Friday, September 25, 2009

CSA 2010

With the season drawing to a close, and only two more weeks left for the Stirling Farmers Market we are already looking at 2010.
In the next week we will have 2010 CSA Brochures ready for you all. As ever there are a limited number of places. We are offering two different types of shares. A whole share weekly and a whole share bi-weekly. If you are interested in CSA Boxes for next year please do e-mail or call and make sure we have your contact details so we can get the applications to you.
We will be increasing our range of Heirloom Vegetables for next year and if I am left in charge of seed orders again you can trust to see some weird and wonderful Veggies in your boxes or at the farmers market.
Friends have already made suggestions of some additonal vegetables they would like to see, so if you have a favourite that we have not grown this year please do let us know and we will see what we can do.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Fall Harvesting, Planting & a Frosty Weekend..

Fall is truly on its way when you see the pumpkin patch start to die back. With this comes the joy of finding out what delights have been growing through the summer in the patch. So far we have spotted some lovely Butternut and Acorn Squash the Cinderella Pumpkins are turning the most fantastic blood orange, and we have a few Howden's in the field. Sadly the stink bugs did kill several of the plants! We also have varieties of ornamental gourds that have grown well.
We have started to harvest the cabbage this week and these will be stored in the cellar of the house. Potatoes will be next!
If you ever need any of the staple vegetables during fall & winter it is always worth calling to see what we have in the cellar.
We have managed to find the most amazing Organic Music & Fish Lake Garlic. Planting will start towards the end of September, once we have decide where to plant the 500 cloves!
We did have a bit of a shock very early on Saturday morning as we left the house to pick veggies for Market. Small areas across the garden and been hit by a Frost! We lost several rows of tomatoes, Eggplant, Okra, sweet and hot peppers.
We where happy to see it did not hit all the plants, not sure if this is due to the garden running over a slight hill? We will take any break we can get!



Thursday, September 3, 2009

Our little helpers..


These are two of many little helpers in pest control on the farm.
We have had our fare share of pests this year. From hornworms, stink bugs to aphids but we also have a great team that helps fight the battle. Michael and I have become quite the pro's at spotting Hornworms and the Chickens get rather excited at the extra protein they are about to receive.
We are very lucky at having lots of toads on the farm and I have several in my greenhouse who have got rather large over the summer and today we where delighted to find a Praying Mantis in the field.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Bee Mazes..


Today Michael placed the bee mazes on two of the hives. The mazes can only be left on for the next two days this gives the bees time to leave the honey super and doesn't give time for the wax moth to take residence.
We hope to start extracting on Friday, not sure how much honey we will have from the hives as we made the decision to leave a super on each hive to give the bees extra honey for their winter stores.