Your organic farm in the Eastern Townships
Each year, as the days shorten and we move into October, I pick up my well-thumbed copy of Verlaine. I always flip to the same poem, a few stanzas thrown on a page, simply written but so evocatively capturing the essence of what we all feel as autumn begins. The poem is Chanson d’automne (Autumn Song), an ode…
Montreal’s public markets are lively these days. We should know, it’s where we spend our weekends. You can feel the end of the season is nigh and like any season end, it is characterized by a last minute frenzy, as some rush to fill up on paste tomatoes for their spaghetti sauce while others load up…
Following its August apex, the season continues to decelerate, trailing with it a number of pluses and a few minuses. On the plus side, who would have thought we’d see such clement weather given a Farmer’s Almanac average first frost date of September 18 in Quebec? We certainly won’t complain, nor will a number of vegetables in our…
You can look for them high and low, but you won’t find them anymore : our young farm employees have left in pursuit of more studious occupations. Colleges and universities beckon, and the call of the classroom has won out…you may still catch a glimpse of them from time to time at our market stands, but they…
I like to say that the harvest season still has a long way to go and that summer still has a few spectacular days left, but these are risky – or at the very least, incomplete – statements. Harvests are but one of the many things that keep us busy at the farm these days. Field…
We have a big week in store at Arlington Gardens. The vagaries of the season are such that we find ourselves having to rush to harvest our winter squash which have all ripened at once as we also hasten to dry out our conservation onions a bit more in one of our greenhouses before bagging them…
August is already drawing to a close and as I write these lines, we are sowing the last trays of the season, a series of leafy greens that will tickle your taste buds in October. To think that we opened our seedling greenhouse in mid-March …and that it has been operating non-stop since, week after week, yielding…
And into the fire… or so it seems, as we exit a heat wave and they are forecasting another cloudless week for vacationers’ pleasure. For this market farmer, today has been an all-hands-on-deck day to ensure a good drenching of all the seedlings scheduled for planting over the next few days as well as seedlings transplanted…
August is upon us and your farmer knows he’s heading into the final stretch. August is a perilous month, one of heavy humidity, blazing suns and late greenhouse seedlings that still require our full attention. Summer’s end plays itself out in the fields, as harvested plots need to be quickly harrowed and just as quickly sown…
I am often asked how best to store vegetables from your weekly csa baskets in your fridges – the short answer is to make sure there is as little water as possible on your leafy greens and to stock up on glass or plastic containers for all your vegetables. For your leafy greens (lettuces, kales and tutti…