Winter, real winter, is finally upon us

Cold weather helps kill pests

Winter, real winter, is finally upon us. We hope it is a good one with cold temperatures and lots of snow. I know this won’t make us popular with everyone, but it is important for a good growing season! Cold weather helps kill pests, breaking their reproductive cycles and setting them back for the start of the coming season. A good snowpack, especially one that melts slowly and sticks around for a while, helps with spring and early summer soil moisture, really important with the drought conditions we seem to have most years nowadays.

Through the cold weather, we are enjoying frozen strawberries, corn and rhubarb as well as cider pressed from apples on our and surrounding farms.  We hope to have enough asparagus production this coming year to pickle and freeze some of it as well.  In the coming season we would be happy to share our tips for putting these delicious foods away and ideas for using them throughout the winter.

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Besides eating, we are busy getting our plant and seed orders ready.  We are taking a pause on planting more asparagus, as we feel the plot we have (just under 1 acre) will be plenty to keep up with this coming season.  Strawberries we plant every year and like the asparagus, we will not be growing the size of our patch (also just under 1 acre). 

We will be reducing the number of corn varieties we grow this coming season, as we have identified our favourites and want to make it easier to manage pollination.  Normally you are supposed to separate different varieties by 500’ and we found this to be a challenge when growing 7-8 varieties!

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In addition to our crop plants and seeds, we have been busy ordering trees and shrubs to plant in hedgerows and our home orchard.  Some of these are food for us, some are food for animals, as well as windbreaks, habitat, nitrogen-fixing, and a host of other ecosystem services.  We are hoping that eventually some of these will produce enough that we can sell them fresh and as value-added products like jams, juice, and dried fruit, to our local community.

Like many others during the pandemic, we have been juggling off-farm work, farm planning, childcare, and online schooling.  This has added stress, but also provide some opportunities, like hanging out with my daughter Lillian and building a treehouse with her.

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We hope this note finds you well!  Please check in with us in early May, when we will start to harvest asparagus.   Mmmmm… can’t wait!

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Cutting FireWood

The Start of the Season

We provide the majority of our heat for our home and greenhouse with firewood. Greenhouses are most commonly heated with propane, natural gas, or oil, all fossil fuels that we are trying to avoid. We have a propane furnace, but try to use it only as a back-up, for un-expected cloudy or cold weather and for those cold nights in March and April, when we struggle to get up in the late night and early morning to stoke the fireplace… It’s hard to start the season as tired!

Lucky for us, we have about 35-40 acres of woodlot, so we are able to sustainably harvest firewood. The theory goes, if you are planting trees and managing your woodlot to increase its size, age, complexity and maturity, the amount of carbon sequestered back into the trees and soil is the same as, or more, than the carbon released through burning. This way we can have a ‘carbon neutral’ heating system for our greenhouse, as long as we don’t use our propane furnace too much…

Having a greenhouse is important for our sweetcorn production. The climate in our area is challenging for sweet corn, especially organic sweet corn production. Corn does not like cold toes, waiting till the soil temperature is quite warm before germinating. One of the ways we get around this is by starting seedlings in our greenhouse and transplanting them to the field once warm enough.

 

So, these photos are in a way the beginning of sweet corn production for the season… mmm… sweet corn!

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