Saturday, October 30, 2010

Fabulous Finds Artisan Show!

Hello hello hello- Happy Autumn Colours,
The sun is shining and it's a crisp lovely morning out there. We're
just enjoying some morning tea on this lovely Saturday (restaurant
free- closed for the season!) morning getting ready to head out to
visit our farmer friends up at Stein Mountain Farm for the night.
Tomorrow it's off to Fountainview Academy Farm for an International
Feast and some of their lovely music. The season has slowed down
enough for farmers to get together and share stories.
Most of the harvest is in- our rooms are filled to the brink with
bright squash colours, potatoes curing, apples and pears mellowing,
tomatillos,eggplants, tomatoes, and peppers waiting preserving. We've
still carrots, sunchokes, and parsnips waiting digging (awaiting some
good frosts to sweeten them up) up and burying in our sunken sandy
space with beets and celeriacs for the winter. There's cabbages
awaiting krauting, leeks awaiting souping (and roasting and
omeleting), more greens awaiting salading (a never-ending bounty from
early spring to late fall).
Our firewood pile is ever growing, compost is still being hauled and
layered, and more garlic is being planted. We're quite excited about
this year's garlic planting. The past few years we've always produced
rather tiny bulbs of garlic- potent flavoured and excellent keeping,
though far from decent size. This year we're undertaking some rather
heavy laboured transformation of garden space. In a patch that has had
two cover crops through the season, we're preparing sunken beds.
Traditionally used for premium crops by many indigenous peoples in
semi-arid desert regions, sunken beds have many advantages over raised
beds or simply planting right in the ground. They trap more moisture
and retain it better (water that falls on the raised paths washes into
the beds), they aren't as affected by the drying winds we enjoy out
here, compost stays in the bed and doesn't fall away (like in raised
beds), the temperature is more moderated (raised beds simply bake and
dry out in our scorching environment). In preparing our garlic beds,
we're excavating clay soil from in front of our greenhouse, and
wheelbarrowing it to the garden to create raised paths. The beds (like
giant troughs) are filled with compost, forked, planted, and heavily
mulched with alfalfa hay. Excitingly, this excavation in front of the
greenhouse is bringing us closer to our dream extension sunken
greenhouse, where the insulation of the ground will keep the
temperature more regulated and allow for earlier and later crops. We
hope to heat the greenhouse with pipes running under hot horse manure,
which circulate in the greenhouse and keep it warm. Walter Harvey from
Snowy Mountain Orchards in Cawston heated a greenhouse this way last
winter where the temperature stayed to 20 degrees celsius! and
provided him with delicious salads all winter long.
This past season we already experimented with several sunken beds in
sandy new ground (where the digging was easier- the soil had never
been amended and so we simply dug a trench and piled it high for the
raised paths, then amended in the trenches) for our potatoes, corn &
beans (and volunteer tomatillos which worked wonderfully), and some of
our eggplants and peppers. All crops did great- the eggplants and
peppers had far healthier plants and produced more fruit than those
planted in raised beds! As well the sunken beds catch extra organic
matter- leaves and such. Fun fun fun.
So we're heading out next weekend to set up at a show in Kelowna
'Fabulous Finds' at Summerhill Pyramid Winery (with the most
delicious, most energetically charged organic wine we've ever
tasted!). The show happens Friday, November 5th from 4pm to 9pm, and
Saturday, November 6th, from 10 am to 4pm. The show is described by
organizer Rio Branner as showcasing 40 of the Province's best artisans
(we're honoured to have been invited!). It's sure to be a great event,
with organic wine and hors d'oerves offered, and lots of great stuff
to check out. We'll be setting up with our full selection of preserves
and tinctures, a freezer full of delicious prepared meals, fresh
baking, and of course Brandie & Char's Mountain Mommas incredibly
diverse original hand crocheted wooly goodies (toques, scarves,
mittens, slippers, creatures).
Hope to see you there!
Enjoy the lovely changing colours of autumn.
Peace,
Michael and Brandie Monkeys

Friday, October 8, 2010

Warm Evening in the Nicola Valley

My how the weather has warmed.... the nightshades (peppers, eggplants, tomatoes) were all flowering today, hoping for summer to keep on keeping on..... We're enjoying a delayed frost with lots of treats from the garden still to munch on.
The restaurant is officially closed until the last weekend in May 2011. It was a great season, though now we're in full swing getting ready for winter.... Loads of firewood, compost hauling for the garlic to plant, cover crop planting, as well as all of the ongoing food processing. A small batch of baba ganooj was made this evening- in prior years we had more eggplants than we could handle- with this cooler summer we were left with a small fraction of the usual harvest (10% harvest on the nightshades!). Oh well- the leeks and celery, potatoes and winter squash, melons and peaches were all plentiful and delicious!