Moving the food movement forward

Today is the second day of my time at Windhorse Farm. There are 35 people here all with the focus of moving the food movement forward. Yesterday we participated in and learned various techniques for working with groups to create energy, excitement and learning. This place is so beautiful and the perfect place for us to come together to focus on food and personal growth. If you would like to follow along with the work here you can check out the http://nsfood.ning.com site for all of the harvest word we are doing.

I am thinking of all of you while I am here.

A warm Sunday in November

Can you believe the weather? Today was a slow day, a great day of rest. We worked away at various activities. Josh and the kids helped Lydia move wood to the new Swallow's Nest home that she is living in. I did loads of laundry and washed the dishes a few times. Izaak, Andrew (my father) and I chased the chickens into their coup and I sat in the hammock for a few minutes, in ah of the fact that it is mid November and it is warm.

Tonight we shared a wonderful meal with my grandparents, Avard and Sandy and cousin Katharine. I contributed a large apple crisp for dessert - so easy and a hit.

Enjoy your week!

final garlic planting

I am so excited. Josh and I just finished planting 3 rows 200 feet long of bulbils, the really small ones. Last week or the week before the guys planted rows of the larger bulbis, but these ones are so tiny. The potential is really fun and exciting. I still have more left over. And I planted them really heavy so we will need to thin them out in the spring. If things work out, one day there will be a lot of garlic.

Publish Post

planning for 2010

For the past number of weeks I have been mulling around the thoughts of how to plan for next year in terms of what will we do differently, what will be the same, do we want to expand our membership or not, etc. Today I am drafting up my ideas for next year and will start to work it down to a plan and then send it off to the designer to add into the materials for a 2010 registration form.

It is hard to believe that a year has past since we first started thinking about offering a CSA. It really was a year ago a couple of weeks ago that I travelled to the CSA conference in Orilla, ON. And now look, we are 34 weeks into our first year of CSA. It is great and it is really fun to think about changes for next year. I am just trying to sort out pickup locations. This is so hard to do because I am not on the receiving end. It is hard to sort out what is the best times, where is the most central and easy to access locations. Honestly, if you have thoughts and feedback please send it along. I am going to draft a quick survey to ask a few questions to help me out.

We have learned so much so far this year - it will be good to incorporate all the learning into next year.

Enjoy the sun!

Wonderful Birthday Weekend

This weekend was Lily's birthday weekend - she turned 4 years old on Sunday. We had two lovely parties on Sunday - one with young friends and family (aunts, grandparents, etc) and one with my grandparents, Lily's great grandparents. We had the most amazing cake that Katharine (cousin) made. A three layer, cream cheese icing, pink cake with purple icing and pink sprinkles. We needed to serve it on dinner plates the slices were so tall. It was very fun and great to celebrate with grammer and grampie.

Enjoy your week - we started ours off with lots of sugar and fun......

Oh - and in the greenhouse the mizuna is about 2 inches tall. The peas are sprouting and the other greens are coming along too. The farm was truly beautiful this weekend - the sun felt great and the air was fresh and warm.

Link to farmers

Check it out Farmers , a link my cousin sent to me.

Garlic update

Yesterday the final plantings of garlic took place. We have 15 rows of 700 ft of garlic planted 6 inches apart. If all goes well you will all get a good bunch of garlic next year. The other exciting event yesterday was planing the bulbils. We harvested quite a lot of mature scapes - they had formed bulbils (seeds). From our research, we think it will take 3 - 4 years until the bulbils will yield a mature and large garlic bulb - but we are willing to try. Kingsley and Boolow planted 10 rows about 25 ft long they are planted about 4 inches apart. They are planted at the end of the greenhouse so they can easily be watered on a regular basis. This will be a long term experiment and hopefully it will work - if it does - it will be a great increase in garlic volume with very little cash output. Yippy!!

Happy Trick or Treating everyone!