Being thankful

A few things we are grateful for at our homestead this week:

1. The two long days of cool refreshing oh-so-needed rain.
2. Our youngest hens are starting to lay eggs!
3. First ripe tomatoes from the garden.
4. Buttons, our 5 year old hen who appeared sick seems to be getting stronger again.
5. A little holiday time away where we got to reconnect with friends and family.

Farm Day - Planting the garden!

Busy day - but so lovely - it's 9:30 pm and we've just come in from all day planting out the seedlings that have been waiting since March and April. 22 kinds of tomatoes (2 large beds, and many many large containers), peppers, eggplants, 1 huge basil bed (5o plants for pesto!), rows of chard, carrots, radish, snow & snap peas, red fava beans, and more beds of bush and pole beans (french filet, cherokee cornfield, and more), 3 beds of lettuce, 2 beds of kale (green and red), plus potatoes sprouting in my 4x4 foot strawbale bed, 2 beds of onion sets a foot high, and one full bed of garlic getting ready to shoot up scapes, strawberry plants filled with green berries set to ripen, rhubarb ready for harvest, and the asparagus already almost finished. It's not June 21 yet, but feels like summer is here! Our meal today was a rich cream of sorrel & asparagus (from the garden) soup, made with the last cream from our raw milk and sprinkled with fresh garden chives. Divine!

Tomato Harvest

It's been almost a month since I last wrote! We've been so busy with harvest that there has been little time for the computer.

Tomato harvest is on! We've been collecting tomatoes by the 11 quart basket since early August, for making salsa, sauce, preserved whole tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, slow-roasted tomatoes, tomato chutney, and of course just eating lots of toasted tomato sandwiches!

Each year when we attend the annual Canadian Organic Growers conference, held at the University of Guelph in January, we find it difficult to select only a few varieties of heirloom tomatoes. The vendors have an astounding array of unusual and familiar types, boasting great flavour, intense colour, early season ripening, late season ripening, champion size, and so on. Each tomato comes with it's own unique story of how the seeds were saved and preserved for generations, so that we have access to these varieties that are unavailable in the grocery store. For example, the "Mortgage Lifter" tomato was said to have helped an ailing farm bail out from under it's debt, the "Polish Pink" was smuggled overseas on the back of a postage stamp, and the "Cherokee Purple" was first grown by the first nations Cherokee people.

In any case, we finally decided on 16 varieties this year - including several we saved from our own garden seed of the previous year's harvest. We have some standard favourites that we grow each year - Yukon Red (early ripening and cold hardy); Mennonite Orange (low acid, beautiful brilliant orange); Yellow Pear (small sweet yellow tomato that is pear shaped); Sweet Baby Girl (tiny red early cherry); and Orange Cherry (which we call the Plan B Orange Cherry, as we first saved seeds from cherry tomatoes picked at this organic farm near Hamilton). This year we also grew Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra, Early Girl, Stupice, Patio (hybrid variety, which grows well in a pot and is an excellent producer of heavy red tomatoes), Polish Pink, Money Maker, and more...

If you can, save your own garden seeds. If your plot is too small, and you fear the varieties becoming cross-pollinated, then purchase seeds from small seed companies that support heirloom varieties. Also, consider joining Seeds of Diversity, a national non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of heritage varieties of all sorts of produce. Members trade seeds, and volunteer to grow small batches of heirloom items in their gardens and send seeds back to be stored and passed on by Seeds of Diversity for the next season.