NEW winter classes now posted! Learn new skills this winter, including fermentation, soap making, sourdough bread, sprouting/microgreens, seedling starting, chicken-keeping, and more!

NEW winter classes now posted!  

Join us at Little City Farm for interactive, hands-on skills-building classes to learn about
lacto-fermentation (krauts & kimchi), soap making, sourdough bread, growing microgreens and sprouts as winter superfoods, seedling starting, chicken-keeping, and more!

More class details & registration here.

End of February in the greenhouse

These warm sunny days bring our passive solar greenhouse temperatures up over 30C, and it's such a joy to go in there and feel the heat.  The microgreens and baby greens are thriving - we have our raised growing bed that runs along the south-facing greenhouse windows filled with sprouts of lettuces, chard, kale, mizuna, arugula.  The counter is full of small seedlings growing quickly, soon ready for transplanting.  The grow rack is full of trays of luscious pea shoots and buckwheat sprouts (grown with seeds from our favourite Canadian sprouting seed source Mumms), everything growing full force and a pleasure to eat in mid-February.

Local Superfood Sunchokes

It's time for our final harvest of sunchokes.  We can't believe it's mid December and we are still digging in soft garden soil. The ground is not frozen, there is no snow!  The sunchokes benefit from a light frost, as their flavour sweetens, so we were happy to wait.  Our final harvest is now in.

Sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus) are a locally grown, easy to cultivate superfood.  They are native to eastern North America.  The plant is tall with a yellow sunflower at the top (in fact they are in the sunflower family).  Once they are planted in one spot, the roots will spread quickly and are hard to ever completely dig up (so choose spot wisely).  They are also known as earth apple, sunroot, Jerusalem artichoke, and other common names.  They are incredibly healthy, offering high levels of iron, B vitamins (especially vit B1), fibre, potassium, vitamin C, and are low-medium glycemic so easy on blood sugar.

The down side is that they don't store for very long.  They need to be kept in the ground as long as possible until near the eating time, best dug fresh and eaten that day.  They taste something like mashed potatoes when cooked - they can be steamed, boiled, baked, shredded and fried, and used as you would a potato.  We like them steamed with butter and salt, and some freshly chopped herbs like parsley, chives, dill, sage or basil.  If we don't have fresh herbs, the sunchokes are wonderful with pesto.\

We are happy to share our sunchokes with locals - so if you want sunchokes in your garden next year let us know.  We can share sprouts or roots in the spring.

Final garden clean-up

This extra extra long fall has given us a late November chance to do one last clean up in the gardens, our final outdoor herb and greens harvest (calendula is still blooming!), plus our latest garlic planting ever!  The greens are abundant in the cold tunnel, growing nicely under the hoop cover - and abundant in the indoor passive solar greenhouse too.  We are looking forward to winter harvests of kale, chard, spinach, chives, mizuna, arugula, tatsoi, and others.

First snow day...been and gone

We enjoyed the first snow a few days ago...gone now, but lovely while it was here as our first reminder of winter to come.

Planting the winter garden!

We are a little late this year with our winter garden - the season just got away on us.  But yesterday we planted up the cold frame grow tunnel with winter hardy greens, and several days earlier the greenhouse bed was filled with new seeds as well.  We hope to have a good harvest of fresh greens from the greenhouse all winter long, and the grow tunnel will give us a head start in late winter with new greens coming up ahead of the rest of the garden.

We are always trying to experiment with stretching the growing season.  In our climate, we need to use hardy greens and vegetables for winter growing but it is definitely possible - not to mention the huge variety that we can provide.  Eliot Coleman suggests over 30 varieties to grow in the winter, as well as innovative planting methods, scheduling ideas and garden designs for winter, in his inspiring book The Winter Harvest Handbook.   There are the usual suspects - kale, chard, spinach, arugula - but then also many other interesting options such as mache, claytonia, cress, tat soi, mizuna, scallions, garlic greens, turnip greens, beet greens, hardy winter lettuces...

Yesterday we started with 3 kinds of spinach including a "winter spinach", wild arugula, mizuna, tat soi, 3 kinds of kale (red, green curly, and lacinato), hardy winter lettuces, beets and turnips for their leafy greens, mustard greens, mesclun mix.  The grow tunnel still has baby chard, kale, spinach, mustard, chives, oregano, red and green lettuces, and arugula already growing, so that is a nice head start.  We'll be keeping regular updates here on the status of the winter greenhouse and winter garden so please continue to read (and grow) this winter with us.

Beautiful snow & sunshine

What gorgeous snow and sunshine we've been having!  The thick flakes were so fun to photograph, and the slightly warmer weather with heavily textured snow was enjoyed on walks and tobogganing this week.