27. July 2011 by David.

Some weeks just seem longer than others… but a few late evenings and hot days help give the feeling of having accomplished a lot more than usual in a week. We had fun moving 400 square bales of hay from the fields into the barn Wednesday evening, after the temperature had cooled down a bit! We took the afternoon to relax the next day which was even better, especially with the temperature and humidity so high. Heat warnings? What are they? It’s much easier to work in the heat when you are used to it.  We are.

Another evening we were trying to salvage old drip tape - the long thin plastic tubing we use to water the garden. In trying to use some sections from last season we were finding far too many holes to be worth patching. Do you give up and throw out a section after two holes or nine holes?

The week ended with our potluck! I’m pleased to announce the most creatively scrumptious dish, by popular vote, was Carrot-coconut Salad. A proud Albert went home with a potato-sac full of goodies including some eggs, the first of the french and purple beans, some hot peppers, zucchini, and dried camomile. His winning recipe was made from grated carrots and shredded coconut (in equal parts) with some raisins or cranberries. This salad was served with a sweet and sour dressing made from 1 cup Apple cider vinegar, 125mL of honey and 2 tablespoons of finely chopped fresh ginger. Apparently the salad is best when the coconut is freshly picked from a tree and ground in a coffee grinder, but we don’t happen to have any coconut trees at Riverglen! Popular vote was also strong for some Carrot Ginger Coconut Milk soup, Lemon-thyme and Spelt bread, Kale chips, Berry shortcakes and Chocolate beet cake! Recipes are going up on the website. A delicious feast

Heather

What’s in my Box?

Week No.7

• Beets: The bins are packed with two varieties for you to choose between. The Chioggia beets are white and red stripes when they are cut open - they can be recognized by a slightly more orange colour.  The (other) beets are a much deeper purple colour and the red from the stems extends onto the leaves along the veins.  Don’t forget their edible greens are yummy too.
• Carrots: Freshly dug for you to crunch, boil, sauté or bake.
• Swiss Chard: We gave our greens a week of rest, and they look all the better for it.
• Peas: Some are green, some are purple - beware the purple ones loose their colour with cooking.  There’s nothing like preparing a colourful feast, only to open the pot lid and see they have switched to green… they’re just as delicious either way!
• Shallots: Tiny members of the onion family, use them as you would their other family members.
• Lettuce: Nice heads of lettuce can still be found in our fields, but they’re heading for your salad bowls. I love summertime salad meals - throw in some grilled chicken and cheese, or some feta cheese and olives.
• Parsley: Nice little bunches to add a different herb to your dishes.
• Broccoli or Zucchini: Tuesday gets broccoli - lovely big heads which are a first for Riverglen.  The zucchini harvest is beginning and will start in the Thursday baskets this week.

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27. July 2011 by David.

First things first, we’ll see you this Sunday, right?  July 24th at 11am Riverglen is hosting a pot-luck lunch for the Intentional Eaters Community - that’s you, our CSA members!  Come out and meet each other over some good food. We’ll give you a little tour of the farm so you can see how things have changed since you were here last, or welcome you for the first time. Please bring a plate, fork, mug and a favourite dish to share. Try to use ingredients from your baskets in interesting ways - if you didn’t get a particular ingredient this week, try finding it at the market or our farm store. If you want to share, send the recipe to info@riverglen.ca and we’ll compile them on the webpage.  There will be a small prize for the most creatively scrumptious dish so bring out your best!

Beautiful sunshine, and… is that the third windstorm this season? We have to try hard not to bore you with news of the weather, but it plays an important role in daily life at the farm. The sunshine means that the hay has been cut - you can see it in the background here.  It’s nice to see fresh hay lined up for the animals this winter! The storm wasn’t as kind to us as the sunshine. There are now a few trees down on the fences around the farm.

I’d like to introduce Alice, who has been giving us a hand with weeding and harvesting!

We’re keeping up with the seeding, hoeing, weeding, irrigation, harvesting… There are freshly tilled beds to plant fall crops in, and we collected a nice batch of potato beetle grubs. We also got a lovely example of why we’re keeping all the cabbages covered this week. Insects called ’sweet midge’ found one little section we forgot to put row cover on! They eat the apical meristem (the growing tip of the plant) which essentially halts any further vertical growth. It’s nice to experience the tangible outputs of farm work when we harvest crops, but the mistakes very tangible too. They’re covered up now in hopes that the rest of them will be saved. It might already be July, but the learning never stops at Riverglen

I’m looking forward to seeing you all out on Sunday.

-Heather

What’s in my Box?

Week No.6

• Carrots: The first of the season… these ones are orange.
• Green Onions: While many people call scallions (or bunching onions) ‘green onions’, here are some true green onions - fresh, summer onions with green edible leaves and without dry peals. Typically, onions are left in the field until the leaves dry up. These become the yellow storage onions you are used to seeing. There will be some of those later in the season!
• Turnip Greens: These tender greens have a delicious taste raw, but they can be very lightly steamed or stir-fried as well.
• Nappa Cabbage: The last of the Nappa cabbage, we still love it chopped up with an apple cider vinaigrette and a bit of fruit (dried or fresh).
• Mesclun: Spicy salad mix bags, dress them up as you like.
• Choice Herbs: The chives are back! Along with lemon thyme and oregano. Choose one bunch.

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13. July 2011 by David.

So what were you doing last Sunday at 5am? I’m going to guess many of you were asleap, and those of you that are early risers were happily going about your morning routines. We were busy in the barnyard stirring Horn Silica, one of the biodynamic preparations. Don’t worry, someone had the sense to brew up a pot of tea for us! Horn Silica starts as ground up quartz crystals which are then buried in the ground for the summer months. We stir a little pinch of powder into the huge tub of water. The hour of stirring, so that the water takes on the properties of the silica, needed to happen before sunrise when the preparation was sprayed on plants. This preparation helps the plants to absorb the light energy from the sun, giving the plants extra strength. It is primarily for the plants whose fruits and flowers we harvest: broccoli, squash, melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, peas, beans… these plants are all in the fields and growing nicely.  We have now given them an extra boost! No, it’s not like pesticides or herbicides or even fertilizers. Steve compares organic agriculture and biodynamic agriculture by saying that organic agriculture is prohibitive (you can’t use this or that) and biodynamics is prescriptive (you should use this preparation and that preparation). I like the positive approach of biodynamics, the focus on soil health and the interactions between plants and their environment. I caught Steve stirring it up, and that’s David misting the broccoli at sunrise.

Oh, and if anyone has some live scarecrow training and wants to put in some volunteer time we’d love to set you on the deer. Just joking, but they have started visiting the garden. We’ve put in extra time making sure the electric fence is working at full power, and we’ve all been caught running after them in the evenings.  Farmers can get very enthusiastically protective of their crops, and it’s a great excuse to wave your arms and make interesting sounds. There’s a double fence along two sides - a magical distance apart. If the deer can’t jump over both at once, and can’t land in between, they shouldn’t be able to get into the garden. We’re thinking of putting the double fence along the other side too, or finding a radio with crazy battery life, or a scarecrow on a motion sensor… or who knows what we’ll come up with this week!

Hope you’ve all marked your calendars for the feast coming up - Sunday, July 24th from 11am till 2pm. Use this weekend to experiment with a dish, then bring it next weekend to share with everyone!

-Heather

What’s in my Box?

Week No.5

• Mesclun : That lovely mix of greens you’re learning to dress up in all sorts of different ways, right?
• Iceberg Lettuce Head : The first of the icebergs grown at Riverglen, David’s very proud of them. We think they’re a perfect crunch when chopped up in sandwiches à la submarine style.
• Chard : A staple green for chopping up and mixing into any cooked dish, it wants to be thrown in a minute before talking your dish off the heat. It is better to chop up the thicker stalk at the base and cook it a bit longer than the greens.
• Nappa : From salads to sandwiches, this tasty cabbage is back in your baskets this week. If you’re going for the ”What’s that?” lunchtime award, try chopping up some Nappa with balsamic vinaigrette and strawberries… mmm.
• Beets : A familiar delicious treat, but don’t forget the lovely greens are tasty too ! The leaves and stalks can be used in the same ways as chard, hardly surprising since these two plants are in the same family - Chenopodiaceae.
• Choice herb : The choice is back, ”choose one bunch”. There is some english thyme in there too this time.
• Radishes (Thursday) : You have waited patiently, and here are your radishes. Don’t forget they can be cooked up a bit of you prefer to tame their spice.
• Peas (Thursday) : From a crunchy snack to a quick boil and buttering, have your peas as you please.

The summer squash are flowering: first comes flowers, then comes fruits, then you get to eat them!

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6. July 2011 by David.

Farm chores   

I had the pleasure of taking on all the chores this weekend, to give the other team members a well deserved break.  We take over each other’s chores regularly (I got a break last week), but this was the first time I took care of everyone at once.  We all have chores, and my quasi-chore is taking care of the seedlings in soil blocks… which isn’t quite the same as dog-sitting, cat-sitting, fish-sitting, cow-sitting, sheep-sitting, chicken-sitting, duck-sitting, gosling-sitting and chick-sitting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s lots of fun to do it all at once, but it also makes you appreciate how much everyone doing their own little part helps the farm run like clockwork.

On that note, I’d like to introduce everyone in pictures this week:

David is the farm steward and mastermind behind Riverglen, and he’s trained us up to be an awesome farm team to work with him!  Here he is in the springtime putting compost onto the fields.

Carolyn is his partner and despite working full time off the farm, she still makes time to play in the fields with us. David once teased us for talking too much as we worked, so she started talking to the cat. We all laughed! Here she is rocking the lawn-mower attachment on the tractor keeping the grass under control.

Steve is an intern and was dubbed the ‘duck father’ by a visitor, and I think the title is appropriate.  Here he’s fixing some re-used drip tape from last year.  We found lots of leaks that needed to be cut out and the hoses re-connected.  There’s a peek at his face in the soup picture too, I’ll have to get a better picture for next week.

I’m Heather, another intern, and I take my hat off to the onions for growing so nicely despite the weeds we’re freeing them of this week. I’ve started writing up newsletters, but keep your eye on the signature as we do switch it up.

Usually, one member of the team prepares lunch for the crew - working outside is a perfect excuse for good food. Sometimes one person will prepare something extra special the night before. Last

 Friday, preparations were half-done by one team member, then another got switched into lunch duty with two second instructions as to how to finish up the dish. We were all thrilled with the result though! Have you ever had pak choi in shepherds’ pie? I think chard or kale would be equally delicious…  Here we used green lentils, ginger, garlic scapes, hot pepper flakes and onion for the bottom layer. In the middle was pak choi (kale should be good too), and on top was mashed potatoes flavoured with lemon thyme and nutmeg. Next time we’ll try grating some cheese in with the pak choi layer.  Today we had kale and chickpea soup based off this recipe:

http://www.canadianliving.com/food/kale_and_chickpea_soup.php . It was delicious too!

Speaking of food… we’d like to invite you to the farm for a pot-luck lunch on Sunday, July 24^th from 11am till 2pm. Mark your calendars! A visit around the farm for those of you that missed it, followed by a feast. So bring along a favourite dish to share.  We challenge you to use the veggies from your basket as creatively as possible.

Heather

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