Happy Anniversary!

Hello Again Everyone,

We are proud to announce that today, February the 1st, is our 2 year anniversary on Bantry Bay Farm!!! Yahoo, balloons and streamers are flying everywhere! Things have certainly changed since we first arrived back in 2006. We've become 3 instead of 4(Brad is in BC now, but will grace us with his presence in the spring hopefully), grown in field size, focused on better crops, gained a new niece(Sasha), lost friends to bigger and better opportunity and made new ones! All in all it has been a pretty wild ride that all of us are completely in love with.

We recently finished our planting schedule and seed ordering so hold on to your seats while I fill you in:

At the beginning of the year we set up a schedule for ourselves to tell us when we need to plant all our different crops. This includes starting them indoors and getting them ready to be planted outside(there is a process to get them adjusted to the great outdoors called 'hardening off'). This year we will beginning in the middle of February with Artichokes(which Sofie loves!) and finish with Garlic(which I love!) in October. It's a full time task trying to stay on schedule but we did pretty well last year.

Now this is where it gets really exciting! This year we have decided to hone in on really good seed. The last few years we have been more whimsical in our seed selection and chose really cool sounding items instead of reliable ones. We are glad we did because we found some really great varieties but now it is time to find the kind that will produce more consistently.
Some of our oldies but goldies are lemon cucumbers, multi-coloured carrots, and really delicious Blacktail watermelons, which is a dark green round melon with bright red flesh. We also had a light green watermelon with a yellow flesh that was also quite tasty.
Some of our new recruits are super early sugar snap peas. These babies grow only a few feet high but they do it quickly for an early delicious treat. We also welcome a whole new world of cherry tomatoes! We haven't really grown cherry tomatoes before(just our yellow currants) so this will be fun. We are going to have an array of colours(red, orange, yellow, black, green, and maybe even purple!). A few other newbies are cylindrical beets(long and skinny and sooooooooooooooooooooooooo delicious!) and ace, lipstick and apple sweet peppers. We are constantly looking for sweet peppers and eggplants that will grow in this climate. They are finicky little things!

So there you have it folks! These are the day of our lives. What I forgot to mention was that I spent the earlier part of this week in Fredericton with my nieces. They are a riot. Sofie goes to school in mornings so I spent some time with Sasha and man can she smile! She loves to be tickled and lets out the best laugh when you get her going. When Sofie got back from school, we would get whisked away into one of her magical lands where she sells lemonade to customers walking by or go to her friends birthday parties around the block(which is really just in the next room over). She has an incredible imagination that is keeping her, and her family,well entertained.


Hope you are all planning your trips to come visit us,
Love Katherine