Field Notes: June 5, 2014

Coming Out

As the days get longer, we’re gradually transitioning our harvest from the cold frame to the outdoor crops. This week, we’ll be bringing more of our succulent and sweet carrots in to both markets. They sure have been a hot seller, flying off our table at both Old Strathcona and Onoway markets.

We have a small number of beautiful romaine lettuce heads this week, as well as some of the Merlot leaf lettuce we had last week.  It was a pretty small harvest this week, but we will be bringing in many more a few weeks from now, including a variety called Pomegranate Crunch. If you’d like to learn why darker lettuce is best, and find out what varieties we’ll have this year, check out the link HERE.

The green onions out by the pond are ready for market, as is the spinach from our outdoor bed. We didn’t have any spinach at all last week, so if you’ve been going through withdrawals, make sure to make your way to market! We started growing this variety, Corvair, a couple of years ago, and it has a wonderful texture that works great in salads.

It’s not only the planned crops that are starting to thrive outside, the weeds are starting to grow like crazy. The big push over the next couple of weeks, now that we’re almost done with planting and seeding, is to get all hands on deck for a weeding extravaganza. Gotta give all the little plants out there some room to breathe.

Going In

We’ve had a really productive week in the fields, getting several things into the ground. Dawn seeded the carrots earlier this week. This year we’ll be growing the more common Little Finger Nantes, as well as a variety new to the farm, called Cosmic Purple.

We have six long rows of the super-sweet corn planted close enough to pollinate themselves, and on Wednesday we sent our crew out to transplant the summer squash seedlings.

We love the patty-pan, or scallopini squash (partly because they look like tiny little spaceships), and we’ll have the lighter-green Magda, as well as the more familiar yellow and green zuchini. We’re trying hard to show some restraint with our summer squash zone, but we’ll have to wait and see. They’re so small going in, but harvesting of these extremely prolific and well producing varieties takes a lot of time and effort.

The Waiting Room

We’re closely watching the weather forecast right now. Environment Canada is calling for a low of 3 degrees Celcius for Stony Plain on Thursday night, which means that out here at the farm, the low could get down to zero. Sure hope that isn’t the case, but we’ll just have to hope that if we do get any frost, it’s patchy, and doesn’t damage the young and delicate plants outside. It’s much too big of an area to cover, so we’re just waiting, and keeping all our fingers and toes crossed.

The Saskatoon bushes blossomed earlier this week, and it sure looks pretty out in the fenced-off area. It’ll be a while yet until we get any berries, but the blossoms are a good sign. We have a large patch of both raspberries and Saskatoons, and we’re really hoping to get some U-Pick action happening out there this summer. We’ll keep you posted!

This is only our second year with a garlic crop, and are they ever looking good! Already, the base of many of the plants is wider around than our crop last year. We were able to get the garlic in much earlier this past fall, and there was enough snowfall to protect and insulate the patch for the entire winter.

Soon, we’ll be able to bring delicious garlic scapes in to market again. Middle leaves of the garlic are starting to thicken up, and are twisting and curling, which is the first step towards creating the scape, or the flower head. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about these cool and tasting things when we start bringing them in.

Talk to you next week!