Heirloom tomatoes come on strong!

Well, we came back to market for a few weeks - the last 2 weeks in August. Partly, we just can’t stay away and we also have had a bumper crop of blackberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and basil that we couldn’t eat all ourselves. In terms of tomatoes, we have had good yields off Limmony (beefsteak yellow), Stupice (Czech red), Wonderlight (yellow), Red Striped Roman, and several cherries - white cherry, galina and sungold (not an heirloom but oh so yummy and sweet). We added some of the roma that we were growing for canning and made some beautiful mixed boxes. 

 

Heirloom boxes

Jamey has come up with an innovative way to keep basil crisp and fresh. He harvests the root ball and bags it up with some water. This avoids the late-market wilting that you see so often with fresh basil. We tested it out and I found that by Thursday of the following week, the basil looked a little sad - but that’s 5 days of freshness. Amazing, no?

 

Basil

I’m now one week from D-Day and eagerly anticipating having one less tenant in my belly. Not that this pregnancy hasn’t been fun and rewarding - we’re just anxious to meet the new wee gardener. In the meantime, we’ve been picking apples, canning tomatoes and jelly and generally trying to put the garden to bed a little early this year. 

R.

Pictures from 2008

This is a little experiment - I wanted to upload some recent pictures from the season, so tried the “Gallery” feature. Hope it all comes through clearly!!

We’re missing all our market customers but enjoying the fruits of a hot and rainy summer. 

Andrea transplanting basil

Marcus watering transplants

Picking copious amounts of peas (with Chloe, she loves peas)

Our friend Mike came over for a tiller field test - the Great Till-Off (and Jamey's birthday)! We tested a BCS, our Simplicity, a Honda and 2 Troy-bilt Horse tillers.

Tilling -Jamey now wants a BCS more than ever. Mike helped us till our fallow plot on one of the hottest days of the year!

Me, at the last market (for us) - a bittersweet day. Nice to be done but we miss all our market friends.

So, what do we do when not at Market? We go to other Markets! This is Jamey at our friend Rowena's stall at Dieppe NB. I left for a few minutes and he was selling zucchini when I got back. Lovely market.

Oh, and we go to the beach. I'm 36 weeks pregnant here.

I'm loving the home garden. Tomatoes... soon. We're eating lots of beans, zucchini, fava, and neverending cucumbers.

 

 

 

 

Last market of the season!

Hello everyone,

Just a quick note to let you know this is going to be our last week for a little while at the Truro Farmers Market. I’m getting too pregnant to pick lettuce, and we need a break to get ready for the baby. We’ll really miss doing market every week and hope to be back in August/September for a week or two with tomatoes and blackberries. You’ll see us shopping there, anyway!

This week, we will have salad mix - spicy and original, swiss chard, mustard greens, arugula, stir-fry mix, green onions, and edible flowers. 

Roxanne and Jamey

Market number 7

Hey folks,

It’s looking like a tasty harvest of greens and veggies at the market this week. 

We’ll have the original and spicy salad mix, green onions, edible flowers, some tasty red russian kale or swiss chard, the last radishes, garlic scapes and…. mmmm peas! 

We will have some tasty snow peas - perfect for stirfry - or wonderful sugar snap peas. 

There’s been lots going on around the garden, we’ll catch you up with a photo post this week. The groundhog, sadly, disappeared before I could photograph him. 

See you Saturday,

Roxanne

Outsmarting chickens

Stories featuring strawberry patches and free roaming hens don’t often have a happy ending. Chickens love ripe strawberries. They will leave unripe ones alone. They can be incredibly efficient, wiping out a patch in minutes, They can be persistent, dropping by the patch a few times a day, even on the way back to the barn at night. After losing a few of the early berries we finally covered the plants with row cover. There aren’t many blossoms left, and most of the fruit has set. Evil birds.

Strange. When you google “strawberries” and “chicken” you get lots of recipes.