Farm news June 12/2018

Alriggghty! – It’s time to get this party started!

This week for CSA we will have choices from:

Lettuce mix, spinach, asparagus, radish/salad turnips, bok choi/chinese cabbage, mustard greens/mizuna/arugula/beet greens, alfalfa sprouts, green onions, dill/cilantro.

The mustard mix  is the spiciest and most colourful one (if you scroll way down you’ll see Renae holding up different greens).  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.

And Below is Lance (remember him!?) holding up our hakurei turnips everyoe seems to love.   They’re sweet and spicy and juicy and the leaves are edible too – you can cook them in with your other greens!

On the farm so far:

First maybe I’ll  bring you all up to date on what we’ve been going on at the farm for the last few weeks:  planting and weeding- that didn’t take long did it?

This spring seems to have been lot more planting than usual.  We had some crazy mid may frosts, then crazy mid may flea beetles and crazy late may cutworms; so with all the replanting we did I think we’ve pretty much planted the whole garden 2x, which for all the mathematicians out there is like 2x the work!  So it’s pretty nice to be finally harvesting something for a change!

This year working on the farm we have a bunch of familiar people.  Lance will l be the resident farmer this year.  You might remember him as the guy only ate 30 bananas a day and would get up at 4 to go for a run before work.  I’ve been trying to tell him that if he just runs during work he gets his cardio in and should actually then pay me for his saved gym membership and saved time.  No one seems to agree but am I not right??

This year we  also  have Kelsey. Last year Kelsey came out to the farm once a week last to just pull thistles all day.  When she came to to start in the spring and I asked if she knew how to weed the carrots she looked at me in disbelief and said me “what the …do you think I did all last year” This Kelsey will be working on the farm and at the market stand in Wolseley so go say hello!  Here she is doing some more of her favorite things: digging up quack grass

The only new person this year is Renae who is trying to challenge Jaroslav from last year as the most responsible teenager ever.  Renae’s here for the summer.  She’s form Selkirk, but is studying at some university in Ontario.  Today she was promoted to veggie washer and I didn’t remember to tell her until after she was done washing that there’s a rain suit for her.  Here she is holding arugula and mizuna in her left hand and mustard greens and tokyo bekana in her right hand.

 

Finally,  Sarah showed up for her first day of work today.  If anyone guesses what she’s been doing for the last month you’ve won extra radishes (hint its’ the same thing she does every year)…

 

Well that’s it for this week.

See you soon!

Jonathan, Sarah, Lance, Kelsey and Renae