Hidden Rose: The most stunning of the red-fleshed apples.
I spent this an hour this morning doing an podcast with a fellow named Jordan from COABC. It will be aired at the upcoming 2021 BC Organic Conference this February. Check it out. www.certifiedorganic.bc.ca Of course, this year everything is different with Covid so the conference will be entirely online instead of in person. I checked out the list of presentations, guest speakers, and it looks pretty exciting! In fact, one of my new “stars”, Chris Smaje, is a guest speaker. He has just published a book called, “A Small Farm Future”, which I have ordered but not yet received. I can’t wait to read it.
He writes about how we need to change our agricultural models from being commodity-based and globalized, to more local and small-scale, supplying local needs in food and other essentials. He argues that this is future we need to secure a sustainable and resilient society. Most importantly, he says how it can actually be done without teeming masses of starving people. He is based in Britain and says that it is possible to feed the current population there solely on British land.
In other news, we did our last apple pressing of the year this past weekend. We had about 250lbs of apples that are coming to the end of their storage time so we either had to make sauce or squish them. We decided to make juice. Most of it went in to the freezer, but we are making 5 gallons into cider.
I am 95% done with seed work, having cleaned everything except some radish seeds and sunflower seeds, and one variety of beans. Germination tests are ongoing, and the website is mostly updated. It has been a lot of work this year cleaning seeds. I grew more seed than ever because sales were… robust, to put it mildly and I had sold out of some seed by March. But when a crop of dry-seeded vegetables (beets, spinach, kale,etc.) is ready for harvest in July, it gets wrapped in a tarp of stuffed in a sack to be put somewhere out of the way until the fall when it gets threshed and cleaned. This fall the seed cleaning work crashed on me like hollow wave. It was overwhelming, so next year I need to plan better and get help for this task.