We’ll have choices from the following veggies this week:
Lettuce, chard, kale, sugar snap peas, radish, turnip, beets, kohlrabi, bok choi, komatsuna, dill, cilantro, parsley, green onion, bok choi
On the farm this week:
So I’m learning what winter in B.C is like. I haven’t seen the sun in a month and it rains all the time. We even got a rainstorm while harvesting today; so you vegetables are extra clean and we are extra muddy. We went from Manitoba winter, straight to B.C winter and soon we’ll be back into Manitoba winter. I’d rather have a B.C winter than a Manitoba summer though.
This week we did our last planting of broccoli, beans and carrots. All of our plantings at this time of year are planted into a cover crop of winter rye and vetch. Here’s Alyssa and Hin harvesting radishes in between 2 small strips of rye and vetch that I couldn’t till in because of the covers on the radish. Also notice the sweet chair Alyssa is sitting on – it’s a chair that is a piece of clothing you wear. It’s the greatest discovery I’ve made in 15 years! I wear one all the time now. Anytime you want to take a seat wherever you are – just sit down! Beyond the rye and vetch is where we seeded the winter carrots.
We’ve also been doing a lot of ‘no till’ planting this year. Here was some rye which we mowed and then tarped in order to kill it with out tilling and this is where we planted the last of the broccoli. Here’s Shola and Hin staring at each other hoping the other one will roll up this tarp and sandbags.
And with all the rain we’ve been getting, our black soil has turned white on top. This isf rom dissolved calcium precipitating as the soil dries out. Our soil is made out of dolomitic limestone, and you’d think that a soil made out of calcium would provide lots of calcium to the plants. Wrong! The calcium in calcium carbonate is not water soluble (except from rain water which is acidic) and there is too much magnesium which crowds out the calcium. To increase the amount of available calcium we add gypsum and sulfur each year. The gypsum is slightly water soluble, and the sulfur converts to sulfuric acid which dissolves calcium carbonate, and as the sulfur leaches out, it’s supposed to pull the excess magnesium away with it.
Here’s Alyssa and our newest helper : Maria weeding our second planting of beets.
That’s it for this week. Thanks and see you soon!
Jonathan, Sarah, Sandra, Alyssa, Shola, Morgan, Adriian, Hin, Maria.