We’ll have the following veggies this week:
Mixed greens, spinach, pea shoots, bok choi, tokyo bekana, radish, turnip, green onion, arugula, mustard greens.The tokyo bekana the lime green bunched chinese cabbage leaves. It’s nice light flavour makes it a good lettuce substitute. I like the peas shoots raw in salad or sandwiches, but you can also sautee them and there’s a recipe for that on the recipe page.My favourite way to eat bok choi is sauteed quickly with garlic and ginger in sesame oil and soy sauce: that’s all I’ll be eating for the next couple weeks. The turnips are also super sweet and great raw, and the leaves are edible also! Iff you want something spicy, choose the arugula or mustard mix (the colorful bunch)
On the farm this week.
It’s been another crazy spring. But since every spring is crazy, I guess it’s just been another completely normal spring! We went from having minus 5c I think just over a week ago to 38 degrees on friday. Plus it still hasnt’ rained here.We managed to miss the rain everyone else got last week. For the most part I don’t mind that, because it’s nice not working in muck, but now that everything is planted, some rain would be nice because we’ve been doing a lot of watering and will need to start moving sprinkler lines around soon.
It’s been a hectic spring with the colder weather not leaving us a lot of time to plant. We actually only finished planting on Thursday, which left us all of Friday to weed the whole farm. We didn’t succeed, but didn’t do too bad either. Here’s everyone harvesting in our pretty well weeded salad patch
The flea beetles have been particularly bad this year and really annoying because they’re not following the schedule that we had agreed on with each other, which is: we plant the brassicas the first or second week of May, then cover them all just before the flea beetles get bad, then the flea beetles calm down and we uncover them the week before harvest starts so we can replant dead ones and weed and water them. The flea beetles didn’t really go away this spring when they were supposed to, but I uncovered them anyways and word got around pretty fast amongst the flea beetles that we had uncovered our brassicas and they suddenly got really bad! The things we hadn’t uncovered were: radish, turnip, arugula, bok choi. As of Saturday I was actually planning on making everyone crawl under the covers to harvest because I though there was no way our plants would survive even a few minutes of being uncovered. But, when we came out this morning there were NO Flea beetles. Maybe it was all the rain everywhere else and the neighbours canola finally came up.
Here’ where we almost spent hours crawling and harvesting under and which probably would have made everyone quit…
The photo above is the harvest crew for this summer: Irina, Katilyn, New Sarah, and Hannah. Irina will again be trading off at the CSA pick ups with me so you will see her every other week. And the only person not in the picture is the other Sarah because she’s usually in the washstation doing all the washing. She keeps up with everyone all by herself and over the summer moveds every vegetable on our farm a few times: off the truck, into the tubs, into the cooler, onto the truck.
I look forward to seeing everyone again! I wish I could give you all hugs, and I know you’re all relieved that I can’t try that this year. You probably won’t recognize me as I haven’t had a haircut in a year now. So if you seem some guy you don’t recognize say hello because it’s probalby me.
And I probably won’t recognize you either with masks on.
That’s it for this week. See you soon,!
Jonathan, Sarah, Irina, Hannah, Kaitlyn and other Sarah