Archive for the ‘From the Garden’ Category

I’m getting quite a few questions about the prospective new Lactuca Urban Farm site, so figured I’d share where things are at. The quick answer: it’s in Inglewood and we’re in the process of negotiating the lease. Although nothing’s a done deal, we’re very near the end of the process. Perhaps I need to back up a bit.

Travis and I started looking at prospective farm sites some time ago. Despite being totally sold on the feasibility of backyard operations, we decided to scale via tapping into unused urban space for a variety of reasons – mostly financial and logistical, partly because we could, but also because both of us are keen to explore the potential of ‘what could be’ in urban ag. This site was our best hope: large enough for a considerable scale-up, easy striking [read: biking] distance for he and I [~1km or so as the crow flies from his house and mine], reasonably tucked away. It’s a site slated for residential development down the road, currently sitting unused. We approached the developer and they were on board if we could clear it by the City and the Community League. We’ve done both those things over the past couple months, with resounding support from the community. So now it’s time to sign on the dotted line.

The site’s over an acre. So we’re adding to the roughly 1000 square feet in the backyard intensive setups by about 45,000 sq ft. It’s more than we need, in fact, and we’re only going to use a portion of the space in the 2013 in order to manage our growth. All this space allows a serious expansion on the salad greens front, but also gives us the space to go to market with heirloom tomatoes, heirloom carrots, heirloom leeks, beets, radishes, cooking greens, and plenty more. The farm plan is drawn up. Seed is in-hand. Logistics are being finagled. Fingers are crossed.

Once upon a time, I built a wine cellar. In order to make decent wine from the grape vines in my back yard, I was advised to practice on other fruit. I practiced on apples. Now my wine cellar’s really a cider cellar. Perhaps cider/charcuterie cellar would be most appropriate. If I call it a wine cellar, it’s only because I’m lying or getting old and am forgetting what is in fact stashed down there. It’s cider. Apple ciders of various blends/batches. Pear ciders of various blends/batches. A couple types of Pommeau [an apple and apple brandy desert wine]. And if you look hard through the bins, you will find some actual grape-based wine. If you were to turn around from this view of the west wall of bins, you’d see kegs. Full of bubbly cider. Awaiting an epic party. Above them hangs odds and sods of dry cured meats. Refreshing that meat stash is on my to-do list.

Edmonton is an apple [and pear] city, and we just haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe I’m reading too much into things or it’s just the circles I spin in, but cider seems to be slowly creeping into our psyche. Maybe it’s just me. I’m starting to think ‘coq au cidre’ instead of ‘coq au vin’. Starting to pair every pork dish with some kind of apple booze. Give me cheese, I now think ‘pear cider’ instead of ‘pinot gris’ [which I still love, btw]. Is part of it frugality? Partly, especially indirectly in that it’s so abundant that dumping a litre into a braise doesn’t phase me, whereas dumping a $20 bottle into the dish does. As a result it creeps into your daily life. But there is also a dominant thread of simple beauty around the harnessing of what ‘where we live’ offers. I don’t think that bit will ever get old.

This one was a year in the works. Way back when, while shooting Episode 23 at Riverbend Gardens, I was enlightened to the situation that is common at vegetable farms in the fall: harvests fill up storage capacity, labour is relieved for the season, and anything left in the ground becomes compost-in-place. Sensible, really. Wouldn’t make sense to try to anticipate the storage capacity and shoot for it, as the first lean growing season would teach you that’s a really bad business plan. So surplus is normal.

At the time, I’d just been introduced to veg gleaning, as a farmer had called the Food Bank asking if they wanted a 1/4 acre of vegetables he had in the ground. The Food Bank, unresourced to go get it, put him onto Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton - who have people swinging on the front lines all fall rescuing fruit of all types. So OFRE put a crew together to harvest it. And win-win-win happened.

So having made arrangements for this one last year, I was awaiting the call from Riverbend Gardens, who had a year earlier generously offered their surplus to charity if OFRE could come get it. The text msg arrived on my phone. I lined up a Salvation Army truck to pick up the charity’s share. And win-win-win happened.

So I built a big cider press. Or rather, I had one built. A metal fabricator built the steel frame, and @landonschedler crafted the oak tray. It didn’t take long in test-phase to be in awe at the faucet flow of fresh juice pouring out of it. It works well.

Cider season, having happened the first part of September, feels like a blur. Chad Moss and I spent nearly every day for two to three weeks [don't remember, the blur thing] either in a fruit tree, under a fruit tree, in a vehicle finding a fruit tree, or in my garage crushing and pressing the yield of the fruit tree. We did take breaks to light a fire and prep a meal here and there. And slept. But that was pretty much cider season. If it takes 100lbs of fruit to fill a carboy, I estimate we saw 5-6000lbs of fruit, marked by roughly 400-600lbs of 3-4 different varieties of pears in the mix. Everything from little red crabapples tasting like watermelon jolly rancher to huge baking apples, to apples with bright pink flesh – we saw a lot of apple. Need to keep better records next year, but I’m confident we cracked the kilo-L this year, and likely made it into the 1200-1300L range. Not all for me, of course. And that’s what makes this cider season an epic one. Spent a lot of time with good friends having a lot of good times, revelling in the wealth of fruit, dipping glasses under the tap of fresh juice, sharing meals and drinks and the satisfying fatigue of hard work. A memorable stretch of life, this cider season was. And the cider will now penetrate into our homes, affecting how we’re cooking and drinking, etching itself more deeply into our food culture. Love it.

I built my first cold frame back in March of 2011. It has undoubtedly changed the way I grow food. I’m now up to 8 frames under lids, with another 6 soon to be built for the 2013 season – the majority for market. This vid is simply a look at how we’re building them now, after much homework in old-school books about how the Dutch and French used to rock this technology, and much debate between Travis and I about the best way to tackle it.

A simple description of the current design: 2×10 back and sides, 2×6 front for the frame on the ground. The lid is a 2×4 back board hinged to the ground frame. 2x2s are then added to the sides and front of the lid, and a space-age corrugated greenhouse plexi is affixed to the top. That’s it. It uses geothermal and solar heat to assist on temperature, and the biggy is the lid itself protects against hail, pounding rain, heavy winds, and frost. And leaf debris, and house sparrows, and neighbourhood cats, and romping children. And snow. I’ve grown greens as early as April and as late as November before without much effort. Now that we’re supplying restaurants, food trucks, caterers, the local culinary school, and the public, it’s time for some effort to extend the season in an energy-passive way and with some volume. I’m not interested in heaters – not just because they’re energy pigs, but because they falsify seasonality, and alter the culture around it. I am however interested in advocating for a re-think about what’s in season, helping sharpen the #yeg pencil around terroir, if you will. There you have it.

I find I’ve been under-representing how much I’ve dived head first into salad greens production for market with Travis from LACTUCA. It’s been a weekly harvest and seeding gig for the past few months, and I’ve learned loads, about zero of which I’ve documented here. Can’t win them all I guess. I blame spending most every waking hour in the past two weeks either picking or crushing or pressing apples and pears.

Today’s salad going to market is delicate and lovely. The endives are starting to shine, growing robustly and light on the bitter in the cool weather. The varieties that are brown or red are also entering their season – a striking difference in color intensity vs even a few weeks ago in August. Growth has slowed considerably, which is posing some challenges for yield. The spring and summer blossoms are long gone to seed. Cold hardy varieties like spinach, arugula, minutina, and mache are about to have their day again, closing out the growing season that they brought in. The romaines and leaf lettuces that were gorgeous through July-August are now being trumped by the epic scarlet frills and merveille des quatres saisons. What a treat to watch varietal performance evolve through the seasons – the best teacher for how to nail down the best seasonal salad mix possible.

I have 8 4′X8′ sheets of corrugated greenhouse plexi arriving this week to top next season’s additional 8 production frames. Demand continues to be heavy, and we’re doing what we can to max out production for the 2013 year. What a project. Urban ag rocks.

Pears rank in my top 3 favorite fruits, for sure. Like with wines, I’m a sucker for the floral, high-toned aromatics. Problem is, until this year my only real source of pears was from the Okanagan. I knew there were pears around here, I just hadn’t seen or tasted any that made me think a realistic replacement to the Okanagan hook-up was in my back yard. Last year I had a spot in the lineup to pick the tree in these photos, but then headed to Normandy and missed my chance.

The pears in this photo are in Edmonton. That’s cool bit #1. Second cool bit is a mature tree yields hundreds of pounds of fruit. Not a 20lb box. Think 300lb box. Unlike an apple they’re hard at harvest and can drop to the ground and still be useful in storage. And the best bit is that there are many a pear tree tucked around Edmonton whose owners are happy to share their abundance of fruit. These ones are Ure. I’ve tried Early Gold [which I planted in my yard this year], Federovsk, and some unknown variety that’s easily as large as a Bartlett, which you might have spotted on my instagram feed, and if you know what it is please do tell.

What to do with hundreds of pounds of pears? Perry, or pear cider, for one. Secondly, it blends beautifully with apple juice. To my surprise, the pear juice we’re pressing isn’t pasty and pulpy like the commercial ones you buy – I really dislike that mouthfeel, which keeps me away from pear juices generally. We’re eating them out of hand as they ripen, will peel, cook and freeze some. May can some, although I try to avoid canning. Whatever the case, the following year will be marked by an abundance of pears.

My garage is filled with bins and tubs upon bins and tubs of ripening pears for the first time in my life. It’s glorious.

This is not a complaint. Every time I feel like I want to complain about this year’s inundation of slugs, I consider what my yard was like before when it was an expanse of lawn, with zero life in or near it. Or I think about the west coast with their huge slugs the size of your index finger – these look big, but only because of a 100mm lens. And I’ll take biodiversity over convenience. I ran into a friend who farms veg organically who described slugs as an urban problem – in a cultivated field there’s too much soil for them to cross before they arrive at a plant. In cities there’s lots of habitat. A con to urban ag perhaps? A manageable one, if so.

These things are seedling mowers. It took me a while to figure out that the house sparrows kind of nip and shred seedlings once about an inch tall, but slugs will make baby seedlings a few days old disappear. I had a patch of beautiful seedlings, went on holidays, came back and they had vanished. So I declared war. I tried the beer trap thing, but failed epicly, so I resorted to good, old-fashioned picking. With tongs, because you only have to try to scrub slug slime off your hands once before figuring out that’s something worth avoiding. It’s kind of like the goopiness of nasty fish slime with the tenacity of evergreen sap. Picked a hundred or so a day the first few, then it dropped into the dozens, until a week or two in I’m only finding a couple every morning. I can live with those numbers. I also can live with getting used to bugs. These things grossed me out before. Now my 5 year old and I hunt them in the morning like they’re easter eggs. Well. Kind of like that.

I dearly wish I could show you via video rather than photos and writing, as I had lined up a video episode for this wonderful place, and realized I forgot my DSLR setup on the lower mainland as we left the dock on the ferry towards Victoria. I don’t think I’ve ever claimed to be smart.

I’ve known about Merridale for a while, and had tasted some of their ciders prior to me falling in love with the stuff, but it was an eye opener seeing first hand the cider gold-mine of awesome they’re sitting on, and taste the gamut of their production. The only cider operations I’ve been to have been in Normandy, so it was nostalgic to be there. Nostalgic, and a little piece of me hopes: prophetic. I think there’s opportunity in this industry in Canada. Big time. All those varietals that grow here in abundance but folks don’t get excited about because they’re not good out of hand translates into cider potential. My nostalgia though was a little mis-sited, as the varietals they use are base more in the British cider culture. It’s all good in my world.

As with most new world producers, the methodology here is based on past winning formulae, with many a contemporary innovation. They make pommeau, for example, but not the way the French do – the french just mix 1/3 apple brandy to 2/3 juice and age it in oak 18 months. Merridale’s is actually based on cider to bring some of that flavour to the party, and they age it in oak a lot longer. Their cider product line is deep with variations on the cider theme – all of them interesting, my favorites being their dessert ciders and Normandie cider.

As with all new ag ground that need be broken, their operation is plagued by government foot-dragging. The distillation portion of the business, an important piece of the puzzle in my opinion, gets hammered with ~170% tax by the province, rendering profitability impossible if trying to hit a price point on a bottle that the market will bear. They’re working hard to change that. Until then, barrels of apple brandies sit in french oak until it’s profitable to bottle and sell them. C’mon BC gov’t.

This place is worth a visit, and worth supporting in general. Sadly, because their product is only shelf stable under refrigeration, transportation far and wide has not been feasible. So despite this being the closest cool cidery to me [closer than France, that's for sure], I still can’t buy the stuff here. One day. Until then, I still heart Merridale. Bravo.

Long, long ago, in a former saskatoon u-pick that is now more lawn than bush, a friend and I harvested saskatoons by the 5 gal pail and I made wine. Not your usual cooler-esque cheery saskatoon wine, but a heavy, dense, rich, viscous wine, aged with american white oak. That was way back in 2009. That vintage is now 3 years old and I’m wagering is the type of wine that will rock in the 10+ year range. I hadn’t had the supply to make another vintage since – until now.

Over a year ago, I got in touch with a U-Pick grower who was on the Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton grower list, but last year the ridiculously deep snow in the winter prior yielded a crop failure thanks to the moose eating the bushes to get through the winter. No 2011 vintage in the stars, trumped by nature. This year though, it was game on. Not only did we get the grower some fruit to sell via her share, and donate a pile to OFRE and a local charity, I came home with enough to make a 2012 vintage of saskatoon wine. No time for it now, so the berries will go into the freezer for the time being until my insane schedule lets off a bit.

Surprisingly, despite the wonderful opportunity to stock up for the winter in a very win-win-win-win situation for all, not as many OFRE volunteers were chomping at the bit to get on board as I thought. We were hardly at capacity for the 2 nights we were out. Still, we managed to glean roughly 350 lbs of fruit. Then we got an email from another Saskatoon U-Pick grower, offering another glean. Saskatoons anyone? I’m done.