Our First Round of Harvesting 2018!

Ahead of this post, I shall apologize for the copious amount of pictures you will be inundated with (I couldn't help myself!):

The day finally came where we could dig up some buried gold and see what our hard labour had accomplished after weeks of hoping for rain and good weather... and mother nature did not disappoint us! We spent a busy Saturday afternoon on the plot with some help from some great friends of ours, to do some pulling of weeds and beets! I mean, look at this foliage! Those sunflowers are taller than me!

We dug up our early season variety of potatoes, our Bellanita (a yellow, buttery fingerling potato), and we were so happy to have such a great harvest of our very first potato plant!

Our beets also did not disappoint! We started to thin out the massive rows we had, and were so happy with the condition of the beautiful beets, golden, chioggia, early wonder and some mangels! We even had some albinos pop up as well.. though we didn't plant any seeds!

Overall, we had a large cooler full of bellanitas, around 40 lbs of harvest from a half row in our plot (I'm totally guessing I have no idea how much things weigh).

We also had 25 lbs of beets and gorgeous beet greens! (again.. the guessing is totally poor). Once we got them home, we created 11 bunches for our customers in Calgary! On top of all of the bunches, we had beets for chipping and got to try our first golden and chioggia beet chips! This small harvest hardly did damage to our beet rows at the farm, so we are going to be swimming in beets in the next few weeks..and I'm pretty happy about that! #thirstybeetchips #allthebeets

After our very first harvest of 2018, I felt a little overwhelmed with how much produce we brought back (we did not expect to have so much) and feared we wouldn't have enough people buy the produce and it would go to waste. However Ben, our eternal optimist, said all we have to do is just provide the produce, the people will want it! And so they are, and Ben is quite the market man, and I am so happy to share this harvest with friends around Calgary, and I hope they feel the love and hard work we put into growing the food! We will be providing more updates on the remaining harvest and any upgrades we manage to tackle in the remaining summer and fall. We are hoping to get more tarp down and control some weeds for an even larger plot next year! And of course, a bigger garlic planting this fall will be on our agenda!

It is incredible how much control we have gained over the land in just a year. From what started as a battle of the thistles, turned into rich sandy soil that although weeding was required, was so much easier to handle! I know we have millions of more lessons to learn, and we were blessed with a great summer of heat and rain, but it does boost your morale when you can harvest and grow so much in just a year of learning the basics and investing a lot of sweat equity and hard work.

I know its only July, but I am already looking forward to next year's planting in anticipation that we can increase our plot and have more succession planting scheduled in order to make this an official market garden and provide produce for months at a time! One lesson to learn at a time and we will get there! But until then, have you seen my beets? I mean, really. Take a look at these marvels:

So I'll leave you with that masterpiece of an image... I think I should probably print this for my wall. Sigh.

Have a great week! I'll see you again in August!

Cheers friends, family and farmers!

Kait

#harvest #beets #potatoes #newpotatoes #chioggia #goldenbeets #beetchips