Tag Archives: spring

A new year and a new chapter

The snow is blanketing the slopes and the clouds in the valley are hanging at what seems to be just above head height from my chair. I’ve made my first stock of the year from vegetable peelings and chicken bones, and I’m planning that by the end of the year this simple healthy base food will be all part of a closed loop system here on the farm.

Our goals for this year include raising chickens for meat and eggs, keeping turkeys, growing 50% of our own vegetables and establishing a herb bed. These may seem like the goals of an underachiever to some, I’ll freely admit that my natural inclination is to declare my intent to do “everything” but to make things easier for my other-half I’ve promised to understate my ambitions everywhere including here. It’s not natural for me, but hey, it can’t hurt!

In order to facilitate our plans for 2017 we have been doing some solid ground work. He has been building me a glasshouse from scratch. It’s a time consuming process. Getting the “free” windows was the easy bit. Since then, he’s scraped them all, re-puttied the seals, cut and hauled trees from our wood, milled wood to spec, built walls in sections, oiled, primed them and begun the gables. This week he hauled the second load of logs to our mill, it took 3 straight days. They are very big logs and among other projects they will also be the main frame for the glasshouse. At just under 50 square meters the glasshouse is going to be bigger than our cabin. He’s put in a lot of work to help ensure our growing has every advantage possible.

To compliment the glasshouse I’ve dug and mulched 10 out door beds, which will be our “kitchen garden” at 10m x 1.25m they give us approximately 125 square meters of growing space for the semi-hardy and hardy vegetables that will make up the bulk of our diet. I’ll tell you what, after three months of eating shop bought and mostly non-organic vegetables I am really excited to get back to eating food we know the sources of. Come on Spring!

Our cat who also made the journey to our new home in Norway. He’s settling in now and likes to ensure he knows what’s going on. Here, he is “owning” the logs that are going to be milled this spring.

Salad, it ain’t what it used to be!

This year I planted specifically with a view to have fresh green salad to hand. It might sound like the move of someone who isn’t quite sure about gardening, but for me, it was a first. I love the modern version of salad that I have come to learn in the past two years but still harbor strong unpleasant feelings toward its 80s incarnations. Planting salad for the 2016 season was in a way an effort to purge the negative feelings toward something that may just become an important aspect of my future.

It wasn’t until my twenties that I started to voluntarily eat salad. “Rocket” had just become the new fashionable thing in Toronto usually accompanied by avocado, tomato and either mozzarella or feta. Until then, my only engagement with salad was the lackluster iceberg, cucumber tomato trilogy my mother put on the table whenever she was on a new diet.

It’s not her fault, a whole generation made salad this way. Back then, if anyone had told me I was purposely going to plant myself a salad garden, I would have scoffed.

It’s the first week of summer and I have harvested my first proper salad meal. Over the past two years I have really had my eyes and my taste buds opened to the magic that can be in a bowl of greens. I am grateful. Early in my journey when Ru Litherland first suggested that our smallholding consider salad as a cash crop I had serious prejudice. My mind still holds the bland and boring salads of my youth as it’s go to image of what a salad “is”. But today, when i sat down to eat my lunch and the beauty of what was on my plate began to sink in I gave the idea it’s first serious consideration. Salad, as a revenue stream has a lot of positive things going for it. It grows quickly, can be done early in a glass house and later in the field, luxurious versions can a relatively profitable. It’s also something I have a lot of harvesting experience with, which is another key consideration.

The banal bowl of my childhood has been replaced by a colorful, fragrant, multi flavored, visually enticing ever changing and exciting mix of herbs, leaves, and flowers. For me there is something decidedly decadent about eating flowers. For starters, it wasn’t something I knew you could do until I started my apprenticeship, and I am not alone. I have to admit, not all of them taste of much, regardless, the fact that they’re there in all their esthetic splendor adds to the enjoyment of eating.

Recently, I’ve been contemplating how the land will generate the capital we will need going forward. Luckily we don’t need much. Salad, might just be the trick.. or one of them.

Today’s salad: Beet leaf, Nasturtium leaf, CCA lettuce, garlic chive flowers, Viola Tri-color and foraged Elderflower.

Getting the most out of small spaces

One of my favorite things about gardening is that I can choose what I want to grow each year. I subscribe to the school of thought that you should plant what you like to eat, however planting the same vegetables every year does get a bit predictable. Experimenting with unusual varieties gives me a kick and expands my knowledge as well as my pallet.

This year, with a view to expand what I can produce in my 1.5m potted roof garden I chose to give planting of “early” and “late” maturing crops a go. To do this I looked for an early maturing small turnip to pair with my old faithful red onion and some French Marigold. I found a lovely sounding turnip called “Japanese Snowball” which is described as a fast growing, egg shaped globe with a mild sweet juicy flavour. The globes should be harvest size by the end of this month, leaving sufficient space for both the onion and marigold development. I’d never heard of the the Snowball variety before I began looking and was surprised to find it’s been around in western world since at least 1885.

I sewed the seeds as directed both for greens (close) and 2.5cm apart in two rows in mid-late March. I’ve already harvested a crop of young greens from one row and eaten them raw in salad along with some chard, last week used a few of the larger leaves as a cooked spinach substitute. Obviously, because my rows are small, my harvests are only handfuls however, I can’t believe how quick they are – they’re ready again! The spaced counterparts remain untouched and are sheltering the slower growing marigold beneath their large foliage.

So far I am very pleased with this experiment. I am quite happy with the taste of the greens both raw and cooked and am awaiting the globes with much anticipation. It seems that I’ve doubled the output of my tiny space this year. Looking back, it now seems quite obvious, however I’d not considered this before my work experience on the Organic Lea farm. I guess it just goes to show what we can learn if we’re open to it.

*This article was originally published on a fabulous website called EatinsCanada.

Fashion in gardening

Potting on Tomatoes

A month ago myself and several volunteers helped plant hundreds of Tumbling Tom and Golden Queen tomato seeds at Organic Lea. They will be both for the summer production on site and for the annual plant sales. For anyone who has ever eaten a perfectly ripe home grown tomato, it will come as no surprise that tomatoes are by far the most popular plants for home gardens in the UK.

These tomatoes have a bluish tinge to their leaves indicating they’ve depleted the nutrients in their potting soil.

The month old seedlings have really thrived in the three week warm spell we’ve been having and it was evident by the blueish tinge on their leaves that the nutrient in the seed compost was exhausted. It’s too early to put them in the ground, so potting on, into more nutrient rich potting compost was the only option. In order to avoid “leggy plants” each seedling is planted into the soil up to the first pair of leaves.

There’s really no excuse not to grow at least one tomato plant. Perhaps more than any other, tomatoes have a wealth of varieties to suit your available space, even a height restricted roof garden like mine has more than one option.

For three years now, I’ve planted heritage dwarf variety Tiny Tim (which grows to 30cm) and had exceptional results. They’ve got some lovely attributes aside from their stature. Firstly, for a tomato they’re remarkably un- fussy. These hardy plants do well in both sun and shade which works well since I am on the move. Secondly, despite their small size they really pack a huge sweet tomato flavour punch, meaning four or five picked and thrown into any dish makes an impact.

This year, just to try something different I’m planting Tumbling Toms from the plant sales.

Regardless of which variety you choose, your plant’s fruit will have flavours that far surpass their store bought brethren. With tomatoes we’re spoilt for choice and justly rewarded.