We’re so excited to be returning to the Dieppe Market this weekend – April 28th!
It’s been a great winter for us – filled with learning at farming conferences, feeding the wood-stove to keep warm, and visioning all the exciting things we hope to do on this small farm!
Crop planning and seed-ordering went fairly smoothly for us this year. We’ve done so much trialing over the years of different varieties of each crop, we’ve noticed which ones seem to do best with our unique conditions and preferences.
One crop we’re trialing this year is bell peppers. For the 1st time ever, we’re part of a wider North American trial. We were sent 8 varieties and we’ve got 3 varieties we’ve been saving seed of for a few years. So, there are 11 bell pepper varieties in this trial! It’s cool because we love trialing anyway – and this year the information can fit into a larger project – and we’ll be following stricter trial requirements which will improve our long-term trialing skills.
The harvest this week is mostly coming from our high tunnel, which we planted back in February.
During that time of year, crops that would normally grow much faster in a warmer time of year, grow much slower. Our high tunnel isn’t heated – but slow growth often produces the sweetest and most nutritious greens. A special treat for this time of year!
Spring greens like spinach and Sweet n’ Spicy mix are so beautiful right now.
We harvested some incredible spring-dug Jerusalem Artichokes (aka Sunchokes).
The weather was perfect for it! For a few years, we weren’t able to harvest the Sunchokes in the spring before they started to sprout. The soil was just too wet. This year, our soils dried out enough, plus the day temperatures this week were warm, however the soil temperature is still cold. Sunchokes start sprouting pretty early in the spring, but with cold soil temperatures, they’re still hibernating. Lucky us!
Our tulips this year are epic!
We planted double the amount as last year – we’ve got some in our high tunnel, some in a low tunnel, and some covered just with row cover (just in case any deer came looking). We have many new types of tulips than we did last year. And colours!
This pretty one isn’t a vibrant colour…..but I’m loving it so much.
We’ll have other greens at market too….baby kale, miner’s lettuce. Some of the others, like lettuce, are still growing so we’ll start harvesting them in the next few weeks.
For spring gardeners, we’ll be bringing seed packets. We’ll slowly start bringing seedlings for sale as they’re ready and the time to plant them arrives. This week we’ll have some healthy parsley seedlings that you can keep in your kitchen and pick from or plant out right away. Our parsley seedlings are already in the field. Soon, we’ll bring hardy green seedlings like kale and chard. Then comes the basil, and finally the fruiting crops like tomatoes, peppers, and ground cherry seedlings.
We can’t wait to see you! Here’s to a great season eating and growing together!
your farmers, Shannon and Bryan
P.S. I’d recommend getting to the market early…the harvest is always a bit smaller in the spring compared to later in the year.
