Week 5 - The Kwantlen Street Farmer’s Market Begins!

It’s May 31^st and we are harvesting on the Terrace Garden for the first farmer’s market of the season. The market starts at 3pm and goes till 7pm on Tuesdays so we have to get cracking. We have peas, kale, lettuce, spinach and radishes to harvest, the other crops are not ready yet. 

The kale and salad bowl lettuce before we started.

Masa, Johanna and I started by picking peas and filled sixteen 200g bags. They were really sweet and were the first item to sell out of at the market.

There is a lot to consider when harvesting, it’s not just pick and go to the market. After you pick you need to wash and keep cool the product (we used ice), try to make sure you don't put in any unwanted organisms in with the produce,

weigh and bundle the produce,

and record how much you harvested, how much are you going to sell the produce for and how you are going to display it so it looks good but doesn’t get too hot and wilt.

After sections were harvested Stafford went through and prepared the beds for new transplants or seeding.

Mike got two temperature sensors that work with an app call Kestrel, one is under a row cover the other is not and they track the temperatures on a continues bases. It was interesting to learn that it was about 9 degrees C warmer under the row cover.

On Thursday, June 2nd we were at the Orchard weeding. While weeding we noticed that we had very little emergence of a lot of the seeds we had planted. We are not sure why and will have to reseed some of the beds. The 'Flamingo Pink' Swiss chard row is going to be plowed under because it hardly came up at all and had a lot of weeds. We will start again maybe something different this time.

After the weeding was done we looked at the pear orchard, and Rebecca told us about a orchard floor management system called the “Swiss sandwich system” where the tree rows have one type of cover or possibly left bare and the area between the rows is a different cover, usually grass and a bare strip is maintained between the two so the grass does not grow into the tree rows.

Anna tilled in the grass around the trees.

A Whole Different World Goes on in the Garden That We Rarely Notice

I find it interesting learning about all the different organisms that live within the garden, some we can see and some we cannot. We tend to call them pests and beneficials. Scientists know very little about the micro organisms that live in soil and are realizing how important they are to the health of the soil and the plants, such as the mycorrhizae symbiotic relationship between certain fungi and plant roots where the fungi helps the plant with nutrient and water uptake and, in exchange, the fungi receive sugars produced by the plant. We have herbivores and carnivores just as we do with larger animals. The herbivores tend to be the pests and the carnivores tend to be the beneficials. Cabbage moth (which is actually a butterfly) can be a beneficial when it is an adult because it help pollinate but in the larval stage it feeds on our crops.

In the next picture there are black aphids in the center of the leaf and the fly to the outside is dead because of Entomophthora muscae a pathogenic fungus which is a potential biological pest control. Aphids are a pest because they pierce the plant and suck out its sap, but more importantly they can transmit diseases to the plant. 

There are predators in the garden, one that most of us know is the Lady Beetle.

I also found a stink bug or green soldier bug that is a pest of seeds, grains, nuts and fruits.

We now know that too much antibiotic use is bad for us in that it kills not just the bad bacteria but the good bacteria as well, and we are getting antibiotic resistant bad bacteria. The same is true for pesticide use, we are not just killing the pests but the beneficials also. Some pests are becoming resistant as well. We also understand the predator-prey relationship, or the "Lotka Volterra" hypothesis, predicting that predators are less numerous than prey (herbivores). The prey usually reproduce in large numbers and some more than once a year (some like aphids almost continually). So when you use an insecticide, for example, you kill all the insects and the pest insects are going to rebound first creating a bigger problem until the predator insects rebound. So it makes sense to learn about the life cycles of the organisms in your garden and soil and try to maintain a reasonable balance between pests and beneficials instead of using pesticides. You can also encourage beneficials to your garden by providing suitable habitat and water for them. This creates a more sustainable system that is healthier for all of us.