The month of September usually offers some of the best sweet corn of the season and this year is no exception. Our sweet corn is growing strong and it is flavourful, juicy and tender. It’s so delicious that we have created new menu items at our food truck that our customers are snapping up. Our food truck is called Fry Days and it is located in Bradford, Ontario. For the month of September we are offering grilled sweet corn added to our wildly popular loaded fries, grilled corn on the cob and a fantastic Mexican Street Corn topping that can be added to any menu item of your choice. If Bradford is a bit far for you to travel to taste the wonders of our sweet corn, you can visit my blog “Surplus Sweet Corn Salad” for something new and exciting to cook with sweet corn.
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Today is International Potato Day! There are so many ways to cook this versatile vegetable. We love our potatoes mashed, baked, grilled, as a potato salad or turned into poutine. What’s your favourite potato dish?
You can visit “Spud Smarts – About Cooking Potatoes” to get the recipes for the dishes featured in this blog. There are many more unique potato recipes available at this link so why not get cooking? Bon Appétit! As you could imagine, the farm is in full flower during the summer. Here are some little known facts about our crop flowers in order of appearance in the photos:
Potato flowers are different colours depending on the variety of potato. These gorgeous pink flowers are a yellow variety. Male sweet corn flowers are commonly called tassels and their primary function is to produce pollen. Pumpkin flowers open every morning for only 6 hours and close during the heat of the day. Wheat flowers are called spikelets and are often dried and used in bridal bouquets. Alfalfa flowers are in the pea family and they can be found in our hay. You can visit “Bugs & Blossoms” to see some other beautiful flowers that can be found on our farm.  And just like that it’s sweet corn season! This weekend we will be opening our sweet corn stand with Norfolk County corn while we wait for our own crop to be ready. We also have baskets of new potatoes ready and waiting for you. Enjoy our fresh and local produce while it’s in season. You can visit “At The Door” for more information about our hours and location.
Baby it’s dry outside! Our crops are thirsty, so we pulled out the irrigation reel last week much to everyone’s horror. Irrigation is labour intensive and it runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every time one field pull is completed, the pipe needs to be laid again by hand. The irrigation requires constant monitoring to ensure there are no leaks or equipment breakages.
The reel needs to be turned off when it reached the end of the pull so there is no flooding. And no matter how carefully we calculate when the reel will be done, the one thing we know is that it almost never finished when we think it will be done. But there is always hope…there is rain in the forecast for tomorrow. To learn more about irrigation you can visit “Inside Irrigation.” School’s out, Canada Day has passed and cottages are open. This can only mean that summer has officially kicked off. And that leads to one thing here at the farm. The season for new potatoes is upon us!
RJ and myself dug these beauties last night. All they needed was a quick rinse and then they were dropped into the pot. We dotted them with butter and gobbled them up. Very soon we will dust off the harvester and you will be able to purchase them at the farm door. You can visit “Tater Tales Grilled New Potatoes” for further cooking inspirations for our new white potatoes.  It’s a little known fact that one of the side benefits of potato farming is the annual rock harvest. The growth conditions we require for our potatoes are the exact same conditions that generate quick growth in the small pebbles in our fields. As you can see from the photo, the rocks can get quite large in a matter of a few months. All the rocks we harvest are stored in separate boxes and sold to local quarries.
Are you questioning any of this yet?! The truth is that rocks are a huge menace to our equipment. Every year the ground heaves and suddenly there are rocks where none existed before. We always keep a careful eye out and remove the new large rocks and boulders from our fields before they can damage our equipment. The rock pictured above was picked up by our potato harvester. It would have done some severe damage had it rolled through all the belts. Fortunately RJ caught it before that happened. Thank you for reading along with me and Happy April Fool’s Day to you! You can visit “Winter Harvesting” for another fun April Fool’s Day joke where I dispel a common misunderstanding about our potatoes we sell all winter.  The packing shed is crammed 50lb bags of potatoes ready for delivery. This is one of three rows of potatoes that are being delivered on Monday. All week the grading line goes full tilt to keep up with orders from restaurants that are planning for one of their busiest days of the year this Friday. Where are you getting your fish & chips from?! You can visit “Chip Butty Recipe” for a fun and very different recipe involving fresh cut fries.
 Spring is in the air! Murray would like to remind everyone to change their clocks tonight as we begin daylight savings time. After a long and lonely winter, I think I can safely say we are all looking forward to longer days, warmer weather and the start of our next growing season.
To see some fun spring photos, you can visit “Spring Cleaning” where John is hard at work performing routine spring maintenance on our tractors. Celebrating women today and every day. Christina and myself wear many hats at the farm. Our jobs entail customer service, organizing daily delivery routes to restaurants, health & safety, food safety, accounting, payroll, general bookkeeping and data management, maintaining our website, updating our social media…..and yes I can go on!
Here are a few great photos of us in action: the good old days when we used to work in the same office before COVID interrupted us; myself hanging banners and signage at our self-serve produce stand and Christina enjoying a view from a tractor on a rare field trip out of the office. One thing we know for certain – we are appreciated here since we deal with all the papers so the guys can be out in the fields where they truly want to be. You can see my role as spokesperson for our farm by listening to my radio interview at “BJ’s Radio Interview’” or watching a promotional video for Snapd magazine at “BJ’s Acting Debut.” |
The Common-TaterThompson Potato FarmFarming is fascinating! 
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