Richmond Urban Farmers

The challenge of offering enough leafy veggies ...

2011-08-09T07:07:00.000-07:00

I always feel the need to offer more than swiss chard and kale ... those two stalwarts of the veggie world. Swiss chard and kale ... spring, summer, fall and winter. How much can one really eat without getting abysmally bored?

When the beets come in then there is the variation of beet leaves. Mizuna has also offered welcome relief.

I think we are getting better at offering a wider range of leafy veggies.
This year we were able to extend our growing season by doing early plantings of spinach, which did very, very well indeed. We also planted patchoy which was more of a challenge.

We planted the smaller Toy Choy variety which I have found, after numerous attempts, bolts very quickly.

For the first time, as we move towards fall, I planted "Shanghai patchoy", a larger "White Stemmed Patchoy" (name unknown) and once again the "Toy Choy" variety.
What was amazing was to see the seeds I had planted on Sunday already germinated by Tuesday! Unfortunately, I planted the two larger varieties in the 100 cell trays which proved to be too small and stressed the seedlings out. On top of that, something ate most of the seedlings! I planted the smaller variety in slightly larger cells and those did very well. I planted the smaller variety out yesterday. We'll see if it bolts.

I will do another round of patchoy shortly.

Fall Succession Planting ...

2011-08-09T06:25:00.000-07:00

To keep the garden productive into fall we have be planting successions of different varieties.

Lettuce and salad mixes have been ongoing all season. We have replanted about six times so far. The goal is to always have more salad coming up.

We have done about five successions of radishes as well. Cauliflower we have planted as three successions and two of broccoli. This also allows some variety in what we can offer to the customer. So we may have cauliflower in the box for two weeks followed by cabbage the next time.

In spring we planted patchoy and spinach, as they enjoy the cooler weather.
I may have done so too early, as we are getting some hot summer days now, but yesterday I planted some patchoy seedlings.

We have also planted one of the beds in onions, two varieties a red onion and Walla Walla onions. The plan is to cover the bed with plastic hoops over winter, just to keep excessive rain off, so the onions don't rot and perhaps raise the temparature a bit. In spring we should be able to harvest onions for our early season box. Well, that's the plan, anyway.

2011 Garlic Harvest ...

2011-08-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

We planted our garlic in October and finally pulled it out the ground in late July.
We planted two varieties a hard neck variety called "Music". I bought the garlic seed at the Steveston Farmers' Market from a Cawston farmer. the soft neck variety was the Spanish Roja we had put aside last year from our harvest.

I learnt that the hard neck makes a flower but the soft neck does not. I also learnt that you know that the hard neck is ready when the flower stalk unfurls from corkskrew curl to straight. The soft neck you know when the leaves start to die back and turn brown.

We got a great harvest of garlic out of our CSA garden. Some for clients, some for seed and if there is any left at the end of the season, some for the "farmers".

Our Clients ...

2011-08-02T19:36:00.000-07:00

Some of our clients are second year customers and we are grateful.
These are hard core believers in local, organic, fresh and sustainable. We are too!

One of our clients arrives on her bike to collect. Even returns the string we used to tie the bundles so we can reuse them.

We have a couple of Mums with young children. The children come to the garden and help choose their share by following the weekly list and put the items in the shopping box.

I enjoy giving the kids the tour. I think their Mums are giving them a great learning experience when they bring them to the garden. I hope they remember the experience fondly. Having seen food growing it won't be much of a stretch to growing their own food in the future.

2011-08-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

Baby beets · Baby turnips · Nugget potatoes · Kale · Swiss Chard · Radish · Zucchini · Salad mix · Herbs (basil, dill, chives) · Garlic scapes

The contents of our 1st Summer CSA box on the 6th July.

That week I commented:
"The sugar snap peas have begun flowering! And we can look forward to their crisp sweet, crunch soon!"

Towards the end of July we were starting to feel like farmers ... for the first time we tried growing cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli in this garden. We have managed to successfully do three successions of cauliflower ... and Oh! what cauliflower.

I learnt something about broccoli this year ... it takes much longer to produce than the cauliflower. We were harvesting our second go around of cauliflower and it was only this Sunday that I finally saw little broccoli heads shaping up!

Luc is great at projecting quantities. He projects how much we will need to satisfy X customers over X number of weeks and plants accordingly. Particularly useful for the veggies that take a long time to grow such as potatoes and carrots. He worked our that he could safely harvest one square meter of potatoes a week and would have enough potatoes for the whole season. So far customers get 1 1/2 lbs. of potato each.

Some of the veggies are so colourful such as the carrots, beets and radishes ... a visual feast!

Wherever possible, we try to include a bunch of flowers. What we call a "laigniap" in Trinidad, which usually refers to the last, unexpected preganancy. A little extra. A surprise gift. Better know as the "baker's dozen" in this part of the world.

There is food for the belly and food for the heart. We try to satisfy both!

RUF up and running for another year ... 2011

2011-08-02T17:24:00.000-07:00

Luc and I are doing the CSA on our own this year, concentrating all our experience and efforts in one large back yard garden. Arzeena has better and bigger farms to worry about as she has bought her own farm in Courtnay, BC.

We have benefitted greatly from our early association with Arzeena who was one of the founding members of Richmond Urban Farmers.

This year, as everyone is aware, got off to a slow start ... as I mentioned to our CSA members in our first correspondance of the 2011 season.

"We now have two years experience under our belts and look forward to year three with enthusiasm.

Despite a very cold and wet spring (due to the influence of La Nina, they say) we have been chomping at the bit as the days roll by. Luc and I have begun the process of preparing the garden and should the weather cooperate we will be bringing in the composted manure and roto-till this week.

Anticipating a later start this year, we have started seeds indoors (see attached photos). You can see that they are doing very well. This will enable us to catch up and have well established seedlings in the soil as soon as the beds are ready and hopefully, soon there after, on your plate, on schedule."

Whipping the beds back into shape after many months of rain and weeds is a sorry way to start the year ... it is certainly a test of ones resolve. It fell to me and any family members I could rope in, to take on the onerous task of weeding. Then I went away for a few weeks, on a search for land and when I came back Luc and his buddies had rototilled, brought in a truck load of manure and sand and restored order. It was as if a fairy godfather had waved his magic wand. I came back to this ...

Back to me now to plant out hundreds of cool weather seedlings ... patchoy, spinach and lettuce.

We were determined this year to push boundries and see how much more we could grow.
We had committed to 10 weeks of summer CSA boxes for 4 clients and we wanted to see if we could be more productive with the resources available to us.

We started by seeing how early we start growing food. That was a good place to begin because we were able start offering small harvests as early as the end of May. That first box had lettuce, patchoy, spinach and herbs.

We continued with larger harvests each week for a total of 5 early season harvests. By the 2nd box we had included gailan and a salad mix. By box 3 we had added swiss chard and radishes. In Box 4 we included mizuna, rhubarb and garlic scapes.

Five weeks in we had this to tell our CSA clients:

"Luc and I did a tour of the garden this afternoon, inspecting the progress of the potatoes (too small to even call “nuggets”), beets (need to fill out) and sugar snap peas (not even flowering as yet but that can happen very quickly) and we report the this week will be a fifth “Early Season Box” as these veggies are not ready as yet. So we find ourselves betwixt and between; on the tail end of spring but not fully into summer. Mother Nature leads … and we, her obedient attendants, … follow." ... that week we were able to add kale to the box.

The Early Season Boxes were an exercise in pushing our own knowledge and capabilities and we are pleased with the lessons and skills we learnt!

Seasons Greetings to everyone

2009-12-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

Keiko Lee-Hem
print + web design
t: 604 569 6385
m: 778 997 5386
www.keikocreative.com

Harvest Box for September 25th

2009-09-22T22:14:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends of our Harvest Box,

Thanks for all of your wonderful support this summer. If we haven't told you this in person, Luc, Susan & I are so honoured to have you in our community. Last week, we paid off the debt that we accumulated during our first 2 years of backyard food growing and are now in the black. Woohoo!!

As the nights get cooler, we are noticing production cutting back so this will be the last weekly box. Our next box will hopefully be available in 2 weeks, on Oct 9th or thereabouts. We hope at that time that the butternut squash will be ready!!

We have 5 boxes available this week, at $20, and we can provide the boxes on either Thursday or Friday afternoon. Let us know which works better for you.

1 bag of Salad Mix
1 bunch baby bok choi
1 bunch beets
1 bunch Swiss Chard
1 bunch carrots
Hungarian peppers
tomatoes
kohlrabi
garlic
baby Japanese eggplant
1 bouquet of zinnias

Please place your order by Wednesday and we'll have boxes ready by either Thursday or Friday at about 1pm. If we haven't already arranged drop-off with you, the pick-up spot for boxes is at Arzeena's house

Kale Chips

2009-08-30T11:49:00.001-07:00

With the gardens in their full glory, we've been harvesting lovely, huge boxes, filled with greens. One green in particular, however, can sometimes be a bit of a challenge for a someone who's never used it. That green: Kale!!

Kale is a member of the cabbage family and is filled with nutrients, particularly iron and folic acid. It's supposedly even more nutritious than spinach! Yet even we sometimes get stumped on what to do with it.

The kale we've been growing this year is a tender, flat-leaf variety called Red Russian. Once it's de-stemmed, it can often be substituted instead of spinach with just a little bit of extra cooking.

However, one of our favourite methods of using this versatile vegetable is to make it into kale chips. Yes! Crunchy, salty chips that are just as delicious as anything found in a bag at your grocery store.

They're so easy to make, you'll wonder how you did without them.

First, de-stem your kale. You can do this with a knife but often, if you just encircle the stem with your thumb and finger making an "O" and run it down the stem, the leaves rip off easily.

Next, chop up any large pieces, but not too small. The kale will shrink when cooked.

Put all the chopped kale in a bowl and drizzle with about a tablespoon of oil and salt to taste. Toss until all the kale is coated.

Place the kale on a cookie sheet and slide it into the oven at 350 for about 10 minutes. Take out, flip - see if any are ready. You may need to put it back for another 5 minutes but that's it. Be careful not to let it burn.

Once cool, place in a bowl and watch it disappear.

Our first ever farmer's market

2009-08-06T13:51:00.000-07:00

We took a leap of faith and loaded up two carloads with veggies to take to the first Gastown Farmer's Market in Vancouver.

We had a wonderful time talking to locals and tourists who were very appreciative of organically-grown food in the downtown core. A couple of friends, Asifa & Sharon came to lend us a hand and provided most welcome relief for bathroom breaks.

We'd like to go back and are hoping to make it on August 23rd. We'll be selling our garlic, flowers, and lots of salad greens.

Please come by the market if you have some time - there was fantastic bread, grapes, fruit and flowers too.

A bumper harvest

2009-07-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

It's amazing what you can grow when you put your mind to it. Today we harvested a huge variety of veggies and the box this week included:

Garlic
Turnips
Snow Peas
Snap Peas
Beets
Swiss Chard
Carrots
Salad Mix
Zucchini
Kale
Zinnias

Pretty awesome if we do say so ourselves.

Carpe Annum ... Grabbing the Year

2009-07-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

We caught the tail end of last year's growing season but hopped aboard January of this year.

Lasagna Gardening ...
That's when we began preparing our third back yard, Seema's garden, by composting in situ over an existing lawn.

Recipe:

Lay down a first layer of cardboard.
Top with many bags of fall leaves gathered off the sidewalk the year before.
Followed by many visits to the beach to collect bags and bags of seaweed/seagrass
and a final layer of a couple van loads of City compost.
Finish with a dusting of rock phosphate and lime in late spring.

Now just wait for the weather to stabilize above 10 degrees and you are ready to plant..

By March we decided that as the grass layer was not fully dead let alone decomposed, we would plant fruit and leaf crops: lettuce, tomatoes and summer squashes and wait another year before rototilling and planting root crops.

Lancing Road

Preparing the beds in spring takes alot of hard work. Weeds to be removed. Amendments to be added to each bed according to what will be planted and rototilled in. Beds to be reshaped. Bean supports set up. Starting and tending trays and trays of seedlings. Many enjoyable meetings over coffee at the neighbourhood coffee shop to select seed, decide on quantities, set goals and objectives, and discuss lessons learnt.

By April we were ready to plant root crop seed; the mood full of excitement, resolve and anticipation. The stop/start beginning to the season meant we replanted seed a few times. Doubt lurked in the dark corners. Much of the seed did not come up particularly carrot, swiss chard, kale, leeks ... many differing varieties. What was going on? Why the poor results? But with some adjustments to the timers on the watering system, repositioning sprinklers and the stabilizing warmth, the garden began to grow.

We did manage to meet Jake's goal of 'all crops in the ground by the beginning of May'. I hope he is satisfied with our efforts and pleased with Joyce's decision to allow us into his beloved vegetable garden.

More Lessons Learnt at Lancing
Lancing we soon discovered, was not a garden for lettuce. The wire worms that haunt the soil there, have an insatiable appetite for it. We were glad we had other gardens that favored lettuces and concentrated other salad greens at the Lancing garden.

The blank spaces in the rows became opportunities for succession plantings, more crops to replace those we were pulling from the ground. We learnt lessons about timing, as we missed the fast paced radishes as they quickly passed their prime, rising above the earth and the slugs chewed little white craters into their red skins.

First Shares of Spring
It took a while for enough variety to be ready for harvest before we could offer shares for sale.

Each harvest feels like a celebration. We all come out and enjoy the pleasure of pulling the first baby beets, cutting the fuscia stems of crisp chard leaves. Combining the elements of a delectable salad mix then washing, cleaning and primping it into bags. Treasure hunting for sugar snap peas, reserving the plumpest one for my own mouth, as I work my way along the row.

We are proud to offer the fresh, healthy food we work hard to grow.

We do love a Free Deal
We discovered a variety of free nutrients and ammendments within the community. Some for the beds, some for the compost bin. Kitchen waste is collected regularly from our coffee shop. Coffee chaff from a small coffee roasting establishment. Soy mash from a local tofu shop. Our compost bin is smoking! All that good stuff in the compost bin will fuel next year's crops ... Cardboard boxes for distributing the harvest from the liquor store. Wood ash from Luc's fire place. Comfrey for making compost tea. and there is the added bonus of getting to know our neighbours and them getting to know us.

Harvesting the Garlic

Arzeena knew enough to plant garlic in September of last year. It tied up two beds for six months. As the curly scapes began to unwind they signaled harvest time. Who new the satisfaction of harvesting garlic. We "ooohed" and "aaahed" over the size of the largest bulbs, we felt wealthy and satisfied breathing in the pungent fragrance; admiring the great piles of garlic.

... and the Sweet Peas are Blooming

We planted zinnias and sweetpeas as - 'man does not live by bread alone'. The first georgeous stems went to our benefactor, Joyce because we are grateful and we have to express it somehow.

Balancing the hard work with Pleasure
Market gardening is aching, sweaty, wet and cold in turn, slow, laborious work with many rewards. Seeing the very best in the companions you depend upon to do what they do best. Doing all that you know how and surrending the outcome to nature. The deep, ancient, fundamental satisfaction of simple pleasures - popping a small, straight carrot from the earth and admiring it, relaxing in the shade, comparing notes and lessons learnt. Stepping in time to the primordial heartbeat of the earth.

The Learning Curve

2008-10-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 12, 2008
It All Started with an Interview in a Local Newspaper ...

Somehow a local newspaper got wind that I was gardening in containers on my balcony and asked to learn more. The reporter came by and after the interview, I had the foresight to ask a favour. I requested he put out a call for local homeowners who would consider allowing us to convert their lawn into a market garden. The newspaper came one better ... they wrote an editorial entitled '"Yes in My Back Yard'. Within a few days I received a call and we had our first front lawn.

We met with the home owners who were interested in having their young children experience and have access to veggies growing in their garden. We wanted space to grow food for the local market. We ripped up the lawn, trundled in a truckload of compost, rototilled it in, formed the beds and by mid summer planted in our first batch of seedlings. Kale, swiss chard, spinach, spreen, lettuces for us and carrots, tomatoes, beets and radishes for them. A few weeks later we were supplying the local pocket market with modest quantity of veg and salad greens.

Our next garden was a dream come true. Someone forward a Craig's List link to Arzeena and she followed it up. Two hundred square feet of land, with concrete paths, a greenhouse, multiple taps and hoses, a tool shed and compost bins. Again it was a mutually beneficial situation; the lady of the house wanted the weeds gone from what had been an active vegetable garden when her husband had been alive and we had a good sized bit of land to work with!

With fall looming we got to work weeding lots of fire weed, emptying the compost bin, bringing in many vanloads of cow manure, liming, rototilling and molding beds. By the end of summer we planted in a snap peas, beets, cilantro, lettuce, patchoy, sunflowers and kale. We connected with a vegetarian restaurant that valued buyinging organic and local and supplied them with salad greens. The cow manure had a dubious gift for us. Copious amount of free chickweed and purslane which became the basis of the salad greens.

By Thanksgiving we put out a call for customers interested in a Share of the Harvest. We managed a small first harvest enough to supply five families, ourselves included.

Posted by Susan, Arzeena, Luc at 7:47 PM 0 comments
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