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.

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My, mushrooms are pretty.

It so happens I was chatting with my buddy Travis yesterday about an unexpected advantage of the urban greens growing project - that it pushes us both to get our act together and do stuff far more diligently than we otherwise would. Turns out that applies again today. Ryan at BTV Edmonton asked me to be on morning TV to chat about blogging and food stuff, which led to me actually having to get my act together to see if I could get something cool to blog and talk about while on the show. So I took my oldest daughter out to a city ravine park, and hooked ourselves up with a cool array of wild mushrooms: red cap [leccinum boreale], comb’s tooth [hericium coralloides], and agaricus.

The mushroom situation this year is vastly different than last. Last year was wet and cool and an epic year for fungi, this year not so much. I wouldn’t say this year’s dry, but the intense heat seems to be playing a factor, at least for the agaricus. They seem to be maturing quickly post emergence – which results in vastly smaller size and lower quality overall. The Comb’s Tooth and Red Caps were in gorgeous shape and didn’t seem to exhibit the same issue at all.

So the salad. Sauteed the mushrooms with some nodding onion and wild thyme, in butter, in the cob oven. Man they smell good. Those will go atop a mix of Lactuca greens, which in turn will be dressed with a saskatoon wine vinaigrette and aged Cheesiry pecorino. Too hot to cook, mushroom salad it is.

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I’ve seen rotational grazing of sheep [Tangle Ridge Ranch, Ep 15], and heard and read lots about the philosophy and science behind rotational grazing of beef, but I hadn’t seen it in practice until visiting Nature’s Way Farm. I was there to shoot a video about Lisa’s veg CSA [Ep 46], but when our day included moving their cows, I couldn’t help but get Peter to speak about it in front of a lens.

I adore when farmers are obsessed with their soil. Peter is certainly one of them. It’s inspiring to clearly see the health in the soil and perennial forage post having had livestock moved through it, rather than the inverse, and it’s beautifully simple that it only takes a single electrified wire and a whole lot of care and attention to be able to restore health and fertility to land with a herd of livestock. Peter clearly brings a serious pile of knowledge and experience to the equation too.

Interestingly, they are the primary supplier of beef to the Sunworks Farm brand [Ep 4]. They also sell halves/whole direct.

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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.

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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.

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Writing about bacon. Again. Just when I thought there wasn’t anything additional to add to the conversation I have with myself here, there was something else to add. A simple conclusion: wood ovens are fantastic smokers. Different than a commercially manufactured smoker that generally involves automation, an element, and some wood chips, it still requires some finagaling in the way of fire management, making it an enjoyable creative process. Not only does it contain smoke as intensely as you’d like, it’s also well suited to creating smoke, as it’s easy to shut down its O2 supply such that it can’t ‘catch’ flame, and instead smoulders and smokes prolifically. I still maintain that an external fire source is critical to successful smoking, so I had a fire in an old baking pan off to the side to fuel the oven with heat when it started to cool off too much to hot smoke, or generate smoke at all for that matter. As usual, the wood of choice in my yard is apple wood, this time supplied by a friend at Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton. A future project of mine: many of the hundreds of trees OFRE has signed up for fruit rescue need some serious pruning + a local meat shop is interested in smoking their meats with said wood = cool.

So after years with a bbq conversion setup, and a year with a dry-stack brick setup, I am now pleased to be staring down a future of smoking in the new cob oven. A friend recently asked me if the honeymoon phase is over with the oven. Nope.

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As you may know already, I like to eat food. I therefore appreciate the work pollinators do. They are a highly necessary piece of the food supply puzzle, without which humans would be in some trouble. And they’re illegal where I live. Not that bees are illegal. They’re everywhere, doing their thing, buzzing about the city. But if you intentionally set up a home for them and coexist with them – that’s illegal. I think that’s the part that’s illegal, anyway. Progressive cities, even ultra-dense ones like Paris and New York, have given the thumbs up to keeping bees and have thriving bee-keeping communities. No apocalypse due to legal bees. Not that I’m aware of anyway.

I have to admit that one of the ‘holes’ in my local food supply is indeed a form of sustainably farmed local sugar, so bee keeping makes nothing but sense for closing that gap. Why would I not enable pollinators in my food-growing yard, and get a pile of honey for the kitchen out the deal? Because it’s illegal in #yeg, that’s why. Perhaps one day soon, it won’t be.

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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.

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I’ve been involved with our local Slow Food convivium for a couple years now, and this year was an opportunity for Edmonton to play host to convivia leaders from across Canada, as well as delegates from Slow Food International for Slow Food Canada’s national meeting. What resulted was a rather epic adventure in food, as well as an unprecedented coming together of talented, inspiring food-people.

It was a rare occasion for me, who spends a lot of time advocating for regional ingredients like saskatoons, highbush cranberries, game meats, lake fishes, etc, to see the who’s-who of local chefs craft thoughtful and beautiful dishes to highlight what’s special to here. Although many celebrate regional ingredients on their menus, I’m pretty confident that the regional-food focus has never been so laser-precise, nor to this magnitude in Edmonton. Ever.

This edit condenses 4 days into 4 minutes. It by necessity excludes much of the goings-on around the enormous event, but hopefully gives you sense of some of the regional ingredients highlighted, and a look at how the local talent worked with them. If you’re interested in becoming a Slow Food member, you can sign up here.

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I’ve been looking forward to this for 9 months. Last August, while looking for mushrooms and saskatoons, I came across a patch of wild asparagus and since have been dreaming of a spring feed of asparagus I didn’t have to grow myself. That day has come. It’s worth noting that I am doubtful this is a native species of any kind, but is more than likely better described as a ‘feral’ asparagus. Some remanent of an old market garden or homestead in the river valley, or seeded by a bird. Or something. I don’t care. It’s giant, awesome, free, tasty asparagus.

The top left photo was today’s score. I’ve never harvested asparagus this thick. Ever. And my dad’s patch is about 20 years old – it’s got nothing on this. The thick ones are as broad as my thumb. Because they’re so giant, they add up fast. I only have a dozen or so, but I think 3 would exceed a normal portion of asparagus. The photo below is what they looked like May 3rd, taken on a forage I led for a crew of crazy-cool Slow Food Canada and Slow Food International folks. It was the first I saw them, so it wasn’t hard to get excited about it. That, and the vast majority of what we harvested was white, the soil around it being loose, and easy to dig down a bit to harvest it while entirely blanched. We ate them shaved and whole, raw, atop fresh eggs scrambled in beurre noisette and wild onion. I am looking forward to a pig out of today’s yield – I’ve been abstaining since last season.

No, I will not tell you where this patch is. But I can tell you that there are other patches around the river valley, and legend is they are even more prolific.

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