We're starting to see a bit more diversity this week! The garden still feels unseasonably lean, but I'm looking forward to getting out some "small" bunches and samplers of zucchini and pattypans :) The beans and peas are almost ready for a first pick, hopefully next week. For anyone not familiar with garlic scapes, they're the flower stalk that grows out of the middle of the garlic plant. We snap them off each year around Canada Day to help the plant put its energy into growing us beautiful cloves instead of developing seeds from the flowers.
In cooking, we use one scape in place of a clove of garlic. Chopped up (doesn't need to be minced) and added at the end of cooking as it is a milder flavour. It's so nice to have that lovely garlic flavour back in the kitchen! We make pesto's, put it on pizza, make garlic scape hummus, and generally use it in all our cooking in place of garlic cloves. They keep well in the fridge, in plastic.
Speaking of which, thank you for voting for compostable bags! While our lettuces are still in the zips for now, you will have collected your veggies last week in our new bags. We're testing out the lettuce but we're concerned about storage life in the compostable bags so they're in zips for now. The compostable bags are accepted in the County, Belleville, and Trenton municipal composting programs. In Toronto they built their system before compostable bags, and so designed it to remove any plastic-like materials before composting... and consequently they end up in the landfill. We've heard they compost well for anyone who turns their backyard compost regularly, or we're happy to bring them back to the farm. At the end of the day even if it doesn't go straight to the compost, we'd prefer have a bag out there that can compost rather than one that will be plastic forever. If you're curious you can read more about different bag types (biodegradable vs. compostable) here. One thoughtful member asked about our labels, and I'm looking into compostable options for them too now. In the meantime, so long and good riddance to those grey bags of old!!
