2024 Veggie CSA sold out! Flower shares still available

Vol.1 No.6: 2021 CSA Week 2

Posted by Liana Glass on

City Beet Reporting Vol.1 No.6

Market Veggies Available Tomorrow and CSA Pickup 2!

Hello City Beetniks,

We hope you're doing well. We'll have more veggies for sale at our market table tomorrow, on top of CSA pickup! Please bring your own bag with you to carry your veggies home in. We also want to make sure everyone stays safe, so we'll be physical distancing and mask-wearing while at pickup. 

We've had a pretty fun week around here, so read on for a few updates, and we'll see you outside the Federal Store at 10th and Quebec from 4:00 to 6:30 pm!
The peas are looking glorious! Lots of the plants are taller than us now and it's going to be a tight squeeze to harvest them when the time comes. Should be lots of fun!  

What's ready this week?

At market and in the CSA we'll have:
  • Bok choy
  • Head lettuce
  • Hakurei turnips
  • Kale 
In addition to the above, share members will get garlic scapes (which can be used like you'd use garlic normally, or make a yummy pesto), and a choice between Swiss chard or beet greens (until one or the other runs out). I'm snacking on a turnip as I write this, and we had some bok choy in a stir fry last night, and in my un-biased opinion, both are delicious! 
 

More Recent Farm Happenings

It was a big week for Urban Farm Infrastructure:


First, we got our tomato trellis set up (with Elana and Baby showing us the ropes). I don't know if Maddy and Elana ever bragged to you sufficiently about the trellis they devised, but it's pretty spiffy! Duncan and Haley were up on a ladder and using a post pounder to get the structure built, while Elana, Baby, and I tied lots and lots of slip knots to train the tomatoes. Once the lead strings are wrapped around the tomato plants, pulling the slip knots tight so the plants straighten out is very satisfying. I know it's early days in my farming career, but so far I think anything that wants a trellis is my favourite thing to grow. 

Next, we made a hugel (top right of the photos below)! Hugelkultur (hill-agriculture) involves taking old wood and burying it under layers of mulch, compost, and soil, to create a raised bed full of slow-release fertiliser. One of our yards had a pile of wood from a rotten pear tree in it, and the eggplants that went in there didn't grow well last year, so we thought we'd try something a little different. We also got a bunch of wood shavings to use as mulch from Kait, a local wood carver who makes beautiful pieces out of trees that come down around Mount Pleasant, so we also loved that they could come full circle back into the soil in the same neighbourhood. For now we've just planted left over seedlings on the hugel, but if this experiment goes well, maybe we'll make more in future seasons! "Throw it on the hugel" has become a common expression around here whenever we have anything extra. 
 
As pictured above, my shoes make a great standard of measurement for assessing lettuce size, and our peas and dahlias attract some cute visitors. We also had a very wet harvest day yesterday, but I'll spare you a visual reminder of what the weather was like.

See you tomorrow outside the Federal Store (rain or shine)! 

Liana & Duncan 
(she/her) & (he/him)
p.s. Thank you so much for making our first CSA pickup last week so wonderful!
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