Hello Farm Friends,
It seems as though I blinked and the May long weekend has come and gone, we had our first Market of the Season, it’s time to plant all of our hot season crops, and I’m long overdue for a newsletter!
Apologies, things have been busy.
Thanks to everyone who shared my job posting, we now have two new staff to give the kids a break from needing to help me too much, although it turns out they are pretty good at putting up a pea trellis. Perhaps because they are big fans of sugar snap peas, which I’m happy to report are coming along nicely thanks to all of this rain.
Although the start of the CSA is still a few weeks away, we are starting to harvest some early crops like lettuce, radishes and green garlic and will be back at the Dufferin Grove Farmers’ Market again this Thursday.
For those of you who live locally, I apologize I haven’t had a chance to get the farm store up and running, but my goal is to open it up this week for pick-up Saturday morning.
As for the CSA I have done a terrible job of reminding folks to send payments so thank you to everyone who has been on top of it! At the moment, we have a full sign-up list, however a number of people haven’t yet sent in a deposit. If you signed up but have changed your mind, please let me know so I can open up your spot to someone else!
If all goes well, we are looking at early to mid June for our CSA start date this year and I would love to have all of my spots filled before then.
In other farm news, after a few weeks of hiccups I am excited to say my new flail mower is up and running so you may notice some slightly more walkable pathways around the farm and we are looking forward to collecting all of the free grass mulch to help keep our weed pressure down in the garden. I have also decided to forego buying in compost this year, as last year’s load was quite full of weed seeds and to be honest, I don’t need more of those as we have plenty already!
Instead I was inspired by a recent workshop organized by Regenerative Agriculture Quinte to start making more of our own compost and really increase our use of cover crops. Although I can’t make the same quantity of compost as I have delivered in the past, I’m enjoying the challenge. If you don’t have your own compost bin and want to bring your veggie scraps back to the farm when you pick-up your veggies each week let me know.
It looks like after Tomorrow we’ll have a beautiful stretch of weather for planting, which is good as the tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and eggplants are all eager to get into the ground and I know the Squash will be tapping me on the shoulder soon after.
Sincerely,
— Jenny
