25 mm or about 1″ of rain has fallen since last evening, and it is still coming down.

And that’s good!

The plants are loving it! This will give them the boost they need. Already they are greener & brighter. The ground is happily soaking up the rain, and the cisterns are filling up (of course we just had a truckload of water delivered on Friday). Equally amazing is how fast the weeds are popping up!

What’s in the box?

Salad turnips, radishes, baby kale, mini romaine lettuce, pea shoots, salad greens.

• Salad turnips are small, round, white turnips that resemble radishes, but without the bite (usually)! Mild in flavour, crisp, and quite tender, they are best eaten raw – simply wash, cut off the tops and enjoy! They can also be stir fried, sautéed, or steamed – both the turnips & the green tops.
• The radishes this week are called French Breakfast radishes. Long and pink with a white tip, they have a similar taste & bite to the more common round red radish. In France they prefer them very small, barely as thick as your baby finger, but I think they taste just fine at any size.
• Kale is the new green in your box. We call it baby kale as the leaves are small – small enough and tender enough to eat fresh in a salad. Our kale is a mix of several varieties with different colours and leaf shapes. Enjoy this beautiful, tasty and healthy green!
• Mini romaine lettuce looks like regular romaine – just smaller. It has the same crunch and the same great flavour. This week’s mini romaine is a beautiful dark red variety.
• The box of pea shoots in your share this week is meant to be eaten – not planted!  Place the box outside in partial shade or inside near a window. Keep them well watered & let them reach about 10-12 cm. Then use as desired – cut what you need and add them to your salad or sandwiches … If you cut them about half way down, leaving a stem & some leaves, they will grow back and you can harvest them again. (Cutting them all the way down at soil level gives a larger harvest – but only once.)

• There will be another salad green in the box as well. It might be lettuce, spinach, bok choy, or arugula depending on what is ready to harvest on the day we pick.

When the rain slowed I ran out to the fields to check the vegetables and grabbed these. From left to right – mini-romaine, salad turnips, French breakfast radishes, beets, green onions. Beets & green onions are coming along but are still several weeks away. Zucchini too!

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Around the farm this week …

I mowed the cover crop field which had so many different species of plants growing & blooming. I left a few strips unmowed for the bees & other pollinators to enjoy. After this rain I will mow it again, work the ground and reseed, this time to buckwheat for the summer.

The tomatoes are growing quickly now – we need to get them staked, pruned & tied.

The zucchini are in flower so we have removed the insect cover and started mulching them. We just moved the insect cover over to the fall cabbages to protect them while they grow.

Seeding continues every few days …

Plant sales have been good at our roadside trailer and at market – but now they are slowing down. We were pleased to donate another truckload of pepper & eggplant & tomato plants to Project Share (projectshare.ca) for their clients and community gardens.

The cats are probably the only ones on the farm upset about the rain today. While they are smart enough to stay in the barn and nap, they are certainly grumpy and want to be left alone!

Happy but dirty after chasing a groundhog in the ditch!