Producer of the Year

Next week is the annual Canadian International Farm Show held at the International Centre in Toronto, ON.  While this show caters more to larger farms, especially those involved in cash crops or large scale livestock operations, there may be a few things at the show that will capture our attention.

Each year for the last few years the event has showcased what they call the 'Producer of the Year' or rather producers...  Three farms are chosen from a series of nominees, one small, one medium and one large operation, to receive this award.  Nominations are submitted anonymously and a committee then selects the winners.

As it happens, Creek Shore Farms has won the award for 2012 in the small producer category.  We are very excited about this and would like to thank (and know who you are, we really would) the person who anonymously nominated us for this award.  While it is a bit ironic that such a new farm has won we are thankful for the recognition and hope that we can continue to pursue the foundations of our farm we have established to support our community in any way we can.

Weird winter weather

Well it has been a really interesting winter so far. In our area it has been mostly rain, which has led to lots of mud. We have also been experiencing a lot of wind (well it feels like a lot to me anyway). So far it has not affected our winter growing too much. Our hoop house is standing strong full of greens and our squash and potatoes are safely tucked away in a wonderful shed that Ryan built.
We did get some snow last week which was a nice change accept for the fact that it was also windy making it mildly unpleasant to work in. Below you can see some pictures of my father (David) and I cleaning up some electric fence in the snow.

Our outdoor chicken area. As you can see the chickens are in hibernation

Self portrait. It was cold

Best place for kittens in the snow? Under the chicken shed of course

There is my dad hard at work rolling fence wire

Smart chickens inside

 On a delayed note we cooked one of our own geese for Christmas diner this year and I would like to say that it turned out pretty well. It was a lot of work but well worth the effort in the end I thought.

Homemade salad dressing to go with fresh picked greens for a salad

Goose going into the oven. Yep cooked on its side almost the whole time

2 hour gravy from Julia Childs cookbook. Well worth the effort

On a final note if you are interested in our summer CSA program please watch for that information to be available soon on our website: www.creekshorefarms.ca

What does a farmer do in the winter?

There is still of course farm work going on, but really farming is not a full time job in the winter. There are no late nights, you can take Saturday off if you want and generally things are pretty relaxed.
During this slow period of time I enjoy cooking (well baking mostly) and I love to make things with stuff we have here on the farm. Tonight for diner we are serving potatoes and salad from the farm. People often ask what I do with things we grow so here is what I did with the potatoes.

Potatoes on a Clay baking sheet

So I sliced the potatoes into a french fry like shape, mostly because I enjoy dipping them in things like honey (yes it delicious if you haven't tried it). You can see that we are serving two different kinds of potatoes here. The yellow ones are yukon golds and the other I don't know but they have beautiful purple skin and stunning white flesh. I think the two colours will make our plates pretty fabulous.

Vegetable Seasoning

 So once the potatoes are sliced I spray olive oil on them (I have one of those refillable pump bottles). This just helps them get a little crunchy around the edges. I then liberally sprinkle the above (yes its from the grocery store although I'm sure I could make my own) which is delicious. Then stick those taters in the oven and bake for aprox 40 min at 400 F. Be sure to flip them throughout the cooking process to ensure even cooking.
As for salad well I think you all know how to do that :)

Merry Christmas

Pictures

So here are some pictures of the finished hoop houses inside and out. I've also included some pictures of what is going into this weeks CSA. Also please note the picture of the jeep. The fair vehicle decided to no longer run after I was at the furthest point from the house with all the veggies picked. 

Dead Jeep

Our two hoop houses

The length of one House

Fancy door latch

Lettuces

Harvested Vulcan lettuce

Leeks, mini cabbages and Komatsuna Red

First winter CSA

Well it has been pretty quiet around here lately. Mostly we have just been cleaning things up and getting ready for our winter CSA. Our first Winter CSA went out last Wednesday and things went pretty smoothly.

Well it appears that I have gone back to my old slacking was and have to write on the blog for almost a month. I will admit that it has been a little slow around the farm with just the daily hub a bub going on. We did finish the hoop houses out back which are now guarding a lovely crop of lettuce, and greens for the winter. And with our first snowfall yesterday having those lettuces protected is a great relief.

Other than the hoop houses going up I guess the only other eventful thing that has happened it that we had 100 chickens butchered for community care (our local food bank). This is something we have been planning since the beginning of the summer and it is nice to have it accomplished. The most time consuming part of the process is actually packing the chicken when they come back from the butcher. We pick them up in big coolers (to keep everything cold of course) and then when we get home we put the chickens into food-saver bags and suck the air out so that they stay fresh longer in the freezer. We did on a positive note only do 50 chickens at a time otherwise it would have taken us all  night to get those bad boys into the freezer.

The first little bit on the top there is old and we are now on our third week of winter CSA and I think that it is going well. This week people got an assortment of lettuces and greens, squashes, garlic, leeks, mini cabbages and a pie pumpkin.

       Boxes from our first winter CSA delivery. How many CSA's can you fit in a Yaris?                                                   Well i fit 14 and there were room for more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oats up in the cherry tree

Parsley holding strong despite the cold weather and snow

Also some people might find of interest this interesting article i just read on etsy about art CSA's. An interested idea. Take a look http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2011/noted-growing-an-art-csa/?ref=fp_blog_title

Its been too long my good friend...

To all our faithful readers I have to sorry for the slack on the blog over the last month. Just when one thinks that things will be winding down a new stretch of work seems to await. So what has been going on around the farm in the last month?
I have to say that I have probably forgotten about 50% of what we have done (I'll blame it on stress, colds, loads of work and little rest) First off during October we put up two cold frame hoop houses. These are just like little greenhouses but they have no heat. They are pretty much used to keep frost and snow off of the crops. The crops in the cold frames are all winter greens, including; bok choy, dandelion, lettuce, spinach, rapini and other fun stuff.
To the left you can see us putting the hoops up the greens are now about 3 or 4x bigger than that.

One injury of the day was this nice cut I got. It really wasn't that bad and luckily I had just refreshed my tetanus shot ( I cut it on a freshly cut piece of rebar).

Since we put up the cold frames we have also done a lot of end of season work. We finished harvesting our pumpkins. Which seemed to be a big hit with our CSA customers. We have pulled out all our tomato post, Ryan has been mowing down all the crops that are finished and I dug out our few sweet potatoes.

This is where my memory starts to go blank and I'll skip ahead to more recent times. So due to the heavy frost we had probably 2 weeks ago most stuff would have died accept for Ryan's forethought to get some frost cloth. Frost cloth is a fairly think fabric that you can put over your plants to protect them from frost. We put it over peppers, cauliflower and peas. The cloth worked great and we were able to harvest everything in excellent condition still.

Just today I harvested some garlic chive seeds to save for next year. I have a friend of saves seeds for me so I thought I would return the favour. I had a fun picture but as usual my computer savy is not working ( I blame it more on my poor e-mail).
That's all for now

Creek Shore on the Internet

So being the popular people we are we had a video made about our farm by Scotiabank. We saw it for the first time yesterday and it will be part of there small business week promotional stuff. Hope you enjoy it!!