The Science Behind Delicious
If you've ever tasted one of our fresh from the field carrots or found yourself popping half your basket of grape tomatoes in your mouth on the car ride home from the Farm Store, you understand what makes our organic veggies unique!
Flavour and lots of it.
Then there's the fact that the veggies you pick up from the Farm Store seem to miraculously last twice as long in your fridge as your regular store-bought veggies.
Longevity.
Why? you might ask.
There is a whole lot of science and attention to detail behind every bite you take of our vegetables. Let's peel back the curtain and see what wizardry... I mean method lies behind ;)
1. We harvest at an exact stage of growth. If you were to graph a vegetable's ripeness (flavour) and its storability (longevity), you would find the point where these two lines meet - at maximum flavor and longest storability. This is the point at which we harvest our veggies! When you pick up straight from the farm you get as close to perfectly picked as possible. Talk about good timing ;)
Commercial growers (who use machines to pick) don't have the luxury of picking only the perfectly ripe veggies and leaving those that need a bit more time to mature. This means grocery store veggies vary a lot between over-ripe and not-quite ripe enough.
We've perfected the art and science of picking each variety of vegetable when it has the most flavoids, before it has started to age. Thirteen years of farming has taught us well!
2. We cool all our veggies to 4*C within 1 hour of harvest. Science shows that the flavour and storability of a vegetable goes down hill once it's picked. That is why we harvest only what we need and within the hour cool the picked veggies rapidly to 4*C. This quick cooling drastically slows the vegetable's biochemical decomposition, keeping its full tastiness and increasing how long it lasts in your fridge! (That is, if you get that veggie straight home and into your fridge :) or even better, if you munch it on the way home.
3. Sold within 36 hours of harvest. That's right, 36 hours from our field to your table (or fridge). Now that fresh! What vegetables we don't sell within 36 hours we simply compost to re-nourish the soil.
4. We create optimal soil health. The more science advances, the more we learn about soil health. While some agriculturalists are looking to find the perfect formula for maximizing crop yield, many of us, "rebel" farmers, are much more stoked about the science of - flavour, soil diet, soil regeneration...
Flavour: Did you know that every vegetable needs a specific diet to grow to its fullest health and flavour? It's true! And we have learned (and continue to learn) that feeding the soil a "whole food" diet, rather than overloading it with chemicals) let's the soil regenerate and create the nutrients that the plant can then access to grow into the most delicious and healthy produce possible.
Soil Regeneration: When you create a healthy soil the plant can then access the nutrients it needs naturally.
5. We choose over 140 different varieties of vegetables to groweach season to ensure we have the tastiest varieties for you! We've tested over 500 varieties of vegetables in our 13 years of farming and have narrowed our favorites down to the 140 varieties of plants we grow. Also, we try out new varieties every year because we are insatiably curious.
In commercial farming crops of vegetables are so large that harvesting needs to be done by machine to keep up. Harvesting is done all at once, when the majority of the vegetables are deemed to be ripe. Commercial farmers are limited to planting varieties of produce that are easy for the machine to pick.
Because we harvest by-hand, we are free to choose the most delicious, nutrient dense varieties without hesitation. If we grow it and love it, we plant more to share with you!
Delicious is a science. And it is an art. It's what we are passionate about because we love fresh organic vegetables as much as you do and frankly because we ourselves have such high standards for the veggies we put in our mouths.
Is all this talk of delicious making your mouth water for summer fresh vegetables? Good!
News of our Summer CSA is on the way starting next week!