Farm news week 14

This week Csaer’s will be choosing from:

Watermelon, onions, potatoes, carrots, beets, broccoli, peppers, spinach, lettuce, dill, cilantro, parsley, basil, scallions, cucumber, zucchini, tomato and eggplant.

I’m excited about the watermelons – they’re delicious.  We will be cutting them into halves or quarters depending on the size (the one I weighed today was 21 lbs).  Here’s Nicole driving in the load we harvested today.

Also, there is some older corn (from last week) that is still very sweet, but is getting older.  I think it would be good for freezing or canning still, and Nicole and Kitana thinks it’s still good for eating, so we will have a few bags of the older corn for people to help themselves to at the end of the line.  What fresh corn we have left will be offered as part of the regular share.

We will also have surplus discounted tomatoes for sale again this week.

This week on the farm:

We had some extra help this week from Mark -Jan (Mark -Jan is a gardener from Ontario and has been offering free samples of his honey to CSA members).  Nicole was sick this week and Mark Jan filled in for a day while she had  a few days off.  Nicole was feeling like a zombie with a bad back at the end of the day last Monday, but is recharged and smiling as much as ever now.

This year I tried some experimental plantings of some winter vegetables that I’ve not grown before including winter kohlrabi, rutabaga, and 2 kinds of storage radish.  Today we tried the black winter radish.  It’s been looking like it’s starting to bolt, and when we tasted it it was woody and so extremely spicy that I started hallucinating when I bit into it.  This is Nicole’s actual face when she bit into the radish (she didn’t know I was filming her).  We’ll  have to wait and see if a few serious frosts do anything to help the flavour, but I think next year I will have to plant it later.  For anyone wanting to try it this year, I think cooking it will be the way to go.

I have to put a picture of Kitana this week because she’s not wearing her rain suit or mosquito netting and is driving a tractor.  Three things I didn’t think I’d see all on the same day!  Here is Kitana digging up potatoes with the tractor.  Apparently this is the tractor edition of the newsletter.

This week at the market:

Mark Klassen will be doing a free workshop on edible landscaping at 5:30.  You don’t want to miss it:

“Our living environments are probably capable of producing much more food than we may be aware.  Urban Eatin’ will explore the idea of turning your green spaces into highly productive edible gardens, combining form withfunction and maintaining the aesthetic beauty!”

That’s it for this week.   See you soon,

Jonathan, Nicole, Kitana