Soon Be Sprung

Hello Farm Friends,

Believe it or not we have now officially entered into Spring! Unfortunately this is Spring in Southern Ontario, so it still feels an awful lot like Winter today, and yet before the trees can leaf out I wouldn’t be surprised if it suddenly throws thirty degrees at us!.

Luckily for me I have a greenhouse to retreat to where things are slowly but surely getting greener and it feels very Springish indeed.

In fact our Spring CSA is just over two weeks away! If you haven’t signed up yet, please do I would love to fill the final spots before the end of March, while you are at it, why not sign up for the Summer CSA too? If you know anyone who you think might be interested I appreciate your help spreading the word, we still have some empty spots and word of mouth is really the best form or marketing.

With the equinox behind us, it is time to give a head start to some of our Summer loving vegetables like Peppers, Eggplant and Tomatoes. Although it will be a while yet before they go out into the field, I like to germinate them in strip trays, which allows me to pack 200 plants into each tray. This helps me save space on my heat table while I still need to keep everything warm and it also stops the little shoots from getting waterlogged in too much soil.

Once they have all come up and are beginning to get their first true leaves I will move them all into trays with bigger cells, a few weeks after that they get potted up into pots where they will wait for any risk of frost to pass before they head to their final place out in the garden.

Not all of our veggies require so many steps, but some of our our favourite fruiting crops really would prefer to grow in Italy or Mexico. To get a nice harvest we have to trick them into getting going early. I don’t mind the extra time they take though because it is always worth it when we finally get those first red tomatoes!

Of course there is also lots of other seeding to be done in the next two weeks, Onions, Celery, Cabbage, Beets to name a few. 

Radishes, Salad Turnips, Bok Choi, along with greens for Salad Mixes and half a dozen varieties of Lettuce are among the things already on their way for our Spring Shares.

Now we just need to wait on the sunshine.

Sincerely,
— Jenny