By: Robin T.
Metchosin Grown and Certified Organic
We love growing delicious vegetables and sharing the abundance.
Our farm stand is open every Tuesday and Saturday all winter long.
On the farm stand this week:
Arugula • Beets • Purple Sprouting Broccoli • Cabbage • Carrots • Celeriac • Chard • Collards • Garlic • Kale • Leeks • Parsley • Potatoes • Radishes • Rutabaga • Salad Greens • Turnips • Winter Squash • Saanich Organics Vegetable Seeds
February is all about Timing
There is almost always a window in February when some soil is dry enough to work. Our window was late Friday afternoon. We had fingers crossed and teeth gritted. Healthy soil is a beautiful thing. Its actually made up of mostly air. If you work it when its too wet, you ruin its ability to hold air, and then it becomes compact and infertile. Its wise to wait. But when you're as keen as we are, you check it every few hours after 4 day dry spell. Its high stakes gambling, but we won. The soil churned up fluffy and loose. Woohoo! Sadly it rained hard on Friday night so I couldn't get it seeded, but at least it's open!
Saanich Organics -Seeds of the Revolution
Seed Bred for our Climate
For the past ten years, I've been going to Washington and Oregon to the Organic Seed Alliance's training sessions for farmer-seed breeders. In addition to being really inspiring, I've learned all about selecting and growing better seed. The principle is very simple - start by finding all the seed companies that you can who are carrying your favourite variety of whatever seed. This is called gathering the available germplasm. Grow these out together, and see which ones thrive. We grow out 250ft rows, and we love when they can be faced with extremes: hot, dry, cold, wet, snow, flood. The ones with poor genetics will die, and the ones that thrive, and have the characteristics that you want, are saved for seed, and replanted. Repeat, repeat in large trials, and in a few years you have the very best seed for this climate. Saanich Organics is saving seed in 4 locations so that we can have the isolation distances that we need. After 10 years of learning and careful selections, we're proud to offer 40 varieties of vegetables and flowers that we are confident are better for our climate than anything else on the market.
A note about arugula and salad: we realize that its been inconsistent and pretty strong tasting at times. We're getting to the end of the life of the greens, some of them are trying to go to seed, but we keep cutting them! Some of them (mostly the claytonia) start to get a burnished red tone in the spring which can be attractive on its own but looks kind of brown in the mix. These are the trials of early spring. We're doing our best to get new greens sown but many factors are out of our hands. Our solution: Salad Crack! See recipe below :)
On the menu at Sea Bluff Farm:
Hollyhock Salad Dressing, or as we call it "Salad Crack" because its so addictive.
It can be used as a dressing on roasted veggies as well.
Hollyhock Salad Dressing
⅓ cup cider vinegar
⅓ cup water
⅓ cup tamari
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup nutritional yeast flakes (we like Bulk Barn's best)
11/2 cup vegetable oil
Place cider vinegar, tamari, garlic and nutritional yeast in a blender and combine. With blender running, pour in oil to reach desired consistency.
