Your organic farm in the Eastern Townships
To be taken with a grain of salt, always, but the latest forecast is calling fora first frost in our area this week– a mere -1ºC, not yet cold enough to slay the weeds in our fields, but nonetheless deadly enough to fell our current crop of nightshades (solanaceas). Decades of local statistics show an…
It has been a while since we’ve had forecasts calling forso much grey and rainy weather.Although Meteomedia – the most pathologically optimistic weather service I have ever come across – was recently forecasting a warm and sun-filled fall, this week has sent us careening into fall colours and dank, chilly temperatures. These rains are far removed from…
A market customer asked me yesterday if market farmers eat betterthan most during the long winter months.Unfortunately, I had to admit that we too despair in winter, particularly when our supplies run out and even we have to trudge off to the grocery store for our weekly provisions. I exaggerate, but only a bit. Most…
There’s nothing better than a cool, grey Monday to slip into Fall.We seized the opportunity to harvest half of our winter squash and to fill several bins with onions of all kinds. It was high time to bring in the onions, which had spent the past week curing in the fields, under a bit of…
When one says ‘market farmer,’ one immediately thinks of soil, tractors and vegetable-growing know-how –but one forgets that market farmers are travelling farmers, and yours truly certainly travels quite a bit. Yearly, as we take to Quebec’s magnificently (!) surfaced roads again in June, we re-acquaint ourselves with every bump, crack, swell and twist, and develop a very…
Week 12 of 23, almost mid-season already,so I must seize this opportunity to mention a couple of things that will soon be upon us. First, our potluck dinner.It will be on October 10, Thanksgiving Monday. The concept is simple : you will be asked to confirm your participation by email; to bring a dish of your…
Have you noticed them lately?The first cool nights of August,an infallible sign that summer has reached its point of inflection, an impossible-to-ignore indication that – despite the many beautiful days still to come – we are slowly but surely entering into autumn. For all the plants in our fields, the cool nights are an open…
In vegetable farming, rain days or days after are so many opportunitiesto catch up on all the to-do items left undone, precisely unless favourable or unfavourable weather leaves us no other option than actually getting them done. Today has been a case in point – i.e. a rainy night followed by an equally rainy day filled with overcast…
There was a time when news of our garlic harvest was broadcast with a drumrolland elicited applause.A sign of the times, perhaps, this year’s harvest – while still important – was sandwiched between pressing field work and more pressing still seedling transplanting. Not to worry, though: our garlic was indeed harvested over the weekend and…
“What is the difference between a québécois summer and an Algerian one?” you may ask.These days, nothing really, except perhaps a few degrees and a humidex measurement. Your vegetable farmer has gone AWOL for a short spell, just long enough for a quick visit to the Numidian country from which he hails to take care of some administrative matters and to…