We have so much to tell you! Let us begin by reminding you that deliveries of your first baskets for the 2016 season will start on Wednesday, June 15 for Montreal West, Town of Mount Royal, Yellow Pages Group and the Caisse de dépôt et placement/Ivanhoe and on Thursday, June 16 for our Westmount friends (see details here). We will welcome you with open arms, particularly if you come with your own loot bags to haul your veggies home. We’ll be bringing eggs, courtesy of our organic grain-fed hens ($6 a dozen – bring us your egg cartons, they’ll get a new lease on life). Accompanying us will be Ghislain Despatie and/or his wife Céline Richard, our very own Stanbridge East organic bakers. They’ll have breads for you to sample, in the hopes some of you may like to sign up for their bread basket program. We’ll let them fill you in on the details in person.
Following an unseasonably dry period, the weather turned – just in the nick of time – serving up abundant rains combined with chilly temperatures more fall-like than spring-like. The mad dash to water small plants and transplants ended abruptly, replaced by pacing and hemming and hawing as we wondered when the downpours would cease. We’ve been told the wet weather will end Tuesday, and it’s a good thing, too, because a cold-induced vegetative state is not one we wish upon our vegetables at this stage. A few days of sunshine will help make our strawberries redder and our beets rounder.
This week’s baskets are much like the first baskets of previous years – overflowing with the leafy greens that Mother Nature coaxes out of the soil first, when left to her own devices. We have a few suggestions to make re the handling of leafy greens, with a view to ensuring they last longer in your refrigerators: the sooner you wash them (again – as our leafy greens are dunked in an ice-cold bath as soon as they are harvested) and dry them, the longer they’ll last. The effort is worth the bother, as the special care makes a huge difference in their refrigerator life expectancy. Excess humidity can quickly damage most leafy greens – best practice is to wash the leaves as soon as you can, then spin/dry them and place them in an air-tight container in the fridge. For more info, come see us at the drop-off. We look forward to seeing you all.