This is the fourth week of Winter shares!!
For those of you who are joining us for the first time, Welcome!! We hope you've been enjoying your share. We normally send a fancy newsletter like this every week during our regular season, but the winter is our down time ..and there is not as much to report : Pictures of snow, snow, snow and more snow would get a bit old :)
This newsletter has farm update and recipes! Note: The winter shares are worth $28, so they are be a little smaller than our regular ($35) summer and fall shares.
We are including a BONUS bag of Against the grain corn chips in the share this week. These are made with sunflower oil, non-gmo ancient grain corn. They are full of fibre, calcium and more. Who said chips had to be bad for you!!
Shelley at Against the Grain farm is doing incredible work saving almost lost, ancient grains. These grains have more fibre and digestable nutrients than conventional grains. Check out their farm: AGAINST THE GRAIN. These chips are very delicious and we end up having staff nachos at least once a week!
Emily (far right) is our new office admin. She is helping us get on top of everything from accounting to customer service. If you've written to us lately, good chances she has been the one to reply. It is a huge relief for Robin and I (Jess) and we hope to have more time to be in the field this year. Also, she is 100% better at organizational tasks than we are.
We participated in a local masquerade to raise money to buy a new bed for our local hospital. We recruited Emily and her husband Justin to help us, and managed to pull of a 105 second hiphop break-dance that was not completely uncool. I mean it was pretty uncool, but we got lots of cheers. It was a great time and over $16,000 was raised!
Well, we try to go cross country skiing.
Here's Robin and Fiona at Renaud Cabin, a great place for a mid-ski snack, just a few kms from P19, which is just a few kms from our farm. This year with the winter share and a toddler, we've been surprisingly busy but we still try to get a few skis in per week. We also went to a farming conference in Cornwall this past weekend, which was great. We got inspired, talked to fellow farmers and slept through the night (baby was with grandma!).
This winter has flown by and we are quickly trying to tie up all the loose ends before the season takes off in a couple of weeks!
We planted Tomatoes last week!
First we plant rootstock and then the scions (regular tomatoes) two days later. We will graft the scions onto the rootstock next week. Grafting gives our plants extra vigour and boosts productivity. We hope to have these in the heated greenhouse ground by mid April so we can (hopefully) have tomatoes in late June (a month earlier than normal)
This will also allow us to pull the greenhouses out earlier (beginning of September) so we can get a good crop of spinach established for the winter 2019-20, and hopefully avoid green shortages.
Sprouts are growin!
This winter has been brutal! We are normally drowning in spinach at this time of year, but there has been so many overcast days that there is not much happening in the greenhouses right now. We have sprouts growing under lights and they're delicious!
I stole this picture from www.thehealthymaven.com, but I did make crispy potato fries the other day and they were delicious! rather than try to tell you how, I'll let the healthy maven website do that. You do need a spiralizer for this. It's a great investment: spiralized root salads are delicious and in the summer spiralizing zucchinis for "noodle" replacement is all the rage :)
If you have more recipes and meal ideas, or want some, head to our community facebook page where our members are sharing what their making with the winter shares!