We're super excited to be sharing our first winter greenhouse greens with you this month! We've got Bok Choy for everyone: it's a classic asian cooking green that grows nice and quick. We love it just barely cooked - wilted in a hot pan for 10-30 seconds, thrown into a stir fry, grilled on the bbq till the edges are crunchy, chopped into noodles and added to a soup just before serving. It's such lovely warm green crunch this time of year. We also have some lettuce mix to share around, not quite as much as we were hoping but enough for most of you. You'll notice that we've mixed iceberg lettuce leaves in this month. Although named for their storage ability near freezing temperatures, they seem to be growing really well in cold conditions and survived very well in our greenhouse kept just barely at zero. The regular lettuces, in the same time frame, didn't size up as well. One of the reasons I love growing a diversity of varieties as it keeps us learning! The sunshine has been busy warming up the greenhouse over the last couple months, it's been between 5 and 15C most days. On the nights that dip too cold our trusty heater has been kicking in. Once we harvest it all for you we'll be turning it off for the coldest months, likely starting it up again in March for our seedlings and some spring greens.
The parade of winter storage vegetables continues this month. We're packing up our butternut squashes as well as a new variety - Koginut. We'll have Koginut to go around next month too if you're torn between them. The Koginut is a new variety bred out of Cornell University, the old fashioned way like you may have learnt of Mendel using on his Pea breeding in your high school biology. It's a super smooth, sweet, and flavourful sibling to the Honeynuts, but with better shelf life (keeping into the new year). Storing squashes is something we're still working on, we dedicated a room to them to try and maintain optimal conditions this year. While it was our best year so far it's still not perfect... They seem to be holding very well despite the wrinkles so we're sharing them. We first noticed it in late November and put a humidifier into our storage room to see if that would help, but unfortunately there's no wrinkle removing tricks for squashes ;) In the meantime, we've been eating lots and they're tasty and delicious inside.
Are you missing your flour? Last year we brought in fresh ground flour for you to order from our friends at Jubilee Forest Farm. This year they've got their own pick-up locations locally as well as in Toronto! They raise chicken and beef on pasture, moving them all daily to a fresh buffet while building up soil organic matter. If you're interested in their honey (some of their bees live in our fields here at Fiddlehead), maple, flours, beef, chicken or eggs check out their website to see if there's a pick-up location near you! We teamed up to host one of our veggie pick-ups at their farm stand on Tuesdays, and they're headed to Toronto on Saturday Jan 11th for those of you near Cabbagetown or East York. They stop monthly in Belleville too. Many of you have been with us over the years, and enjoyed some Fiddlehead meats back in the day. Part of why we chose to focus on the veggies instead was because there are other dedicated farmers growing meat the way we would (or better!) We're happy to support them instead of stumbling through animal chores after our days in the veggie fields ;)
