Move forward... and don't look back!

As we get to the end of February...despite the current temperature of -32C and the forecast of -50 C with the windchill this weekend.. there is a ray of hope! Tomorrow it is March 1st and I have faith that with it will bring an (eventual) warming and turn towards what we all seek, yearn, indeed are begging for! The sun is getting warmer (ask any cat who lounges in the sunny window) and the days are getting longer... all signs that we are making progress. This winter has been brutal. But soon we will look back and affectionately and proudly swap stories of the highest snowbank or the coldest day. This hope of spring is what keeps us all moving forward. 

Here at the farm, we are eagerly anticipating the new growing season. We have been busy planning how to make this year even better than last! The winter has been hard on the animals and they too are dreaming of green grass and warm breezes. In January, our nanny goats blessed us with eight new kids. Despite being born during one of the coldest weeks, all survived and are thriving. Two of them... Martie and Arya required some quick intervention from us and as a result they have been hanging out in our basement being bottlefed for the last month! Their mamas unfortunately have no interest in these cutie-pies so we milk them twice a day and feed their babes 4-5 times a day! I'm pretty sure they laugh at us when we leave the barn each day! It is hard though to have a bad day when you get to end it snuggling with these two!

Today I went to get all our passports renewed... not because we have some great warm destination planned but they were expired and it needed to be done. However, should the universe see fit to hand us a tropical vacation.... by golly, we are ready! (Can you win those with Roll up the Rim?)

So I encourage you to not let the terrible weather get you down, to look forward towards the sunshine! (real or imagined!)

If thinking about boxes of yummy produce all summer long would cheer you up... we are now open to applications for our CSA Share. Check out our Products page for this and other offerings. 

Cheers! 

-L

Week #12 - FFF CSA Blog - To everything there is a season...

This week marks the last of our CSA shareholder boxes :(  It is always a time of year that I greet with mixed feelings. I will miss the weekly routine and opportunity to meet our customers and share our the bounty of our labours.

However, I would be lying if I wasn't looking forward to a bit of slower pace and less pressing deadlines. But as some famous playwright said... to everything there is a season.

Now we turn our attention to preparing for the coming winter - harvesting, preserving, storing and building and preparing new winter homes for some of our animals. And of course - more time for the best thing we've ever produced - our three wonderful children.

A big thank you for those that came out during Open Farm Day! We had over 200 visitors on Sunday and loved being able to show off our operation and teach a bit about what we do!

This week our customers will enjoy (among other things) a lovely watermelon, several different varieties of squash and some tomatillos. A tomatillo is also known as a mexican tomato or tomato verde (green tomato). It grows on a plant that is similar to a tomato but a papery husk forms around the tomato (a lot like the ground cherries). Many people have not eaten a tomatillo before and therefore I've put a few links below to some ideas of what you can do with them. My favorite is making Salsa Verde (green salsa) - absolutely love the stuff. A trick I use is to make the sauce - blend it and then pour into ice cube trays and freeze. Then I place in a ziplock bag and whenever I need a bit of Salsa Verde to add to recipe or put on my taco - I can take out as little as a tablespoon or as much as a cup just by selecting the number of ice cubes I need!

http://www.canadiangardening.com/food-and-entertaining/in-season/five-things-to-do-with-your-tomatillos/a/37287

http://allrecipes.com/recipes/fruits-and-vegetables/vegetables/tomatillos/

What's in the Box this week?

Peppers
Potatoes
Pumpkin
Honeydew melon
Tomatoes
Squash - several varieties
Tomatillos
Leeks
Beets
Watermelon
Ground Cherries
Ground Coriander
(Cilantro when it goes to seed becomes Coriander - we've ground it up and provided it to you in a little bag. Fresh coriander is the best!)

So to our shareholders we bid farewell for now and promise to check in regularly when we have something new to share or sell. Let's hope for a quick, mild winter followed by a glorious spring! Hoping we will see you all back again for veggies share next year! Bye for now! Take good care!

Week #11 - FFF CSA Blog update

Yikes! Its week #11 of our twelve week CSA! Where has the time gone! Hard to believe that we will be done for the season! We will miss our weekly chats with our customers and the weekly routine of picking and packing!

We are also busy getting ready for Open Farm Day which is this Sunday. If you are looking for something to do on Sunday and want to explore the farm other farms - this is a great day to take one in. Here is a link to information on Open Farm Day:

http://gov.mb.ca/agriculture/business-and-economics/market-development/open-farm-day.html

Also in case you  haven't seen it, check out our Open Farm Day video previewing the farm:

http://youtu.be/zM0_LyXHJjY

What's in the box this week?!

Peppers (assorted sweet and hot)

Potatoes
Cucumbers
Carrots
Zucchini
Herbs (Basil, Parsley, Chives)
Ground cherries
Spring onions
Squash
Tomatoes (a rainbow of varieties)
Honeydew Melon
Leeks
Swiss Chard
Beets
Green Beans -  The warm weather has given us a second flowering which is quite a treat this late in the season.

Just a heads up, next week, which will be the last week, there will be a number of extra items so bring your muscles! Our pumpkins are almost ready so we hope to tuck them in for the last week. As well our bumper crop of tomatillos has taken its time but if finally ripening up. (Don't worry if you don't know what those are ) - they are yummy and I'll provide some recipes. We will also have a watermelon for everyone! (We had one this weekend and it was heavenly!)

 

Hope you enjoy this week's goodies!

Week #10 - FFF CSA update

This week the CSA boxes are so full we almost couldn't fit everything. You each get a very heavy box brimming full of goodies, so bring your muscles to pick up!

 

Peering into the box, so many recipes come to mind….. How about potato and leek soup? Salsa? Chocolate Zucchini cake? Baba Ganoush?  Simply click on the link below to see how to create these yummy items from this week's box contents!

 

Potato and Leek Soup

Salsa

Chocolate Zucchini Cake - Gramma Fenez's recipe

Baba Ganoush (eggplant dip)

What's in the box this week?!

Peppers (assorted sweet and hot)
Potatoes
Cucumbers
Carrots
Zucchini
Herbs (Basil, Parsley, Chives)
Ground cherries
Spring onions
Squash
Tomatoes (a rainbow of varieties)
Eggplant
Honeydew Melon
Leeks

This is a busy time of year for many reasons… we are bringing in the majority of our harvest, Philip helping to combine for a local farmer, we are getting ready for Open Farm Day and of course our kids are going back to school this week!

The gardens continue to grow well however we have had a fairly significant attack of flea beetles! They love plants like kale and other brassicas and can reduce a beautiful lush plant to a skeleton within hours. We are hearing from other farms that we are not alone as many others are suffering the same fate. Flea beetles typically only are an issue in the spring an we haven't been troubled with them in the late summer before. While there are chemical responses that could be used there are very few natural remedies  so … no kale this week!

Week #9 - FFF CSA Blog - A Time to Be Grateful

Hope everyone has been doing some bicep curls this week! As these CSA boxes get heavier and heavier, you are going to need some well developed muscles to lug them around. Each box is full of wonderful goodies!

 
Harvest time is one of my favorite (and definitely the busiest) times of year! Every day we are faced with a virtual cornucopia (I love that word) of treasures from our gardens. No longer do we go out with a simple pail or bowl to collect natures' creations.. Now we bring wheelbarrows full of goodies on each walkabout! 

This time of year so full of nature's gifts always makes me so grateful for the full, rich life we live. Hearing about the horrible experiences and living conditions elsewhere in the world, I am struck by a significant sense of good luck that I was born in this part of the world.  As we wheel our carts of food out of the garden, I know that there are so many others that have much less. I have no wise and sage words to fix what ails the planet but suggest a good start might be to give freely of our gifts and  always be kind!

So what does your cornucopia of goodness include this week?

Kale

Peppers (assorted sweet and hot)
Potatoes
Cucumbers
Carrots
Zucchini
Swiss Chard
Herbs (Basil, Parsley, Chives, Oregano)
Cauliflower
Ground cherries
Spring onions
Squash (assorted )
Tomatoes (a rainbow of varieties)

We have soaked the cauliflower overnight to ensure you have no "stowaways"

a.k.a. caterpillars.

Week #8 - FFF CSA Update - What is a "peck" anyway?

We all know that Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. You may not know that a peck a dry measure that equals about a 1/4 of a bushel.



Sweet Bell Peppers
 

Serrano Chiles

While you won't find that many peppers in your CSA box this week, there is a variety of peppers that are flourishing in our fields and thus have or will make their way to you over the next few weeks!
I thought it might help to walk through some of them to help you decipher the sweet from the hot (an important distinction for most of us).  Throughout this blog update you will find pictures of the different kinds of peppers we are growing this year.
 


Jalapeno

Sweet Bell Peppers: (we grow green, red, purple, orange and yellow)


Habenero

Serrano Chiles: long green chile (light green)
Jalapeno: short, dark green chile
Habenero: green to orange - pepper looks like its been crumpled - very hot
Red Chiles: - long, thin chiles - can be eaten either fresh or dried.





Medusa Peppers

Red Chiles

A couple of other items of interest related to this week's box.... bitter cucumbers? I have been researching this topic as it was driving me crazy and I thought I would pass along what I found. Every once in a while we would come across a bitter cucumber from the garden and I was trying to figure out whether the bitter ones are smaller? Larger? Less green? How can you pick them out?

Well what I found out was that the bitterness is caused by a actual chemical that is found in the stem, leaves and skin of the cucumber. Every once in a while the bitterness leaches into the flesh of the cucumber. Not a lot is known concretely about why this happens to one cucumber but not to others. However, when you are cutting a cucumber and discover that the stem end may be a tad bitter... keep cutting and you will likely get past the bitter part as it rarely affects the whole "fruit". You can also just peel a larger part of the skin and outer flesh off as the bitterness often is only around the outside.

Ground Cherries - each of you have a small sample of ground cherries in your boxes this week. These little nuggets of goodness come wrapped in their own paper husk. This berry grows on a bush and is in the nightshade family (same as tomatoes, peppers and tomatillos). You know they are ripe when they fall off the plant, the husk gets brown and papery and the berry is a deep yellow. Hope you enjoy!

What's in this week's box? Thanks for asking...
 Kale
Peppers - assorted - both sweet and hot!
Potatoes
Cucumbers
Carrots
Zucchini
Swiss Chard
Herbs (Basil, Cilantro, Chives, Parsley, Oregano)
Broccoli - for the half shares
Cauliflower - for the full shares
Ground cherries - a little taste for everyone!
Spring onions
Squash - assorted (spaghetti squash, sunshine, scallop and acorn)
Tomatoes - while most are red... you will find some purple and yellow tucked in!

Hope you enjoy your treats this week!
 

Week #7 - FFF CSA - Think Purple!

Are you a one eyed, one horned flying purple veggie eater? This year we grew a few new purple veggies… besides the obvious purple kale, beets, turnip and eggplant we also grew purple beans, tomatoes, carrots, kohlrabi and peppers!

 

Over the past few weeks, we've tucked some purple beans into our CSA boxes. As many of you likely have discovered, they are magic beans… purple when raw but they turn green when cooked. This week you will find purple carrots to try and some of you will even find a purple pepper!

 

Last month CBC reported on research that has been done citing that people who eat purple vegetables and fruits have reduced risk of high blood pressure and lower cholesterol and are less likely to be overweight.

Why so special? Purple vegetables have a plant compound called anthocyanin in them. Its what makes them purple! This compound apparently is good at collecting all those free radicals in the system and is great for soothing inflammation. It is also reported to boost the immune system and improve memory and brain function.

Wow! Who knew! Never mind telling your kids to eat their greens! Think purple!

Next year we will have to try purple cauliflower and potatoes! What do you think? Would you eat a purple potato?

What's in this week's box?

 

Kale

Lettuce

Peppers - assorted (some purple!)

Potatoes

Beans

Turnip

Cucumbers

Carrots (purples ones!)

Zucchini

Swiss Chard

Herbs (Basil, Cilantro, Chives, Parsley)

Broccoli or Cauliflower (for full shares only)