CSA For The Last Day of July!

Everyday starts and ends this way..for about another month!

It finally feels like summer! We had to wait until the end of July - but summer seems to be here!  Lovely and warm today, very little breeze, not a lot of bugs - fantastic day for harvesting for our families!  We were actually late for Tuesday's meet-up because there is so much to harvest right now!  We used our time a bit more wisely today and think we'll be on time!  There's so much labour-intensive veggies to harvest right now we could sure use some help - especially with raspberries!  If you'd like to find more raspberries in your basket and have time on Thursday mornings please let us know!

Beans will come hot-and-heavy for the next few weeks.  Here's a great link, with links at the bottom of the page, to a lot of ways to keep beans for winter use!  We've never dehydrated beans, but it seems like a good idea! They'll take up shelf space only, and a small space at that!  We regularly freeze beans and pack them in portions in freezer bags.  They stack nicely in the freezer, thaw quickly for use in soups, stews and stir fries!  We've picked the first of the Dragons Tongue - a Romano type bean, big and flat but tender and tasty!  Treat just like any other bean; unfortunately the purple stripes fade on cooking.

Our growing partners Amanda and Ed have provided beautiful cabbage again today.  They've also brought the first harvest of some fresh herbs.  The ferny leaf of the dill will be wonderful chopped for the new potatoes or in your salad - very different from the dried dill in the stores.  The heads of dill will flavor jars of the 'Dilly Beans' from the link above or a wonder to flavour vinegar for homemade salad dressing.  The flat leaf Parsley will be excellent chopped into salads or sprinkled on grilled chicken or pork.  It's also excellent for stuffing a roast chicken and I believe the first chickens from Luna Field Farm are available this week.  The herb with the flowers is Greek oregano - a zesty herb that will also be excellent in your salads.  It's fantastic to add a little Greek flavour to meats and pastas.  Try a little of the herb in your box straight, to give you an idea of the flavour.

The first share of new potatoes for Thursday's families- a lovely red Norland.  Please don't over-cook young potatoes.  We usually simply steam them for about fifteen minutes but you can boil them, too, just not too long!  New potatoes sometimes can get mushy if roasted in tin foil on the BBQ, so perhaps wait a couple of weeks until we've got older spuds for you!

Last week everyone got Boyne raspberries - the standard hardy raspberry for the Prairies grown here for decades.  For this Thursday, we got a small pick on Mammoth, a newer variety developed at the U of S.  There's just enough today for the Full Shares.  We'll be interested to see if you notice a difference.  We won't make any comment here 'cause we don't want to influence you!

So, for the Full Shares: Lg. cabbage, 3/4 lb. each of green, yellow, Royal Burgundy and Dragon's Tongue beans, 4 lbs. new potatoes, Lg. Mammoth raspberries, bag each Mesclun mixed lettuces and Grand Rapids, fresh dill.

For the Part Shares:  Lg. cabbage, 1/2 lb. each green, Royal Burgundy and Dragon's Tongue beans, 3/4 lb. yellow wax beans, 3 lbs. new potatoes, 1 lb. shelling peas, Boyne raspberries, bag each Mesclun Mix and Grand Rapids lettuce, fresh flat leaf parsley.

For the Single Shares: Sm. cabbage, 1/2 lb each green, yellow wax, Royal Burgundy and Dragon's Tongue beans, 3 lbs. new potatoes, Boyne raspberries, bag each Mesclun Mix and Grand Rapids lettuce, fresh Greek oregano.

Seedlings Are About to Take Over!

The time has come....the seed starting unit is full!  The first seeding of peppers and herbs are starting to outgrow their trays!  We've got more tomatoes, peppers and herbs to start, and soon we've got to start celery, broccoli and cauliflower!  We've got to make some space!  Sooooo...it's time to pot up!

We've got tables at the ready with grow-light stands.  As our sun room is east facing, the light is not great for young seedlings.  We don't want lanky, spindly plants so, over the years, we've invested in some table top grow lights and had one donated by pal Deb, as long as she got veggies in exchange!  We also have some more lengths of fluorescent lights to hang under the tables because every inch of this sun room will be green within the next four or five weeks!

We'll pot up peppers and tomatoes largely into those six packs for now, herbs will go into 2.5 inch pots.  The flat of basil seedlings, thickly seeded in five rows, will probably become five, maybe six flats of little pots.  The flat of 'California Wonder' pepper seedlings will become four or five flats of six packs.  You can see how we start to fill the space quite quickly!  Along with space concerns, all the little babies become more of a maintenance chore - watering will quickly take twice as long  This cycle will continue for about six weeks: pot up, make room, start more flats of seeds.  With the nice weather we've been having, we may be able to move into the greenhouse early this year and 'thin out' the jungle the sun room will become.  Oh, right, add that to the never-ending 'to do' list: clean and disinfect the greenhouse!

Holy Smokes! The Parsley is Alive!

Over-winter parsley.

Greek Oregano

Thyme, coming back!

Self-seeded spinach.

In between showers (! yes, Manitoba is flooding and now it is raining!) I took a walk through our gardens. The eastern part of our fields was just about ready to till; the western part, particularly the slope that leads to the dugout and around the dugout is still very wet and mucky.  Now there is rain forecast for a couple of days, so tilling will be delayed again.  The dogs needed a good walk and because our road has become a major thoroughfare due to other road closures in the area, it was better to stay on the Farm.  We have thirty acres to stroll around so a good workout can be had, albeit many muddy paws were made!  Some delightful surprises awaited me.  The Parsley is alive and flourishing.  Walking through what was the herb section last year, I was quite surprised to find Thyme, Greek Oregano and the Parsley looking very good.  The Mint (no big surprise there) and the Comfrey have also come back nicely.  These have all come through a long cold winter with no mulching or fussing.  We love that!  Admittedly all the herbs are on the north side of a substantial row of raspberries, so snow was probably trapped and held there.  Also a welcome sight: spinach that has self-seeded and will be ready to eat quite shortly!  Sometimes it pays to not be to quick to clean up beds after harvest is finished!  Our trees haven't quite leafed out yet, so fresh spinach will be delight!

Spring Growth - Indoor Herbs!

As the days get longer, plants begin to come awake. We've still got a good layer of snow and freezing temperatures so outside plants remain dormant! But inside, we've over-wintered a few pots of different herbs and they are feeling the Spring vibe! Over-wintering herbs is always a challenge; these plants are all outside for the summer, so sometimes we deal with pests trying to come inside with them. This year, we've struggled a bit with white fly, which we think we've beaten with sticky traps and neem oil soil drenches. Then, we have to deal with the hot, dry air created by our indoor heating. Most of the herbs we keep in the sun room, which is east facing and very cool. We allow them to go dormant, water lightly just once a week and try not to harvest too much during the winter. This works well for woody, long-lived herbs like lavender, sage and rosemary. This year, the thyme and tarragon were both looking brown and dry. I cut them back hard in January, and they are bouncing back beautifully. The tarragon, pictured here, is growing vigorously. Just behind it, on the right, the thyme is just starting to bud. It will be so good to have fresh herbs for cooking again! And shortly, we'll start to seed more so we'll be herb-happy soon!

We've Been Looking For This!

We try to be earth-friendly and sustainable in what we do here at Aagaard Farms. We've been looking for information to keep our chickens chemical-free: no antibiotics or hormones for our eggs, thank you. It's hard! Online, in the bookstores there is lots of information for cats and dogs, some for horses and a wee bit for cattle. Found one great book for goats, which we don't have (yet!). Chickens, not so much! So, we were quite excited to find an article in one of our fav new magazines 'Backyard Poultry'. Herbal remedies for poultry, particularly for spring eggs and breeding, and the info on three great websites. Susan Burek is an herbalist at Moonlight Mile Herb Farm, Laura Corstange runs the Wishing Tree and the both answer questions on an herb forum all about poultry and animals at Blue Moon Forum!

We Love Our Herb Pot!

Nothing gets us through the winter like our herb pot! It's three years old now, and everything is doing fairly well. It sits outside by the fountain all summer and comes back inside quite early in the fall - often around Labour Day. I don't want it to get any frost which can happen almost anytime by the end of August around here! There is rosemary, sage, tarragon, oregano and lemon balm in this pot. Nothing grows much during the winter so we can't clip is wholesale, but used sparingly is will get us by until it starts to grow again as the days get longer.