Getting Ready for the Market-ocalypse!

Tuesday September 26 2017

Even though we are in autumn now, the sun and the heat came by to say hello one last time this Tuesday!

Early Blight on Cherry tomatoes

 

During our usual walk about we assessed the terraces to see what is to be harvested for the market, and what is to be taken out because of the change of seasons, or disease.

Cucumber season is now over,  but there was enough greens for a few bags of salad blend.

The Cherry tomatoes are still producing despite the presence of early blight, and the nasturtiums bounced back very nicely after being infested with aphids in the summer. 

The Kale Trial: no data was taken from the kale trial this week.

Rep 1 is improving! This could be do to the cooler temperatures which kale can thrive in.

Rep 2 by the sunflowers is still pathetic, which isn’t surprising as they are so close to the sunflowers that can exude phytochemicals that can restrict the growth of other plants nearby.

Rep 3 looks like it has been hit with some powdery mildew near the base of some of the plants, and some plants were even starting to bolt, which is concerning at this time of the year.

  

Piper giving the melon a sniff

Stark preparing a breakfast snack for us all

Scalopini

Mike checking out the mystery squash

Arugula

Baby Kale

Nastursiums

The arugula on the terraces is doing very well! And the kale next to the arugula was harvested as baby kale to add to the salad blend, as well as mustard greens.

Piper and Will transplanting onions

Once the truck was packed up and off to the market the rest of the students transplanted some very sad looking onions, and we will all have to cross our fingers that they will survive the transplant!

Some weeding was done, as that is always needed, and then that was it!

The Market:

It was a race to the finish line on the terraces as always! The truck needs to get to the market site and have everything set up by noon, and as always (at this new location) it was a very busy start. Stark even said he had to fend off customers before the market opened like they were zombies in the Walking Dead!

Last weeks market broke the all time record in sales, unfortunately this week was not as successful as last week, but there are no complaints from anybody because this new location is so much more profitable then the previous location on campus.

The taste and smell of Fall.

Perhaps you have noticed that little chill in the air that arrives at night, or sometimes even earlier in the day? Or maybe you have remarked that the evening air has a distinct smell, a smell which I find rather difficult to describe, yet somehow I know that fall is in the air and that soon winter is coming...

Basil initiates flowers as days get shorter and a nightly chill sets in

It is now officially fall. However, the changing season has been evident long before arriving at the calendar date, Sep. 22, which marks the vernal equinox. As we arrived for school, the full intensity of summer clung on desperately, with intense heat, and sunlight, only to be modified slightly by lingering smoke . Even though I had left to do research in Mexico for a month and was largely absent during the month of August, being back in the Lower Mainland, I was reminded of the oppressiveness of the smoke and heat that engulfed everything. The grass was so parched by this time, that it would shatter to a fine powder as it was tread on. Finally, a break...........

relief...... by the end of week, it rained.

At this time, the weather became more livable with reasonable temperatures. This shift was not the only change that was set in motion by the arrival of the first rains. The nighttime temperatures had started to drop to the low 10's creating a noticeable difference between the day and night temperatures.

Hazel cleaning the bin between harvests

Similarly, in our weekly harvest these changes have become evident. At the third week of the semester, we were still able to harvest lots of heat loving summer annuals such as: tomatoes, peppers, okra, basil, cucumbers, and shiso; but these have noticeably slowed down in their ripening resulting in much lesser yields than the previous weeks harvests. We would have harvested zucchini, but that pretty much entirely succumbed to powdery mildew (picture below). We also harvested some more cold tolerant crops such as leafy greens - kale, lettuce, spinach, arugula; nasturtium leaves and flowers, hakurei turnips. Even the more cold hardy crops offered only modest harvests - it is a time of transition after all, and lots of our fall harvest crops have yet to reach sufficient maturity for harvest.

A meager tomato harvest

Nic harvesting basil

The peppers are still hanging in...

Shiso

Piper preparing the produce to be weighed

The produce above is what we were able to harvest off the terrace. Additionally, we had potatoes and beans in cold storage from the previous week's harvest, and had a few students working with Torin to  harvest celery, leeks, beets and corn that day. All of the produce was weighed, and then processed into bags and was then aggregated at around 11am, to be transported by truck to the Farmers Market at Minoru Plaza.

The last of the hakurei turnips

Nasturtiums in their element

Arugula

Oak leaf lettuce

As is usual, doing the market harvest leaves us with little time, but we do our best to attend to the needs of the terrace as much as time permits. For example, Jordan busied himself with the harvest of rye seed, and carrot seed, and then cleaning up the spent cucurbit plants (mostly zucchini). Some students and Mike set about tackling weeds with hoes in hand.

Jordan posing for the camera

These plants gave up on life because of powdery mildew

At the very end of class, all of the students congregated to hear Mike's report about the latest news with Garden City lands. It seems we have encountered another snag in gaining the right to farm the GC lands. The ALC has sent an order to Richmond municipal council to remove a foot of soil. For various reasons, the council does not agree with the order, and nor do our instructors. Mike explained that given the mandate of protecting soil for current and future farm use, adding 2 feet of non-native soil is counter to the purpose of the ALR. However, adding the extra soil is critical for two important reasons: the soils of GC lands are highly contaminated with led from past uses (rifle range, control tower), and by adding extra layers the risk of the led being bio-accumulated by produce is greatly reduced. The second reason, involves the greater context of climate change induced by anthropogenic activity - e.g. the accelerated release of GHG into the atmosphere. In this context, all the peat in GC lands is huge reservoir of organic carbon, which if cultivated in a conventional matter (ie: being drained and tilled) will quickly transform into a huge source of CO2 gas in short manner of time. In contrast, and even though minerals soils are not as productive as organic soils, they can actually increase in soil organic matter overtime with sound practices, thereby becoming a sink for atmospheric carbon. To summarize, adding a good layer of mineral soil overtop of the peat may actually help preserve thereby stopping it's degradation and release of CO2 gas. Given that maintaining the mineral soil cover is imperative, and the city is trying to resist this order.

Mike and his children (sorghum)

With that, the class was over - actually, it had already ended 10 minutes before, but I think we were all intrigued to get caught up with the latest on the Garden City saga.

Assessing the state of the cherry tomatoes

If you don't practice good dental hygiene, then your beans will get squashed by sorghums

Tuesday, September 12th, 2017

Our first day back at the orchard after our summer semester break! While students were enjoying a mini 'offseason', the Sust Ag program managers were up to their eyeballs (and further) in plant growth, harvest, pest management and market. 

Stunted corn- damaged by wireworm!

As usual, we started the day with a little walk around to see what the plants had to say. We observed there was lots of corn ready, and lots of stunted corn! We noticed this problem starting up earlier in the season and even discovered the culprit - wireworm!

Wireworm in young corn root. Photo taken July 27/2017 at the Orchard.

Wireworms are attracted to the CO2 emitted into the soil from plant roots. They follow the CO2 'trail' and when they get to the roots, they eat them! How rude. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot we can do in the midst of the season. Isabel is running a trial to help test the efficacy of a pathogen to control wireworm. There are various other strategies organic farmers can employ, but since wireworms can live up to 6 years in the soil before they morph into their adult phase of life (the click beetle), they must be managed with an eye to the long term. Maybe we can develop a market for click beetles, and make trapping them on the farm an economically beneficial activity. 

Nearly empty Brassica patch. Beans galore in the background

Our cabbage and cauliflower have come and gone, and now all thats left is brussel sprouts in the Brassica patch. Pretty soon the empty space will be planted with a cover crop. In the background there you can see bean support systems holding up glorious beanage like you've never seen before. Our farm managers Torin and Grace were hard at work harvesting beans yesterday. Funny story - beans don't look all that menacing but they actually have very small spiky spines on them. If you harvest lots of them without long sleeves on you could scratch up your arms pretty good. I've never bean more surprised to hear such a story about a plant!

Potatos, mid senescence

The vegetative parts of out potato crops are starting to flop over sideways - but thats normal, its called senescence. One of the differences a consumer will notice between the various potatoe varieties they may buy are the thickness and toughness of the skins. Potato skins will harden if left in the ground after senescence, increasing their storage life. Its typical for organic growers to mow the vegetative portion once senescence really kicks in, which is what we will be doing soon.  I was going to ask our instructor Mike to elaborate further on this topic, but he moved onto another subject, and I didn't want to interrupt him mid senescence.

Our squash patch, under attack my mildew

The squash patch seems to have set fruit nicely, however it is battling a mildew attack. This is common on the coast, and as fall moves in more and more moisture will become present and probably exacerbate the problem. Mildew does not get into the fruit so there is no problem there - however it will start to kill leaves and reduce photosynthesis and therefore yield. Hopefully those leaves can hang in there and keep pumping that wonderful sugar filled sun juice they make into the sweet squash!

These pumpkins stay green and are grown for their tasty green seeds

You know how you carve pumpkins to make Jack-o-lanterns and the seeds that come out are not green? Exactly! Now, where do you think those green pumpkin seeds that you buy in bulk at the grocery store come from? Thats right! There are pumpkin growers out there growing varieties that have been bred for the specific purpose of producing those little green seeds we all love. We are growing a few this year and they aren't even orange if you can believe it!

An unripe butternut squash

A warty yet tasty pumpkin. Variety name: Galeux D'Eysines



More Galeux D'Eysines

Last year I tried this orange/white warty pumpkin for the first time. I made pumpkin pie from this recipe and got great feedback from everyone I made it for. Don't let the warts scare you off! These tasty pumpkins are great for pies and general lovely sweet squash recipes. They are so beautiful they are practically Galeux'ing.


A Happy Harvest!

Once the walk about was done we did some quick work harvesting a whole bunch of veggies - celery, corn, potatos, beets. That stuff all got hauled off to the market at Minoru Plaza, but not before everyone posed for a photo with the harvest in the back of the truck!

This beautiful large stowaway spider snuck its way back to campus in the celery.
Thats my pinky finger for size comparison.  

4 Sust Aggies appearing similar

Students examining Rep 3 of the Kale trial

To cap off the day we went out to the terraces on the Richmond campus where we are running a Kale trial. There are many varieties of Kale being tried here and we are interested in assessing many characteristics - flavour, texture, resistance to pests, etc. We all lined up with a Kale variety and Mike quizzed us on the characteristics and recorded our responses. The students reckon that by the end of the semester we are going to be savvy Kale-oisseurs, able to identify the Kale variety simply by smell. If only we could be so lucky as to receive that much exposure to Kale in one lifetime, but we get the pleasure of it all in one semester! 

Sweet Sorghum

As I left campus a little later I took a photo of the 'little' stand of sweet sorghum Mike has planted in the terrace garden. These plants are now a sturdy 12-15 feet tall, starting to form seed heads. Apparently if you chew on the stalks they actually taste quite sweet. But don't chew on them for too long, or else you will get sor-ghums!

First Day back to our Last Semester

Amid cloudy skies, Sep.5, 2017 marked our first day back at our (already!) last semester of our Agroecosystems Management class, and it won’t be long before time will magically fly by faster each week than the week before, especially now with our 3 hour weekly class!

We agsembled together and then had our quick morning walk-about along the terraces and:

• We saw that the lettuce plants were germinating well.
• We sampled the swiss chard and came to agreement that it had become too bitter to market, so we will need to take it out.
• We came across one of our kale trials and noticed that there was inconsistent growth among the kale plants, including the kale plants that were within the same variety (as visible by the varied heights) within the trial. We hypothesized that the growth inconsistency may be due to the effect of variance in light exposure/shading of the kale plants, as kale grows better under full-sun than in shaded areas.  

Kale trial location

Kale trial- note the variation in growth

           We had encountered a similar case of inconsistency of colour with our rye grass that was previously planted near the same area where the kale trial was planted. Some reasons proposed for the observed differences of colour included inconsistent application of compost/soil amendments, differences in soil drainage rates, or temperature effects from the surrounding concrete.
          Maybe its an unlucky coincidence, or the effect of some unaccounted physical or chemical factors at the site. This is one of the reasons why record keeping is so important, as past records can provide useful clues or information that can help guide our future decisions.

•  We also checked on the squash plants and noticed that it had a case of powdery mildew, which had developed on some of the leaves but that had negligible effect on our harvest.

Squash leaves affected by powdery mildew

After the walk-about, we geared ourselves up to jump back into market harvest mode.

Harvesting:

Peppers!

Squash(left) and arugula(right)

Hakurei Turnip

Cucumber

Nasturtium leaves and flowers

Processing:

Washing Turnip

Leek Trimming

Bagging salad greens

Our harvest included Hakurei turnip, squash, cucumber, basil, nasturtiums, leek, peppers, and our feature of the week: Shisho. 

Shisho

Shisho is a unique tasting leaf with an atypical blend of flavours…if you could, imagine tasting a mix of mint, basil, citrus, or even cilantro at the same time! It can be a challenge to not be taken aback by the taste, but also to learn that it can be used as a flavourful herb to add to a wide range of dishes, whether its meat, seafood, vegetable, or soup, or even as a topping. 

A few of us also collected both quantitative and qualitative data for one of our kale trial plots (we have three replicates in total across the terraces). For each kale trial, each variety of kale plant is planted in a chevron pattern. The data samples are taken from the large outer leaves of the kale plants.

Kale trial:

For quantitative data we:
-Kept track of number of plants
-Counted and weighed the leaves
-And measured the height up to the tip of the youngest leaf, and took the average of the measured heights.

For Qualitative data (3-step process) we:
1. Did a taste test: describe the flavor(blandness, sweetness, bitterness); texture (rough, smooth, tough)
2. Noted pest damage (eg. aphid density, caterpillar damage…)
3. Concluded whether the kale variety was marketable

We also learned that the Kwantlen St. Market has been relocated to Minoru Plaza , conveniently located just outside the Richmond Public Library and Cultural Centre. 

This location change has been positive overall so far. This is the second location change that has occurred so far, and it has been interesting to see the effects of location change on the market and how much the market has grown. Starting off at the parking lot at the KPU Richmond Campus, then shifting to in front of the terraces, and moving just recently to the plaza… each place had its pros and cons, to the growers, vendors, and consumers in terms of accessibility, convenience, and sales. And those pros and cons may differ quite significantly between the three parties, so it is important to consider the effects on all three.  

The Agroecosystems Management course has enabled us to experience how agriculture is affected by not only challenges on-farm but also challenges off-farm; how with continued persistence, perseverance, and supportive collaboration, we can devise and test different solutions to help adapt to those challenges; how the process is a dynamic one that comes with both ups and downs; and how each result can serve as a learning opportunity.

With regards to our newest location change, customer traffic has been much better at the Kwantlen St. Market at the Minoru plaza, especially compared to the traffic we had at our terrace location. This new location, with its more accessible (and still free!) parking and greater access to the public community, is helping expand the market with a much greater number of vendors and also generating more sales. 

Free parking

Local vendors:

The market runs every Tuesday from 12-4pm until October 31 at this new location. Come visit us and discover our local vendors, learn about our produce, and maybe you will stumble upon a new Shisho of the day or some new treasure every now and then!