Hooray for dry days!

Hi everyone! I hope you've been staying dry over the past few weeks, and that the flowers Rebecca shared with you last week were a nice contrast to the grey days we've become so accustomed to this summer. As I type this the sky looks somewhat threatening once again. The rain has been nothing short of relentless here, but the forecast for this week is looking relatively dry, if not sunny.

This is the time of the season when we're making a final push to transplant and seed the last generations of fall crops (such as radishes, turnips, lettuce, herbs) so they have enough time to grow before our market ends mid-October and the CSA ends in early November. Unfortunately it's been far too

wet to do much bed-flipping so now we're playing catch up to get everything in the ground this week. For some good news, our peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants are finally starting to ripen with some vigour! The slicing tomatoes in particular are coming in hot. Typically they really start pumping earlier in August, but as with most things this hasn't been a typical summer. We'll take the wins where we can!

It's been an eventful week already here on the farm. Yesterday we put our chickens out to pasture for the rest of their (short) lives. We raise meat birds once a year to stock our freezers. We don't sell any at this point, but maybe down the road! Would you be interested in organically-fed whole chickens?

They spend the first few weeks indoors under heat lamps while they're growing from chick-hood to adolescence, then we bring them into the field to get a taste of fresh air and some grubs and to fertilize a future market garden block. They spend their days pecking around and sleep safely in a homemade 'tractor' we built for them (and they're surrounded by electric poultry fencing).

Later this week we're going to learn how to extract honey. Our uncle is driving down from Cape Breton to teach us how to gauge when to harvest and how to use the extractor. I'm looking forward to it! Diversifying the farm's offerings to include honey will help make the business more resilient long term.

For some recipe inspiration, check out the following:

- We really like creamed swiss chard in our house. It's a decadent way to eat your greens.

- This adaptation of a basil vinaigrette that I love to make would be great on fish, chicken, and salad (and likely many other things). I

- I've been making a classic basil pesto to top off grilled zucchini and other veggies, it really dresses them up!

That's all for now! Enjoy your end of summer cool-down.