Veggie notes of the month:
- Napa cabbage is our winter staple for salads, much gentler on the digestion than regular cabbage, we slice this as our salad base. We like grating in other veggies for colour and flavour, the watermelon radish - red, golden beets or rutabaga - yellow, kohlrabi and daikon - white. It pairs nicely with both creamy dressings and vinaigrettes, our favourites have a little sweetness like apple cider vinegar. Stephanie makes it into kimchi for a flavourful side to quick meals with nice crunch and flavours.
- We've collected our baby potatoes (mix of red and yellow) to offer up as such, little roastable treats!
- Brussels we didn't list last month as they were yellowing and we didn't think quality was up to snuff. However, as we've been busy eating them I couldn't resist sharing them with you. They are yellowing but delicious.
- We are really hoping to get fresh greenhouse harvests in next month! For those of you who were with us last year, we had a round of lettuces ready in December, held the rest of it in the greenhouse to January, and then harvested a third round as whole heads to store into February and cut into bags then. Sadly they got planted a bit later this year and didn't size up on schedule. Our tomatoes were delayed too, so we tried to keep them in the ground longer and won't be making that mistake again. Our hope is the lettuces start to grow again this month.
January is the month for crop planning, seed orders, wrapping up the bookkeeping and our annual accounting. Stephanie took breaks to put up some fancy greenhouse doors. We plan out our budgets, investments, staffing, and CSA targets then make sure it all works out in our cash flow. It's the time of the year when it's very clear to us that farming (and running any small business) is about a lot more than growing vegetables in a field. We enjoy the extra challenge, and what's not to like about being able to work at a desk with a pot of tea for a change? For a month or two a year we can thoroughly enjoy it, continuing conversations about opportunities and musings into the evenings by the fire... what if we planted lettuce with the tractor instead of the paper potter? What if we could get in the new "radiance" breed of sweet potato that was developed in Canada for our shorter growing season with deeper orange flesh and even more deliciousness? What if we could reuse canvas bags to distribute your veggies? How could we reduce the tillage we use to produce our veggies? Kaizen or the Japanese lean principle of continuous improvement has our imaginations working full tilt these days :)
