A Welcome Breeze

Last week ended on a refreshing note, with scattered showers and a welcome breeze. Enough water to quench the thirst of parched vegetables, but not enough to replenish irrigation ponds. These days, beggars can’t be choosers, we’ll take whatever water comes our way. Meanwhile, vegetables and weeds are engaged in their annual combat, one which…

An Ode to Irrigators

A quick search in the dictionary leads one to conclude that irrigators come in all shapes and sizes, and serve a very wide variety of purposes. Our irrigators, however, are of the human kind, and have been sweating blood and tears almost literally – given the successive heat waves we have been experiencing – to…

Family and Friends

As is no doubt true for many of you, COVID-19 is everything but business as usual here at the farm. That said, seeding and transplanting in the greenhouse are essentially untouched, these are activities we handle on our own, meticulously. Likewise, basic field prep is handled by our home team – sitting high on our…

2020 Season Launch

It is with equal parts pleasure and trepidation that we announce the launch of our 2020 CSA season, our 11th to be precise. We thought it best to wait until the first real winter storm of the year was behind us, but as we are only a few weeks from the opening of our seedling greenhouse,…

October Mondays, October Sunsets

With the arrival of Fall and fewer vegetables to be harvested, we’ve begun to take Mondays off over the past few weeks. It’s a good thing. Firstly, I don’t really like Mondays. Secondly, Mondays are rarely sunny, or so it seems, lately. And so we seize the opportunity to sit, to do a bit of…

Of Squash Harvests

We harvested the last of the winter squash today. Beautiful butternuts, harvested at dusk, are stacked high in our otherwise now empty seedling greenhouse. ‘Twas never thus, we who thought the squash harvest had to be a single epic battle, leaving us always feeling overwhelmed and heavily outnumbered, not unlike Alexander’s troops as they stood their ground…

Ode to Eggplant

Your baskets are overflowing with eggplants these days, and in response to the queries of some, I feel compelled to explain the why and wherefore of this overabundance. There are three vegetables I grow in large quantities, all of which belong to the solanaceae, or nightshade, family – eggplant, peppers and tomatoes. In the case of…

Seeking Balance

We’ve had to reorganise the warehouse – moving crates and boxes, freeing up passageways – to make room for our first Fall vegetables, our winter squash. On this Monday morning, we harvested them at dawn – spaghetti squash, buttercup and more. While we were at it, we also harvested our seeded watermelons, our favourites, perfectly…

A single blueberry season

I’ve started working on my créole lately. I wasn’t particularly intent on studying another language. We already speak three at the farm, Spanish being our lingua franca given the time spent with our Mexican crew. But necessity is the mother of invention, and a smattering of créole has been useful given the help we’ve been getting from workers hired…

Cornfest

After a few years of dwindling corn yields, I am pleased to announced that our stratagem seems to be working; as a result, you will be able to munch on your cobs shortly…Without going into technical detail, it seems that the success of our electrification scheme had less to do with the 110-volt hook-up, and…