Yesterday we had the help of some members to repot (into larger soil cubes) our little tomato seedlings. They were getting very crowded in their tiny cubes, but we had held off repotting them until we could free up some shelf space by rotating hardier seedlings outdoors. It’s much warmer now, and the difference in growth of the plants already in the ground is noticeable even after just a couple of days, while the carrots and onions weeks ago have finally started to germinate.

… And these are his chicks, at least most of them. The “girls” have been moved to a separate section of the chick house. At a week and a half, the “boys” above are already noticeably larger than the females, but I think the girls look brighter!

Lots of vegetables are seeded in the garden or transplanted to the tunnel, but they aren’t showing much enthusiasm. The garlic (above) is what looks best, but then it had a head start since it was planted last fall. The snowpeas (below) were doing well until the snowstorm on Tuesday, and they haven’t budged since.


Our artichoke plants (above) are undergoing their “winter”, so for them the cooler temperatures are a help. They were seeded indoors in February, potted up and moved outside. They are grown as a biennial, and if everything goes according to plan, when they are planted to the garden a little later they will think they are in their second year and produce (yummy) flower buds.

In the above photo you can barely detect the rows of garden cress, but the wild turkey tracks are obvious… Here’s a closeup of the tracks, though it doesn’t give you their size — I would say probably 4 inches long. I hope the flock doesn’t spot the snowpea seedlings!

The plants in the tunnel are a little more encouraging:

On the right there’s boc choi, mizuna, lettuce and spinach, on the left starting at the far end there’s chicory, dandelion, more lettuce, more boc choi, leeks and bunching onions. We were using newspaper as mulch, so there are bits left over in the pathways. The pile in the middle pathway is coffee casings from Joël’s coffee shop: makes great organic mulch.

In the seedling greenhouse are trays ready for transplanting, but we’ll wait until the weather gets back to our seasonal averages.

You know the gardening season is just begun when… you have to make ten trips back and forth to get everything collected, just to seed a tiny bit of row! Rusted up over the winter, I was.

But once everything inside the tunnel greenhouse, I sure got warmed up. So it was off with the tuque, scarf, and winter jacket to seed the little patch of chervil that you see just behind me.

Our little tunnel greenhouse figures highly in our plan to begin the basket season much sooner, and it will be packed full in a few weeks. The challenge then will be to start working outdoors, in the field, where currently there is about an 18″ blanket of thick-crusted snow. So, well, we shovelled a bit: first to locate the bed we’ll be needing in a few weeks, then to put down a test strip of plastic to see whether it would be worthwhile on a larger scale to speed up the melting. Crazy darned farmers!

Nicolas’ contribution to Christmas decorating this year was to wrap lights around “his” tractor. Funny guy.  What could he have in mind for Christmas dinner?  — Rotisserie turkey on the PTO? Oh, maybe I shouldn’t be giving him ideas…

It was so lovely to wake up to a snow-covered landscape this morning, let’s hope it doesn’t melt away again before Christmas.

The snow somehow makes everything slow down. Of course it takes longer to get from point A to point B trudging through snow, but it’s not just that. The snow really seems like a blanket, tucking things in for the winter. We don’t sleep like the garden does, but while it sleeps, we dream. There’s a feeling that things are as they should be, that there is time for rest. So while we dream (and plan) in winter, we allow ourselves a more leisurely pace.

We sincerely hope that you have time to catch your breath too, and enjoy your Holiday Season with those you love.

This story begins on Saturday October 29, when I decided I’d had enough of the big Banana squash taking up half of my work table. Banana squashes can grow big, very big, and this was the second largest to come out of the field. (The largest Banana squash ever had a brief career as a crowd pleaser at the Cumberland Market before succumbing to the knife at our annual members potluck.)

I washed the squash, a herculean task of its own given the weight, and wrestled it into the oven where it was gently baked (at 250°F) for several hours. I wasn’t aiming for very smushy, just manageable. Cooking the squash this way precludes any recipes that call for roasted squash but hey, there’s plenty more where that came from!

When the squash had cooled enough to handle I cut it open, scooped out the seeds and peeled it: I didn’t weigh the results but you can see in the picture on the right how much squash we were dealing with. Oh, boy.

First recipe: mini Pumpkin Tarts for a Co-op meeting on Saturday night (No comments please on how farmers need to get out more!) I don’t normally go for such luxurious recipes but the tarts were a big hit.

Sunday was the big manure-shovelling day: since we don’t currently have horses on the farm, we have an arrangement with our neighbours who give us their manure in exchange for hauling it. The tractor is very helpful for loading the manure into the trailer, but once here we have to shovel it out by hand. No use trying to keep your boots clean, just in you go and shovel!

Between loads I managed to put together a decent lunch: Autumn Pumpkin Loaf and Harvest Stew. That went down pretty well with the crew. And we have a beautiful compost pile, picture to come in another post.

We finished manure hauling and other assorted jobs outside rather late, but I was determined to make a Squash Lasagna for supper. This is a family favourite, even though it’s a vegetarian recipe and the guys are all meat eaters. In one of the gardens there was a rather tenacious bunch of swiss chard that had grown back after its bed was tilled and seeded with a cover crop. I picked a bowl full of those leaves just as the dark was settling, and headed indoors to cook. We were all famished by the time the lasagna was ready, so it didn’t have its picture taken!

Having spent most of the weekend outside, I was determined on Monday to finally make the Pumpkin Cheesecake that I’d promised as a birthday gift to my daughter-in-law, Joëlle. It was my day to stay with the ailing grandchildren (chickenpox), and they were so eerily quiet that I could get some cooking done. For this recipe I wanted the pumpkin to be as smooth as possible, so I pureed some in the blender. But then I forgot to measure it, and added the other ingredients to the pumpkin in the blender instead of mixing it a bowl… I’m thinking the cake must have been less sweet than the recipe intended, but I heard that it was pretty good.

Tuesday supper was Pumpkin Mushroom Soup, which we really enjoyed.

On Wednesday I made a batch of Pumpkin Cookies – these are plain, unadorned, not-too-sweet cookies that we call “galettes” in French. They make a wonderful snack, but it’s very sad when they run out, which is always very soon after they’re made.

Thursday seemed like a good day to make Pumpkin Pie. Pumpkin Pie is revered at our place, even though we make it with so little sugar that it barely constitutes a dessert. It has to be made with real pumpkin so that it has some chunks that you can see (and taste!) It’s about the pumpkin, not just the spices. Ours features molasses too, so the resulting pie is dark brown, a far cry from the orangey pies that we see at the grocery store.

But that reminds me of a favourite family story! One Thanksgiving dinner at my Dad and Mom’s, after everyone was suitably stuffed with the traditional turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, and assorted vegetables, it was time for what we had really all been waiting for: the pumpkin pie. It was dished out, everyone settled into it with gusto, but there was something wrong. After a couple of bites it dawned on me: Ma, you forgot the sugar! Although she wasn’t actually eating any of the pie, my mother responded vehemently: “I did not!” When I insisted that the pie was indeed sugar-less, she turned to my brother-in-law to get a third opinion: “Chris, what do you think of the pie?” After a moment’s hesitation Chris, ever the peacemaker, answered: “It’s… ah… fluffy!” At every pumpkin pie served since then, we relate the story.

On Friday I made another Autumn Pumpkin Loaf, matching it with a second curried pumpkin soup – this was using another recipe, but it wasn’t as good as the Moosewood recipe above.

Saturday morning was time to tackle two recipes for canning. The first was a new recipe I was trying for Pumpkin Citrus Butter. An easy recipe to be sure, but I found it to be bitter and ended up adding a whopping extra cup of sugar to the mix. I didn’t like the texture either, which wasn’t butter-like — more like halfway between a butter and marmelade. I was disappointed and would have thrown the whole lot out in the end, except that Jean-Pierre really likes it.

The second recipe though, for Butternut Maple Butter, is a real winner – real pumpkin and maple flavours. Although the recipe doesn’t say to, I processed the jars in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

The rest of the day was spent working outside (it’s never done), and a warming Pumpkin Risotto was just the ticket for Saturday’s supper. I’ve made plenty of risottos, but this one really surprised me. It was simply scrumptious!

Now we were getting pretty close to the end of our stash of cooked pumpkin, so I was looking for recipes using a little less. On Sunday morning, what could be nicer than a batch of warm Pumpkin Spice Muffins? Yumm. This recipe uses lots of little bits of ingredients, especially if you don’t keep “Pumpkin Pie Spice” in the cupboard, but was well worth the effort.

The very last bit of cooked squash on hand was used to make a pasta sauce (photo above right) for Sunday’s supper. I cooked the sauce according to the recipe, but when I make it again I would cook it a little longer so that the flavours are more blended. And that was how we ended the great Banana Squash adventure!

They’ve been replaced with the sounds of school children and traffic. The hustle and bustle of the city keeps me moving, but I long for the quiet stillness of the farm. Bruno and I have been showing up every day at the Occupy Montreal Protest at Victoria Square; a growing movement to voice dissent towards the fraudulent banking system. Most people would agree that 1% of the population holding all the money and power is both corrupt and dangerous. Hundreds of cities are part of the worldwide movement, so if these issues concern you, I encourage you to make an appearance in your city’s occupation site. I will resist delving further into politics because it’s a matter better discussed on the blog Bruno and I are about to launch: http://wechoosefreedom.wordpress.com  However, one thing is certain; the people are rediscovering their power and the light of humanity has never burned so brightly.

 On that note, it only seems fitting to share with you one final gift from Covenant Farm’s glorious bees! As my final farm project, I brought home beeswax to make candles. A fantastic local company, Busy Bee Candle Supply http://www.busybeecandlesupply.ca was kind enough to send me  candle making supplies. This included the wicks and a silicone bees hive mold that made the process incredibly easy. I was able to create the cutest candles imaginable! Their sweet, smoky scent takes me back to the sunny afternoons we spent with Jean Pierre extracting honey in the Gallery kitchen. Gone are the worries of city life for a few brief moments, as I affectionately recall the summer months and the warm hearted people I was lucky enough to share it with…

"Bruno-master-farmer-to-be" posing with the squash

We had perfect weather today for harvesting the spaghetti squash that were lovingly seeded by Rosalind early in the summer in the East field. Roz had to leave (sniff, sniff) to return to her studies at Mount Alison, but we’re sure she’ll enjoy seeing this picture of a bumper crop.

We have less than a bumper crop (and this is an understatement) of yellow onions. Members will have to look closely in their bins to find them, they are so small! So we are grateful for what did grow, in this most challenging of seasons.

It has become an unfamiliar strange feeling, to be watching the skies, gauging how many more cubes you have time to transplant into the soil before the rain really begins to fall. Rain clouds are magnificent, especially when they loom large and grey, moving rapidly towards you with a hint of thunder rumblings. Those ones mean business!

So the garden may be happier than us by all this rain, but not by much. Oh, how much we have been wanting this wet wonderfulness!!

Another day brings more harvesting tomorrow — just yesterday Stephanie was saying how at this point in the year, we spend more time harvesting than we do weeding, because the vegetables are yielding so much, so quickly!! The weeds are doing just as well, but we don`t pay them as much attention…We pay for it later.

Well, here are some recipes I wanted to share with you all…some things to try with the plentiful summer squash, and then a recipe for a kohlrabi salad. (The salad was an accidental discovery – after a long day today, I began to follow what I thought was the recipe, only to find what I made was acres away from the intended outcome. Well! The salad, paired with Stephanie`s mishap pizza were both delicious. Sometimes creativity is tastiest, right?  Here is a new, pretty dandy salad to try.)

Kohlrabi Salad
4 small or medium kohlrabi, diced
1-2 apples, diced
half cup dates, chopped
quarter cup feta, crumbled
1 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

Chop up all ingredients. Stir the vinegrette together separately, and then toss all together. Bon appetit!

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Savory Summer Squash Quick Bread
1)4 cup oilve oil
2 cups all-purpose flour
1)4 cup finely ground yellow cornmeal
2 tsp baking powder
1 1)4 tsp dried oregano
3)4 tsp salt
1)2 tsp baking soda
1)2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
2 large eggs
3)4 cup buttermilk
2 cups grated summer squash (pattypan or zucchini, you choose!)
2)3 cup finely crumbled feta cheese

Heat oven to 350. Coat a loaf pan in olive oil and set aside.
Combine flour, cornmeal, baking powder, oregano, salt, baking soda, and pepper in a large bowl.
In a separate bowl whisk eggs, buttermilk, and olive oil until smooth. Fold in squash and feta until evenly combined. Then pour the squash mixture into the dry ingredients. Mix well!
Pour batter into the loaf pan, and bake until bread is golden brown, about 60-65 minutes. Let cool, and enjoy!

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And here is one more recipe that I found and that I very delicious! Zesty Zuccini Blueberry Muffins, from: http://www.abushelofwhat.com/search/label/zucchini

May the coming days bring us more rain!