Greenhouse Growing

The salad greens, wintered produce such as apples and squash, frozen produce and processed products are currently available to go to market. It was decided Friday morning that it was important to move these products this week, and so Klippers Organics decided last minute to make a presence at the Penticton Farmers' Market on Saturday. This means that Friday was harvest and preparation day.

My first task was to help Nadja and Manon harvest and box lettuce heads. There are a ton of different varieties available including butters, romaine, green oak leaf and red oak leaf. The lettuces have been growing rapidly in the greenhouses on the farm and are at risk of maturing too much in the next week before we go to the Vancouver market. You can tell if a lettuce head is too ripe by its center stalk - if it is woody and getting dense in the center, this means the plant is trying to seed and will be bitter tasting.

When in the green house, the humid air and extreme warmth you can feel on your skin certainly allows you to understand how these plants have been able to thrive so early in the season. Right now it is so hot that the greenhouse doors need to be opened during the day time so that the plants don't overheat.

Once we boxed 23 boxes with approximately 150 heads of lettuce, I moved on to organizing squash. First I had to sort through the crates of squash and prepare three to four boxes of each variety to take to market. We are certainly at the end of our squash supply, but I was still able to prepare boxes with spaghetti , kabocha, green hubbard and turban squash. In fact we have a lot of turban squash left, because it appears consumers are not as familiar with this product and consequently do not gravitate towards it at markets. Any squash that have started to mould will be fed to the chickens or if the rot is not too bad it will be fed to the apprentices!


The rest of the afternoon was spent peeling garlic - the fumes of garlic in the air and on my skin reminded me of a time when I was consuming raw garlic as a health experiment and I still love the odour as much as I did then. We were peeling garlice because in the 2009 season, Klippers sold out of garlic by February 2010 at the winter market. Therefore in the 2010 season additional garlic was planted given it was such a popular product in the hopes that it would last through the winter until this year's fresh garlic could be produced. Unfortunately, the garlic did not keep all the way through the winter as hoped, and so we are now salvaging the good garlic cloves from the expired ones to make frozen crushed garlic.

I think one of the key lessons I learned from my afternoon work is not to waste. It appears every item no matter how far gone it may appear, still has some life or some use. You just need to be creative to figure out how to get that remaining life to be profitable which, it appears, often means processing it into another form.