These adorable pictures are guaranteed to start your Tuesday morning by generating a warm and fuzzy feeling! I sometimes stumble across the most endearing animals as I travel around the farm collecting images for the website. Here are a few of my favourite photos of the cutest little animals that live here with us, from the family of ducklings that has taken up residence in our irrigation pond to the baby hummingbird that flew into our garage. For more pictures of animals you can visit “Pond Life Part II.”
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What’s growing at the farm this week? The potatoes are thriving with all the rain this summer. They are sizing up nicely and it looks like we should be on track to start selling them in early August. The sweet corn is not as far along as we would like to see given the very cold and rainy start to the summer, but rest assured it will eventually be ready to eat. The winter wheat is close to maturity, even the sections that were knocked down earlier this summer. John finally made the first cut of hay and we can only hope the rains hold off for a few days so it can dry properly. So the farming trade off continues….what’s good for one crop may not necessarily be ideal growing conditions for another crop. You can visit our “Production Gallery” to see more photos of our crops growing as well as the equipment we use.
Cooking with my friend Chef Derek Roberts was a two day whirlwind of creating recipes and sharing ideas. As we cooked together, Chef Derek developed a taste for country music while I learned an appreciation for blue cheese.
We are thrilled to present these potato salad recipes that are based on a top secret family recipe passed down to me from RJ’s grandmother. The basic potato salad recipe comes with all Grandma Morton’s cooking tips and secrets she shared with me on how to make the perfect potato salad. Chef Derek and myself have created three different options for dressing: “Dill-icious”, “Blue Cheese” and “Onions 3 Ways.” No matter which of these recipes you choose to make first, we guarantee you will be delighted with the end result. Click on the file above to either print or download the recipe. The recipe section of our website is growing quickly! More potato recipes can be found at “Spud Smarts – About Cooking Potatoes” and in previous installments of “The Common-Tater” in the recipes categories. Bon Appétit! Over the last few weeks the potato plants have burst into flower leading RJ to nickname the fields beside our house “The Garden.” Rather a big garden indeed! Not only are the delicate flowers beautiful to look at, it means good news for those of us who are waiting for new potatoes. The flowers are proof that the tubers are thickening up into potatoes. The white flowers are on our early potato plants called AC Chaleur and the pink flowers are on our Yukon Gem plants. There is a wide variety of potato sizing when the plants are this young as you can see in the picture of the potatoes I scrubbed up and sorted by size. So while they are ready to feed my family for dinner, they are not quite ready to be sold to our customers. To learn more about new potatoes you can visit “One Potato, New Potato!”
We are hiring! We are looking for a part-time entry level office assistant to work in our busy home office in a fast paced, deadline oriented work environment. Specific job information, duties, and qualifications are itemized in the PDF document above. Resumes can be emailed to tpf.employment@gmail.com
Happy birthday Canada! We are proudly flying 20 Canadian flags this month at our farm. If you’re out and about today, swing by our Canada 150 driveway to pick up a bag of 100% Canadian potatoes! As we get ready to celebrate the birthday of this amazing country we are so proud to call home, I thought this would be a perfect time to highlight some Canadian Spud trivia. Did you ever wonder how many potato farms there are in Canada, or where potatoes are grown? Enjoy this slide show dedicated to Canadian potato facts. You can learn more fascinating potato facts by visiting “Spud Smarts – About Potatoes.”
To quote a famous author “A River Runs Through It.” And let me tell you, there is NOT supposed to be a river running through our sweet corn fields. Our fields here are generally very sandy and drain quite well. But this summer there has been too much rain for our fields to handle. As you can see from these pictures, water is rushing from the forests and pooling in the fields. Hopefully the rain will cease, the fields will dry up and the little sweet corn plants won’t drown. To see a video of RJ planting sweet corn in the extremely dry conditions of the summer of 2016 you can visit “Sweet Corn – Coming Soon!”
 Today we mourn the loss of one of our employees. Tony DeFusco worked for us as a driver for over ten years. Sadly he lost his battle with cancer last week. He was a responsible, reliable and dedicated employee who embraced his life to the fullest. He had a great sense of fun and a keen sense of humour. He will be sorely missed by all of us here at the farm as well as by our customers. We hope you are at peace Tony.
This Father’s Day morning seems to be the calm between the storms. Yesterday’s ferocious storm blew in and out quickly but left behind a trail of damage that cannot be overcome. Over 30% of our winter wheat has been knocked down. The little potato plants that were bent over will straighten up and be fine, but the winter wheat will not recover. While we will still be able to harvest it, the combining job will be difficult and time consuming. Today we hope the severe weather predicted will pass over us. I think we have had enough excitement here for one weekend...You can see a video of our winter wheat dancing in the wind last summer by visiting “Dancing Wheat.”
June is a relatively peaceful month for our farm. The rush to plant the crop is thankfully behind us, and early crop maintenance has been completed. Last year was a dry as a bone and the irrigation equipment was cleaned up and put to use early. This year we have already had more rain than the entire season of 2016. While there are some bare spots in areas where the seed potatoes were drowned out early in the spring, the potato plants are thriving in most fields (as you can see from the nicely filled in rows in the photos above.) The close up pictures are our Yukon Gem potato plants, which are very popular with our customers. To learn more about our different varieties of potatoes you can visit “What We Offer – Potatoes.”
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