Swarm

On Friday we lost 1/2 a hive at the farm. Sad day. That said, watching the swarm was one of the coolest things I've done in a long time. I was at the wash station when I heard a strange humming sound & thought maybe one of the volunteers had left their car running. Upon investigation, I discovered it was coming from the crazy swarm of bees leaving one of the hives. It looked like this when I stood in the middle of it:

(The blurry dots around the little walnut tree aren't pixels..they're swarming honeybees!)
 
Here's a bunch of them sitting on the tree leaves:

And here's what I saw forming when I looked up:

Called Sarah Hemingway to see about catching the swarm (since beekeeper Trina was on vacation) & she brought out an empty super to try to entice them, but sadly they had other ideas & got away while we were in the field weeding.

The other 1/2 of the colony will have remained in their hive with the original queen. They were likely overcrowded & decided to let a new queen hatch - a new queen which 1/2 the bees will have taken to a new home in the wild. As I understand it, this is sad for honey production on a number of levels:
1. 1/2 the population of the hive has been lost, depleting productive potential for the rest of the season.
2. The 1/2 that left will have gorged themselves on honey in preparation for their departure, depleting existing supplies as well.

Wish I could've caught them leaving & followed them to their new home - though I'm not sure anything could have beeen done to recapture them once they'd settled. Sad day for honey at Fertile Ground, but it was a pretty spectacular thing to witness.

Tomatoes: that ubiquitous yet elusive fruit

As August unfolds, I am delighting in my first taste of summer's most luscious yet frustratingly short-lived fruit. For how ubiquitous they are, their harvest window is awfully short in this part of the world - 2 months of fresh tomatoes is a really exceptional season. Sometimes we just get 1. Amazing. I am going to enjoy every mouthful of this month.

They begin here, in April:

6-8 weeks later, depending on last frost, we plant them out:

We've had lots of trouble with blight in past years, so this year I decided to try a new approach. Fewer tomatoes & more infrastructure. We mulched them to keep the soil from being splashed up on their leaves.
(Johnny was carrying the last bale out just before this picture was taken..I swear!)

Then we set up some high-tensile trellising to support them up off the ground, and have been pruning them weekly to encourage lots of air flow and allow the leaves to dry out. Blight loves hot, damp conditions, so we're out to foil it. I bought high-tensile electrical wire, tensioners, and lots of T-bars. It started out well, with volunteer Thomas taking the lead on stake pounding:

However, the wire, which was only available in a 2500' roll, quickly sprang to disaster when unclipped. Imagine 2500' of stiff wire crossed and tangled like a 100lb ball of yarn. I swore a lot. Occasionally, Thomas & I found some good humour. I only took phots of the good-humoured moments. Don't be deceived...

 

 We did finally get the wire strung and pulled taught with the high tensile reels. 

The next task was to prune the tomatoes down to 2-4 main stems & clip them to the wires. Nobody tell me I don't have a green thumb.

We've been pruning them & clipping them to higher wires weekly ever since - here they are recently with their 1st fruits ripening!

And finally...their 1st CSA appearance last Friday!

Now...lest you mistakenly think we have won the battle this year, I need to point out that I'm pretty sure I've seen early signs of blight in the crop. We're diligently pruning out any affected leaves to try to stave it off. So far so good but Tuesday's rain may have worked against us. Also, we've had a brand new alien appear at the farm this year: Hornworms! These disgustingly large beasts are a nasty brute to squish and many of us have been seriously gooed in the process already.

Yes..that is a bucket of its companions in the background... here's a close-up. My intern Carrie & I had a squish-fest with these guys after an understandably queasy-stomached volunteer collected them while pruning...

Here's to plenty of blts, pastas, salads, salted slices, quiches, wraps, sauces, salsa and other tomato-y goodness. I'm just saying, these fruits are elusive at a farm scale...they better be GOOD.

CSA member Claire gets Record coverage

Thought some of you might be interested in reading this article about Claire - one of of our CSA members who volunteers regularly at market and sometimes in the fields. She's 17, a gourmet cook, and on an 18 month 100 Mile Challenge. Pretty exceptional!

Here's the article: Everything Just Tastes Better 

In other news, the best market exchange of the day (which made Claire & I almost choke from laughing) went as follows:

Man, holding out a bunch of our radishes in front of the till: "How much for these?"
Us: $1.50
*man reaches in pocket*
Woman: "Those are organic"
*man pauses, glancing curiously at her*
Woman, forcefully and with a pointed stare: "I never eat organic."
*man, confused-looking but dutiful, slowly returns the radishes & walks away*

Yup. Watch out. Those organic radishes might just kill you.

Article in The Record

Well looks like I got some nice newspaper coverage in The Record today. The reporter did a pretty good job of capturing my emphasis on community-building as well as food production.

Little helpers with big hats

Yesterday I had 5 little ones & 3 moms out at the farm in the morning. They "helped" by washing out the harvest crates in preparation for our 1st CSA pick-up tomorrow (wheee!!!), but mostly they put on fancy sunhats & ran through the hayfield. Adorable.

 

Almost ready to harvest

The sun has been fantastic the past couple of weeks - I'm actually happy to get rain again today so we don't have to start irrigating the new seedlings we've been planting just yet. Thought I'd post a few pictures of how things are looking - we'll be starting harvest next week with a 1st CSA pick-up on June 17th and our 1st Saturday at Kitchener Market a week later on June 25th!

Here's a few of the greens, almost ready to go:

Fava beans flowering - so pretty!

Also pretty - some chive & sweet william flowers:

Still-green strawberries getting me excited for my first taste of fresh fruit in months:

Sweet little kohlrabies balling up nicely:

And a couple shots of the nightshade seedlings we were finally able to get in the ground:

Oh! And check out the size of the zucchini plants just transplanted at our Work Bee less than 2 weeks ago:

Can't wait to start feeding people again...

Work Bee

I love our holiday Monday work parties. I spent much of last week obsessively checking the weather, worried that this one would be thunderstormed out. But the rain gods were smiling down on us (or maybe just momentarily distracted) and we managed to escape the entire work day entire dry (we won't talk about the deluge in the evening that left big puddles in the newly-planted shallots and pounded the bejeebers out of the wee carrots...).

We are for a brief moment entirely caught up with our planting! This feels awesome after weeks of being held up due to too much wet weather. Here's what we did.

Planted all the zukes & cukes & tucked them under row cover, safe from the nasty striped cucumber beetle:

Trellised the peas:

Planted flowers, shallots & celeriac:

Seeded tatsoi, chinese broccoli and radishes:

Spread compost on many beds planted prior to my neighbour being free to broadcast it with his manure spreader:

And hoed the swiss chard:

What an awesome day. Huge thanks to the stoic volunteers who braved the predicted storms to spend a day in the fields. You're all superstars. I wouldn't have handled the evening's downpour nearly so graciously without you!