May Long Planting Weekend

We were plenty busy this weekend! As it has become tradition, our May Long weeked was spent up at the farm, busy bed prepping and seeding for the season ahead. The easiest way to forget about this whole pandemic thing for a while is to simply disappear in a veggie patch. Hard, rewarding work certainly can cure what ails me. (for those who are following the farmers blog and I had mentioned spring nuptials in a previous post, as you may have guessed there will be no wedding in June, and we are looking into next spring to rebook.. unfortunately the way things have gone this year, but we will carry on, and have a bigger party next year to celebrate.)

Although there was a ton of work to be done, it wasn't nearly as labourous as the past seasons, with less quack grass and thistles to tackle and nice loamy soft soil to work with, and the garden has finally reached the size where we are comfortable maintaining for awhile. We won't be expanding it any further, for now, and will be working on weed management and finally soil health (less rototilling and more broadforking, covering, composting, etc.) We are getting so close to the epic garden we had envisioned just 3 years ago!

Here I am soaking in the views of my office. Ben has been slowly building up my epic antique garden tool collection, including this legit watering can. (stay tuned for 1930's wheelbarrow picture, once we have refurbished it!)

Overall everything is looking fantastic this season, and I can't wait for everything to start sprouting up! We have so many experiments in the ground this year and we hope that we can find some more successes to carry us through the season with new ideas. This weekend we planted 15kg of seed potatoes from our friends at Eagle Creek Farms, three varieties including our favourite, Candy Cane. We planted our first heritage red fife wheat. We are trying our first winter squash and pumpkin plants, we planted a type of broom corn and are trying our first beans! It will certainly be a teaching year for us. We are also hoping for an earlier market this year in late June/early July, with early french breakfast radishes, japanese hakurei turnip, garlic scapes and baby beets and carrots! Fingers crossed the prairie forecasts agree with us this summer and we can organize a couple of markets throughout the summer.

Here is a glimpse of the garden plot this year:

Working on the Garden May 10-11

After May Long planting

What you don't see in this picture is the side garden with an additional 4 rows that also contains our rhubarb plants, strawberries and haskap plants, which means we are at 16 rows that are about 150 feet long (or abour 5kg of seed potato long!). I rigged up some trellis for our snap peas and cucumber plants, and will need to make another for our pole beans as well. So our garden will be even more vertical this year which will be fun, including our two varieties of corn, and our plentiful sunflowers. I was lucky enough to get to the farm for a few weekends early this month and with the weather being so great, we have more seeds in the ground earlier in the season than we ever have. I am hoping that with this slight extension to the season, we will be able to avoid the September snowstorm that takes out a lot of the final ripening (especially for the corn/squash).

As we have learned from last season, we now have row covers for our turnip and cabbage plants, and hopefully this will help us with pests in an organic manner. Since I already saw some tiny japanese hakurei turnip sprouts on Sunday, I got them out right away. Pretty amazing that by May 17th we are seeing stuff sprout up. By June 1st, the garden will be well on it's way!

So next weekend will be the last of our seeding, putting in the warm blooded seeds such as the squash, round zucchini, pumpkin and the last row of carrots and beets. Then it'll be weeding and watering until our first harvest! I will try my best to record our successes and learnings again this summer, as we continue to grow and build on all of our experiences. I feel like I say it every year, but it seems that every season feels like a break out year, with huge strides, and this year is no different. I feel like it's the first season we seem on top of the weeds, with a more established plot. But boy are we getting more and more comfortable living up on the farm with spending the past few weekends there, escaping the crazy of the city with this pandemic, it's getting harder and harder to leave every Sunday evening.

So I'll leave you with a dirty smiling face, and I hope you look forward to all of the sprouting pictures I'll be posting in the next few weeks! Check out our instagram page for more updates while I'm on the farm, as I like to post our updates in real time too!

Cheers friends and farmers,

Kait