Well, that’s it for another Edmonton Folk Music Festival! Only another 49 weeks until we start setting it all up again, and we’re already looking forward to it. We’ll be heading in later this week to help with tear down – all of the infrastructure that was set up now has to be packed away until next year – but after that we’re all done. If you’d like to hear more about the highlights of the festival, my friend Alita asked me to write a quick guest blog over at ArtTrends magazine, and you can take a look at it HERE.
By the end of festival weekend, Dawn and I were getting used being called ‘The Sprout Girls’ wherever we went. Other site crew members knew that we had supplied both site kitchen and festival kitchen with our shoots, so the new moniker started up during set-up, and we ran into several of our Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market customers enjoying the festival, who would exclaim, ‘Hey, it’s our sprout girls!!’ It was great to have a little break from the farm, and now we’re refreshed and ready for one last two-month push in this outdoor season. We’re hearing the migrating birds in the forest and feel, with the changing light and nighttime temperatures, that the season is winding down. We’re so proud of the variety of beautiful produce we’re able to sell at this time of year, and look forward to reconnecting with our customers at market.
This is a great time to make it down to market and load up on some delicious summer ingredients. We had some beautiful
Inside a beautiful head of lettuce
heads of lettuce on our table last week: Red Romaine, Green Romaine, Merlot (deep red) and Anunu, and were disappointed to bring several back from our market day. We and our staff have been gorging ourselves on the stuff all week, so all is not lost, but we really encourage you to pick some up while they’re available – it’s some of the best lettuce you’ll find all year. We’ll be bringing in the Green Romaine to the Old Strathcona Market on Saturday, and are offering the two red varieties through The Organic Box, as a substitution (we should have a few of each variety on our table in Onoway).
We’ll have all kinds of yummy things to add to your salad, too. Of course, there’s our year-round microgreens that add a special pop to your salad, and the beautiful edible flowers that add a bit of panache. The cucumbers are growing like crazy, and our numbers are getting bigger every week. We try to snap them off the plants while they are still pickling size, but the variety we grow (Excelsior), are still delicious when they’re accidentally allowed to
Salt and Pepper Cucumbers
grow bigger. We also grow Salt and Pepper Cucumbers which, with their pale yellow skin, look unusual, but their taste is absolutely delicious! They are a little sweeter than than the usual green cucumbers we’re all used to, and they’re the ‘burpless’ variety, so if you suffer from indigestion when eating cucumbers, they’re worth a try.
The tomatoes that have taken over the cold frame are now starting to ripen on the vine, and there are pockets of red and orange sprinkled throughout the massive green forest in there. If you’ve eaten nothing but store-bought tomatoes for the last little while,
Delicious Cherry Tomatoes
grab a pint and remind yourselves of what a tomato really tastes like.
Elsewhere in the field, we’ve started pulling out our garlic crop. It’s only our second year growing heads of garlic, and we learned the hard way last year not to leave them in the ground for too long. Using the digger on the tractor, we’ve harvested around a third of the crop, and they’re laid out on one of our big, metal tables, curing
The Garlic needs to sit and dry, or cure, for a few days before it goes into storage
for a few days before we put them in storage. Some of the heads are
huge, and the flavour of the garlic is quite strong – we’re finding we need to use around half as much as usual in order to get the garlic taste we’re looking for.
We have some beans that are finally ready to pick. Green beans are the first up to the plate, and in the last few weeks, they’ve started to produce in larger numbers, so we’ll be able to bring some in to market, and the yellow variety isn’t far
Dragon Tongue Bean, ready to pick and eat!
behind. In the cold frame, the Dragon-Tongue beans we planted in some beds to replace some nitrogen in the soil are ready. The Dragon-Tongue bush beans are my favorite, by far, and it’s not just because of their cool name and coloring. They’re best raw, since the color fades away when cooked, and they are a little broader and juicier than the more conventional bush beans (which, don’t get me wrong, are still delicious).
Out in the Brussels Sprout patch, the plants have transitioned into the next stage. The sprouts themselves have started to form on on the stalks! Each little round cluster will eventually become a ball of goodness, like a miniature cabbages. Until I’d tried fresh Brussels Sprouts a few years ago, I thought I
Brussels Sprouts finally forming
hated this vegetable, but there’s really no comparing fresh Brussels to the packaged, frozen stuff I was used to as a kid.
And our most prolific crop at the moment, by far, is the summer squash field. We just started offering half-pound containers of baby Patty Pan Squash to The Organic Box, and the number of requests for this product is swiftly on the rise, with good reason. If you’re not sure what to do with this cool -looking vegetable, I’ve written a quick post about it that you can find HERE.
Even though it has only been one week, it seems like a long time since the last market. We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Until next time,
– Kate
