Amarosia Organic Garden

Every Saturday we go to the Moncton and Dieppe Markets laden with fresh produce and for the first few months we returned with empty crates.

Then Dave had this great idea that we should compost not only our own farm waste but other peoples as well.

We started off with orange peels from Majestic Juices, then added carrots tops, banana peelings from Crêpe makers and anything else that happens to be available.

We add to the mix, wood chips from a local saw mill and lawn clippings from a local lawn care company.

Of course we have to be careful to get the proportions right: Too much ‘green’ fresh material and you get a pile of stinky slime, too much ‘brown’, dried material and nothing much happens.

The newest compost pile has material added to it every week.

The pile is then mixed thoroughly to ensure a good blend of green and brown materials and to mix the cool outer materials with the hot material on the inside of the pile.

The pile heats up to over 60C very quickly. Part of the reason for turning the pile regularly is to make sure that it doesn’t get too hot. Too much heat will actually kill the bacteria that are breaking down the plant materials.

After about 8 weeks we stop adding to that pile, and start a new one, but continue to turn each pile, each week to make sure that the composting process continues.

Notice that even without new material being added, the pile remains hot in the centre for weeks.

We allow the piles to cool for 6 months which gives the worms and fungi time to get in and do their good work. We have been buying in certified organic compost from the Sussex area (Cardwell Farms) and it is great stuff, but we’ve always felt a bit funny about using so much gas to ship tonnes of compost across the province so we are really proud and excited to be producing our own now:-)

Last winter I told Dave that I did not want to try to grow potatoes this year. Potatoes are best grown in sandy well drained soil with a low pH. We have a heavy, poorly drained clay soil which is fairly pH neutral. In fact, exactly the wrong kind of soil for growing potatoes.

We also live next door to a conventional potato grower and by default we get whichever bugs he has been attracting over the years including the delightful Colorado Potato Beetle. For 4 weeks a team of 4 of us went out every two days and squashed potato beetle bugs, eggs and larvae. They still managed to breed faster than we could keep pace with them and the plants took a real beating.

During this time the weather was really hot and dry (roots need moisture to grow) so the potatoes stayed small. When finally the rains came, they came in torrents bringing with them both blight and weeds. The already weak potato plants suffered yet further.

Finally, when our neighbours clipped the tops off their plants, the flea beetles that had been living in a couple of acres of potatoes descended onto our few beds in search of food. It was carnage and the plants disappeared over night.

If you’ve ever wondered why there are such problems with pesticides and nitrates in the PEI water this is the reason. Potatoes are hard to grow without chemical fertilizers and pesticides and relatively easy to grow with. Farmers are not spraying for the fun of it, they are doing it to prevent losing their crops.

Of course there are safer solutions. A Spinosad spray (made of a bacteria which attacks the beetles) is one. However it costs $300 and will cover a HUGE acreage. We only plant 4 beds…

Digging a steep walled ditch around the field margin and lining it with black plastic will act as a trap. However, you either need a very strong back or specialist digging equipment.

Applying lots of compost and thickly mulching in straw, leaves or seaweed OR growing the potatoes directly in a pile of very thick mulch are extremely effective methods of avoiding both pests and disease… but depend on having a large supply of compost and mulch.

Simply growing them in ideal soil conditions would help a lot… but those conditions just don’t exist on our land.

As ever we are too big to use home gardener tips and too small for commercial solutions. Hence my desire to opt out this year.

However, somehow, some time in February I changed my mind and launched myself back into potato growing mode. Dave managed to find a cheap potato planter and harvester in Kijiji which proved to be really effective at both (see above)

All Blue and Norland
However, our yields were paltry. Just enough for two feeds for the large boxes and an additional 1 feed for all members. Not the huge harvest I had dreamed of during those snowy winter days when I forgot all about the trials of the previous season!

Our onions were also something of a washout. They are truly the most delicious onions I have ever eaten, be we didn’t manage to grow them to the size I had hoped. Other local farmers had the same problems (hot, dry weather when they were supposed to be getting bigger and then wet when they were supposed to be curing) so we were not alone in our poor harvest. Unlike the potatoes, I am sure that we can do better with the onions and I have a plan for next year.

Thank goodness for the things that did do well. The benefit of being a highly diversified farm is that if one crop fails, you always have your other crops to fall back on. For every poor potato crop there is a bumper crop of tomatoes:-) The challenge is the incredible organisation it takes to manage a highly diversified farm. We hope to get better at it with practice!

Clockwise from top left

1. Galia: Round with netted skin. Bright green flesh.Heady aroma. Extremely sweet and flavourful.

2. Cantaloupe: Round to elongated. Netted skin and strongly ribbed. Bright peach colured flesh. Sweet and delicious.

3. Honey Dew: Round with netted skin (but less so than Galia). Green/yellow flesh. Sweet but far less flavourful than Galia.

4. Asian Melon: Elongated. Yellow skin with shallow ribs. White flesh. Sweet with a very mild, delicate flavour.

This year most of our melons have been delicious but we found the honey dews rather bland compared to the others and one variety of melon, Noir de Carmes, turned out to be very disappointing as a dessert melon.

However, it makes an excellent curry with its mild, not too sweet, moderately dense flesh. If you ever find yourself with a melon that is not quite sweet enough try the following.

Melon Curry

• Melon
• butter
• Crystallised ginger (or fresh ginger plus a tsp of sugar)
• Large garlic clove
• Vegetables of your choice (eggplant, fava beans, peppers…)
• Dessicated coconut
• Red lentils
• optional: cilantro

1. Cook 1 cup red lentils until they are soft and soup like

2. Fry pieces of cystallized ginger, chopped garlic and cubes of melon over a gentle heat until caramelized.

3. Add other vegetables plus coconut and sauté.

4. When tender, stir in red lentils, add salt to taste and allow to simmer for flavours to develop.

5. before serving, add a little chopped cilantro and stir in to wilt.

This is me on Thursday after a grueling few hours of tomato picking in the hot sun.

Hat: Farmer’s

Attire: casual, comfortable, stained, full of holes, somewhat smelly.

This is me on Saturday trying to look as unlike my Thursday self as possible

Hat: Sales person

Attire: Smart, comfortable, clean and hopefully not smelly or with holes!

Although I spend most of my time looking like photo A, this is not the kind of person people want to meet at the market. They want to be served by someone clean, well presented and certainly without grubby fingernails.

This is why many farm stands are not manned by farmers at all; they hire nicely presented young people who have little or no experience of farming, wouldn’t know how to prepare or preserve the majority of the vegetable they are selling, may not even eat vegetables (!) but are friendly, bilingual  have clean fingernails.

David and I are trying to be the best of both worlds. Authentic but presentable, knowledgable and perky. We feel its important to be able to explain to you not only what a vegetable is but how it grows and what to do with it. We also pull two 12 hour shifts the days before the market and then get up at 4am to load the truck and get there on time. We may be able to scrub the dirt from under our nails, but sometimes its hard to hide the wrinkles under our eyes.

Our organic inspection is over for another year and it looks like we will pass with flying colours:-)

Our inspector spent 3 hours with us reviewing everything from our composting process (he was impressed, which is quite something as he is a composting expert), to our pest and disease control strategies, to whether it would be possible to trace a packet of basil from the point of sale right back to the source of the seed (our lot numbering system worked wonderfully!).

It’s a great learning experience for me too seeing as I am a relative newbie organic inspector (only 3 years under my belt) while our inspector this year travels all over Canada, and internationally, inspecting.

Having passed the paperwork end of things, despite this being a frantically busy year with a hugely complicated system (three markets, a CSA, a store and a restaurant) our systems were up to the job, which makes me feel all the more confident in offering the ‘Organic Record Keeping for Farmer and Inspector Sanity’ at the upcoming ACORN conference:-)

Ok, so first of all for any of you who are confused. Heritage and Heirloom mean the same thing when it comes to veggies. They are, in short, vegetables grown from seed, handed down from generation to generation; mother and father to son and daughter. They are selected for their flavour and practical use in the kitchen; Some tomatoes are great for sauce, some for sandwiches and some for just popping in your mouth and savouring. They are chosen for their ease of growing; some tomatoes are meant to be grown in New Brunswick, others in California. And of course their many and varied appearances. Tomatoes do not need to be round and red.

In short, there is no one tomato that fits all purposes, no matter the claims of the Bio-tech companies… and even if there were, we still need genetic diversity in the event of change. A drought may wipe out one kind of tomatoes, but another will survive. Blight in a rainy year may destroy one cultivar, while another thumbs its nose at it. Given that we are living in a world of climate change, one would think that we should cling onto every tool we have to survive. Genetic diversity is an incredibly important tool.

‘Tigerella’ a small field tomato or large cherry, it lives up to its name! Mild and sweet just bite into it and allow it to burst open in your mouth.

Golden Jubilee is a massive beefsteak tomato with a mild, low acid flavour, It’s ideal for slicing and adding to a sandwich with a little salt and pepper and a few pieces of lettuce. You don’t even need the bacon!

Red Striped Roman is the most beautiful paste tomato. You can make delicious soups and sauces with it as well as being a work of art.

Garden Peach really does look just like a peach, complete with fuzzy skin and mild delicate flavour.

Pumpkin is a HUGE beefsteak style tomato, great for slicing and grilling or making into soups and sauces. It has a deep, rich flavour.

Black Krim is prized by chefs everywhere for its complex smoky flavour. Simply slice and enjoy.

Russian Paste is the ultimate paste tomato. With a great rich flavour and very low in juice and high in meat you can whip up a thick creamy sauce or soup in no time.

For more gorgeous photos, descriptions and recipes for heritage tomatoes along with (as if you need them!) good reasons for preserving these culinary gems, try out Amy Goldman’s new book ‘The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table’ .

The small boxes this week contain 6-7 items and the  large boxes contain 9-10

1. Asian Greens
2. Candy Onions
3. Lemon or English cucumbers
4. Fava Beans
5. Tomatoes
6. Norland and All Blue potatoes
7. Rare Heritage tomatoes (pictured = Black Krim)
8. Ground Cherries
9. Asian melon
10. Cantaloupe/ Honeydew melon

This Globe and Mail article had me fuming! It talks about how the cost of grains has increased dramatically recently making home baking unaccessible to some. Rye flour has increased to $25 for five kilos of flour, up from $10, over a very short space of time. Relatively speaking this seems like a really dramatic increase until you take the following into account.

1. Food has been really cheap for a long time. We’ve just gotten used to cheap prices. The $10/ 5kg was a great deal. $25/5kg is probably a more appropriate cost for good quality flour.
2. Most of that cost still does not go to the farmer. Some goes to the flour mill and a lot goes into marketing… plus of course the supermarkets make a big profit for placing the flour on their shelves. Buy direct from the farm or a local mill if you really want to keep your prices down, but remember good food takes time and costs money to produce and farmers need to be reimbursed for their hard work.
3. The cost of fuel, labour, farm equipment, inputs etc etc have been increasing steadily for years while the cost of food has remained constant or even dropped. Farmers have been suffering as a result. Price increases like this are long overdue.
4. These price increases are only really affecting grains and oils because they have alternative uses as automobile fuel. Farmers can make more money growing for cars than for people. The current relative scarcity of food grains and oils makes them a great commodity to speculate on, pushing their prices even higher.
5. In a typical box of cereal, the grain itself is only a tiny fraction of the cost. Most of the cost goes into packaging, processing, shipping, marketing and storage. The increased costs of packaged cereal are to pay for all of the ‘other’ expenses as much as for the grain itself. Also, apparent grain shortages are a really good excuse to put prices up. Think about what happened before Hurrican Ike. Gas prices went up even BEFORE it happened. The same market forces are now influencing the price of food.
6. If we increased our prices in a similar fashion our salad and beans would cost $10/bag, our tomatoes $7.50/lb, our zucchini $2.50 each.  Suddenly $4 salad sounds like a great deal!

The late maturing heritage tomatoes are starting to ripen now in all their multicoloured glory. I find the variety of flavours as well as colours, shapes and textures quite amazing.

Yesterday at the market a lady was going through all of the tomatoes squeezing them, trying to find ‘firm tomatoes’. She didn’t explain why. Probably she was just used to the horrible cardboard things they sell at the supermarket.

Dave, horrified by her man-handling of these delicate fruits, politely offered her some samples so that she could tell that they were ripe. She didn’t buy any in the end. Possibly our tomatoes tasted ‘wrong’ as well as looking and feeling ‘wrong’!

Luckily the rest of Moncton and Dieppe seemed to think that our tomatoes were just great ‘as we sold all kinds and received compliments on their quality, flavour AND price! We are currently the only farmers at either market that sell heritage, field grown tomatoes and I think that people are grateful to finally have access to tomatoes that really do taste like they ought to. Brimming with flavour, juicy and with thin, delicate skin.

clockwise from top left:Mennonite orange, Black Krim, Red Striped Roman, Striped German, Tigerella, Black Plum, Taxi, Brandywine.

For the second time this year we opened our doors, this time to members of the public, and while Dave showed them around the farm…

Steve fiddled away to the visitors as they arrived

Katherine and Carolyn (plus Jocelyn and Serge) helped weed the perennials beds

Dick Lane applied seaweed to the herbs

and Deniz, Selina and David picked up Lebanese cucumbers and tomatoes

Afterwards there were Heritage tomatoes and melons to sample

And worms to be kissed!