Harvesting Herb Bunches

We grew basil, cilantro, dill, and two kinds of parsley at the farm this year. They always sold really well at market and they are a great item to have next to the cash box. If someone is buying tomatoes you can suggest a delicious basil tomato salad or some cilantro to make a fresh salsa. People were always interested in buying a bunch of fresh herbs to compliment what they were already purchasing. We also sold the herbs with a quantity discount - $3 each bunch or 3 for $8.

Harvesting was a little different for each herb:

Basil 

For creating basil bunches we would pull off select leaf stems by hand, making sure to not remove more than 1/3 of the plant at a time. The plants would continue to grow throughout the season. There were usually about 20 stems per bunch. Tie them with a rubber band and then trim the ends to be even with your knife. We would take our tote and stand it sideways on its end - then you can lay the bunches, stacking them inside the tote. Once you fill up the tote, you can stand it upright again and the bunches will all be standing up straight. Add a little water to the bottom of the tote. Try not to have the leaves stand in water as they will turn brown/black. We would also bring a shallow tray to market to put inside of our wicker basket. We would add 1/2 inch of water to the tray and stand the basil up in that - keeps it fresher longer.

Cilantro and Dill

For both of these herbs we would harvest the plant by cutting the root just below the soil surface (like in the picture above.) This way you are harvesting the whole plant instead of just individual stems. Take off any remaining cotyledons, low leaves and any dead stems. We would do maybe 15 stems per bunch. Rubber band them and trim the ends to be even with a knife. We would wash the bunches with the sprayer and then store in a tote without water.

Parsley (Curly & Flat)

For a while we were harvesting just stems and letting the plant continue to grow but half way through the season we switched to just chopping off the whole  plant, leaving about an 1 1/2 inches of plant to grow back fully. Pick out anything that is too small or brown. Also pull of any leaves that are really low, so that the rubber band doesn't cover any leaves - they will rot quicker. Band them and trim the ends. We would dip each bunch in water to remove the dirt. At market - flat sells better than curly, it has a better taste too. With my crop plan this year, I'm planning on growing just flat, no curly. But, just know your market. 

Sweet Treats - Sole Food Farm & Earnest Ice Cream

Working at the farm gave me a constant supply of fresh produce, totally delicious. We especially had a steady stream of eggplant, peppers, zucchini, tomatoes, and greens that didn't sell at market. So many delicious savoury dishes - ratatouille, stir fry, pizza, frittata, salads. 

My ultimate favourite though was when we had friends visit in August and served chocolate buttermilk Sole Food zucchini cake and strawberry basil ice cream from Earnest Ice Cream made with Sole Food basil. So good!

Earnest Ice Cream started this summer - they make ice cream by hand and focus on using local ingredients in seasonal flavours. Andrew made a video for them and as a result, we got free ice cream all summer. They were always at the farmer's market and sold glass pints at independent shops. If you are Vancouver - check them out! 


Here is the video - it will make you seriously want the ice cream!

Earnest Ice Cream from Andrew Norton on Vimeo.

Capped Brood

When I wrote about the honey harvest I mentioned that capped honey looks different from capped brood. Here is a shot of a frame that is mainly brood. You can see that the capping is more papery, dull and brown. There is a bit of capped honey in the bottom left corner - those look a bit shinier and golden. You can also see how the brood cells tend to concentrate towards the bottom-centre of a frame and then arc out towards honey cells. That top right side of the frame is actually the bottom of the frame when it goes back into the box.

The wider cells are ones where drones emerged - these male bees are slightly larger than the female worker bees.

You can also see the queen in this shot - the queen has a much longer abdomen than the other female worker bees. Although this is an easy identifier, if you have 70,000 bees in a hive, it can be tough to find your queen so most beekeepers will put a paint spot on the thorax of their queen. Our queen has a yellow paint spot to make it easy to spot her. Many beekeepers will use a certain colour for each year so that they always know when that queen hatched and can keep track of her age.

Lemon Cucumbers

We grew some lemon cucumbers in our high tunnels at both Hastings and Vernon. These babies are delicious! One of my favourite things we grew. They have a similar crunch to a green cuke and the seeds are very similar. I think they taste citrusy, but that may also be because I am thinking "lemon" when I eat it.

Lemon cucumbers are also great for a school garden - any time you can grow something that produces lots of small plentiful fruits is great for students. Just like tomatoes, it's easier to share lots of cherries with students than to try to slice up a beefsteak.

They were also a pleasant surprise for most market shoppers. We would always put out a small chalkboard with the lemon cuke name and do samples of slices. People were always interested to give it a taste and they were always hot sellers.

I've heard that the specks on them are both normal and bad - they brush off with your hand or a soft cloth, but they also are fine to eat. Any insight on what they are?

High Tunnels

This season we built 4 high tunnels at our farm site on Vernon Drive. The site is a brownfield - a former gas station that is still under remediation contracts with the former tenant. The soil is contaminated and we grew everything off of the ground in raised beds. The above photo is a panoramic shot of the site after we had cleaned it up and before we started building. There were a few folks living on this sits over the past few years, so there was quite a bit to clean up. 

Assembly

We got our high tunnels from B&W Greenhouses. They come in hundreds of parts - lots of assembly required. It took us a few days just to assemble all of the arches. We then mapped out where all the posts had to go, drove in the posts with sledgehammers (and the help of a jackhammer on the pavement parts) and then started to put up the arches and attach all the purling. Big lesson here: rent a laser level, measure everything at least three times and pay attention to the details. The tunnels all work but there are certainly some wonky parts. Also - we built these in the month of may and it rained most every day, cold and pouring rain. 

But I really learned a lot. I've used a drill growing up but never really felt like I knew what I was doing. But two weeks into this process I was saying things like "let's use the impact driver with the 3/4 inch self tapping screws." My father was impressed!

Up, Up and Away!

Once we got all of the pieces together we had to pull the plastic onto the greenhouse. We pulled the plastic on one of Michael's strawberry houses at Foxglove Farm but we had a team of people who knew what they were doing AND no wind. When we tried them at Vernon we had two folks who had done it before and knew what to expect and a team of exhausted farmers that weren't sure what we were doing. And some light wind.

To pull the poly up you lay it out accordion-folded along the length of the house. You wrap a rock in the corner of the plastic and tie a rope around the rock, leaving lots of rope length to pull on. We tied rocks at both ends and also 2-3 throughout the length of the plastic. We had around 6-8 people helping to pull the poly. Starting on one end you can toss the corner with the rock in up and over the arches (the rock just gives some weight to the corner so that you can toss it.) Someone on the other side should grab the rope and start pulling the corner down on the other side. Someone should be inside the house with a long stick (a broom works well) and they push up on the plastic from inside the house to move it over and down towards the other side. As the plastic starts to slide down you throw over the next rope. Most of the people helping should be on the opposite side, pulling down on the plastic. Be sure to grab it in bunches rather than just pulling on a bit of it - it's really easy to put your finger right through the plastic and you are really pulling hard to get the plastic down.

As you pull more plastic you are getting yourself into dangerous territory - this 200 ft sheet of plastic is essentially a gigantic sail. Just a small gust of wind can catch the plastic and really create a dangerous situation. 

At one point I was holding down the plastic on one side and the when the wind came I was lifted fully off of the ground. Make sure - If the wind comes - just let go! I have heard horror stories of folks not letting go and getting lifted and thrown 20 feet up and away.

The first day we tried to pull it up we had two unsuccessful attempts. The following day we had less wind and more people and got two houses pulled before planting our tomatoes. 

These hoop houses are one of the things I am most proud of this season. They were physically and mentally exhausting, but to look back at what our team did is pretty amazing. And they add such value to our operation - we dry farmed our tomatoes and are able to do some serious season extension at this site.

Honey Harvest

We collected our honey in late July - we had a total of 9 full frames from two different hives. Both honey and brood cells are capped, but the capped honey has a waxier, shiny look and the capped brood has a papery, dull look to it. We looked for frames that were full of the waxier capped honey.

Lots of beekeepers use a super on the top of their brood box with a queen excluder in between. The excluder keeps the queen from entering the super which means she won't be able to lay any eggs in the super - keeping it for honey only. Our hives were set up with two brood boxes and no super, so we had to look for frames that had the least amount of brood. Typically, the brood is towards the centre-bottom of the box so the frames that are closer to the outside of the box were full of honey. 

It's important to only take what is surplus honey for the hive. The honey they are producing is meant to keep them through the winter. They will continue to produce honey and it's ok to take this surplus, but you need to make sure they will have enough food source to over winter successfully. Lots of beekeepers that sell their honey may prioritize harvesting honey and then supplementing their bee's food source with sugar water. I would prefer they have the more nutritious honey for their food. One thing I learned is if you are anticipating a cold winter the bees will actually require less honey since they will be less active, if it's a warmer winter they will be more active and will require greater energy. 

Also, if you do harvest honey it's a good idea to keep some to be able to feed to the bees if they need it. Instead of feeding sugar water you could feed the bees some of their own honey which would be more nutritious (and less processed.) If you are collecting from multiple hives, be sure to label since you should feed the bees only honey from their own hive. 

The Harvest

We pulled out each frame to see how much honey it had, we took frames that had about 95% capped honey. If you decide to take that frame, make sure you brush off (with a bee brush or a soft brush) the bees on the frame back into the hive. We then put each frame into a large plastic tote with a lid to keep the bees off of it and also any wasps that may be interested in the honey. When we brought them inside, we made sure we didn't have the windows open since we would most likely get some panicked bees concerned we were robbing. 

To start we scrapped all of the wax off of the frame with a uncapping scratcher. We put all the wax into an old ice cream pale to make lip balm with later. We were sure to do this work over some baking trays to collects any sticky drips. 

Once the wax was scraped off we placed the frames inside a honey extractor. The extractor holds two frames at a time - you insert them vertically and then close the lid. A hand crank causes the frames to spin quickly and the centrifugal force pulls out the honey from the frame and flows down to the bottom of the extractor. There is a valve at the bottom that can be opened and allows the honey to flow out into a container.

We transfered our honey to a collection of glass jars and we had tons! 

Afterwards we returned the empty frames back to the hive to be filled again by the busy bees. 

The two hives we harvested from were only 2 km away and look at the colour difference! The one on the left is from the Strathcona community garden and the one on the right was from the Mt. Pleasant neighbourhood.

Soil Testing Guidelines for Urban Agriculture

Toronto Public Health has done an amazing job of creating guiding practices for soil testing for urban growers. I went to a workshop organized by Black Creek Community Farm as they are about to get their 8 acre site tested and are deciding how best to go about it.

Having worked at Sole Food, where the majority of our farms are located on former gas stations or parking lots, I was really interested in the soil testing standards that TPH came up with.

Originally they intended to do a literature review and see what guidelines existed in other major cities for urban agriculture. What they discovered is that most guiding practices for urban food growing were either non-existent or purely anecdotal and not evidenced based. And so they took on the project – reviewing all the literature and coming up with a framework that communities can use.

Soil testing can be very expensive – to do a full test of toxins can run you upwards of $3,000 per sample! And for a community garden, backyard grower, school food garden or urban farm – that can be a non-starter right there. Most groups couldn’t even afford one sample – and then consider that one sample wouldn’t even give you the information that you need.

The TPH guidelines have done a really great job of making the process less costly, trusting community groups to do the testing themselves (and not requiring a soil consultant to interpret the results), identifying what tests you can leave out and telling you when to not even bother testing your soil.

There is a general movement in this work away from the Safe/Not Safe dichotomy, which I totally love. In reality, we may go with worst case scenario and call a plot of soil “unsafe”, but in not growing on that soil we may be eliminating a lot of healthy behaviours and outcomes – someone growing in their backyard may mean their only access to fresh produce in their neighbourhood, a way to get exercise and physical mobility built into their day, the development of pollinator habitat, improved air quality, etc. Instead, we can inform someone of the risks, give them the tools to analyze the information and then make a decision for themselves. Someone’s need to eat may outweigh the risk of growing food in soils that are near a major arterial road.

And so, some soil testing basics that I love:

• Low Risk: If your land has always been residential, school, parkland, farm land or a child care centre and is not within 30 m of a major arterial road – don’t even test it. You will be ok. Wash your hands and wash your produce.

•  Medium Risk: if your land is within 30 m of a major road, or was ever part of a hydro corridor, commercial land, former landfill or in a lead reduction zone – you should get it tested. Unless – you land is really small (13 ft x 13 ft), then raised bed gardening will cost you less than getting your soil tested will.

• High Risk: If your land was ever industrial use, a gas station, a dry cleaner, an auto body shop, etc. then don’t even get it tested. Isn’t this one a revelation! You know already that it is going to be laden with heavy metals and lots of other nasty stuff – so you will pay $2000 (minimum) to get all your tests and find out that it is full of nasty stuff (which you already know!) So TPH recommends – just do raised beds.

And the ultimate thing to remember: do what makes you feel comfortable. We talked about how the Black Creek Farm is probably medium risk as it has always been farmland (meaning its safe) but it’s right up against Jane St (a major road.) So you as an individual could choose not to get it tested if you feel comfortable with those risks. But the farm will be selling its produce to the community and hosting lots of school groups for educational tours – and to feel comfortable, they are getting the soil tested. Point is, folks should be informed and then act based on the knowledge they have and their own comfort with risk.

What to test for?

Heavy metals and PHA’s. That’s it! The research shows that these are the things to be concerned about when considering produce nutrient uptake vs. other vegetation you may grow. You do not need to test for the whole sweet of toxins ($3,000 per sample), instead just ask for heavy metals and PHA’s and you should be able to find a $150-$200 price per sample.

TIP: The more samples you send in, the lower the per sample cost. So, find some other farmers, growers, community groups that will gather samples on the same day as you. Label them all well and send them in as one test.

So good! Here is the link to the TPH report. They are looking for feedback on their work and are hoping to develop a “train the trainer” model so that community members can get this information out to growers. Such good stuff.