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Haliburton Farm

Organic weeds

I spent some time reflecting on the back-breaking nature of organic farming last week.

Wednesday’s tasks at Haliburton were to liberate the squash patch from smartweed, which was something more than abundant.

Four of us made a good dent

and were rewarded with lemonade and some rejected potatoes, which I took home and roasted with thyme, lemon and mushrooms, as instructed by Nigel Slater.

Saturday I paid a visit to Local Yokels, where with my growing weed-naming skills I can with some certainty say that we pulled smartweed, sorrel, morning glory, plantain, mustard and lots of other stuff from the squash,

the broccoli

the cabbage

and the corn (boo!)

Couldn’t say hello to the chickens as they had been taken away for a holiday to get over the trauma of witnessing whatever was killing their kin – a weasel, it was thought, rather than raccoons, as the corpses were left in the chicken tractor. Whatever it was, security’s going to be ramped up considerably before they return to the field.

But the berry trail was looking good, with lots of berries ready for the picking.

And the bees are very happy in the borage

though it’s nearing the end of honey season, and I’m looking forward to a visit to Larry & Marilyn’s to help out with some extraction on Monday.

Saskatoons to sorrel

The native blackberries are nearly – but not quite done now, and a few premature Himalayans are peeking out on the roadsides, but not enough to pick yet. I found a precious few saskatoons when I was picking the other day: my dear Saskatchewan friends will be interested to know that they are native to this part of the world as well as theirs. I didn’t find enough to do anything more than mix them with other stuff, but still. Exciting to the berry-fingered.

Last week at Haliburton Farm we were pulling and cleaning garlic,

getting it ready to hang.

Their veggie stand always looks enticing; love those little round zucchini.

I made an exceptionally good zucchini parmigiana the other night, which was just like melanzane parmigiana only different in one fairly obvious way. I got my version from Jane Grigson’s excellent Vegetable Book which is funny and encyclopaedic and fun to read cover to cover.

This week we were pulling weeds, and I encountered a lot of red sorrel,

which made me think of sorrel soup, which is an excellent thing as you can eat it hot or cold. I brought a couple of hefty bags of these lemony weeds home with me, cleaned as much as I had patience for, and used this recipe, without the spinach. I didn’t cook the sorrel, just dumped it all into the blender with the broth, onions (had no leeks) and potatoes, and the heat cooked it as it landed. It is a good idea to sieve it though as some of it is kind of stringy.

And I ate it with a dollop of Greek yogurt; I have found a passable if not authentic version of this in Victoria which does ok for purposes like this and for making tzadziki to eat with another excellent zucchini dish, Delia’s version of kolokithokeftedes (Κολοκυθοκεφτέδες).

Bread and dirt

It’s been a pleasant summer here at the Iambic Cafe. I’ve recently been on a bread binge, using the nearly no-knead bread recipe

that was featured recently in Cook’s Illustrated – which I always pick up to read on the plane. The bread is refreshingly easy to make, as long as you plan a day ahead (it takes 18 hours resting time plus another couple of hours rising). And this one from the New York Times sounds very easy and convenient. I might start experimenting with levain breads; this blog entry gave me some inspiration.

I also visited a couple of organic farms this week. Local Yokels is a group which provides an acre of cultivation, a cluck of chickens and a well-cleared blackberry trail to groups of children and adults with disabilities for use in therapeutic gardening. It’s a great example of how much can be achieved with very little: there’s a lot of innovation and re-use of building materials, augmented with organic growing practices like micro-drip watering and companion planting. The scarecrow, built by visiting children, is rather splendid.

Haliburton Farm is, thanks to citizen action, city-owned and volunteer operated. I took up tools for the cause

and weeded a patch of golden beets one sunny day. Nasturtiums dressed up one of the fields…

some laying ducks another.

The university has been tending the wetlands area and installed a bat house

and a mason bee house.

Only one of the tubes appeared to be filled when I peered in. The bees lay their eggs in the tubes, separated by their own mini-concrete walls, and when they fill a row they wall up the end, so you can easily see which ones are occupied.