COMING OUT
Baby Carrots and Volunteer Garlic
We’re just launching the newsletter now, celebrating the kick-off of another Northern Alberta spring, but in our heated cold frame, it’s been spring for a few weeks, now, already. We first planted in there on March 3rd, and we’ve been harvesting from there since April 11th.
Get Yer
Ya-Ya’s Out
We’ve been anticipating the week when we can finally bring fresh baby carrots to our stall at the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market, and it looks like this is the week! Like divas, the Ya-Ya carrots we planted in early March have been waiting for the perfect moment to pull off a dramatic entrance. It’s so much fun seeing people at market stop dead in their tracks, exclaim in delight, and make a bee-line to our booth to grab a bunch (or three). It takes a lot of time and elbow grease to be able to bring carrots to market before the grass is even green outside. Our cold frame is heated by a wood-fired furnace, with underwater pipes buried under the beds, heating the space from the earth. It’s perfect for a root crop like carrots.
Space is limited – we currently have only one structure, with plans to purchase and build more this summer – so our bunches won’t be on the table long. If you want to ensure you can bring some home, make sure to come early! The market runs from 8am – 3pm.
Volunteer Garlic Shoots
This will be the second week we’ll be bringing outdoor-grown garlic shoots to market. We started bringing garlic shoots to market early in the new year, on January 4th, as well as offering them to customers at The Organic Box. 2013 was our first year growing and selling garlic (and weeding it, too. Oy-vey was that a job). The garlic we were storing over the winter started sprouting, and we were no longer comfortable selling it. After fretting about the loss for a few days, we decided to put some cloves into trays, just like we do our wheatgrass and microgreens, and try growing some garlic shoots. We didn’t know if it would work or not, but figured we had nothing to lose.
They are so. freaking. good.
Delicious added to salads (especially a nice Caesar Salad), in scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, as a garnish, or even on tacos. Anywhere you would normally use green onions or chives.
We did have one week at market without any garlic shoots to offer (we ran out of bulbs to plant), but luckily, we now have some growing outside. There were some bulbs left in the field where we harvested our first bulbs last fall. That wasn’t part of any grand plan, or anything – some bulbs got dropped and left, some heads of garlic just refused to come out – but it’s working out well for us now. They’ve been great short-term volunteers, as we have to pull them all before we can plant anything else there. We never plant a crop in the same spot in consecutive years (it’s all a rotation in order to help with soil health), so this year in that part of the field we’ll have pumpkins, buttercup and spaghetti squash in that part of our gardens.
The outdoor garlic shoots aren’t quite as tender (they’ve had to brave winds, and cold temperatures) and their flavor is definitely stronger than the ones babied indoors, and we sure are glad to still have some to bring to market, and to keep in our fridge.
Warning: They’re addictive.
GOING IN
Potatoes
We’ve planted quite a bit outside in the gardens already this year. Even though the nights have still been cool (and even some of the days, too), some plants, are cold hardy enough to still take root. Over the last two weeks, we’ve planted radish, carrot, lettuce, beets, spinach, arugula, onion sets and dill. With the little bit of heat we’ve had over the last week or so, they’re finally starting to show above ground.
Frankly, my Deere
We don’t pull out the tractor very often, so when Dawn and her dad Aime attached the potato planter to the ol’ John Deere, just as the sun was going down last Friday, I had to head out to snap some photos. I’ve never seen the potato planter in action before, so I was curious to see how it works.
The planter attachment makes the job much less labour intensive, and a whole lot faster. Potatoes get loaded into the hopper, and the person sitting in the seat, facing backwards, has to make sure that as the potato drops and gets covered in dirt, another potato replaces it in the circle. We’re succession planting this year, hoping that we’ll be able to bring baby potatoes in over the course of the summer. That’s the plan, anyways.
IN THE WAITING ROOM
We started picking asparagus for home and staff last year on May 14th. While the perennial spears have started shyly poking their heads out of the ground, we won’t start picking until this weekend, and we’ll have to wait another week or two before we have enough to bring to market. The beginning of May 2013 was much warmer than this year (in fact, I think we had a day or two of plus thirty temperatures around May 5 last year, which was just weird), so the asparagus is taking a little bit longer. We planted some purple asparagus last fall, but we’ll have to wait a couple more years before we can harvest them, as they need time to really take root and become productive.
We have big plans for the next few weeks, so make sure to come back and check it out. If you know of anyone else who would be interested in learning more about microgreens, wheatgrass and organic vegetables, please pass on the link. We’d love to have them on-board!