We've been busy harvesting all the storage onions and winter squash in what feels like mid-July weather! It's been hot work but so far both the onions and the squash are looking great. Our squash harvest is a little on the low side but not enough that it will effect quantities in the shares. There will just be fewer squash for me to take to the market or sell at the end of the season. Starting next week you can expect to see some sort of winter squash in your shares for the remainder of the season. Yum! 

This heat has also encouraged the tomatoes to ripen at a faster rate, which is great because now it is a race against the blight that is on most of the plants. The heat is also allowing us to get a third week of beans which is unusual at this time of year. But you won't hear any complaining from me - longer production is always great!

I am thrilled to be including some big, beautiful beets in the shares this week! We've struggled growing beets the last two years but this planting is the nicest I've ever grown. I experimented with transplanting the beets, rather than sowing directly in the field, and this seems to be a winning method. 

Rob (with some help) spun all of our 2017 honey from the comb yesterday and we will begin bottling as soon as we receive our shipment of honey jars. I anticipate that I will have our 2017 honey available for purchase starting next week at the CSA pickup. We are pleased with the harvest of approximately 650 lbs of honey this year. This is a low quantity compared to the number of hives on the farm but 2017 has been a particularly bad honey season so we did OK. Since the weather was so cool and rainy, the bees had to spend a lot of time in their hives consuming their honey rather than foraging and storing up a large quantity. Otherwise, the bees look healthy as they head into the winter season.

Since beets are making a debut in the shares this week I thought I would share some relevant recipes. Beets are a powerhouse of nutrients and full of delicious flavour! And don't forget that the greens are edible too! Just lightly steam, saute, or throw into smoothies. I enjoy beet greens lightly sauteed with some olive oil, sea salt, and garlic. At their simplest, beets can be roasted as a side dish or salad topping. Or they can be grated and added to salads and slaws. For other ideas, check these recipes below:

Beet Latkes with Smoked Salmon
​35 Recipes You Simply Can't Beet
​Beet Berry Smoothie

Well, we are finally seeing summer weather at the end of September! This warm stretch will help the crops we are still waiting to mature and keep the summer crops going a little longer. Our tomatoes are now officially full of late blight, which was an inevitability with the cool, wet weather we have been having this summer. Luckily, we are only seeing blight on the plants themselves and not the tomatoes. We will definitely have tomatoes in the share this week. I hope we can get at least one more week after this but blight can kill an entire planting of tomatoes overnight. The drier weather we are seeing right now will help to slow the disease progression down slightly.

My apologies to any share members who received garlic that was rotten on the inside in previous weeks. We seem to be dealing with some sort of fungal issue with our garlic. This is very disappointing as it looks like nearly 60% of our garlic will be fit for compost only. We think it is due to the very wet summer (our garlic was in one of the fields that flooded in the spring) but are also exploring other potential reasons. I am getting better at predicting which bulbs will be rotten inside and am being ruthless in weeding these out. For those that had a bad bulb, I will be bringing extra garlic this week for you to help yourself to a replacement bulb. 

Now, Terran and Rowan would like to share their thoughts on 'Our Favourite Things' list. Terran, who is 12 years old, typed out his answers and emailed to me. Rowan, who is 8, dictated his answers to me so these are all their own thoughts!

Favourite Farming Task
Terran: Harvesting. I love to harvest leaf lettuce, and green/yellow beans.
Rowan: I like helping to cut leaf lettuce with scissors and pulling the Vermont Garden Cart around the farm. 

Favourite Crop to Grow
Terran: My favourite crop to grow are onions. I like to plant and weed them.
Rowan: Tomatoes are my favourite crop to grow and I like to check every day to see if they are ripe.

Favourite Vegetable to Eat
Terran: Green beans, especially when boiled.
Rowan: Potatoes, tomatoes, summer squash, mushrooms, and carrots are vegetables I like to eat all the time. 
 
Favourite Kitchen Hack
Terran: Get all of your ingredients out before you start making anything, including bowls.
Rowan: Make sure to cut up all your vegetables before you turn on the burner. This way, the oil in the pan doesn't burn before I am ready to add vegetables. 

Favourite Non-Farming Past-time
Terran: Driving my remote control car and playing video games ;)
Rowan: I love to ride my bike and watch Terran drive his remote control car. 

Favourite Farm Attire
Terran: Jogging pants and a t-shirt because those are the most comfortable things EVER.
Rowan: Shorts with underwear, a t-shirt, and rubber boots or Blundstones. [editor's note: I'm pretty sure underwear only makes his list because he hears me remind him often enough to wear them :)]

Favourite Way to Pass Time While Doing Field Work
Terran: Thinking of playing video games and driving my remote control car.
Rowan: Thinking of what I want to do when I am done working. 

Hope you enjoyed 'Our Favourite Things'. We will be back to normal next week with some recipes!

This post is coming a day late because we made the last minute decision to spend a couple days camping at Bruce Peninsula National Park. We had lovely weather and managed to fit in some great hikes and a boat ride over to Flowerpot Island. Thanks to Ali (our share member and friend) for making sure the animals stayed out of trouble on the farm! Now, back to real life!

This week in 'Our Favourite Things'  focus we're going to learn bit more about Rob. Some share members know Rob quite well through his day job with the County of Wellington's Green Legacy Programme. And for others, you may have never met him. But here are his favourite things, as dictated to me.

Favourite Farming Task
Rob's favourite farming task, like me, is harvesting. We grow a huge number of fruits and berries, which Rob takes the lead on planting and maintaining and they are just starting to fruit reliably in the last year or two. Rob has been busy harvesting and freezing or dehydrating plums, elderberries, currants, aronia, and many other fruits. Plus Rob did most of the garlic harvest this year. 

Favourite Crop to Grow
Fruit and nut trees are Rob's favourite crop to grow and will form a large part of our farm in future years, as they become old enough to produce. So far, in addition to the above mentioned fruits, Rob has also planted: apples, pears, peaches, raspberries, seabuckthorn, mulberries, haskap, goji berries, and cherry trees. And for nuts, he has planted: heartnut, baurtnut, chestnut, hazelnut,  and northern pecan. Soon we will have more fruits and nuts than we will know what to do with!

Favourite Vegetable to Eat
While definitely not a vegetable, Rob's favourite farm produced item are his homemade fruit wines, meads, and cyser. This spring Rob made Elderberry Maple Sap Mead and this fall Rob is planning on experimenting with an Elderberry Apple Cyser. For those that don't know, cysers are hard ciders that use honey to raise the alcohol content. Sort of like a combination of cider and mead. 
​
Favourite Kitchen Hack
If in doubt over what to make, Rob's answer is always to throw it in a smoothie. We have a Vitamix blender and it is Rob's favourite kitchen tool and gets daily use making Rob's strange concoctions. If you've ever seen Rob out and about, he probably has a giant mason jar full of green sludge at his side! If you have an overabundance of celery, cucumbers, kale and other greens, lettuce, herbs, carrots, and more just through them in a blender with some fruit and you are set for the day!

Favourite Non-farming Past-time
Because Rob doesn't get to spend as much time with our boys as I do since he works off-farm, he's favourite past-time is to play real time strategy video games with Terran and Rowan. Every week they seem to have a different favourite but League of Legends and Art of Conquest are leading the pack right now. On a personal front, Rob is an avid athlete and particularly loves trail running. Never one to shy away from pushing his limitations, Rob has run a 100-mile race, several duathlons, and other road races. Now, he prefers to run in nature for pleasure. After doing some hiking on the Bruce Trail these past few days, Rob would like to take some time to do some trail running along sections of the Bruce.

Favourite Farm Attire
Up until this year Rob said he hated hats. But inspired by his late friend Paul Day, Rob decided to try out a Barmah hat. These leather hats are made in Australia and Rob looks like he's straight from the Australian outback! Now, the hat is never far from his side (or head). Except for the one time Rob thought maybe someone had stolen it from his truck. But a few weeks later, as the snow receded we found it frozen to the top of our firewood chopping block! A bit of oil and it was just like new.

Favourite Way to Pass Time While Doing Field Work
Rob's a talker and he loves to work alongside others discussing everything from politics, to health, to philosophy, to the latest Game of Thrones episode. While many people are not skilled at working and talking at the same time, Rob actually gets faster when he has someone to chat (or debate) with!

Stay tuned next week to learn more about Terran and Rowan!

We managed to make it through our first two frost warnings relatively unscathed. That's right - frost warnings in August! It did get rather chilly each night but we seemed to avoid frost which hopefully gives us a few more weeks of good growing weather. 

I am going to spend the next couple of blog posts profiling some of 'Our Favourite Things' for each of us on the farm but before I get into that I wanted to do a quick egg update. As members noticed last week, our egg production has reduced. This is for two reasons. First, our chickens tend to start laying less as we head into fall. And second, we are beginning to sell and butcher some of our laying hens. We have been doing much thinking about our farm in 2018 and have decided to streamline operations and make some changes (more on these changes in future blogs). One big change we will be making is to nearly eliminate egg production going forward. We will always have a few chickens for our own eggs but will not be making this a major farm enterprise. The reason for making this choice is two-fold: financial viability and personal enjoyment. Our egg production is the least financially profitable part of our farm and ties us to the property in ways that our other ventures do not. As a result of fewer eggs this season I will be doing these two things: bringing eggs to the CSA pickup on a bi-weekly basis and limiting eggs to 1 dozen at a time per CSA family. 

And now, on to 'Lorraine's Favourite Things'. I thought profiling each of us on the farm would give share members a better understanding of us and also learn more about why we do what we do. Stay tuned for Rob, Terran, and Rowan's favourite things in future blogs! Since we are listing our favourite kitchen hacks below, we will be skipping the weekly recipe for this series.

Favourite Farming Task
Harvesting is my favourite task: seeing all the beautiful produce that is a result of my hard work makes that work worthwhile. My love of harvesting is followed closely by my love of anything related to planning: plotting crops in the field, ordering seed, and thinking of ways to grow the business.

Favourite Crop to Grow
This is kind of like asking a parent to choose their favourite child! It's much easier for me to choose my least favourite crops to grow (peas and parsnips). As for my favourites, I love growing any type of onion. They grow really well for us and we use so many in our cooking that I can't imagine not having such variety of flavours. I also love growing anything in the curcubit family like winter squash, summer squash, and cucumbers. Finally, I love growing carrots. While weeding them is a real pain, they also produce very well in our soils, are well loved by share members, and can be enjoyed nearly year-round.

Favourite Vegetable to Eat
Now this is hard! I enjoy every single vegetable (unless you count mushrooms) when they are fresh and in-season. The variability of foods that we eat throughout the seasons is one of my favourite parts of farming. But if I had to choose, I'd narrow it down to these favourites: kale, cabbage, arugula, yellow beans, patty pan squash, delicata squash, onions, garlic, tomatoes, new potatoes, and all fresh herbs. So not really a very narrow list.... :)

Favourite Kitchen Hack
Keep a jar of herb pistou at the ready in the fridge at all times. Not sure what to do with a vegetable? Simply steam or roast and then drizzle with a little of the herb pistou and it's delicious! Add a poached or fried egg, whole grain like rice or quinoa, a handful of nuts or seeds, or some meat or cooked legume and you have a nutritious and simple meal. A large percentage of our meals involve the above items drizzled in herb pistou. You can cook a large volume of grains or meat at the beginning of the week to simply warm up and toss with your vegetables and pistou for a super quick meal. Traditionally, pistou is a combination of olive oil, basil, garlic, and sea salt. But you can customize it in any way you want. Here are my favourite combos:

Spring Pistou: olive oil, chives, oregano, garlic, lemon zest, sea salt
Basil & Parsley Pistou: olive oil, basil, parsley, garlic, red pepper flakes (optional), sea salt
Cilantro Pistou: olive oil, cilantro, garlic, honey, jalapeno (optional), sea salt

I use approximately 1 cup oil and small handful of each of the herbs plus 1 clove of garlic and the remaining ingredients to taste. I put everything in a wide-mouth 500ml mason jar and then blend with an immersion blender. You could also use a regular blender or just chop all the herbs finely and don't blend. 

Favourite Non-farming Past-time
My three favourite past-times are reading, music and theatre, and camping. Reading is the easiest for me to fit in to our busy summer schedule and I love everything from mystery novels and historical fiction to all sorts of non-fiction. Right now I am reading The Case of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Keane, which explores the history of neuroscience. As for music, I have played the piano pretty much my entire life and have decided this winter to teach myself to play the ukelele. This is inspired from watching YouTube videos of the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain! And camping - something we find hard to do when owning a farm but I hope to do more of in the coming years. 

Favourite Farm Attire
My wide-brimmed hat, worn-in Blundstones, and fanny pack are essentials! My hat has seen better days: stained and warped brim from wearing in rain and sun and wind. And just the other week I pulled it on my head so hard I ripped part of the brim away from the hat so now it hangs partially off my head. My fanny pack carries everything from my phone, headphones, notepad, pencil, lip balm, sharpening tool, elastics, and random bits of other supplies I need at any given time!

Favourite Way to Pass Time While Doing Field Work
Sometimes field work is exciting and I enjoy listening to the sound of nature or chatting with whomever I am working with. But much of the time I am working alone on a task that is monotonous or less enjoyable. For those times I listen to podcasts. My current favourites are: Farmer to Farmer Podcast, Revisionist History, Dear Hank and John, and The History Chicks.