We’re so excited to be starting back at the Dieppe Market after our winter break – starting this Saturday (8 am to 1 pm). We’ll be outside in our normal season spot.
Seeing friendly faces is the best part!
What are we bringing this week?
Veggies
We’ll be harvesting beautiful fresh greens and round red radishes that were sown into the field back in early April. They’ve been babied with covers throughout the varying weather conditions this spring.
We’re also harvesting some specialties that only the spring brings: dark green nettles, Egyptian green onions, the unique herb lovage. At this time of year, most of our meals contain at least one of these delights, if not all. We really enjoy each season’s fleeting specialties as much as we can.
We also have some storage veggies that we’ve taken a lot of care to keep fresh and crisp throughout the winter, including rainbow carrots, purple, white, & red daikons, Black Spanish radishes, kohlrabi, cabbage, and celeriac.
Seedlings
This is the time of year (for 4 quick weeks) that we have seedlings for sale for your own gardening. These seedlings are all organic, grown with organic seed, in organic potting mix, with organic amendments that we mix in ourselves to enhance the health slowly over the season for the plants (including organic alfalfa meal, which is important as regular alfalfa meal can come from GMO alfalfa plants grown in Eastern Canada).
While I do my best to grow the seedlings out as evenly as possible for each of the 4 weeks we’re selling them, invariably there are some different plants available (or no longer available) each week as they’re getting ready to be sold or sold out.
This year, we’ve got the most tomato seedling varieties we’ve ever had: around 30 different varieties! This includes cherry tomatoes (from small currant types to grapes to larger fill-your-mouth cherries), of various colours (red, yellow, orange, pink, purple/black). Also a selection of medium-sized tomatoes of various shapes, sizes, and colours. Slicing tomatoes of various colours. And plum/paste tomatoes (also of various sizes and colours) that you can use to make your own sauces, salsas, ketchup (one of the tomato varieties is called Heinz!), etc.
Some of the tomatoes are vining types (indeterminate) and will need staking (unless you don’t mind the sprawling space they’ll take up), and some are bush types (determinate). Of the bush types, there are some that are particularly good for very small spaces (like a pot on a patio).
Other vegetable seedlings include: various hot pepper types, eggplant, Swiss chard, kale, cabbage, Egyptian onions (perennial), lettuce, Brussels sprouts, and celery.
Herb seedlings: basil (green, purple, Thai, lemon), chervil, summer savory, parsley
Fruit seedlings: Incan berries, gooseberries (perennial), figs
Flower seedlings: Pink Hawaiian peonies(!) (perennial), calendula, strawflower, nasturtium
Seeds
We’ve packaged up quite a lot of different seed packets this year, more than ever before. These are all seeds you can still start now (no more onion, tomato, pepper or leek seeds, which should have been started by now). Some of them may need to wait a few weeks still if you’re planning on direct-sowing them in your garden (depending on your site and your ability to protect them, we can still get frost at night). We’ve got some planting instructions on our website, along with other gardening tips here.
Vegetable Seeds include: arugula, asian greens mix, kale, lettuce mix, cilantro, dill, carrots, beets, radish, peas (both snap and shelling), bush beans, watermelon, cantaloupe, winter squash, cucumber, etc.
Flower seeds include: zinnias, sunflower, white lace flower (orlaya), calendula, love-in-a-mist nigella, sweet peas, bupleurum, sweet William, purple-flowering daucus, black beauty poppy, lemon bergamot monarda, nasturtium.
Perennial seeds include: Garlic chives, Blue False Indigo Baptisia, Lupines.
Raw Honey
From the 12 hives who live on the farm. These honeybees get their pick from such a diversity of flowers here, including blooms from: our cut-flowers, fruiting vegetables, vegetables who don’t normally flower before harvest but that we leave to flower for the seed crop (like arugula), perennial fruit, hedgerows, wild spaces on the farm, cover crops when left to flower, so-called weeds when left to flower (like dandelions). It’s always so fun seeing what flowers the honeybees are focused on in any given day or week. And the diversity really makes the honey so unique.
In Other Farm News…..
This week, we’re picking up baby chicks! It’s been quite a few years since we’ve raised chickens, having switched to ducks for a time, and then having no birds over the pandemic (being concerned that it would be a challenge to get organic feed which isn’t as easily accessible). Actually we drove over to PEI earlier this week for 2 reasons. One was to pick up some organic feed from Barnyard Organics for our chicks (starter and grower blends) as none of the feed stores around us are carrying it at the moment.
The 2nd reason was to visit the Dexter Cattle Company, an organic, grass-fed Dexter cattle farm. This visit was the next step to move along our “family cow” dream. The farm sells out quickly of heifers (they’re sold out for 2023 and almost sold out for 2024) so we needed to visit and make plans for reserving a young cow(s) for ourselves. It was a very inspiring visit and the cows had such a peaceful energy. It was all very exciting PLUS the baby calves who had just been born were just so perfect and adorable (as babies have a tendency to be).
Speaking of babies, the mama bears whose territory we live in are moving around with their babes, harvesting dandelion greens and grasses for their spring nutrition. One mama has 3 new cubs, while the other has two 1-year-olds.
I think that’s about it for bigger news from the farm. Most of the news we share with each other tends towards things like, “I saw a hummingbird pollinating the Haskap flowers,” “The Mayapples survived in the woodland planting,” “I just counted 16 frogs as I passed the pond.”
I hope your spring season has also been filled with News like this that may more accurately be called Noticings.
Perhaps this weekend’s Market will bring more!
