With last night’s forecast calling for -3°C, I finally figured a little floating row cover frost protection might be a good idea. In fact, though, with the cloudy, windy, wet conditions right through to Saturday evening, a solid freeze didn’t seem all that likely. And that turned out to be the case. The min/max thermometer outside the greenhouse registered a low of -5°C, but only a few crops suffered minor damage. Even the basil, which is really tender, did well: the top layer of leaves took one for the team, but the rest were fine. Here, some sweet pepper plants sit under cover, but the forecast for the next week is…quite warm. When exactly does the season end?
peppers
Basic barbecue
In my continuing series of small, curious steps backward, yesterday, I acted impulsively on an idea that’d come to me a couple of days earlier. Instead of the usual junk food “treat” that’s become a Saturday afternoon ritual on the way back from the farmers’ market , we stopped in at a local, independent butcher and bought small portions of beef, pork, chicken and four types of sausage, and at the mega-hardware store, a cheap, old style barbecue ($20CDN). Back at the farm, the meat got skewered, along with farm onions, mostly hot peppers, and three types of zucchini—a prepared rub on the meat, salt, pepper and olive oil on the veggies—and then it was over the coals instead of the usual propane treatment. There was enough to do it all over again late this morning for…brunch, to feed four. It may be a little silly, enjoying every turn to the seemingly simpler, like doing away with fast food and propane tanks in favor of a marginally more basic cookery, but it feels…good. I think this is tiny farming-induced behavior. Demand simplicity!!
Little bundles for market
As things slow down in the garden and crops finish for the year, there is more time for really tiny harvests of this and that. Fifteen bundles of chives, a couple dozen small but tasty red peppers—little hauls like these add variety and incremental sales at the farmers’ market stand. I imagine you can afford to spend time on this kind of thing only on a really small, hand-cultivated farm. The veggie line-up for today’s market: carrot, mesclun, potato, onion, garlic, beet, summer squash, tomato, green onion, parsley, a few eggplant, peppers, cabbage and cauliflower, a little spinach and chives…
Hot peppers
As things begin to slow down in the field, with crops finishing for the season, half-forgotten gems brighten up the harvest days. Here, two beds of hot peppers, tucked away at the bottom of the field, have been doing uncommonly well. I’m not well versed in pepper heat, but I can tell that most of the selection is…rather hot. So hot that delicately biting into the flesh, without actually chewing a piece, is enough to provide a sensation that most people find quite intense, even slightly alarming. These beautiful red Cayenne Long Slim are no exception!
Four shares on the table
After the long holiday weekend, I did a quick new harvest for the handful of usually-on-Monday CSA shares. We have three CSA pick-up days, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and harvest for the last two can be mostly combined on Sundays. With kinda cool and cloudy weather today, veggies could be left outside on the table for a few minutes—in full summer heat, they’d quickly start to get toasted. I’ve tried to reduce PLASTIC to a minimum (tiny farming has somehow made me averse to much packaging, especially with plastic). The tomatoes need to be kept together, they’d be crushed if let loose in the final shopping bag. And the greens, well, no other easy solution (I’m looking into reusable cotton salad bags that could be put in the fridge, another future project; I’ve moved to paper bags this year for potatoes). As for the shopping bags, I’m considering reusable tote bags, two per shareholder, that could be swapped empty-for-full each week, but the extra BAG MANAGEMENT I know would be fairly, let’s see…time-consuming. Details…
Share of the week
A specially Thursday-picked Large share, tiny farm flexibility in action for a shareholder who missed the weekend pick-up. A Large is about one and a half the size of the standard Single share. This week: carrot (Touchon), beet (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme), tomato (assorted heirloom), mesclun (9-lettuce), spring onion (Ramrod, Red Baron), summer squash (Sunburst, Golden Dawn III, Ambassador), potato (Gold Rush), pepper (Ace), onion (Stuttgarter), garlic (Music). The shares have been pretty good this year, not over the top (in a superabundant way) as they have been at times in the past, but definitely solid value for the fresh, local, organic dollar!
More from the Market
Today’s wares set up behind the stand at the farmers’ market. First thing in the morning (that’s around 7 am), we open and arrange all of the crates and use them to stock the stand and assemble CSA shares. Here, we’re partway into the morning—as the day progresses, crates get stacked. Visible in the pic, an assortment of mainly heirloom tomatoes, carrots, assorted sweet peppers (we picked a lot of ’em green before turning to red rather than let them shrivel in the near-drought conditions), various beets, garlic, and green and yellow beans pre-packed for the CSA. As for the traffic, the day was on the quiet side, despite great weather—it seems the fresh, local, organic trend so pumped in the media this year, and apparently somewhat sweeping the cities, is taking its time hitting the countryside. All in all, though, a decent Saturday!