Your organic farm in the Eastern Townships
It seems all we have been doing in our spare time for the past month is staking and suckering tomatoes. Tomato chores rank pretty high on the tedium spectrum of vegetable farming – close runner-ups to weeding carrots (by far the most tedious of all vegetable chores). But, as we keep telling ourselves, it’s worth…
Given an early Spring and recent warm days, our plants are growing like gangbusters. This morning, as we were staking tomatoes, I started thinking that this might be a record year, agriculturally speaking, at least. Take our tomatoes, for example: June is not yet over and they are already laden with fruit. I am so…
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 The nonchalance of early May has been replaced by a sense of urgency as we have to plant, and fast, before the next rains.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…
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…
Here we go again. Broccoli is getting a bum rap, and American consumers are going to pay. Reacting to the current debate on President Obama’s health care bill (‘Obamacare’), certain politicians and Supreme Court justices are turning broccoli into an ideological scapegoat. “The government can’t force us to eat broccoli,” they’ve said in rebuttal to…
The first fall frost welcomed us in the fields this morning. You know there is no turning back to summer once frost has hit, even if, as they are forecasting this Thanksgiving weekend, it is followed by a balmy Indian summer spell. While some vegetables resist, and even relish, frost (brocoli, jerusalem artichokes and lettuce,…
The month of July was exhausting, with yo-yoing temperatures and countless fires to put out. August looks promising in comparison. We have begun harvesting the season’s first melons – they are truly delicious – as well as those summer stalwarts: eggplants, peppers and the quintessential tomato, which weighs heavy on the vine in great abundance…
Not much time to write, as we prepare for the deliveries of our first baskets before the Saint-Jean weekend…A few pictures are more telling than words : while we will continue to start plants from seed in the greenhouse through July, our recent focus has been on planting and transplanting in the field. Many mid- to…
It is difficult to speak of anything other than rain these days. There has been so much of it these last few weeks that some sections of our fields just aren’t draining. You can forget the use of most farm equipment in the soggy patches. Given the nature of our soil, tractor treads would take…
After last week’s proverbial April showers, we were hoping not only for May flowers, but for drier days propitious to planting. So far, though, May has been a disappointment: a short sunny break (four days), followed by diluvial rains since Tuesday noon. For farmers with loamy soils, a few days without rain will not suffice…