June 6/ 2017 A Berry Special Day!

Today is Market day! it was a balmy 22 degrees with the sun shining! a perfect day for harvest. Today was a pretty standard market day with initial morning tasks being harvesting, washing, packaging, and preparing for the market. Once everything was up and running we switched off people running our table with people out in the field weeding and transplanting in the afternoon. One new thing we tried out today was using flags to mark the areas that were ready for harvest. All in all this method worked quite well and prevented over harvesting and missing harvest-able crop. Alex took it upon himself to be farm manager for the day and made sure all the flags were properly planted and went around giving us tags with the name and cultivar of the crop we were harvesting to make weighing and recording a simple task once we were done in the field! Mike was a big help with transplanting and rototilled all of the empty spaces to get them ready for planting melons, peppers, and more leafy greens!

As you can see, the Kale has been thriving despite the recent hot weather! which is good business for us considering all of the kale monsters that live in the Lower Mainland! the Green Onions and Swiss Chard are coming in a close second despite a bit of leaf miner damage on the Chard. unfortunately, our top seller; the salad greens, have all either bolted or gone bitter in our newfound heat, therefore we have very few salad mixes to sell this week. because we don't have salad mixes, our table this week is quite sparse, but for the first time this week we do have .....(drum roll)......

STRAWBERRIES!!!! we were all so excited to find that the row of strawberries we planted for Rebecca's experiment was finally bearing fruit that we could eat!... I mean sell... Unfortunately something else had the same idea that we did and ate a huge amount of berries before we could send a team out to the orchard for first harvest! Our two main culprits for this strobery  are hungry community gardeners and little woodland mammals such as voles and squirrels. Rebecca was ready to find the culprits responsible and give them a peas of her mind but decided on peas instead of war, because soon enough there would be more than enough strawberries to go around!