LATEST FROM THE FARM — Gardening Tips & Tricks

It’s hard to believe it, but even here in Ottawa we can be eating a variety of organic local greens right through the winter. While most of the salad that you’ll find in the grocery store has travelled in excess of 4000 kilometers to get to your plate, ours has travelled less than 50 meters.

You’ve grown a garden full of amazing vegetables and your plants are looking evermore bountiful. It’s time to harvest, but now you’re not sure how to tell when everything is perfectly ripe and ready to pick. This is what you’ve been waiting for all season and you want to make sure you make the most of it! Don’t worry, Farmer Jo is here to help.

Tending a garden is a perfect example of how one needs to focus on the journey, not just the destination. Gardening isn’t simply about the final harvest, it’s about all of the care, thought, and attention put into it throughout the course of the season. Getting out into your garden on a regular basis allows for mindful presence, a connection to the earth and natural environment, and builds a relationship with your plants. This presence, along with regular maintenance, will allow you, and your garden, to bloom.

Choosing what to grow in your vegetable garden is at once a fun, and sometimes overwhelming, undertaking. When you look at all of the options available it is easy to get carried away, or overcome by choice! Learning which vegetables and varieties work best for both you and your garden can be the process of a lifetime, but Farmer Jo has a few ideas to get you started.