WEEK 16: Winter will come...

Maybe it was that bout of frisky fall-like weather that got us thinking about the cold winter months that lie ahead (or maybe it was the 100lbs of tomatoes sitting on the hay wagon ripening/rotting in the sun...), and preserving the bountiful summer crops made it onto the work board. The weeds have let up a little, and we've gotten pretty efficient with the harvesting, so Wednesday we spent the better part of a day producing 45L of tomato sauce, and this weekend I made peach jam with seconds from the Hamilton Mountain Farmer's market.

Chris and Denise celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary (hurrah!) and left on Thursday for a romantic Stratford getaway (A Winter's Tale, it so happens).
We had harvested everything from the Sargeants on Wednesday for Thursday's markets, so we were way ahead and actually left early to head into town with the truck and trailer loaded. The harvest is kick-ass, by the way: juicy watermelon and cantaloupe and sweeet sweet corn and beautiful long straight english cucumbers and cool stripy beets and purple haze carrots and fine fingerling potatoes and... no room for it all on the market tables!

Friday we hosted a dozen or so teenagers from a YMCA employment camp, and the interns did a pretty decent job at keeping them entertained and informed on our "cycle of the farm" tour of the main attractions here at Manorun (the veggies, the pasture/livestock, the hoophouse, and the compost pile:)
We are conducting an experiment with our young beets: one bed got sprinkled with boron, a micronutrient which our soil is lacking according to previous years' soil sampling (lesson: it's not all about the NPK folks); another bed got a good douse of compost tea. Will they turn out drastically different? Only time will tell...

We picked apples down the street at Myers after work, and Meghan returned refreshed from her week at the cottage right on time for David to take his vacation in New York. Next week we lose Meghan again to her sweet wine testing job, and all the farm daughters go back to school. Times they are a changin'.

WEEK 15: Sluggin' it

While for some the heat of the dog days may make time seem to slow in a haze of lazy days, I discovered that the second cut of hay meant we had to slug it fast, and hard, to get the hay out of the field and into the barn before sun down, after a regular day of work. Having missed the first cut (which was way more hay), I was impressed with the might of my fellow workers, who were throwing bales around like kleenex boxes as I sweat and grunted and feared I might vomit. The hard work is compounded by the thrilling fear of trailing the hay wagon, whose wobbly wheels give it a nice weave from the shoulder to the oncoming lane as we travel the 4km from the rental property to the farmstead.
We made it though, and had pizza and beer to celebrate.
Busy market day on Thursday (I set up and ran the Locke Street stand alone, while Denise and Jocelyn stuck it out at the Dundas market with Cactus festival festivities blocking them in).
Friday was a sweet cruise to the week's finish line: we got several hundred of our fall brassica seedlings and the last of the storage crop seeds into the ground (rather late) and ended it all with an Oh to Grow session on farm implements. We also planned our YMCA adult camp visit, which the interns will head next week, as Chris and Denise will be gone celebrating their anniversary with a little Ontario foodie road trip.
This weekend, the trailer twins (Jocelyn and Meghan) are gone to their respective cottages, David is doing his usual work with Backyard Harvest in Hamilton, and I am finishing up some promo and educational material for Manorun to use at market, and hoping to do some tomato processing... the harvest is plentiful this year, with lots of sun and heat and regular- but not excessive- rainfall on our sandy loam soil.

WEEK 14: Dog Days of Summer

Just back from a half day at the University of Guelph's Centre for Urban Organic Agriculture... David's debriefing comment sums it up best: nice, but there wasn't anything progressively urban about their 2 acres of hand-worked crops, although the touches of permaculture (perennials, companion planting, contour planting) were cool to see.
We are feeling the lull of regular summer-hot days, harvesting, weeding, and planting more for the fall. We will surely break out of it this week with some extra-long hay days (second cut). Soon enough, we will be losing much of our crew to school and other jobs, start cleaning up the fields, and bring out the layers to fight the fall chill at work...
OK. Enough. Whining, wistful, time to say goodnight. Goodnight!

quotes

"Industrialized, chemical-intensive agriculture and our globalized system of distributing food and fiber are literally destroying the earth, driving two billion farmers off the land, and producing a product which is increasingly contaminated. That's why the wave of the future is organic and sustainable, not GMO."

— Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words."

— Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty

"An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs produced in this country are used for nontherapeutic purposes such as accelerating animal growth and compensating for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on 'factory farms.' This translates to ... almost eight times the amount given to humans to treat disease."

— Union of Concerned Scientists

"Each one [of the Earth's 5 million invertebrate species] plays a role in its ecosystem. It's like we're tearing the cogs out of a great machine. The machine might work after you tear out ten cogs, but what happens when you tear out a hundred?"

— Scott Black, Xerces Society, quoted in Sierra

"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."

— John Sawhill, former president/CEO of The Nature Conservancy

Only when the last tree has been cut down,

Only when the last river has been poisoned,

Only when the last fish has been caught,

Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

— Cree Indian Prophecy

"Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes."

— Erving Goffman

"One's stomach is one's internal environment."

— Samuel Butler

pictures galore!!

WEEK 13: Picking beans, pulling weeds, and planting seeds

We are definitely experiencing the harvest-weed-plant cycle of growing food. This week was another easy break: we got a holiday on Monday (an exception to the rule) and just had to put in a flexible 2 hours of bean harvest (can't keep ahead of'em... 2nd timeline coming on strong!); we had a CRAFT day on Wednesday at The New Farm www.thenewfarm.ca, who does some very cool stuff growing for restaurants and for The Stop, a progressive food bank in Toronto that offers cooking classes and community garden alongside charitable food donations; and on Friday we ended the day early for our usual Oh to Grow intern education session on pest management.

Between holiday, harvest, and education time we managed to liberate our carrots and parsnips from the grass-pigweed invasion, and planted our fall timelines of beet, carrot, turnip, radish, and greens.

The harvest gets better and better these days, with corn coming on strong (you can tell a ripe ear when it looks "swaaarthy" and feels plump... got it?)and the first few tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants coming off the plants. Cauliflower and cabbage also add some delectable diversity to the table.