Whitsend Market Garden

2023 CSA shares are sold out as of today.

Keep an eye on our "Farm Gate Store" page if you want to purchase some of our award winning produce this summer.  Details to be updated about our farm gate store soon....

It is probable that our produce and honey will be at the McDonalds Corners market this summer as well.

Hello Everyone:

Finally, everything is wet.  

Now we brace ourselves for mosquitos, though at least they won't affect our crops.

The last of the tomato transplants to go in were on June 13th.  There was one bed that was not ready when the previous tomatoes were transplanted shortly after the frost.  It might have been sown in the nursery a week later than the following plant.

As you can see, this older plant is actually smaller than the previously photographed younger plant.  While the plant in the previous picture thrived in the somwhat protected environment of the hardening off shelter (and often outside of it duringthe day due to space issues), the older plant subsisted on hand watering.

Typically one of the easiest crops to grow, the first round of radishes has had a very uneven germination.

It will be easy enough to start a second round for the July harvests, though the hot weather might impact the flavour.  I typically don't bother planting radishes in mid summer, but we do have some shaded areas so I wil give that a try.  It is possible that less sunlight will result in better flavour but smaller roots.  

This is a big success and a morale boost - a fully germinated carrot bed.

Last season, I discovered that heavy muck soil such as we have here in Lanark is difficult for carrots and some other plants to germinate in.  I experimented with  three methods and found that mixing sand into the beds helped a lot, though the last round of carrots last year (in which I used the best method I trialed) only had a 15 per cent germination rate.

I used a combination of sand and light seed starting mix this year and it seems the results are good - the next bed of carrots is just stating to germinate, and several other crops that failed to germinate last season are also doing well.

Here is a example:  four rows of coriander in a bed similiarly treated as the carrot beds.  Coriander is in the carrot family, though it's seeds are much larger than carrots.  I didn't pant any coriander last year, so I don't know if this is an improvement or not.  

Another carrot family (umbellifer) crops is parsnip.   I sowed parsnip last year and in a 25 foot bed with two rows, germinated three plants.  

I'll have to wait a while to see how well these seeds took to the soil - a few (pictured here) are stating to come up, though the date range for parsnip germination can be as soon as seven days or as much as three weeks.

Suspense...

The turnips (one of the crops that failed to germinate last season) have done very well with the sand amendment.  

I assume that in a year or two, as I continue to work the soil and add compost and organic matter such as grass clippings, the soil will loosen up naturally, and their will be no need to lug buckets from our sand occurrence at the other end of the farm.

It looks small, but I have a mantra I came up with several years ago that I keep repeating at times like  this:  Growth is exponential.

This is a very dependable variety of romaine called Freckles.  It can grow to the size of a large romaine, but heads up nicley as a mini sized plant.  It's flat leaves make it good for sandwiches and burgers.  For salads, I suggest combining it with our loftier greenleaf variety, which should also be ready for harvest next week as well.

If the lettuce heads are still small, I have enough to offer four per customer at harvest time next week.

As it is one of the most visible crops on the farm right now, I get quite a morale boost just walking past it.

Another morale boost.  I had the potatoes covered to conserve moisture in the soil.  Now that the covers are off, I see that we have a better than expected emergence rate.

I did not have enough seed potatoes of our early Onaway variety to plant enough for our CSA customers, and so had to slice the largest tubers in half.  This is a fairly standard procedure, though my experience has been that lawn grubs seem to get to the sliced tubers quicker and eat them before the plant can start growing leaves.  

I referenced our soil type earlier in this post, it is muck soil.  Unlike sand, silt, clay, or loam, it is made up of decayed plants and organic matter from dried up lake beds and swamps.  

It is said to be the type of soil best for growing onions.

These were pictured a few weeks ago in a previous post, and are starting to fill out their stalks and grow taller.  They'll start to set their bulbs as the days start getting shorter.  .  

Garlic, a close relative of onions.  Just starting to produce scapes.  

I have not found any mention of garlic being grown in muck soil, but the previous owners had good success growing garlic and the garlic this property produced for us last season was some of the best I had grown since I started twelve years ago.  

A week late is better than never - here are our winter squash plants adjusting to their new home on our new set of beds I started working this season.

The vegetable fields are pretty much at capacity, so I will have to start making arrangements to build the next field of beds with a plowing this autumn, disking next spring, and a season of tending a cover crop of turf busting radish, nitrogen fixing peas, and grass suppressing buckwheat.  

Sometimes I speak too soon:  The peas started flowering last week and it seemed to me that I would have lots of peas and nothing else ready for  delivery.  I was certain I would have to choose between doing a separtate delivery for peas (expensive and time consuming) or keep them for farm gate sales only (probably too many to sell at the farm gate, and nothing for the CSA customers in Ottawa).  

Thankfully, they have yet to set their pods.  It's been a few years since I last grew snow peas, so I have a bit of re-learning to do.

This is all too familiar:  A couple of nice sized spinach plants and too many micro sized or less.  (Look at the row on the other side of the bed, those plants should be the same as the ones I am holding).

Spinach starts ok with irrigation but it's deep roots require a lot of deep moisture in the beds.

I'll thin these out tommorrow in the hope that either next week or the week after I'll have a better quantity, though these plants will be getting close to their aturity date and too much heat at the wrong time will send them to seed.  Wait and see...

A working farm is rarely photogenic - there are always several tasks in process, row covers are not exactly pretty, and with the dutch clover starting to bloom for the bees and too much grass seed heads, there is no incentive to mow.  (I mow a lot when the grass is seed free as I use the clippings for adding nitrogen to the compost and also for mulching into the vegetable beds.

  

But from a distance, the relentless growth of grass does give an appearance of lushness.  I just hope I can find the electric fence lines that are set into the unused pig field before the mower finds them...there is never enough time to do everything else...