Well our CSA Garden season has officially come to
a close. The last of the vegetables were delivered last week  and we hope everyone enjoyed them. We would like to thank everyone who
participated in our CSA season this year. 
Your support of our small family farm makes all off this possible. Thank you so much!!
Clean up in the garden has started now. The animals help a lot with the final clean up. The pigs will be the last group of animals let into the
garden. They root up all the large roots and find any potatoes that get left
behind. After the animals are all done dad would like to till the garden once before winter but time is flying by and with so much needing to be done, I hope we can get to all of it.
Elly has been processing beets, carrots and corn this week. The kitchen is a canning place for the next little while until we finish up. We have been bring in the potatoes as well for winter and storing them in the cellar, it is great having the storage for year round produce we grow ourselves!!
Today Luisa heads back to Germany. We will miss her so much. It was great having her here and we can’t thank her enough for all her help!
This past weekend my brother, Justin and his lady, Melissa were out from BC. It was great to see them and in true farm fashion we put them to work hauling the last of the straw in for winter. Justin always jokes it is like a working vacation when he comes home.

This week has been very busy doing all our fall prep work for winter. Though it has been 30 degrees this week the changing color of the leaves tell us that winter is just around the corner and there is always so much to do before it freezes. Dad has been busy bailing barley straw into small square bails so we can put the bails into the sheering shed to be used in the lambing barn for the winter. It is nice to be able to use our buildings all year round.  We have been going out a couple times a day to load up bails. Because of Gord’s neck still being in a brace he drives the truck, my mom and dad stack and Shaun and Luisa through the bails on to the trailer as Gord drives between the rows. Dad will get off and help Luisa every once in a while when they have to start throwing up higher. My cousin Bailey came out today and helped throw bails onto the trailer and to help unload them. I have been put on pregnancy leave so I am no longer allowed to help with the heavy lifting, just take pictures!!
Elly has been busy in the house processing and canning vegetables for winter. We sure love the help putting the vegetables down because to not have these great vegies through the winter would be hard.  We still have some strawberries left
and Elly has made a few batches of jam as well but we seem to eat it as fast as she makes it!! (the strawberries tend to disappear before becoming jam as well)
It looks like this weeks delivery will be our last delivery. We
will let you know on Wednesday if it is for certain!!

This week with vegetable deliveries we were able to send a large
amount of corn and potato’s, beets, celery, carrots, leeks and the lettuce we planted right after it hailed a month or so ago (it tastes fabulous so enjoy everyone)!! This week will NOT be our last delivery we will be able to deliver next week as well. It is awesome that it is going to be so warm for the next week, allowing us to extend the season just a little longer.
This week for harvest we have had help from Luisa, Gord and Elly. It is so nice to have the extra help and we really appreciate it!! Olivia is always present helping lots but she hinders some times more then she helps. She loves taking a bite out of every carrot!!  We often find some neat carrots in the patch and save them so everyone can see, we love how God can make the little things amazing!

For the last 3 nights we have had frost. It rained last night and
the garden is looking quite abused by elements. It seems like fall is coming early with the leaves turning yellow and covering the ground. Dad has been walking through the garden and it looks like this may be the last week of deliveries. If it is we are going to send a large amount of potatoes and corn so I hope everyone can come and get there “storing” pick up.
We started using the potato digger to harvest the potato’s we put
down for the year. We now have to wait till the garden dries up so we can continue. It seems crazy that last week we had close to 30 degrees and this week we are really feeling like it is fall. Luisa was so happy how warm it was when she got here and now she is saying it is like it has been for the last 2 years she was here. Chilly!! She has been a big help harvesting the garden, with only 4 weeks left till my baby arrives I am getting less and less helpful. My mom and Dad have said it is expected but I still feel bad.
We are planning on giving more updates through the week to let
you know how the vegetables are doing.

Last night we had a great friend, Elly call from Saskatchewan worrying about frost. On the news it was forecasting for frost in some areas so we went out and covered all we could. Thankfully we didn’t get any frost but this morning Elly called and told us she had -4 at her place. She still hasn’t headed out to see the damage in her garden, she says she is dreading it.  Elly and her husband Gord have been out to our place several times during the season helping us plant seeds in March and potatoes in May. They also stayed with us when Gord had his trucking accident early in the summer. We are looking forward to them coming out again this weekend.
Yesterday evening we picked up a friend from Germany, who flew in from San Francisco. Luisa will be staying with us for 3 weeks. Luisa has been to our place for 3 years and it was great to hear she was coming again. 
We harvested vegetables yesterday and we are so happy to see
 everything is fairing so well. This week we are sending corn!! We grew Trinity corn and we have been so happy with it. Our family has had corn for super for the last week and it has to be our favourite variety we have ever grown.  We sure hope everyone enjoys the corn like we do!!

It is already september and things here on the farm are changing just as fast as the summer flew by. Our boys, Tyler and Dallas, Shauns Mom, Janet and niece Delayne left for Nova Scotia on August 30th. It sure makes our home a lot quieter and leaves a large hole in our hearts. It is hard to not have our family togeather all the time and all the business is missed. Our daughter Olivia sure misses the boys and for the first few days would go looking for them in there room. It will take some time to get use to them being back in Nova Scotia again.
The days have been chilly this past week, harvesting vegtables on Wednesday was actually a little cold. We even had to take a break from washing vetables and warm up Olivia and my niece Kayden with some warm dry clothing and hot chocolate. My dad said it felt more like the end of september then the begining but thursday was thankfully alittle warmer and we weren't quite so bundled.
On Friday we had -1 degrees Celsius and we had a small amount of freezing happen to some tender vegetables but for the most part the garden was unharmed because of coverage and protection by way of buffer plants. Our strawberry patch seemed to be hit the hardest. Vegetable deliverys will still continue till the freezing over night finishes our season off. Its sad to think this great season is drawing to a close.We will keep you posted on the activitie and hope that with our row covers we will be able to extend the season as long as possible for all of us. I am not looking forward to not havin fresh celery as it is my favorite and it never tastes the same as it does directly from the garden.

August sure is going by fast. The garden is coming good and so are the weeds, we have fallen behind a little in the weeding department but we will continue to pick away at it till we are done.  My sister Julie her husband Travis, and their daughter Kayden will be staying at the farm for the month of August while they wait for their new place to be ready to move in to.  It is busy having two babies in the house but is nice to see them play together.  The kids and I have been weeding in the garden and the boys love to throw the weeds to the pigs (the pigs love it as well.) It is great being in the garden with the kids, they sometimes fill up on peas, baby carrots and strawberries but it is not such a bad thing.
We have volunteers right now from an organization called Katimavik. It is great to have Kate and Jessica here at the farm. 
With this weeks delivery we harvested beans. Picking beans is a
love hate job for me.  I love eating beans and working with the harvested beans is always nice but picking them can seem so endless. Thankfully there was lots of help this week and we picked 160lbs of beans so that every half share received 2 lbs of beans. We hope everyone enjoys them.   

We are harvesting again this week. It is a relief to see the vegetables are not too damaged. The leafy greens seemed to take the most damage, so there will be some slightly damaged vegetables in this weeks delivery.  Even with a weeks rest we did loose some of our younger lettuce beds so we will saddly have a lull in lettuce in the coming weeks. We are busy replanting lettuce seeds and seedlings to make up for the loss but we will still be a little bit behind.
Each time we harvest we clean beds right out and this leves us opportunities to reuse the beds.  With vegetables like head lettuce the remaining bottom leaves are gathered up and fed to the pigs (which they love) and we then work the soil. Dad often puts more composted dirt onto the bed to replace any of the nutrition that the previous crop used up. There are certain crops that will have composted manure added later.  Once the soil is worked and the bed prepped dad picks a vegetable that will grow well, because certain plants do better following each type of vegetable.  In this particular case there was head lettuce and we choose bunching onions to go into the harvested bed. We start all our vegetables in soil blocks so we do not use plastic pots and transplanting is easier. Dad uses a cake spatula to pull the onion blocks out of the trays and set them into the holes dug for each one. The spacing is precise to make harvesting and weeding as
effortless as possible. It is nice to utilizes the space in our garden to its optimum amount

It has been a hard week on the garden with all the hail and driving rain. We quickly covered the plants with a row cover whenever it did hail but the plants are still bruised from the force that the storms hit with. We are going to have to give the garden a break this week unfortunately and not have any vegetable deliveries for Wednesday July 27th in Airdrie and Thursday July 28th in Calgary. This will be the first time we have had enough damage to the garden from hail that we could not deliver. It is sad but we are optimistic with a weeks rest for the garden we will be delivering next week. 
We will have some damage to the vegetables for next week. We will do our best to trim off the damage and to harvest the least bruised vegetables next week. Thankyou everyone for your continued support.

We are delivering to Calgary today. The vegetables looks so great and we are excited that everything looks so nice. This week we are sending Roman Lettuce, butter crunch lettuce, Leaf Lettuce, swish Chard and Bunching Onions.
Yesterday we weeded in the garden, everything is so much easier to pull  with the soil being so wet.  Dad started putting the rigging up for the bean climbers. As we were working in the garden we watched another storm build in the distance and about 4pm it started to hail and rain and we all made a mad dash for the vegetable room.  The warm weather helps the garden grow but I hope it stops bringing hail.
We have been working the beds where we have harvested for replanting. It is nice to see how we can utilize the beds more than once in a season.  I find you can always learn new things in the garden when working with my dad, and I hope I can absorb it all. The kids have been in the garden with us. Tyler helps as much as he can and Olivia and Dallas go and find all the mud puddles they can. It is so nice to be able to take the kids to work with me I love seeing them raised on the farm and in the dirt, but my children sure are dirty kids!!