Still knowing what I do, the cherry trees are beautiful. The red and yellow of the fruit is in beautiful contrast to our clear blue skies and the rich green leaves under which they are growing. Plus, the other apprentices and I have come up with a great solution - chocolate covered bug filled cherries. If chocolate covered cherries and chocoloate covered insects are both good, we might as well just combine them all at once!
The strawberries have also started to ripen. These little delicious burst of flavour have always been very exciting to me. Living in Vancouver, I used to do day trips to Surrey to go to the u-picks at the end of the strawberry season to take advantage of the fact that the price was $1.00/lb. I have learned I can pick a lot of strawberries. We have been happy to send strawberries to market this week and also put them in our large CSA shares.
Last, I was asked to harvest turnip this week for market. Glad to have a new vegetable to pull out of the ground, I started the endeavour of pulling these roots and getting them ready to bunch. However, much to my dismay, every turnip I pulled up had been eaten by worms! Now there is currently a discussion going on about weather the worms are wire worm or root maggot and I hope to get clarification this week. If the little pest is one of these two, he will only eat turnip, however if he is the other and we pull out all the turnip, he will migrate to carrots or beets which we obviously want to avoid.
Regardless, as you can see the turnip we have pulled are being consumed and the tiny worms just cut out. When I was assigned the task of cultivating the turnip, I honestly had to stop and ask if we really couldn't sell any of them - I figured that people have to realize that organic means that there are pests, so maybe consumers ok if there is only one worm? At the Penticton farmers' market this weekend, other farmers had gone about cutting out the worms and bagging the turnips together to sell. It seems turnip is just not meant to be grown in Cawston (sorry Mum).
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