Eating Local is Getting a Whole Lot Easier!

Homemade bread and yummy tomatoes! Now that's summer. As the Farmers' Market season starts for us, eating local and fresh is getting waaaaaay easier. The tomatoes in the picture came from Julie at JR Greenhouses in Souris. She's got a hot house going and it's making me very happy. Julie is selling at the Friday Night Farmers' Market at Shoppers Mall, and I scored a few of her awesome tomatoes! Almost as good as one off my own vine and way better than those in the stores. And, as my tomatoes are only blossoming, hers will do very nicely, for now! She should have cucumbers soon - put cottage cheese on the shopping list!

Hard to believe that this coming Saturday is the first Farmers' Market at Riverbank Discovery Centre. Hugh and Linda Moffat think they may have new potatoes. Maple Valley already had a few bags at the Friday Night Farmers' Market. I dream of new potatoes from about February on. I'll have to get Farmer Man to sneak beneath a few of our plants to see if he can find any - even for a little meal, let alone to take to the Farmers' Market!

I spent part of the morning 'finding' the beets and the Swiss Chard. The rain has encouraged the weeds, and it was really time to wade into the rows and find the good stuff before it gets overwhelmed! I adore Swiss Chard;I have a recipe from my sister Cathy for a green relish made with chard which I'm anxious to try! I'm probably still a couple of weeks away from harvesting any. Patience, patience! It's hard when you read as many international blogs as I do - they've been harvesting in California and Texas and such for months, while we're just cheering on the seedlings! Oh, well, our time is coming......

GMO Foods

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are quite controversial in food circles. The science is new, and could be disasterous - we just don't know. Europe has required foods containing GMO's to be labelled as such for many years. America is now on a push to get them to quit labeling them. I, personally, want the choice of what I eat, so I want all the information on the labels of foods. I'm signing a web petition asking for GMOs to be named as such on labels. Go here to help and get more information!

More Indoor Food!

At Seedy Sunday I got some very nice multiplier onion sets from Heritage Harvest Seed.  Nice plump, firm bulbs with a healthy, papery cover.  Since we have salad makings growing, I decided to tuck a few bulbs into the herb pot.  The pot sits in the south-facing patio doors; our days are getting longer now and the weather warmer.  I figure inside those patio doors may be a little like California (as long as we don't open those doors!).  The onions are doing well, although nothing happened for about four days and then suddenly.....we're going great guns!  They'll be sooooo good with the fresh-cut mesclun greens! 

Dark Days Challenge: Organic Lamb Chops

A simple meal, but very tasty!  Organic lamp chops from our friends at Logan Farms, oven-roasted with a bit of bottled BBQ sauce and minced garlic.  Our homegrown Blue Mac potatoes mashed with garlic and a bit of sour cream.  And our first serving of our greens (see previous post) topped with fresh sprouts from our new toy!  Farmer Man used some salad dressing on his greens, but I found them too tasty to need anything. Many of the participants in the Dark Days Challenge over at The (not so) Urban Hennery are in parts of the continent where they are already gardening outside - but a little indoor gardening tasted darn fine here in Manitoba!

Fresh Greens!

Ahhh, fresh greens for dinner! The first harvest from our tray of mesclun mix.  Farmer Man just took the scissors and snipped some greens onto the cutting board.  Remember when baby lettuce was all the rage a few years ago in the restaurants?  Well, now the buzz is micro-greens, the babiest of the baby greens! (People always seem to want to take everything to the ultimate degree!)  Lettuce is an easy crop to start inside, and cutting it this fresh means it's full of nutrition and taste.  ANYBODY CAN DO THIS!  Sorry to 'shout' but really, anybody can do this.  We've used a standard growing tray without holes; here in Brandon you can find them almost anywhere that offers seeds and growing supplies, like the Green Spot, Lindenberg's, maybe Patmore's (I'm not sure) and probably even some of the big box stores that have seed starting supplies (but we like to support the local businesses - don't we?).  We've filled the tray with a sterile, soiless mix called Sunshine Mix but it could be Pro Mix or any bagged seed/potting mix. We've seeded the lettuce mix on top in five rather thick rows, covered with a light bit of more soil and about three weeks later - voila! dinner!  Lettuce is an easy one to start, especially for new gardeners: it likes it cool, doesn't need a ton of light.  No fancy heat mats or grow lights required.  Find a cool, bright place and watch your dinner grow.  Spinach would be another good one to start with, maybe I should get that organized this afternoon!  Just be careful with the watering, since there are no holes in the tray it would be easy to over-water and drown the little babies.  We're topping up the water about every three days - you can tell, with a little experience, by the weight of the tray.  Don't be fooled by just looking at the soil surface - it will always look dry after a day or so, but there may be plenty of moisture underneath.  Once the little plants have a few sets of leaves, we've fertilized when watering by adding a very dilute liquid kelp mixture.  The really cool thing is that most of the lettuces in this mix will re-go, and will be able to be re-cut in a few weeks time.  Are you going to give it a try?

Eating Local: Our Favourite New Toy!

We're missing fresh greens these days and have purchased a few bags of the organic greens at the supermarket.  But, they never taste like we remember our own garden greens tasting last summer!  So, when ordering some of our seeds, we saw this gadget and thought to give it a try.  I know sprouts can be fairly easy to start: in a jar, on paper towel, etc.  But we're looking for a quantity in a fast, easy and sanitary way (cats can get up in amazing places).  This is the Biosta from Vesey's Seeds and we ordered three different seed mixes for sprouts at the same time.  Yummy!  Like so many things - fresh is much better than what's available in the store.  And easy!  Sprinkle the seeds on one or all three trays, fill the top tray with warm water twice a day, which drips through the other trays and voila! great tasty, crunchy sprouts in five days!  We might even have enough to share a few with The Hens!

The Benefits (or not) of Organic Food

Another study, another debate: are organic foods more healthy? The link is an article on Forbes, with a new study showing little nutritional difference between organic and conventional food. We've never been about that; our thing is the FRESH food has more nutrition because the nutrition hasn't had as much chance to decay. And the flavour of fresh, fully ripened food is waaaaaay beyond so much of the stuff that is trucked for thousands of miles. And we really do believe pesticides and chemical fertilizers can leave residues in your food, which this study did not investigate. Check it out: http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/article/forbes/1217/organic-food-behind-the-hype