Archive for the ‘Vegetables’ 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.

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.

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.

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.

Thursday has turned into harvest day here, and has become one of my favorite mornings of the week. I get to get up early, check out what’s at its best, eat some stuff fresh from the plant, and do some creative food stuff composing salads for Lactuca Micro Farm. I’m going to try to make a point of posting about what’s in the salads, as it will not only diarize it for me, but folks at market ask, and this is a good way to get them the info without having to waste paper to print it on. Also a good way to highlight what’s in season in my world at this precise moment.

Below is a shot of Dubuisson endive, and it’s making its first appearance in the mix. I’m not generally a big bitter greens lover, but am trying to work on my palate on that front. Lots of other cultures have learned to appreciate them so I figure I can too. Not hard to balance them in the array of flavours going on at the moment. This one is an old school french frisee type. Also new the lineup this week is peppery nasturtium petals [orange and red], and a double dose of the citrusy pop of geranium petals. Not trying to be fancy, the flowers actually bring loads of flavor and balance to the salad equation. My garden is abloom with coriander blossoms, which have a floral citrusy bent that I really dig, and some of the last mustard and nodding onion blossoms are still making their way in. There’s also a particularly heavy dose of tarragon. The chassis of the thing is heavy in red russian kale, mizuna, a variety of lettuces, some very baby arugula, etc. Lots of planning is being put into the base mix – being nerdy about specific hard-to-find varietal choices for the blend, lots of which is seeded and should show up in the salads in September. I also put out a few packs of cooking greens for market this week too – mizuna, kale, and tatsoi primarily with a pair of garlic scapes in each pack for funsies.

The greens thing is kinda going crazy. Lots of infrastructure planning, building, seeding, and general logistics going on. Will be doing a lot more writing about it as we continue to ramp up on what’s become a really wicked little urban ag business in good old #yeg.

Wow have I been blog absent. Not a record stint, as I’ve had a few since 2005 when I started, but this one’s up there. Sorry about that. Back to regular programming.

As it turns out, me bringing my greens to market in Ep 45 has steadily evolved into a bustling little business that Travis and I are having a lot of fun with. Lactuca Micro Farm is rockin it. 124th Street Market days have continued to sell out more often than not, and every week or two there seems to be a new caterer or food truck wanting to procure a regular supply. Cool stuff. Lactuca’s about to tackle the City Market downtown. No problem with demand for custom greens.

Now to supply. Demand is heavier than anticipated. Thankfully, there’s room to ramp up on the production front. For my setup, that means cold frame construction. Problem is, I hadn’t planned for this. At all. So I’m just now figuring out how to edit my current mid-season garden gong show to include new frames for greens seeding. Also planning where future frames will go. Why cold frames? Hail storm protection, for starters. Seem to get a weekly reminder of that. Another biggy is I just lost a nice bed of lettuce seedlings to house sparrows while I was away on holidays. Need to screen the seedlings from them, which they seem to pummel at the 1/2″-1″ mark. Biggest reason is for cold and snow protection in March/April, October/November when we’ll be able to produce greens in shoulders seasons without going down the energy consumptive greenhouse road. Those are a lot of good reasons.

This build: 2 2X10s. One for the back board, one cut in half and cut at angles to adjoin the front 2×6. I put 4′ 2×4 down the middle. It provides support, but even more importantly I find that brace allows you to grab something when reaching deep into the middle of the frame. Cost is about $15 I’d say for the frame as a ballpark figure. The lids or ‘lights’ will be the same as my other frames: plexi gleaned from a greenhouse kit someone was offloading on kijiji, screwed to some 2×2 frames. This one’s seeded, each half into quarters, so 8 varietals. Doesn’t look like much now, but it will through the 2-4 week mark, after which it will be harvested and re-seeded for September harvest. Growing stuff is fun.

I’d heard of Lisa via Slow Food Edmonton some time ago, but only recently had the opportunity to meet her. The drive north to her family’s farm via the Shaftesbury river ferry is shockingly gorgeous, and I was subsequently enamoured by their mixed farm, to be honest. I’ve heard many people speak or write about the romantic notion of farms being dead. Not here. Berkshire piglets run about while the milking cow moos to be milked, and laying hens cluck. Dogs lead sheep flocks through pasture, cows come for a pet when moved on their daily rotational grazing routine, and a greenhouse marks the veg CSA that I was there to shoot. It’s that kind of place.

This video’s about what motivated Lisa to come back to the farm post-University to start up a veg CSA, and I couldn’t help but ask her a fair bit about some of the advantages mixed farming provides. I give her props for growing up there, a good 500+km north of where I garden, way up at 56.2 latitude, making them latitudinal neighbours with the Hudson Bay, Denmark, and more northerly than Moscow. Fortunately, what she loses in heat units she gains in daylight hours. Couldn’t resist shooting their rotational grazing setup for beef, more on this in Ep 47.

Full disclosure: this video is one of many I was contracted to produce for Think Local Market, a government funded initiative to provide an online storefront for producers in rural communities.

My buddy Travis has been doing cool food stuff for ages, and you might recognize him from prior episodes about the Edmonton Organic Growers’ Guild or ice fishing. In fact, we were sitting on the ice catching whitefish when he mentioned his spring plans to do an intensive backyard greens operation for sale to market, restaurants, and door-to-door by bike. I knew this episode was in my future. Such a cool idea. What I hadn’t planned was that he’d be selling out in a blink at a single market, and that the excess greens I was experiencing in my gardens would be of use to him. He was all over the idea of aggregating community backyard growers for sale at market, so he now sells ‘Vitamin K’, which is the seasonal blend-of-the-week from my yard. It sells out. His entire production sells out. We’re both ramping up production to try to keep up. The funny part: I’m still growing all the stuff I normally would for my family – apparently my small yard can grow enough for us AND have excess to get to the community via the market. Who knew.

For those that bought, here’s what’s in it this week: bionda di lyon chard, spinach, french tarragon, chervil, red russian kale, miner’s lettuce, mache, wild chive blossom, forono and bull’s blood beet green, arugula [leaf, white blossom, and buds], mizuna [leaf and yellow blossom], komatsuna, mustard [the hot one], dandelion, chick weed [yup, it's edible and good for you], tatsoi, Italian oregano for some savoury action, a touch of dill, a mix of lettuces, and a variety of other this and thats. This week saw the last of the spinach until the fall crop, and many of the blossoms there this week, won’t be there next. Not because I’m trying to switch things up. Nature’s doing the switching up.

Travis has been doing some online video about his micro farm, which you can check out here.

The more I get identified as ‘that local food guy’, the more I entice objections, or rather, rationalizations to defend why folks choose not to eat ‘local’. First of all, it’s worth noting that the term ‘local’ is rather bad terminology. I am not seeking a 100 mile diet. I’m seeking food that’s good for my health, the planet, and the community that grows it. If I lived next door to Monsanto, they would be local, but I wouldn’t support them. Fair? And because I’m a finance an operations management guy, I like to optimize stuff. When it comes to veg and herbs, we generally eat a 20m diet. I digress.

One of the top 2 reasons I hear folks telling me they don’t eat ‘local’ is because it takes too much time. The other one is cost – which I can argue with numbers and win the day – but time, time is a tougher one to explain, to illustrate. So I came up with the 1Hr Garden concept. I’ll allow the video to explain further.

This edit will grow as the season progresses, ie. I’ll be adding to it, rather than creating multiple parts in a series about it. Enjoy.