TERRA VERDE HOMESTEAD
  • Our Farm
    • Meet the Farmers
  • Certified Organic Produce
  • Pastured Poultry
  • Kune Kune Pigs
  • Honey
  • Blog

CSA Week 14

9/21/2015

 
You will be excited to know that Rob has started taking supers (the upper hive boxes where the bees store honey) off the hives in preparation for harvesting honey! We won't have the honey ready for this week, but you can expect it for sale in the following week or two. So far, it looks like a decent harvest, with quantities similar to last season. When Rob harvests the honey at this time of year, he collects all the supers and takes them to his beekeeping friend who has a spinner. This means that rather than cutting the comb and straining the honey by hand, he can spin the frames. This allows us to extract the honey in a fraction of the time.

In other farm news, we are working steadily at prepping beds and harvesting vegetables for winter storage. We harvested our potatoes last week with a total harvest of 385kg (not including the early potatoes we included in the shares). This is a smaller harvest than desired, but still workable. It just means that we won't be selling any bulk potatoes at the end of the season or at the farmers market. There was a fairly high number of potatoes that rotted in the ground prior to harvest. We are unsure if this is due to the late blight or heavy rains near the end of the season. We culled out the rotting potatoes and decided to start including the potatoes in your shares two weeks earlier than typical. You will still receive the quantity and frequency of potatoes I planned for but just at a different time frame. Because of the rot, I was concerned that the potatoes might not store well and didn't want to hold on to them only to lose them in storage. 

The red and yellow onions, as well as the shallots have dried nicely and you will be receiving these regularly for the remainder of the season. 

Kimmy has been busy laying plastic mulch mats around all our newly planted Seabuckthorn bushes. These mulch mats will help keep the weeds (primarily twitch grass) away from the immature bushes and allow them to get established without competition. I am looking forward to a BIG seabuckthorn harvest in a few years time!

Rob, with the help of our intern from last year, Ian, has been busy working on a contract farm design and planting job. We will share more details when the project is done, but they are planting perennial fruit and nut trees on a large scale to serve as a demonstration of how to incorporate trees into agriculture. This is an exciting project and an area of our farm business that we will be expanding on significantly in the next couple of years. 

The final bit of exciting news around here is we are beginning the process to apply for organic certification! A new certification programme, offered through Procert (one of the primary certification bodies in Canada), has just started that is geared towards small scale farms of less than 10 acres. The application and approval process takes a bit of time so we won't expect the process to be finished until mid-summer 2016. Nevertheless, we are excited about the potential to make our organic farming techniques official! This winter I will be spending much time gathering information and making many spreadsheets! A key component of certification is a clear paper trail of all the inputs, techniques, purchases, and activities that our farm uses. 

Weekly Share Contents

Carrots
Potatoes
Beets
Tomatoes
Eggplant
Head Lettuce
Garlic
Chard or Kale

Picture
Beets are a favourite vegetable for us. In addition to being highly nutritious and versatile, these delicious vegetables store very well so that we can enjoy them throughout the winter. Most commonly, we roast them, grate them raw into salad, make borscht, or add to smoothies and juices. For more ideas on how to use beets, visit these links: 

http://www.adishofdailylife.com/2015/03/balsamic-beet-salad-with-arugula-goat-cheese-and-walnuts/#_a5y_p=3543561


http://www.marthastewart.com/907476/tomato-beet-salad


http://www.simplebites.net/a-recipe-for-unprocessed-dark-chocolate-beet-bundt-cake/


https://www.bloglovin.com/blogs/not-your-standard-4105879/beet-hummus-2841363871/


Comments are closed.

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    Picture
    Picture

    Archives

    February 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Our Farm
    • Meet the Farmers
  • Certified Organic Produce
  • Pastured Poultry
  • Kune Kune Pigs
  • Honey
  • Blog