Another August Day on the Farm!

We spent another day on the farm last weekend, harvesting and planning for the next season!

We got busy by rescuing some sad abandoned rhubarb from the city and transplanting it to the front of our new fruit plot! The three new rows we have covered with tarp last month will be the new location of our future fruit plot!

We wanted to get started on some perennial action at the farm, and what better way to start then by adding a rhubarb patch! We also snuck in our cute little strawberry plant from the summer that we hope will hang on for years to come! So we have officially begun our fruit patch in 2018. As long as everything doesn't die over the winter... gulp.

We hope to add to our strawberry rows year after year, with slow progress and one day enough to harvest for a good jam session in July! On the other side of our new plot we are beginning our Haskap orchard this coming weekend! We took a quick trip to the Saskatoon Berry Farm on Sunday for a delicious breakfast and discovered they had a sale on their bushes, so we scored a great deal on 2 large haskap bushes (Tundra and Borealis) and two small bushes of Honey Bee, which is a pollinator for both of the large haskap varieties we bought. We hope they take well to our soil environment, but this is the big test! We want to see these guys flourish before we invest further in some plants, but we do love the idea of a substantial haskap orchard in the coming future. We know very little about growing haskaps, so it is all a big experiment. Fingers crossed!!

--> Here are the gorgeous haskap bushes we got this weekend! To be planted this coming weekend!

We also unearthed our last variety of potatoes for the season, AmaRosa! They are a gorgeous purple red potato with dark flesh that keeps when cooked. We were impressed with all three of the varieties we planted and harvested this year and will definitely be going back to Eagle Creek Farms for their seed potatoes next year! Please do check them out if you are interested in growing next year.. their website is:

We got Bellanita, Candy Cane and Amarosa this season and have intention to do all three again next year. Don't change a good thing, amirite?!

It was a busy day at the farm, and we had to assess and process the amount of produce still in the ground at this stage in the season. We did over plant for what we could handle in terms of sales and organizing this year, admittedly. It wasn't that we didn't realize how much we were planting... well actually there was a bit of that, but it was mostly that we couldn't believe it would all actually grow. We surprised ourselves in how well everything grew despite a hot dry summer. Compared to last year, we produced easily 10x the amount with almost as much manual work! So we did learn some hard lessons in storing and lacking room and all that fun stuff that comes with lots and lots of produce and nowhere to put it. Next year, we will have our ducks in a row a bit better to properly sort out and organize our season. Our main focus will be on succession planning with beets and carrots, and sorting out the potential for a weekend market for 2019.

On the agenda more presently is learning some homesteading skills such as pickling and preserving with all these delicious beets and carrots we have! On Monday night, I started the fermenting process referred to as "kvass" on some golden beets and chioggia beets. So we shall see how that works.. we are pretty skeptical, but Ben does love bread kvass... so we shall see if he loves beet kvass as well! You never know, it could be one of our preservation techniques of choice! Fermentation is definitely the trendy thing to be doing anyways. Anyone ever tried beet kvass? We would love to hear your experience. It is apparently incredibly popular in Ukraine and Russia... which still doesn't make me confident LOL.

So as the slumps of August roll on, and the farming burn out is real.. we are planning to head to the farm AGAIN this Saturday for more harvesting and planting of haskaps. Perhaps this could be our last big harvest, we shall see. We are hoping for another gym market to push some carrots and beets and potatoes out to everyone who might want them! What a year already though! We almost feel like legit market gardeners!

Almost.

Not quite. But Almost.

I will be posting more blogs for the season on planning out the next season, wrapping up and on our garlic planting this fall as well.. so I'm not quite ready to say goodbye for the season just yet! We are inserting the organization factor in here full force to try and keep on top of things for the following season. Like excel sheets and dates and even keeping track of expenses... dun dun dun. I don't think I want to know how much we spend on this rather expensive hobby of ours!

So I look forward to our next post together, until then my friends!

K