Happy New Year!

To our friends and customers, we offer a heartfelt thank you for the year just ended and best wishes for a 2013 filled with good things and clement weather. Claire and Nasser at Arlington Gardens

Ode to a Crucifer

This week we write our ode to the turnip, a sadly under-appreciated vegetable. The ones we’re harvesting now are delicious  – with a turnip-y sharpness that balances out the plump sweetness they’ve developed thanks to the cooler (and wetter) weather we’ve been having. Like our other spring crucifers, our previous crop of turnips suffered the…

Last Rays

The weather has been playing tricks on us. After two (almost consecutive) frosts last week, we saw balmy temperatures again early this week – just enough for our veggies to recover from the brief cold spell. At this time of year, every sunny day counts, particularly if there are two or three in a row.…

Farm Feast

We want to thank those of you who joined us for our September 9 mechoui. Nearly 170 of you, adults and children combined, converged on the farm. Good humour and plentiful food were the order of the day, we have the pictures to prove it. The weekend seemed off to a bad start on Saturday,…

Make or Break

The stress level on the farm has just gone up a few notches. The nonchalance of early May has been replaced by a sense of urgency as we have to plant, and fast, before the next rains. Coming days will be spent binge planting eggplants, peppers, corn, zucchini and cucumbers. Two weeks from now, we’ll…

Watching Things Grow

From one year to the next, change is the only constant, or so it seems. Rewind to May last year: we were experiencing diluvian downpours, waiting for the rain to stop long enough to be able to transplant our first seedlings to the fields. This year’s weather is only marginally better – showers instead of…

Drain Doctor

We’ve taken advantage of the recent dry spell to work on our drains. Well-drained fields are critical, as water can accumulate in undrained patches, a real headache when planting time rolls along. Some fields, given their soil composition and texture, drain naturally. Others need a little help. Not so long ago (in the 70s and…

Climate Change

Too much change in just a week. While winter never really settled in this year, at least the chill was sufficient to remind us that we do live in Canada, after all. But over the past few days, ‘place your bets, all bets are off!’ a climate croupier might say. We’ve gone from winter woollens…

Thirty Acres

Photo is of June Afternoon, by Konstantine Rodko, from the cover of the 1991 edition of Trente arpents by Flammarion. Trente arpents ( translated into English as « Thirty Acres, » but « Twenty-Five » would have been more accurate) is the tragic story of the rise and fall of turn-of-the-last-century farmer Euchariste Moisan, as told by québécois novelist…

Turnips to taxis

We should have known this before embarking on our agricultural adventure, but it is only recently that we learned that the patron saint of gardeners is Saint Fiacre (Fiachra is an ancient pre-Christian name from Ireland). Apparently he was as effective at healing haemorrhoids as he was at growing turnips. Saint Fiacre, represented more often…