Crops

Chef Steve Boudreau from Poets' Cove Resort picking up our first crop of Asian microgreens at the Pender Islands' Farmers' Market.

Microgreens are tiny vegetables grown in flats of soil that are harvested at the seedling stage, when they are about 1 to 2 weeks old and their first leaves or cotyledons have just developed. Microgreens are larger than “sprouts” which are not grown in soil but smaller than older “baby greens.” For their small size, they have amazingly big flavour and taste. They are a bit tricky and expensive to produce, as a result they are a bit pricey.

We’ve been considering growing microgreens for a while now – but were unsure of how they would be received on Pender. This year, with a little encouragement from Poets’ Cove Resort‘s Chef Steve Boudreau, we finally decided to give it a go. We are exceedingly happy with our initial experience. Depending on local interest and demand we hope to have more available – possibly even at the market!.

Happy to report that we have had good germination of the carrots in the greenhouse and were successful in preventing excessive losses to slugs and weeds.

Carrot seedlings receiving and micro-misting before being tucked under their remay cover.

This afternoon the recent cold snap forced us to temporarily bring most of our young seedlings indoors. With high outflow winds predicted overnight, we worried that a potential power outage (something that happens quite regularly here during winter storms) would snuff out the life-giving heat on all of our electrically-heated propagation benches. At this point we can’t really afford to loose the plants that we’ve started. All we can do now is hope that the weather improves.

These are the kind of challenges you face when you push the envelope. You have to plan for the potentiality of failure, which keeps life interesting!