Tomatoes, Celery, Corn, Basil and Hot Peppers

Tomatoes! Death becomes you. The tomatoes are dead. The frost earlier this week did them in, and we are happy. A couple of people here still tried to salvage a few last tomatoes to extend the tomatoe sandwhich addictions they have developed over the last few weeks. And others yet were trying to nab a few for seed saving purposes. But for the most part, we are done with them. (Side note - to save tomato seeds you crush the seeds out of the flesh of the tomato, cover these vegetable innards and let them ferment which deactivates the compounds that would allow the seeds to sprout. So when you actually collect the seeds, you are getting them out of a goopy, foul smelling, fermented mess you have let sit for weeks.)

Now we are undoing all the work in the tomato field we spent seeks putting together, namely cutting down all the supporting strings, then we'll remove the metal poles and the plants and last the plastic mulch and irrigation system. This should all be done by next week.



On the only two crops that remain in the field that was assigned to me is celery and celeriac. This weekend was the last summer market in Vancouver, so we harvested most of the remaining celery to send off for sale. I am unsure if they will keep the rest for winter markets.


Back behing the tomato field was planted two rows of pop corn. After the frost, this too was ready to come off. We tore off the cobs, peeled them back right away and will let them cure for a few months in a dry and well ventilated location. Once they are dry you can pop the corn right off the cob in the microwave or if you would like to pan pop just peel back the kernels. The cobs sell for $1.50 each.

By the time the frost was strong enough to kill the other crops, it had devastated the basil. When it froze, the basil turned black-brown and looked like death. I didn't make any pesto or really use the basil too much this summer, though I thought about it, but working in the basil field was always a favourite. Some would say it makes a person smell delicious!

Last but not least are the hot peppers. I took a special interest in the hot peppers in recent weeks, a crop which sells for $15.00/lb, and got to know each of our varieties quite well. When dealing with hot peppers, a popular question is how hot are the peppers really? Well it turns out that there is a grading system for 'hotness' called the Scoville Scale and it is measure in Scoville heat units (SHU). For example, a sweet bell pepper has 0 SHU while a jalapeno has anywhere from 2,500- 8,000 SHU. On our farm we grow a wide variety of hot peppers, and our hottest is the habanero which is around 300,000 SHU. That's right, it is often 100 times hotter than a jalapeno.

The peppers we grow are pablano, padrone, habanero, jalapeno, hungarian hot, serrano, yellow cayenne, cherry bomb, joe's long cayenne, purple cayenne and thai dragon chile. I dehydrated a of these varieties for later use and also pickled a few varieties. Take a look!

Habanero pepper basket.

July 28, 2011: Farm Status

Half way through my apprenticeship, I am in awe about how much I have learned, how much I have seen, how much I have experienced and I look forward for what is still to come. Since we are more than mid-way into the growing season, I thought it would be appropriate to share a visual documentation of 'where the farm is at'. Here is a collection of the current highlights of my job:

The apricots that we thinned earlier in the season have started to ripen. It turns out we have a few varieties of apricots growing at Klippers, so the bulk of the apricots are still not ready. Here you can see the different sizes and colours of those we are taking to market.


Next, we are lucky to have quite a few early harvest peaches at Klippers. This has allowed us to take peaches to market, which fly off the shelves so fast, for a couple of weeks now. Unfortunately, because peaches are so delicate, and worth so much, apprentices rarely harvest the peaches. That being said, we are lucky enough to get the seconds for breakfast, drying and smoothies!!

Every week we take multi-coloured bunches of chard to market. Usually we get about 30 - 40 bunches a week.
We also bunch collards, which are a thick leaf green from the same family as cabbage. The leaves are great for wraps especially, but are also hardy enough to be cooked.

Kale (Dad this is kale) is my favourite green. All of the chard, collards and kale are plants that you continue to harvest until it frosts - you take off the larger leaves each week and then by the next week the plant has grown big enough to do the same thing again.

Garlic! After harvesting tons of garlic scapes, which caused my hands to peel horribly because of the acid in the plant sap, the bulbs thickened up nicely and we have now started to harvest them for storage. Currently we are taking about 420 heads to market on the weekend, which sell for $3.00 each or 4 for $10.00. We will continue to take fresh garlic for many weeks, but that which is in the ground needs to come out. For this reason, we are drying the garlic by hanging bunches in our sheds or laying them out on tables. The important thing is to avoid the sun and to keep the air circulating so that the bulbs dont rot. It has taken us about 18 hrs to do 6 rows. We have 12 more to go. Garlic is a big job.

After the turnip root maggot, the only other problem we have encountered, besides the cold weather which has put the growing season behind, is aphids. Aphids seem to love our salad greens in the green houses and all the collards (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, collards, kale, kohlrabi). If you can see the grey powder looking residue on the cabbage above, it is in fact all aphids! The problem is the bugs are so small that it really doesn't warrant searching through the leaves to clean them, so we are discarding a lot of plant material to the chickens which could normally be used for human consumption. But I understand you always need to account for loss.

Beans are now being harvested every Monday and Thursday. It is amazing how fast a vegetable can ripen. Every time we do the bean harvest we have buckets of beans, where three days earlier, those beans were not at all ready. We have yellow, purple, green and a purple/yellow bean growing. We didn't have very good germination with the beans, so two weeks ago we filled in all the empty spots with more beans. However, the maturation time for the plant is about 6-7 weeks, which puts us in to September. For this reason, we won't be planting any more this year.

This is a Hungarian Hot Pepper. I have not yet tried one, but understand it is very spicy. It is the first of our peppers to be ripe. If ever you need to curb the spice burning in your mouth, and don't drink or have milk, you can use a parsley concoction.

The basil is doing very well given their rough start. We are still working on making the plants big and bushy, which means we harvest the leaves and sell them by the pound ($20.00/lb) at market. Above you can see one of the varieties of basil we grow, lettuce leaf basil, so named for it's very large leaves. To bush up the plants, we have to pinch off the heads from the plan so that where there was one head, now two will grow.


Organic carrots are one of my favourite foods. If ever you need to do a taste comparison between organic and non-organic, use carrots. You will be impressed. We have purple, red, rainbow and orange carrots being harvested right now. Some are from a bind weed infested field, which is a bit of a pain, but the carrots are still tasting delicious. Once we pitch fork them out and bunch them, we then need to pressure wash the dirt off. See the brilliant difference in colour!
I am allergic to beets, to which everyone says they are sorry for me. I can understand the appeal of beets given their many uses (soup, salad, roasted, dried) and their fabulous colours. On our farm we have purple, red, white and gold beets. It is really fun to pull the big ones and also to jet the dirt off to reveal their brilliant colours. That being said, we have SO many beets going to market, that the beet harvest is definitely an event. Still, we can't seem to harvest enough for market.

We put in a second herb garden about a month ago. I am really not very good at using fresh herbs because they are normally so expensive to buy in the store and then it is so difficult to finish them before they go bad. For this reason, I will just say that finding ways to incorporate more fresh herbs into my diet is a current personal goal. Especially because consumers tend to be in the same boat as I and do ask for ways to use the herbs. All I know for sure is that our mint is outstanding in mojitos.


This is Kirsten harvesting beets in the bind weed field. As you can see, the field looks less cultivated and more wild. We stopped weeding this field, once the crops had enough of a presence that they could fend for themselves against the weeds. When 'harvesting' in this field I feel more like I am foraging than harvesting though because you have to dig through the weeds to find your crop.
Kirsten pressure washing some of our purple beets. I really enjoy the pressure washing job.

That's the it folks. Enjoy your organic produce. We've worked hard to prepare it for you.

June 8 - 15, 2011: Weeding and Planting

This past week was filled with emergency weeding sessions and lots of planting. We started the week weeding the carrots and beets that we did not finish at the end of the previous week. Over the weekend when I was in Vancouver for the markets, there was a hot spell here in Cawston, so the weeds shot up very quickly in our absence!

I have learned that one of the good sides of weeding and thinning, is that most of what we weed and thin is edible. In fact, sometimes we bring lamb's quarters to market, which is a eaten most often as a salad green, but on the farm it is primarily a weed between our crops. Similarly, in order to grow full beets, the plants must be thinned when they are young. The baby beets are also edible as greens, so after one morning of thinning I came home at lunch time with a stuffed bag and armful stuffed with baby beet greens. Our fridge was very full for a good many days until I pureed the greens to make a delicious coconut curry beet green soup!
We also started last week planting squash. It was the first time I have planted something directly from seed. I learned that you generally want to plant the seed at a depth of three times the seed size. It doesn't matter what direction the seed is facing, but it was important to give it ample space within the mulch so that the seeds germinate and grow. I was fascinated that I didn't know a good number of the varieties of squash we planted and look forward to learning more about them when they grow.

In order to seed one of our fields that is pestered with bindweed, a weed that would tangle itself around our plants, we had to lay out huge rolls of black nylon sheets to mitigate the weed growth. Also, the reason that it has been so important to get the squash seeds into the ground is because we must make sure that the squash can reach their maturity before the first frost. At this point, we are supposedly close to that deadline based on the weather patterns from previous years.

On Wednesday we harvested for the market at Main Street in Vancouver. We had red and gold beets, green onions, kale, salad mix and eggs available for sale. We also harvested collards, which I didn't realize were the leaves of any plant from the collard family - collard is short for colewart which means 'cabbage plant'. The collard family includes broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, cabbage, kale and brussel sprouts. This is just proof again that one can use everything a plant has to offer in some way.

Planting continued throughout the week. We have planted eggplants, melons, zucchini, lettuce, celery, celeriac, fennel, tomatoes, basil, parsley, tomatillos and peppers. Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, we have planted a plethora of varieties of each of these food types. The reason I say maybe not so obviously, is because though I again consider myself a foodie, I have been completely ignorant of so many of the cultivars of these plants, and I can see how this fact might be overlooked by readers.

We finally returned to the wind-swept tomato field to mitigate the damage done by the heavy windstorm in early May. Though the surviving plants are thriving, I would say that farmer Annamarie's 50% loss estimate was fairly accurate. Some rows were more than 50% lost while others maybe only 10% loss. Hopefully our later transplants are able to catch up and start producing.

The weeds also shot up in the chicken fields, so we got in there to mow down the brush to keep it under control. One of the added benefits is that you can also find hidden nests then too! Here you can see that a few chickens found a deep patch of grass to make their nest, but it was only revealed after the weeds were mowed.


The last bit of exciting news is that the field of garlic at the front of the house has just started to scape. This means we will have garlic scapes at the market soon!