New season

A local Quebec grower brought in some beautiful romaine lettuce he grew under polyester row covers.  Although there is relatively small volume of this kind of crop, it is a harbinger of the coming season.  Most of the early crops of lettuce and indeed any local veg go to the Montreal market, since the wholesalers will pay as much as it costs them to get the same crops from California.  US companies already have local produce and will not pay a premium for Canadian.  So until the Canadian wholesalers and Chain Stores are overwhelmed by local growers, only a few export oriented farmers will take the lower returns offered by US buyers.

the e-coli disaster

Over 20 people dead and hundreds with kidney shutdown.  Just another dagger in the heart of the produce business.  Although Spanish cucumbers were originally blamed, then lettuce and tomatoes, it seems now that the infection may have originated at a German organic farm which produces bean sprouts.  These may have been mixed with the salad items blamed for the outbreak.  While the short term damage to the produce industry is bad enough, the long range problem is the rise of antibiotic resistant strains of common bacteria such as e-coli, salmonella, etc.  The promiscious use of antibiotics in agriculture must be curtailed.  The implications to the food chain we all depend on are too enormous to treat with any less than international action.  Meanwhile, no sprouts for dinner!

tomatoe time

Got most of the tomatoes in today.  Not a moment too soon, according to the calendar.  However, with the weather we have been having they probably would have gone backward for the past couple of weeks.  Planted leeks, beets and beans also, so it was a pretty productive first week of June.  We have had a lot of drying time during the last week which helps, but many areas in my gardens are still too wet to till.  The strawberries look beautiful, and the drier warmer weather is coming in the nick of time for them.  Of course, if it stays dry all this week, I'll probably be looking for rain by the weekend.  That's the farmer in me coming out.

Planting madness

The garden is drying out reasonably well, so it is time to push the panic button and try to jam as much into the ground as my middle aged body can handle.  Not only that, but try to fertilize and weed all the beds that I did manage to get planted during the deluge.  It's not a pretty sight, but with a little luck, we may get back onto some sort of schedule.  Most of the older plantings look yellow and tired, but aerating the soil and fertilizing will bring most of it back.  Lake Champlain is still 2 feet over flood stage, so many people don't have these options.  Farmers near the lake will be making some difficult decisions over the next couple of weeks.  At least I'll get the tomatoes in this weekend, and the peppers next week.  Then at least it will feel like a real season.

e-coli blues

Over 1500 people in Germany are affected by a particularly virulent strain of e-coli and the authorities have not been able to figure out how it got into the distribution system.  However it happened, it is an ominous situation.  If people are not confident that vegetables are safe to eat, they will stop buying them.  Even veg that needs to be cooked before eating will be affected by the panic.  If this happened in the US, sales of veg would probably come to a complete halt.   I grew up on a truck farm which shipped most of its' produce to New York every night.  There were no food safety rules.  Most produce was hand picked by people who may or may not have washed their hands (or the rest of themselves) during the previous 24 hours.  There was no refrigeration and everything was consumed within 24-48 hours of harvest.  Did people get sick?  I don't know, but it was certainly never reported as such.  Today, produce is harvested and packed up to two weeks before it is consumed.  Although there are many food safety rules, and all processed produce is sanitized in some way, there are many reports of people being sickened by vegetables.  Is it the increasing presence of superbugs?  Or are people's immune systems compromised to the point they are incapable of resisting these bugs?  Or is it the whole system from farm to fork that needs to be revamped?

Gardening notes

the weekend will be dry enough to start catching up planting and weeding in the garden.  If the tomatoes and peppers get out now we may be starting to eat some in August..  The weeds are another issue.  Farmers and gardeners hate to replant fields that have become overgrown.  It's almost a test of wills with the land.  However, at some point, it becomes more damaging to the crop to remove the weeds and starting over is the prudent thing to do.  I guess it all comes down to the psychological investment we have in our handiwork. 

Tornadoes

Four people dead and millions in destruction....tornadoes in Massachusetts!  Things are getting more and more weird on the weather front.  This kind of stuff happens in the midwest and the south, not the northeast.  There were tornadoes in NY last year, so I guess we will have to get used to the possibility.  Hurricanes are bad enough.