Metchosin Grown and Certified Organic
We love growing delicious vegetables and sharing the abundance.
Our farm stand is open every Tuesday and Saturday all year long.
On the farm stand this week:
Arugula • Chard • Collards • Sprouting Kale • Radishes • Salad Greens • Saanich Organics Vegetable Seeds
Our Peas are Up!
We love growing peas, and we grow 3 successions every year so we'll have a long harvest of succulent munching. We aim to plant April 1, May 1 and June 1 but we're flexible. Because April was so cold, we're going to delay the next succession by a week so we don't end up with too many peas at once...or is there such a thing?
Tractor Driving Lessons!
I love the opportunities I get to empower young folks with practical skills. The most popular lessons by far are the ones that involve driving the tractor. I get quite nervous when they're up on the tractor for the first time because so much can go wrong, but we hammer home safety and taking things slowly. Christine and Regina nailed their tractor lessons and I thought I'd show off their good work. Look at Regina perfectly filling the wheel barrows with compost. Gold star!
Transforming the Greenhouse from Spring to Summer!
Those wheelbarrows you saw being filled above were dumped into the greenhouse. We're really lucky at Sea Bluff to have so much wonderful compost at our disposal. Many of you have heard of nutrient dense food. We take this concept to heart when thinking about fertility. We have the compost from our own crop residues, the sacred seaweed from Weir's Beach and the delightful pig manure from our neighbour (which we compost here for a full year while we monitor temperatures). All this nutrition gets lavished on our crops with amazing results. Healthy soil yields healthy food.
Calling all Kestrels
We were contacted this week by a researcher from the Rocky Point Bird Observatory. She was looking to help create habitat for Kestrels, small falcons that feed on our nemesis -house sparrows. We took a walk around the field and she picked a spot for our nesting box that faces South East. We are crossing our fingers for a Kestrel family! If you look really closely in the ring around the Garry Oak, you can see our first Camas coming through, along with some Shooting Stars and Western Buttercup. This is the start of the restoration we have in process here, spearheaded by Sasha and his work with HAT and Saanich Native Plants.
On the Menu at Sea Bluff: Kitchen Sink Salad
The key ingredient to the Kitchen Sink Salad is really the bowl. You need a wide platter-like bowl so you can lay out all the goodies to tantalise your diners. Fortunately here at Sea Bluff everyone is ravishingly hungry so its quite satisfying to make lunch for the crowd. As the name goes, you can put anything in: leftover rice, a can of chickpeas, some roasted nuts...anything goes.
Here we have a base of spinach (yes, there's lots coming!) with a centre of baked beens. Next there are some finely sliced squashes. The Winter Sweet that we have on the stand are amazing thinly sliced, rubbed with oil and baked for 20 minutes. We eat the skin! Then there's some Japanese turnips in there, quartered and then halved. And for some fun, crispy tortilla strips. Take tortillas, brush both sides with oil, and then stack them, slice into strips and lay them on a baking sheet. Bake at 400•F for 20 minutes, while you're roasting the squash, and you'll have crispy bits to compliment the textures. Top with a buttermilk dressing - I used buttermilk, a bit of yogurt, some garlic and paprika. Everyone went back for seconds.