2011 Catalogue Now Online

Today's the day you've been waiting for... the 2011 catalogue is now out! Check out the full online version at www.annapolisseeds.com, the print catalogues are coming soon too. Spread the word!

Harvest Season 2010

Well that was a fantastic growing season! The nearly ideal weather we enjoyed during the summer stayed right through to the end of the harvest season, which was fortunate because we had a lot of seeds to gather! The seeds are now long since harvested and many are already packaged up for the new catalogue, while the garden is resting for the winter under a fresh blanket of snow. Here's a long overdue glimpse of some of what we got up to this fall...

-Amaranth and sunflowers are a great pair as we learned.

- Checking the Lazy Housewife beans for maturity, they were a few days away from getting harvested.

-One of the stories of the summer was our amazing corn crop. This is the variety True Platinum, and although only on in four seeds that I planted grew (due to lumpy soil and a lack of rain in May) each surviving plant produced three or four big cobs.

-Soybeans ready to harvest in September

-The new greenhouse

- To dry the corn I left the cobs on the plant for as long as I could, and when rain threatened I harvested them and hung them in the barn from their own husks. The seeds will come off easily when they're dry.

-A kaleidoscope of tomtoes. Clockwise: Striped Cavern, Cole, Azoychka, White Cherry, OSU Blue and Absinthe. Centre: Black Krim.

- OSU Blue tomato, a very unique blue skinned tomato. It was developed at Oregon State University by cross-pollinating a red tomato with a wild blue tomato from South America.

- Removing the seeds from one of our many Musquée de Provence pumpkins. We ate way too much pumpkin soup and pie that week!

- One of the final tasks of the fall, planting next year's garlic. I'm excited about our future garlic plans, it's going to take a few more years of multiplying the seed stocks but I hope to have a limited selection of seed garlic available in the not too distant future...

End of Summer Updates

It's been a busy few weeks lately with Dan Jason visiting, putting on the seed workshops and throughout this trying to keep on top of the biggest seed harvest yet. All three workshops were big hits, many thanks to everyone who came out for them! They were so much fun I'm already trying to think about doing more... I'll keep everyone posted. Below are a few shots from the events:

-Threshing demo at the Halifax workshop, Aug 22.

-Back on The Weekend Gardener... this time with Dan! Hope you caught the show.

-The Middleton workshop was the biggest and most lively of the three, with a very keen and knowledgeable group. Here we are talking tomatoes.

-Thanks to David Baldwin for this great shot of us.

-Dan articulating the finer points of seeds.

The Watershed Music Festival and it's workshops were especially fun, unfortunately I don't yet have photos to post. Be sure to make it to next year's festival! Pollination Project is also holding the second annual Stinking Rose Garlic Festival on October 30, be sure to make it there too.

So after all this seed saving evangelism I'm pretty happy to settle back into the quieter daily rhythm of the farm and to get back to harvesting the actual seeds! There are so many cool new varieties that I'll profile in a future post, Cole and O.S.U. Blue are two tomatoes I really want to get people excited about...

Exciting news with the greenhouse, it's finally complete! We had a work party the other day and with many hands and co-operatively still air we got the plastic attached with no problems. The effect was amazing, within one minute of the cover being on you could feel a noticeable difference in temperature between inside and out. The plans now are to start drying more seeds in the greenhouse and later on to grow winter greens for the markets. Maybe I'll get into the heirloom tomato seedling business in the spring... Until then seek me out for both greens and seeds at the market this winter!

Radio Interview

Just a quick post before I go to the city, giving everyone a heads up to tune in to The Weekend Gardener this Sunday on 95.7 News FM in Halifax (I always find it easier to just go to www.news957.com and listen live). Dan Jason and I will be on Niki's show from 12:00 to 1:00 talking about seeds and about the workshops we're doing. We still need you to spread the word about the three workshops (people are the best advertising!) so please do spread it if you know anyone interested!

August Seed Saving Workshops with Dan Jason

Very exciting stuff in the works lately! Apart from the garden (which is overflowing with seeds right now... more on that later) the seed saving workshops with myself and Dan Jason are really coming together. Dan is coming out from Salt Spring Island at the end of the month and the two of us will be giving three workshops, one in Halifax, one in Middleton and one in Bridgewater. All the info is attached below, hope to see you at one of them and please do spread the word if you know anyone interested!

-Halifax Workshop: 3:00 to 6:00 at the Spryfield Urban Farm, August 22nd. Cost: $25 for the general public and $10 for Urban Farm members. An intro to seed saving at the urban farm! We'll have a garden walk and talk about as many crops as we can cover, as well as hands on demonstrations (bean threshing, tomato fermentation, etc..) and discussions on the deeper political and philosophical aspects of seeds and urban food production. Contact Su Donovaro to register: urbanfarmspryfield@gmail.com

-Middleton Workshop: 2:00 to 5:00 at Annapolis Seeds (8528 Hwy 201, Nictaux), August 25th. Cost: $25 Come visit the seed farm and learn the fun and increasingly crucial art of saving seeds. Some topics covered will include pollination, threshing, organic growing, the importance of maintaining biodiversity as well as a garden walk to discuss specific techniques for each crop. All knowledge levels welcome! Limit of 20 participants, contact owen@annapolisseeds.com or 825-4732 to register and reserve your spot!

-Bridgewater Workshop: 10:00 to 3:00 at Watershed Farm (768 Allen Frausel Road, Baker Settlement), August 29th Part of a very special weekend at Watershed Farm, the workshop is closely tied with the first annualWatershed Music Festival on the 28th (1:00 to dark). On the 28th we'll have lots of music and different workshops throughout the day, and on the 29th we'll have a slightly more advanced (and much quieter!) seed workshop. We'll go into great depth for this one covering each crop individually as well as covering broader topics like threshing and storage. Also exciting will be a lesson on hand pollination of squash from local squash guru Chris Sanford! Included is a delicious organic lunch along with snacks, you'll get to head home with seeds of both mine and Dan's as well as seed garlic from Watershed Farm. You can register online here. Spots are filling up fast!

Another Photo Update

-Lancashire Lad pea

-Leek flower

- My home glistening in the fading evening sun

-Arugula flowers (we're going to have a ton of arugula seed this year)

- These are pretty special: Crown Peas. They're the most unusual pea I've ever grown, formerly considered a separate sub-species of the common pea they have huge clusters of spectacular flowers, forming a "crown" at the top of each plant. The pods are short but tasty. It's almost like a cross between a sweet pea and an edible pea.

-Phacelia is a great nectar crop as well as a cool season cover crop. Bees are currently being drawn to it from seemingly miles around.

Haymaking

The garden is at its leafy, blossom-filled peak right now, and so are the weeds. The hot weather and regular rains that we've had since June have been a blessing for plants both domesticated and wild alike, it's all I can do to push the weeds back enough for the cultivated ones to take up a dominant place... this is not an immaculately tended garden by any means! The newly seeded hay meadows are a riotous, tumbling profusion of wild mustard, ragweed, goldenrod and bindweed, however after scything down these opportunistic meadow dwellers I've discovered a healthy carpet of my cultivated grasses, previously hidden from view - a good sign for next year.

Our own hay meadows are another year away from maturity (they were just seeded this spring after wresting the land from the forest a few years previous) but we have the good fortune of having a neighbour on one side who has more land in grass than the inclination to cut. We've been scything and making loose hay up in that field for the last couple of weeks, it's definitely a learning process for me. Following the very thorough instruction from the Vido Family (you can read one of the articles here) and from what they showed me last summer when I spent some time at their farm I built a couple of hay racks and then went at it. The rack construction is really simple, I made mine with scrap 1x3 lumber, although future models might be made from coppiced hardwood poles from the forest. They're basically two square frames leaning against each other (like an A-frame) and tied with twine at the top (they fold for easy storage and transport).

My current hay making process is to cut the grass and leave it in it's windrow for one full day. I initially planned to spread the windrows so the grass dries more evenly but I've found that mature timothy and orchardgrass (and other course, airy plant matter) dry just about as fast without spreading. After that time I rake the grass into heaps with a wooden hay rake (hand made from yurt-pole cutoffs and with wooden teeth which avoid digging into the ground - photos on the way) and stack it up on the racks, forming a hay cock. After it's stacked the grass continues to dry with air circulation underneath it, and the bulk of the grass on the inside won't fry to brown in the sun like it would if exposed. I take the hay into the barn as soon as I can, though if built with enough skill a cock (or any other version of hay stack) can stay in the field and for some time without getting damaged by rain. I haven't yet mastered the cap design (ideally it should shed water like a thatch roof) and the cock pictured here got soaked in that last thunder storm we had. It was wet and steaming away like a compost pile from microbial activity when I dealt with it a few days after, it made an excellent mulch for the tomato patch! So there's lots to learn yet... I'll keep at it between weeding and tomato staking and the myriad other jobs on the mid-summer farm.