Well, hello from Lower Onslow, Nova Scotia. It is April 8, and for the first time in years there are no wee seedlings gracing our windowsills. No shelves full of tomatoes, onions, fennel, and no dirty fingernails.
So, what’s up with Salad Bowl Gardens?
At the end of last season, we decided we were needing a hiatus from market gardening; a sabbatical, if you will. Our son is a toddler (2.5 yrs old now), and we were expecting another little baby over the winter. We knew life would be busy and make it difficult to continue market gardening and parenting and working as we had done before. I (Roxanne) had been doing some consulting and inspecting work and planned to continue it this season. Jamey would continue his work as a civil servant. 2010 was our 6th year of growing veggies for sale, and although we had found efficiency in many ways, I feel we lost ground to the weeds and miscalculated some planting dates and volumes. It was hard to give the garden the attention it needed, even with the superb helpers we had.
So, 2011 is going to be a fallow year. A year to cover crop – build fertility and suppress weeds. A year to focus on the landscaping and on the house repairs that always fall by the wayside during the cropping season. It was a hard decision to make, mainly because we have loved the relationship with our customers and providing them with good organic food. But it felt like the right decision for us.
This winter was long and hard. Some turns in the road we were not expecting made life a little more complicated. I spent nearly two months on bedrest, leaving Jamey to keep the home fires burning. A whole community rallied around us; dear friends and family. Pam warrants a special mention as she did our fall chores and planted all our garlic! Just before Christmas, we had our premature but healthy baby, Gabrielle. In the midst of all this, my Dad passed away unexpectedly. It is funny how the entire world can change in just a few days. While passing the hours on bedrest, I was drawn to old pictures of spring gardening and new green shoots. It gave me strength when November was so grey and awful. Now spring is here, and I can’t imagine how flowers can still bloom in the absence of someone I loved so much. My heart isn’t in it this year.
Gabby
The good in all this is my renewed appreciation for our family, my beautiful, amazing kids who have a new cousin on the way. I am looking forward to a summer growing food for our family. We can’t even think of how many tomatoes to start for 4 people – what a novelty (I think I have limited Jamey to 100 plants). Jamey is taking some time off from his day job to do two things: spend more time with the kids and I, and take over managing the Truro Farmer’s Market this year as they begin to prepare for a move into the Old Fire Hall. I (Roxanne) have been blessed with a great job working with our Organic Regional Network to help interested farmers transition into organic production. Extension work – assisting growers, developing resources, organizing workshops – is really exciting to me, and it is part-time too.
I may keep updating this blog to keep track of new changes at the homestead. I might start a new one instead to keep this strictly farm-business related. Who knows? But keep checking in from time to time, if you like. Likely we’ll have some cute kid photos, probably in the garden.
