A Visit to Soiled Reputation Farm

Whew! We're not even half-way through our day. Fortunately, it's time for some food. We all gather in the garden of Soiled Reputation, where we enjoy a brown-bag lunch of ham sandwiches or veggie wraps, local apples and decadent little squares with chocolate chips and caramel, washed down with Wellesley apple cider.

While we're having a little pause here, let me say "Thanks!" to our guides, Drea and Tania, and our driver, Warren. Well done guys; it was a great day. At $25 per person for a day that lasted from 10 am to 5 pm and included lunch, it was also a screaming bargain. If you think you are going to be anywhere near Stratford for the Savour Stratford festival next year you should definitely plan to make the tour.



The garden was lovely, still full of spectacular flowering plants. I made sure to get the name of that towering cloud of yellow daisies to the right and above my head (yes; a rare sighting of the shy and elusive Ferdzy*): it's silphium terebinthinaceum, but you can call it Prairie Dock if you prefer, and you might.


Soiled Reputation is the farm of Antony John and Tina VandenHeuvel. They raise organic vegetables, especially greens, which are sold at farmers markets, to restaurants and through CSA shares. They grow over 50 vegetables in all. Antony was the eponymous star of the Manic Organic television series. He also paints, acts and creates music in his spare time. (He has spare time?!)

There are several greenhouses on the farm, but they have just recently been planted with late fall and winter crops, so there was little to see there besides beautifully raked and leveled earth.


There are egg-laying chickens enjoy the lovely fall weather in a pen by the barn. They are also the clean-up crew for unsaleable vegetables.


A little further along we were introduced to Jesus (Hey-soos) the burro. We were warned that he bites, but he restrained himself in exchange for skritches between the ears. I thought he was very sweet, actually.


Row covers protect late crops from flea-beetles. They also let in most of the light and all of the water. Something we want to get and use in our garden next year, for sure.



Rows of lettuce in the field. Soiled Reputation is an 80 acre farm, of which 40 are certified organic. They are blessed with excellent soil and an excellent location. The soil is Perth County clay-loan, a rich and beautifully balanced and very workable soil. The location is just sufficiently far east of Lake Huron to catch much of the rain created by weather patterns moving over it. (As someone who had 2.25 inches of rain spread over 3 months this summer I am filled with envy.)

On average, Soiled Reputation produces about 400 pounds of salad greens a week throughout the growing season.


Twenty acres are devoted to growing vegetables. Soiled Reputations fields are large and rambling. Partly this is because about a third of them are under alfalfa at any time. Alfalfa is a legume and like all legumes fixes nitrogen, a key nutrient for vegetables. Alfalfa fixes up to 140 pounds of nitrogen per acre, compared to 40 to 50 from peas. In November the alfalfa is ploughed under and the decaying leaves add organic matter to the soil over the winter. Even on top of all this, Antony adds a ton of turkey compost and homemade compost to each acre. He's taking a lot out of the soil too though; by careful planning he can get up to 4 crops out of each space in a summer; a typical cycle might be peas, lettuce, beans, and finally turnips.


Rows of succulent leeks still stand out in the fields. The bluer the leek, the better it will withstand cold. Antony lets the weeds grow up around some of them; this slows their growth down and delays the need to harvest them, thus extending the season.



Antony shows us a beautiful green Romanesco cauliflower, famous for its' fractal pattern of florets. He talked about how it reminded him that everything is linked in chains of similarity; and how is farm is one of a set of micro environments that link Canada to Costa Rica and allow the rich diversity of migrating birds that we have to exist. (Antony is an avid birder.)



Carrots, in a rainbow of colours (it's a little hard to see but these are purple and yellow). The soil at Soiled Reputation is rich in calcium, which is vital in producing sweetness in vegetables. These were very good carrots, I must say. One trick he has for growing them is to plant them, then set up a mini-greenhouse (a pane of glass, really) over a small section. Once he sees signs of germination there, he knows the rest of the carrot seeds will not be far behind. He uses a propane flame weeder to go over the rest of the bed, and so the carrots germinate without competition. You know what Mr. Ferdzy wants to get now. I understand you can get them at Lee Valley.

And on that note, it's on to the next farm.




*Mr. Ferdzy kindly took the pictures on this trip, so that I could concentrate on taking notes. A big thank you to him, too.

A Visit to Perth Pork Products

Back to the tour. The next stop was at Perth Pork Products, home of the de Martines family and a whole bunch of very interesting pigs. The de Martines were busy this day, so the tour was given by Linda Walton, who is a friend and neighbour along with one of their daughters. This is a typical farm of the area, dating from the 1850's. The de Martines came from Holland and bought it in 1979. A few years back, during one of the low-price crises that afflict pork farmers with depressing regularity, they were in danger of losing the farm. They decided on a new course. Ingrid took an off-farm job, and they started raising Tamworth pigs. This is an old and hardy British breed; the resemblance to wild boars is noticable, although they are consistently redder in colour as well as larger. More recently, they have added Berkshire pigs to the mix, and they still raise commodity pigs (that's what you get at the supermarket) in the barn.



They also have wild boars, which look remarkably like the ones in the Asterix books. So they should, I guess! They live outdoors all year round. They have plastic calf hutches surrounded by bales of straw, which the pigs can burrow into to keep warm and to provide shelter for their babies when they have them.


The babies are really, really cute, having reddish stripes. All the pigs wagged their tails as they ate, which was really funny to watch but I'm afraid all they were doing was keeping the flies off.



The de Martines collect vegetable scraps from the local farmers markets and restaurants as a treat for the pigs. Their main diet is corn, barley and soymeal. The manure from the pigs is used to fertilize the fields, however the farm is not organic as they have no reliable supply of organic feeds available. In addition to the vegetable scraps they get black walnuts and other nuts grown on the farm as a treat when they are available. They were given some when we were there, and we could hear them crunching away as they ate them, shells and all.


Next we headed out to the shelter/pen where the Tamworth sows live, along with Todd, the boar. These are their breeding stock. As soon as we came along they all trotted out to see us. These were once a common pig in Ontario, and their long lean sides produce lots of bacon. However, the white commodity pigs, while not nearly so hardy, are ready in 6 to 7 months. The Tamworths will not be ready for 9 months to almost a year.

It takes a 1 1/2 years to 2 years before the wild boars are ready to market; the same with the "Iron-Age" pigs.



One of the de Martines daughters poses with the pigs.


Happy as a pig in mud...



After we saw the Tamworth sows we continued on past their shelter a good distance.


There, we found the pasture for what Perth Pork markets as "Iron-age" pigs. These are a cross between the wild boars and the Tamworth pigs. They look a lot like the wild boars, but in a range of colours between the grey of the wild boars and the red of the Tamworths. They started raising these when they could not get a Tamworth boar. They do have one now, but still produce the "Iron-age" pigs, which combine the slightly gamey, finer grained and more solid meat of the wild boar with a little more fat.



They too were happy to be fed a box of vegetable scraps from the market, although I was amused to see that they all sniffed at then rejected a lemon. The large grey pig in the middle right side of the picture is the boar, Prince.



There is a viewing room where the commodity pigs in the barn can be seen roaming about inside.


And finally, there is a small shop on the farm where frozen pork or smoked proscuito hams, schinkenspeck and bacon can be purchased. Orders can also be made online.



A piece of schinkenspeck and a proscuito ham from the fridge.

Not Done Gardening Yet!

We interrupt this Stratford Farm Tour series to talk about what's going on in our garden. These photos were taken at the end of last week, and already they have cast off from the dock of the present and are sailing into the past.

This bag contained our saved garlic, garlic bulbils and shallots, which we planted. We still have to plant the garlic and shallots acquired in Stratford - where, we don't know exactly. But somewhere.


Mr. Ferdzy breaks up the heads before planting. Being the obsessive-compulsive type that he is, each row must be be carefully lined up with a measuring tape. Fortunately he does not insist that exact measurements take place in the other direction, or he'd be on his own with the planting.


The cukes have been over for quite a while, so I pulled out the tomato cages which had supported them. As you can see though, there's still some life in the garden.



Almost as soon as this photo was taken, the corn was pulled out. The bed of early corn was already pretty empty, and the bed of mid-season and late corn was essentially over, especially after some small animal - squirrels? - pulled off all of the ripe corn and ate it, or at least pulled it apart and strewed it over the lawn. *Sigh* next year, I think the corn will have to have it's very own, personal electric fence. You'll note we still plan to plant corn. That's because what little corn we did get was SO SUPERB. We're going to keep trying until we get it right.



There's still a couple of melons in the garden, but they too are winding down and will be pulled shortly.


The tomatoes are an impenetrable jungle still, but they too are slowing down. I did pull another bushel out of them though, and there are more green ones coming along than I have any hope of dealing with. I expect to get a good few more ripe ones too.



That newly cleaned and manured bed had potatoes in it. Now that they've been harvested, we have planted a bunch of carrot and radish seed in it. We will see what happens... Mr. Ferdzy is hoping for a very late crop of carrots this year; I think he is rather overly optimistic. But we'll see! Who knows?



The zucchini are taking at least a week to produce what they used to produce in a day. I don't think it's the powdery mildew with which they are afflicted; I think it's the colder nights and shorter days. The peppers and eggplants aren't doing anything much either.



Here are the two former corn beds with the corn pulled. The one in the back has had the cleaning and manuring job done; the one in the front still needs it. We were a little amazed to realize how much larger the beds were supposed to be versus how large they actually were by the end of the season. Grass is probably the worst weed there is! We will definitely need to continue chipping away with edging the beds.

These two beds have been replanted as well, with lettuce, spinach (lots of spinach) and some quick cold weather brassicas (kale, tatsoi, arugula). They will no doubt need to be finished off under hoop houses, but we are expecting 2 days of rain which should get them off to a good start. Our 3 month drought seems to be over, thank goodness.

A Visit to August's Harvest Garlic Farm

On Sunday we took a tour of local farms put on by Savour Stratford Perth County Culinary Week. Our first stop was August's Harvest, where we were greeted by owner Warren Ham. He explained that they grow about 10 acres of garlic, about 10 acres of shallots. He's been growing garlic for 21 years, and this year is his first with a general vegetable CSA, for which he grows 60 varieties of vegetables.


We started out in his barn/shed where much of the action is taking place at this time of year. The machinery above is used to remove the outer layer of dirty skin from the garlic heads, leaving them smooth and clean. Cases of packed garlic surround the cleaner.



Warren showed us his garlic curing device; garlic is put in chipboard box, and as the moist warm air rises from it, it is pulled out by the fan on top.

Warren explained that the garlic they grow is allium longicuspis, a very ancient form. It has fewer cloves than more modern varieties of garlic, having only 4 to 6 cloves. It is, in fact, our old friend "Music". Did you know that fresh garlic has a higher sugar content than grapes?! I didn't.


Next to the curer sacks of garlic cloves await planting. Cases of processed garlic products line the shelves behind them. The garlic heads, by the way, are all cracked (broken apart) by hand. Machinery exists to do this, but a lot of it gets bruised and damaged. It's planted by hand too, for the same reason. However, it can be harvested by being undercut and lifted mechanically. It then is left to cure in the field for 10 days before coming in to be cleaned, finished in the box curer, sized and crated. Much of it is sold to the local Korean market.



I've spoken a bit about garlic bulbils on the blog before. Garlic is interesting in that it does not flower or produce seeds. Garlic is normally propagated by breaking the heads into cloves and planting the cloves in the fall. Like daffodils, they will form roots in the cool late fall and early winter weather, then go dormant until the spring. In the early summer, as they grow, the clove of garlic will expand and split into more cloves of garlic, ultimately forming a new head.

However, this vegetative reproduction (cloning, basically) means that any viruses or stubborn fungi or bacteria the cloves pick up over time tend to get reproduced as well, and over a few years the garlic can really deteriorate. You can solve this problem by sending sound garlic to a laboratory to be reproduced through tissue culture. However, there is an easier and cheaper way to revitalize your garlic.

While they don't produce flowers, garlics do produce a long, looping flower stalk, generally known as a scape. Usually these are removed. This achieves two things; the plants' energy is redirected to produce a larger head of garlic in the ground, and the scape can be sold as the tasty delicacy that it is. However, if the scape is allowed to develop, in the fall the garlic will be topped by a head of little bulbils - tiny garlic cloves, identical to the cloves growing underground except in size. Because they are above ground and not in contact with the soil, they do not accumulate the problems that the underground cloves and heads may suffer from.

So, every few years some of the garlic is allowed to form bulbils. The bulbils are planted, and the first year they form a single round clove of garlic. That's what is in the bushel basket in the photo above. These will be planted again, and next summer they will form heads of garlic. After 4 years of planting, the garlic will be fully mature and can be treated as usual.



Once we had been shown the process that the harvested garlic goes through, we went out and looked at the garden. August's Harvest also runs a CSA, and rows of peppers, tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and other vegetables were still there, although the brassicas had been harvested.


Warren Ham was a prairie boy originally, and he still grows a favourite fruit of his childhood - Saskatoon berries. The shrubs have been moved recently, so are still quite small.


There's all those squash we saw at the Garlic Festival the day before. Beyond them, the garlic fields are full of mustard. The mustard is grown until the seed pods begin to ripen, then it is plowed into the ground. The strong mustard kills some of the pests of garlic, in particular nematodes and, I would think, acts as a green manure as well. I was chatting about this with Warren's lead hand at the garlic festival, and I'm going to try the simplified version he was recommending; mixing powdered hot mustard seed with water and watering it into the soil. I'm going to try this around my turnips and rutabagas, which are somewhat prone to getting worm damage. It might work and even if it doesn't, I will have only lost a few pennies worth of mustard and a little time, and no harm will be done to the soil.



However, it's an action-packed day so it's time to get back on the bus and head on to the next farm...

A Visit to the Stratford Garlic Festival

We started our wild weekend of dissipation with visit to the Stratford Garlic Festival. Admission was $5 to the old Stratford fairgrounds, where there were 2 alleys of booths set up, with a tent at either end for demonstrations.



We could have bought some corn cooked by a wild old steam engine.


There were a couple of potters; this one had brought large number of garlic storage jars.


There are more people out there making processed garlic products in Ontario than I would have thought. This display was from The Garlic Box. Some interesting looking things there...



I took a lot of pictures because there were so many interesting booths, but what we really gravitated to were the people selling garlic, so those are the pictures I'm posting. We got very excited at this booth and went away with a couple heads each of "Bogatyr", "Anne's Italian Softneck" which has unusual extra bulbs or bulbils on the stem just above the main head, "Fish Lake #1" (from the legendary Ted Maczka originally, so a piece of Canadian garlic history), Ferganskij (originally from Uzbekistan), Tibetan, and Portugal, a variety from the Azores. We've already planted the seed garlic saved from this years crop, as well as a whole bunch of bulbils collected from an abandoned farm garden that we found last month. We're going to have garlic coming out our ears.



More garlic, in tied bunches this time.


A number of farmers brought other vegetables besides garlic. This was a rather spectacular display of winter squash from August's Harvest, who also had plenty of garlic. And Ancho and Anaheim chiles! (Actually, the Anchos are really Poblanos since they are fresh, not dried.) I've never seen locally-grown southwestern style chiles for sale before, so I was quite excited and bought a big bag of each. Turns out the lead hand at August's is a Mexican Mennonite who insists on growing them... way to go, guy!



Why yes; more garlic.


With all that garlic around, you have to stand out of the crowd somehow, and I must say these were probably the largest heads of garlic I have ever seen. Big Ass Garlic is located in Dorset, Ontario. Is it those minerally northern(ish) soils that make them so big? Or is it the variety?


Garlic lovers are often chile lovers too, so The Crazy Pepper was a great booth to have at a garlic festival. Actually, just about every booth was something fascinating and worth spending time at (and money, if we'd had any!)

We also sat in briefly on some demonstrations in the big tents; one on roasting garlic and one on making garlic braids. In both cases, we arrived in time to be so far at the back of the crowd as to make seeing anything impossible, although the sound systems were very good and we could hear everything perfectly well.

Overall, it was a very pleasant afternoon and well worth going. The festival is not quite over; there will be a "Garlic Dining Experience" happening today. Don't rush out looking for tickets though. It's been sold out for days, at least. Look on the bright side - this is such a successful event, I'm sure it will be happening again next year.

I'm Still Here...

... I haven't been kidnapped by aliens.

It's been a crazy, busy week though. My father and his partner were here for 3 days, and then we headed down to Stratford for some of the great food events happening there all this week. We had a pile of work on Monday to do in Kitchener-Waterloo, and now we're back home doing one final burst of planting in the garden.

I have some great stuff to post from Stratford; I just have to sort through all the photos and notes I took and put them together. Coming soon!