Chris making one of his goofy faces at the special Earth Day Farmers Market from two weeks ago.

Hi Everyone!

This Saturday marks the official start of market season for us and we’re excited! For the second year in a row, we’ll be at the Haney Farmers Market in Maple Ridge every Saturday between now and the end of October. We’ve also just been approved to sell at the White Rock Farmers Market! We’ll be there every Sunday in July and August.

This Saturday we’ll have the following edibles and seedlings at our booth at the Haney Farmers Market (Memorial Peace Park on 224th Ave from 9am – 2pm):

Edibles:

• radishes – we’ll have a fun variety of radishes freshly harvested – perfect for crisp radish salads.
• salad greens – we’ll have mixed lettuce greens, spicy greens, braising greens, and kale florets.
• nettle greens – be adventurous and try out some wild, super-nutritious stinging nettle greens.
• herbs – freshly cut mint, thyme, oregano, chives, and lovage will be available.

Seedlings (all grown from organic seeds):

• kale (Blue Curly & Red Russian)
• swiss chard (Pink Flamingo & Rainbow)
• collards (Champion)
• tomatoes (Yellow Pear, Nyagous, Alpha, Jaunne Flamme, and Sweetie)

We hope to see you there!

A corner of our garden, recently fitted with bamboo teepees for our pole beans.

I blame the weather for our lack of blog updates. April (and May so far) have been outrageously gorgeous. This past week has been full-on summertime gorgeous. Needless to say, the plants, the animals, and ourselves are LOVING it, and spending time on a computer has dropped to the bottom of our current priority list.

This weather is pretty much exactly opposite of what last year was. Last year was rain, rain, rain, cool temperatures, rain, which brought slugs, slugs, slugs. This year we’ve got sun, sun, sun, crazy warm temperatures, and no slugs. It’s pretty awesome. It means we’re outside watering every day (not something we expected to be spending our time doing so early in the season). It also means that plants are flowering way earlier than normal and that our new arugula is already bolting(!?). Crazy. But we’re not complaining. We’re tank-topping, jean-shorting, and flip-flopping this weather up!

Here’s a quick list of what we’ve been up to for the last few weeks:

• transplanted hundreds of seedlings into the garden beds, including mixed salad greens, kale, chard, collards, broccoli, brussel sprouts, flowers, peas, beans, potatoes, onions, scallions, carrots, beets, and herbs;
• hosted our first market booth of the season at the Haney Farmers Earth Day Market;
• had two days of pre-school groups come tour the farm (so fun!);
• attended more permaculture classes;
• wrote a Farm for Life article for the upcoming issue of Footprint Press;
• and drank lovely glasses of wine with lovely people around lovely farm bonfires;

We’ll try to be better at blogging about more of these things as they happen. We hope everyone is enjoying this spectacular weather. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post with information about the two farmers markets we’re planning on being at this year as well as a list of what you can expect to find at our booth this weekend.

Cheers!