s a pro at pounding stakes into the ground and put in all the stakes for our pea trellis last week.
The first thing I like to do each year is complain about the weather. It has been a cold spring this year with a lot of cool nights. We even had a couple frosts in June which is a first for me! Now I know why the smart farmers always wait to plant things. The first surprise late frost we had we spent a day covering plants. The weather looked good after that and so I thought we should uncover everything. Sarah said “are you sure you don’t want to wait and see if there’s more frost?” And I said “what are the odds of that happening, let’s uncover it “. And sure enough the next week we had a frost and spent a whole day putting up hoops and covering things back up again. Oh well…
With the cool spring things have not been growing as fast this year as usual. They’ve just been hanging out in the field waiting for some nice weather to grow. But it looks like we’ve finally got some nice weather now and hopefully things will grow extra fast to make up for lost time!
That’s it for this week. See you soon!
Jonathan, Sarah, Irina, Danielle and Nick