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Well now, here we are after a week or so since my last post. I'll sum up our work for the last while: hoeing and hand weeding. We've all been on weed control almost full time, except for some of those rainy days. We've worked our way through all of the beds of carrots, beets, parsley, cilantro, parsnip, onions, spring onions, leeks, parsley, celeriac, celery, and the cut flowers. Last week the work was wonderful -- the overcast and cool days make this sort intensive work a joy. I mean, what could be better than hovering a few inches from the earth whilst decapitating helpless weeds and chatting with folks about your favourite t.v. shows as a kid? Actually, much of the time we're quiet, chatting intermittently about nonsense for a bit and then returning to our work.

On the rainy days we worked on the cool room, seeding, and getting the harvest area set up. The cool room is currently in the integration testing phase. We've got the room completely insulated, the air conditioner installed and venting. We left it running today to see how it works. Unfortunately it's hard to say if it did anything at all. The room was 14C in the morning, and then at the end of the day the out room was 23 C (because we left the door open purposely) and the cool room was up to 15C. Now, we're thinking that maybe the air conditioner isn't even cooling since we haven't done anything to recalibrate the thermostat, but we'll need to keep testing to be sure.

The harvest area has been cleaned up a bit and is looking close to being ready to go. Last week we tested the new system for rinsing lettuce mix. Here's how it works. We have three barrels (actually, halves of pickle barrels) filled with water. The lettuce mix to be washed goes in a big net which is pushed into the first barrel of water and sloshed around a bit (gently so that the stuff doesn't bruise). Then the net is lifted out of the first barrel and put in the second. Repeat for the third. Then the net of clean, but wet, lettuce mix is transferred to the old washing machine we hacked up. A few seconds in the spin cycle and voila! Dry, rinsed lettuce mix. Beauty!

Well that's the plan anyhow. We gave this a shot last week and it seemed to work very well. We'll know at the end of this week when we head to the Georgetown Farmers Market to sell our stuff. What are we likely to be selling? Well, hopefully salad mix. In any case, from now on I'll keep a list up on the side bar of my best guess as to what will be available at the market on Saturdays. It's not certain since what we bring depends on exactly what is ready and what we harvest, of course.