Catch Up

Well now, let's catch up. It's been the regular pattern of harvest days and fields days. The garden is looking amazing. New crops popping up all over the place (hint: beets soon, and also zucchini!). Our field work has been mainly removing row cover, hand weeding, and hoeing. Maintenance work really.

One piece of news, the massive brassica planting we did last week was entirely ruined. We covered the seedlings in floating row cover after we planted them, and then left them for two days before coming back to have a look.

Bad idea.

The farmers think it was a combination of the extreme heat last week, row cover, and not irrigating. We pulled the row cover off on Thursday to discover that almost every seedling was burnt to a crisp. This is a bit of a shame because we had planted the cabbage and half of the broccoli that was intended for the winter.

This week we managed to plant a few trays of left over cabbage and cauliflower, but I think the farmers are going to ask other CRAFT farms if they have any transplants to spare. Okay, I have to say it: it's amazing how quickly things can turn from promising to disastrous with crops.

The market went really well on the weekend. I think partly because of the variety we had, our increasing skill at displaying our veggies and engaging the customers, and because we had a newly painted sign. I'll see what I can do about posting some photos of it tomorrow.

This week Jarrod, Jeff, and I worked on making a better device for rolling up the row cover. I could explain, but I think a picture would be more helpful.

I've also still been fiddling with the cool room. Last week the thermometer outlet arrived. It's working wonderfully; it's keeping the temperature at 10 C within 1 C, without frosting up at all. This week I'm working on tracking how much power it's consuming and comparing it with the power consumed by the old cool room (i.e. the entire farm store).

Finally, snow peas. We harvested snow peas today for the Oakville and farm CSA pickups. Delicious. I like snap peas a lot, but I get pretty sick of them after munching on them for an hour. Not so with snow peas. There's something infinitely satisfying about them. But they have to be perfectly ripe, otherwise they taste either like masking tape or potting soil.