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!

Weeding, Thinning, Planting and Manure

Time is flying by here on the farm. Bonnie, my long-time friend, said to me yesterday that we have already been in Cawston for 28 days. It is amazing how much we have done already in this time, though I wish she could stay so that we could continue to explore the beautiful Okanagan.

Last week on the farm we continued to do the work we had started a few weeks earlier and finished up quite a few jobs. We finished planting the tomato plants finally, then moved on to planting a couple of rows of basil which are currently still looking a little yellow. I learned when we plant the basil to remove the heads of the plant to encourage them to bulk up.

I spent an afternoon mowing one of our peach orchards, because we have moved right away into thinning the peaches which I have been told will grow much more quickly than the apricots have (which is very fast in my opinion). The peaches also need to be given much more space to grow than the apricots were, so we are thinning quite extensively. We are giving them a space from about your thumb tip to your pinkie tip while extended. Seeing how full the apricot trees are now that the apricots have grown, it barely seems like we thinned them at all. I have taken this as a lesson for the peaches - take off more than you think you should.

We spent some time weeding the onions which are also growing fast, though not as quickly as the weeds. I was recently away for five days and I can't believe how much everything grew in my absence.

The last job for this week was cleaning out the chicken coup - great. The birds were all chased out and we started piling the manure into wheel barrels to take over to the compost heap. If you have never been in a chicken coop, when you unsettle the layer upon layer of straw and crap (excuse my language) that has been leveled down, the smell is suffocating. But the job had to be done and it was quite rewarding when we had sorted the spaces out for the birds.

Weeding and Planting; Washing and Bagging

The sun is out, the sky is blue and weather warm (25 C). In my experience, the weather here is something that belongs to late summer days, where the sun is still strong enough to change the colour of your skin, but its warmth is welcomed as a solace from the cooler nights. Yet, it is not August, it is May! It is raining in Vancouver, flooding in Montreal and in all likelihood snowing in Calgary.

I start with this meteorological anecdote, because it is the warmth and beauty of this place that make it not only a unique and fruitful agricultural climate, but it also is what makes working mundane jobs totally worth while. The weather and the place are the motivation I need to weed, plant, wash or bag for hours on end. Whenever I get tired of the work at hand, I think about stuffing envelopes, data entry or email blasts, which are to me the business world alternatives to the repetitive work that needs to be done on the farm. In the end, I am always 100 times happier to be here, under the sun, working the land than in an office peering from my desk enviously at the sunshine beyond my office window.

This week there is a lot of planting and preparation that needs to happen for the season. On Monday, I started off the morning weeding the onion field. So far this is my least favourite job. Essentially, we have a large field covered with 18 rows of plastic, and each piece of plastic has been punctured with six holes across and I would estimate 150-200 deep. In each of these holes is planted an onion. If my estimation is right, that is close to 19,000 onions! Weeding the onions meant reaching into each of these little holes and pulling out the weeds. Working two people per row, it took my partner and I almost 3.5 hrs to do 3 rows. Needless to say it was a lot of work.

The reason that the plants are planted under the plastic is to retain the heat and soil moisture because Cawston is such an arid environment. Also, the cover is supposed to help with preventing the weeds from growing too savagely. We'll see how that works out.

That afternoon, we moved to the next field to plant tomato plants. There are an enormous variety of tomatoes being planted at Klippers Organics, and I look forward to getting to know all the varieties. It appears that tomatoes do best when they are seeded inside and allowed to grow in a green house until about 4 inches. The trays of tomatoes are then taken out of the protective greenhouse environment and laid outside for a few days to toughen up before being planted in the ground. The tomatoes too are planted beneath plastic rows, however the tomatoes are only planted one across and require about a foot spacing between each plant. For efficiency sake, the plastic and irrigation (which is a drip line underneath the plastic) was laid in the morning, then Annamarie punctured the holes in the plastic one foot apart, we then laid the tomato plants out by each of the holes and the final step was to push the plant deep into the ground. With tomatoes, you want to plant them very deep because all the furry bits on the stem of a seedling will become roots if covered in soil. This will allow each plant to have a more extensive root system and be better stabilized from the elements.

While we organized the plants, Annamarie took care of keeping track of which varieties were planted where. (Definitely a log book day!)


Tuesday was similar. I started with weeding the strawberry field of cooch grass. I don't know much about this grass, but it's roots were plenty in our strawberry field. After 3 hrs of raking and pulling, it appeared that the situation was better, but to an onlooker they would not have believed we had accomplished anything!

The spaces between the rows of strawberries that were already planted were being mulched with straw. In one of the straw boxes we had a nice morning surprised and found five little quail eggs. Kirsten ate them for lunch.

In the afternoon, we started bagging 4lb Spartan apples still left from the fall for the upcoming Trout Lake farmers' market. Again, it is important to know how to put all the produce to use, so those apples that were too bruised or rotten to be bagged will either be dried, made into cider or fed to the chickens. I have already sliced up six of the apples and they are drying in our kitchen dehydrator as we speak. Yum!

Opening weekend last year Klippers sold around 210 bags of apples at Trout Lake. Since the weather is supposed to be a little 'damp' this year, we only bagged 160 bags which we completed in just under an hour.


My last job for the afternoon was to finish washing the chicken eggs for the market. Eggs are always a popular item at farmers' markets. Klippers sells their eggs for $6.00 a dozen and today we finished packaging 210 dozen to take to the market this weekend. Hopefully they sell!

Essentially, we start with the oldest eggs (which are really only a few days older than the newest), dump them in a big bin of water, and scrub off any dirt or crap that may be on the egg. For the most part they are pretty clean, but we also have to watch out for eggs with cracks or eggs that are broken. If they are completely broken, the eggs obviously are useless and get tossed. If there is a crack in the egg, we keep them for, you guessed it, the apprentices! Also though, I have learned if the egg is broken but you can see that the inner membrane of the egg has not been ruptured, you can still eat the egg. Having learned that membranes are designed to allow substances and particles to move in and out of it, I have decided that I would prefer not to eat the broken eggs that have their membranes intact. However, I am more than happy to eat the eggs with cracks in their outer shell or ones that or just too massive to fit into the egg cartons - I am always filled with joy when we find really humungous eggs.

In our storage trailer, we have hundreds of egg cartons that people have been so kind to return to us to use or reuse. It always makes me wonder what kind of people remember to turn in their egg cartons on a weekly basis. Who are they? What are they like? What are the life values of these people? I know it doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to do, but I have been so trained to recycle that as soon as I have emptied my egg cartons or reusable bottles, they are out of my house ready for pickup. Today, packaging the eggs and seeing all the different brands and companies of egg cartons people had donated for us to use, furthered my curiosity on this subject. I am interested to meet the 'egg people' at the market and see what they are like.

In other news, Klippers might be getting a cow! I really hope that this happens because it will definitely be an awesome supplement to our current diet and decrease our monthly food bill. But a cow does need to be milked EVERY DAY. It is definitely a commitment.