Our Veggies & Herbs

Some of our veggies come from our friends down the street at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm. I farmed with Melisanne, who runs the YMCA farm, 10 years ago at Fresh City Farms in Toronto. It’s fun to connect again and farm together. Their farm is also organic, and the farmers who work there have great energy and care around the crops. You can visit them next time you’re in the neighbourhood (visit their website here).

Squashes are loaded with great nutrients. A staple of indigenous cultures in the Americas, the squash is an important part of local food resilience. Why? They store well in the winter and hold a lot of nutritious food.

I like baking squash, sometimes with a little cinnamon or maple syrup. It also works great in soups. I’ll cut up an acorn squash and put the pieces in the freezer for later use. You can get a lot of squash out of it!

These acorn squash come from our friends down the street at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm. Each acorn squash is around 1kg.

A sweet, medium-sized apple that grows on one of our apple trees. This is a wild apple that is unique to this tree, so you get to try an apple that maybe only a few dozen others have before.

Apples grow all around the world, and humans have been eating them for many years. Most apples were sour in the past, and at one point apples were almost outlawed because everyone made alcohol from them.

Super fresh. No sprays or coatings. Just grown with Schomberg air, water, and sun!!

Lots of arugula fans out there. Like many of the fresh vegetables off the farm, arugula is packed with important nutrients and minerals our bodies need. Arugula often makes it onto superfood lists and certainly has a unique taste.

Most arugula is found in salad mixes. We don’t grow salad mixes on the farm because we don’t have the specialized equipment to do so. So earlier in the season, I didn’t try to grow much arugula. But since so many members asked for it, we thought we’d try it. So get a bunch of fresh arugula and have fun adding it to meals.

A potent herb with a delightful taste. Basil grows quickly in heat. It also reminds us of mint in how it grows. Its character is filled with vitality in the garden and adds a hint of summer to any dish you sprinkle it in.

Cool beans. What a surprise in the store…beans!

So I actually shouldn’t be growing beans and peas. At our small scale, beans are very unprofitable. They take a long time to pick on harvest days, when we already have limited time to begin with. So I wasn’t going to grow beans this year for the vegetable box. However, Farmer Keon really likes beans. He planted beans in random spots throughout the garden, and they’ve been quietly growing over the summer.

I brought my first bunch home earlier this week and I think I ate all the beans myself. We like to cook the beans in a little olive oil and garlic. We then keep the beans in the fridge and add them to meals when we need more veggies. I found myself adding them to a lot of meals.

Beet greens add an instant vibrancy to your salads.

I recently started eating beet greens with purpose. In the past, the beet itself was the primary part of the beet that was eaten. But the tops (the greens) are just as edible, and we’ve grown beets that happen to have the perfect beet greens.

So for you beet fans, here’s a way to get some of that beet taste before the beet.

Beet it!

This is the famous Detroit Red beet grown to full size. You can eat every part of the beet. I love the greens in salads, the stems can go into stir frys, and the beet itself can be sliced thin to eat raw or boiled.

Oh, the bell pepper. Purple, red, and green – whatever the colour, I am a big fan of peppers. These come from our friends down the street at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm. When the nights get cold, these should be nice and sweet.

This gem comes from China and is popular in Asia. It’s in the cabbage family, although you cook it like mustard greens.

Add it to stir fries or just steam it. I admit, I don’t steam many vegetables – but this one is actually quite tasty just steamed. Soy sauce or sweet sauces take this nutritious vegetable to the next level.

Broccoli shoots anyone? These little shoots really pack a punch and taste just like broccoli…surprised?

Normally when you buy these shoots at the store, they don’t last long. But when they’re still growing in your little tray, you get way better broccoli for longer.

This is a pre-order item. You place the order, and the following week I send you a small tray with living radish greens growing. Clip and eat your microgreens throughout the week – they always taste fresh. They’re also awesome for kids, since they can add a bit of greens right into their food. Loaded with nutrients, vitamins, and spunk.

Harvest your greens. Water once or twice. Then send back the trays.

You may be surprised to know it takes around three months to grow a carrot. The carrots you buy most of the year come from storage somewhere. So fresh farm carrots have something different that those other carrots don’t have.

As I’ve been studying how our carrots grow and researching other farms that grow more food in the winter, I came across some interesting information. The finest carrots we can grow are the late fall ones that get super sweet. So we’re on the road to trying this out.

Another aside with carrots: Apparently, kids love eating fresh carrots. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and heard it from many farmers. Excited to see how this works out!

Cauliflower was a lot of work to grow! Most of them in the garden didn’t form any heads, so the sheep were happy to eat those.

For the cauliflower fans, you’ll have to let us know how they taste. Vegetables like cauliflower are really special because in the past you would have to wait a year to eat them, and then they’d be gone before you knew it.

Cilantro, not parsley. They look really similar but taste different. Interesting fact: A percentage of people taste soap when they eat cilantro! Glad I’m not one of them.

Common mallow is a wild plant with unique properties. We just started using it in juices on the farm and find it acts like a thickener. The leaves and flowers are also tasty raw.

Look this one up. Digestive issues? Common mallow treats sores and helps with the kidneys and urinary tract. It’s a powerful plant that grows all around us, so it’s a fun one to learn about. I’ve been surprised at how nice it tastes.

Fresh, sweet corn on the cob. Fun fact: All those corn fields you see around are growing corn that isn’t sweet! It’s a starchy corn that’s good for feeding livestock or processing into all those corn-filled products in the store (e.g., fake sugar).

On another fun note, humans ate popcorn for thousands of years before other types came around. Corn is really an incredible producer that can store for a long time. Along with wheat and soy, corn is a very important crop in our food system.

So sweet corn is this treat we get only once a year. It’s the corn we eat fresh. If you have time, leave the corn in its wrapper and cook the corn over a fire or barbecue – it’ll give it an old-time smoked flavor. Boiling the corn is probably the easiest. I ate sweet corn with butter for years, but have recently gotten into flavouring it with lime.

Refresh yourself with cucumbers on hot days. All veggies when fresh and grown in rich organic compost produce a food that not only tastes good but is also loaded with beneficial nutrients and compounds. I know there are a lot of cucumber fans, which tells me there is some good stuff in this vegetable that our body craves.

Refresh yourself with cucumbers on hot days. All veggies when fresh and grown in rich organic compost produce a food that not only tastes good but is also loaded with beneficial nutrients and compounds. I know there are a lot of cucumber fans, which tells me there is some good stuff in this vegetable that our body craves.

A famous squash for Northern Farms, the delicata is a staple winter squash. Squash are important because they can store well into the winter. These come from our friends at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm down the street.

I was turned onto these by two farmer-chefs who eat all their own food. They find squash to be a cornerstone of winter eating. I myself am trying to explore the squashes a little more because they’re so important to a sustainable local diet. I plan on shredding mine and then dehydrating the squash so I can add it to my soups all winter. Yum!

An Italian eggplant. Another heat-loving crop from the greenhouse. The eggplants are looking great, and it’s nice to see them starting to produce fruit.

I want to learn more ways to cook eggplant this season. I only know how to fry them in a little olive oil or on the barbecue, but I also really enjoy eating them in Middle Eastern dishes.

I find that every year I focus on a few vegetables and learn a few different-tasting recipes. It doesn’t happen overnight or in a season. I think this year I’ll explore the eggplant, so if you have any good recipes let me know. 🙂

An attractive-looking lettuce. Adds great texture and bounce to your salads. I know this vegetable as the endive lettuce that comes from the Mediterranean.

I don’t have a lot to say about this vegetable. 🙂 Judge this one by its cover. Looks good in the field and on the plate.

Oooh la garlic! Very popular for cooking, and it’s also quite medicinal and good for our health.

This garlic is not from our farm, as we’ve been replanting our garlic so we can have enough to start selling. It often takes a few years to build up enough stock for certain foods – garlic is one of them.

I got my hands on some extra garlic from two farmer friends. So it’s a bonus that we all get to try some local garlic this year.

If you’ve noticed the trend with local food, it’s more tasty and rich with smells than what you get at the grocery store. No exception with this garlic. If you’re a garlic lover, then you’ll appreciate the new levels of garlic. If you like garlic but aren’t a professed lover of garlic, then remember: less goes a longer way.

It’s not the garlic, but the green top that grows with the garlic. It tastes like garlic – so cook it like it’s garlic – except it’s green!

This is a fun addition to the store as garlic scapes are very much a direct from the farm vegetable. Garlic scapes can store for up to a month in the refrigerator and give us that garlic taste we need before the actual garlic is ready.

Oh-so-fun cabbage. Cabbage rolls, anyone? Kimchi? Salad or soup? That’s as far as my knowledge with cabbage goes when it comes to cooking.

Cabbage is super healthy, so I regularly make kimchi now. I’ve also tried freezing cabbage in the past, which worked well. I’m a fan of some thinly sliced cabbage in stir fries. I find cabbages provide a lot of food, so I end up using them in a few dishes when I do start eating them.

Our cabbage heads are small to medium. We weigh them out before they go into your vegetable box. If you select 1lb, then we’ll actually give you one cabbage.

Green kale! This is one of the most potent kales out there. Potent in the garden means it’s potent in the stomach.

This is my favorite general kale. Works raw, steamed, baked, fried, dehydrated…that’s all I’ve tried so far. What have I missed?

Green onions go with everything. They can be eaten raw or cooked. Our green onions are almost like garlic and can survive the cold winter months.

Every year, this happens: You have green tomatoes that never have a chance of turning red! The tomato plant needs enough sun to make the sugars that ripen its tomatoes.

So what do we do with the green tomato? Make salsa or fried tomatoes. I’ve actually never tried frying tomatoes, but I certainly make salsa. It’s a nice addition to tacos or a sandwich.

Get a pound or two and try it out. If you’re into canning, then a few pounds can pack some jars. I like to use the 250ml jars and then give out the salsa as gifts. It looks great, and if you add a little sugar it becomes just as sweet.

Ground cherry is a sweet/tart fruit that belongs to the same family as tomatoes and potatoes. It really reminds me of a tomato in terms of texture and look. They have a similar flavor profile as the tomatillo.

I don’t have a lot of experience with this one. These come from our friends over at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm. I’ve grown a few plants over the last few years but only made some salsa. If you look them up, you’ll find recipes for pies, sauces, desserts, and drinks. What could you try?

First food from our greenhouse. Peppers are great for our health and add such a unique touch to our food.

These peppers are a hot pepper, although I find them quite mild (which I like). This is obviously relative. I don’t like very spicy food, but do eat spicy food – I hope that helps.

The skin is always milder than the seeds inside. So if you find it too hot, you can always remember to take out the seeds before eating.

Summer time sorrel. Like other sorrells, this has a great sour flavour. The leaves also have a nice texture for eating. Our farm member Vijay planted these, and his family uses them in many foods including sauces and pickling.

The variety of flavours in foods indicate different compounds. It’s the same way different colours in foods also indicate what’s in the food. A great strategy to make sure you get all the variety you need is to just get in all the flavours.

Another type of peppers in the store! These are an Italian variety of sweet peppers that come in fun colours.

Italians are not only known for cooking but also growing. This is actually quite common throughout the world – good in the kitchen means good on the farm. These peppers come from our friends at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm.

These are not artichokes. Artichokes grow above ground. Jerusalem artichoke is a tuber that grows underground. I’ve only ever noticed them at healthy grocery stores like Ambrosia.

They taste similar to potatoes. I’ve mainly eaten these sautéed or fried. I add them to potatoes, and they go great together.

So two things you should know about Jerusalem artichokes:

1) They make you fart. If you treat these like potatoes and eat a big portion, you’ll be farting up a storm. Great for your health, not for the family. But in regular doses, they’re great!

2) You can plant these roots now in the garden and have them growing forever. These are hardy in our cold climate, which means they survive year round outside. Just a warning: you’d better pick a good spot in your garden, because they are hard to get rid of!

Few plants can survive our cold winter, even under the protection of greenhouses and row covers. So we had the bright idea of doing a tree sale! Basically, take a whole tree of kale home and give one last push to enjoy fresh greens and also save some greens for the winter.

The Toscano kale is perfect for saving. You can enjoy some fresh in meals, make some kale chips, or pack some leaves in bags and stick them in the freezer or dehydrate them and store them in the pantry.

What a fun way to explore a plant and study how it grows. You can expand your understanding of where their leaves come from. It’s incredible how strong the stem gets on these plants in just a few months.

Das German cabbage, the unique looking kholrabi. I’ll surely be trying some new things with this vegetable. The bulb and stems are the edible parts. Eat them cooked or raw.

If this is a new one for you, a good tactic is to just cut it up thin and add it to your food!

Fresh lavender! It can replace rosemary in recipes. Or you can dry it out and just have it make things smell nice. You can also mix lavender with epsom salts to create a nice bath, or hang a bunch in the shower and have the freshness around you.

The colder months mean soup season. Perfect timing for leeks! Leeks go great in soup. How else can we eat this vegetable? I came across a recipe with leeks on pizza, so that might be what I try this season.

These leeks come from our friends down the street at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm.

Full heads of organic lettuce. Wow! So nice to see such big, healthy salad. Imagine what it can do for you and your family?

Fresh. Mint makes life tastier. It really does, activating our glands in our mouth. Makes sense when you get really close and smell that mint.

We start off with small bunches for the mint lovers before the rest grows up and there’s mint for everyone.

Because mint activates your mouth for food, there are some of you out there who are actually addicted to food with mint in it!

A full onion, top and bottom. Eat the tops as green onions, and the bottom is your standard onion bulb.

I had my first one two days ago, and the family loves these onions. It’s fun to eat produce that looks different then what you find in the store. These onions are a little different, with a unique flavour profile. Try them!

Fresh pea shoots as you need. A nice tray actually goes a long way in the kitchen. Living food filled with nutrition and spunk. Cut a little for sandwiches and salads, or just eat them on their own.

This is a pre-order item. You place the order, and the following week I send you a small tray with living radish greens growing. Clip and eat your microgreens throughout the week – they always taste fresh. They’re also awesome for kids, since they can add a bit of greens right into their food.

Harvest your greens. Water once or twice. Then send back the trays.

Mom sweet pumpkin. All around the world, people eat pumpkins and grow specific varieties which are super tasty. Yes, you can still eat the pumpkin you have on your doorstep for Halloween, but these pumpkins are the correct variety and also organic.

I’m a huge fan of roasted pumpkin. I’ll eat the roasted pumpkin fresh, then puree and freeze what’s left over. I’ve also frozen slices of fresh pumpkin, then used them in the winter for soups. Oh yeah, and pumpkin pie. If you like pumpkin pie, then nothing will beat fresh culinary pumpkin.

Fresh instant greens. This little tray packs a lot of greens. I like to place the tray on my table and just cut greens as I go. It’s fun and easy to spice up any dish – sandwiches, stir fries, salads, etc.

This is a pre-order item. You place the order, and the following week I send you a small tray with living radish greens growing. Clip and eat your microgreens throughout the week – they always taste fresh. They’re also awesome for kids, since they can add a bit of greens right into their food. Loaded with nutrients, vitamins, and spunk.

Harvest your greens. Water once or twice. Then send back the trays.

High in vitamin C, which is an antioxidant that helps boost your immune system. This week, I have a spicy variety – mostly a red type, but some purples too.

I use radishes to clear my sinuses. A small bite gets that spicy taste working its way through me. I’ve recently been reminded that all parts of the radish are good to eat!

I cut the green tops and save them for a stir fry. I store the bottoms (the radish bulbs) in a tupperware with water. That keeps them nice and crisp in your fridge.

While I was researching radish, I came across an article talking about who eats radishes: Apparently, it’s affluent eaters who are picky about quality, taste, etc.

The most requested veggie this year would be rapini. It’s an example of how important plants are to us when we’re used to eating them.

Rapini doesn’t like growing in warm weather, so we had to wait until the fall to try it out. As it turns out, rapini is also loved by birds. Despite our best efforts with nets, little birds pulled out a lot of the small plants. So this time around, we only got three bunches of rapini.

Next time around, we’ll need to try a more aggressive strategy to keep those birds away…a cat or scarecrow? Not sure yet – but with rapini’s popularity, we certainly need to try more.

Oh-so-fun cabbage. Cabbage rolls anyone? Kimchi? Salad or soup? What’s the difference between green and red cabbage? Some recipes seem to call for different cabbages. I think red cabbage adds more colour to meals.

Cabbage is super healthy, so I regularly make kimchi now. I’ve also tried freezing cabbage in the past, which worked well. I’m a fan of adding some thinly sliced cabbage in stir fries. I find cabbages provide a lot of food, so I end up using them in a few dishes when I do start eating them.

Our cabbage heads are small to medium. We weigh them out before they go into your vegetable box. If you select 1lb, then we’ll actually give you one cabbage.

Great for baking and frying. And the tender leaves are nice chopped in salad.

Super kale in the garden! Take one leaf off at a time and this kale plant will keep giving you kale throughout the season. Super hardy and nutritious! Great in any garden in Schomberg.

If you plant it near your house, you can cover the plant in winter and have kale into the new year! Ask me how and I can show you. Go kale, go you.

Red Russian kale has a beautiful color. Eat it raw, cook it, or make kale chips. I dehydrate them and eat them all winter…all year, actually. Starts in the garden.

Rhubarb is an extraordinary plant. It can grow all the way up to Alaska! It’s a hardy perennial with a unique taste. I bet you didn’t know the leaves are actually poisonous! The only other common vegetable plant that shares that trait is the tomato plant.

I actually eat it raw most of the time, just chewing on some stalk. Rhubarb is famous in pies. If you know other ways to eat rhubarb, let me know.

Our rhubarb in particular has been growing on the farm for a long time. This year, I was able to take 40 plants just from this one mother! In the future, we’ll have even more rhubarb to go around.

There are a few types of zucchinis out there besides the common dark green type. Zucchinis have a lot of cooking options. Just look up recipes for something that catches your attention.

A fun farm innovation. An easy way to get a great salad packed with different veggies. This means you get different nutrients, vitamins, colours, texture, taste, and more.

I know sometimes it’s hard to buy all the different bunches of veggies to have them on hand to make a salad. So this kit has enough of everything you need to make an exceptional salad.

In this kit, you’ll find green onions, lettuce, beet, arugula, radish, carrots, kale, and chard. Throw everything together, and you’ll have a fresh, healthy salad for a few meals.

Super spinach! Every plant in the garden has a unique growing advantage. As farmers, we exploit that unique growing advantage to grow more of that plant. It’s a back and forth with humans and plants.

For example, rice has the advantage of being able to grow in water. They don’t actually need to grow in water, but because they can and most plants cannot, farmers grow rice in flooded fields to eliminate the other plant competition. Cool strategy, huh?

Spinach grows in the cold weather, better than any other plant in the garden. Our spinach in the greenhouses will grow as our fresh dose of green throughout the winter.

Spinach has many great health benefits: Better bones, skin, and hair. Reducing the risk of diabetes or cancer. I was surprised when looking it up. Spinach is loaded with vitamins, minerals, and more. It fuels a healthy body!

Spinach is also amazing because it can be eaten in so many ways – people say it’s probably the chicken of vegetables. Raw or cooked. Frozen or fresh. Easy to add to any meal.

Stinging nettle is an oldie but goodie. It’s edible and has medicinal uses. You need to look this one up.

I’ve only used stinging nettle in two ways. The first is for arthritis in the hands. Rub some leaves on your skin and let the stinging action activate blood flow. The initial sting subsides to a fresher, lighter feel. Hard to explain – you just have to experience it for yourself.

I’ve also eaten this potent green in soups. It’s kind of like spinach! Eaten raw, the leaves need to be handled with care unless you want a sting. Roll the leaves to eat them raw. It’s work to eat them, but this is a green you can find outside in early spring, if you know where to look.

I love sweet peppers so much, it was one of my first crops. This season, we had no sweet peppers on the farm because my seed was bad and COVID hit during the window when I needed to start the plants. 🙁

So these sweet peppers come from our friends down the street at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm. 🙂

Native to the Mediterranean, swiss chard is beautiful to look at and eat. Tastes great eaten raw or cooked.

Here’s one tip for eating chard raw: don’t eat the stem. I find the stems are great to add to stir fries, but they make for a whole lot of chewing when eating them raw.

The tomato: Queen of the Ontario vegetable garden? Of the people who do start a vegetable garden, I’ve noticed the tomato plant seems to always be there. And lots of people grow only tomatoes. Why?

Grocery store tomatoes are distant cousins to fresh garden tomatoes. Garden tomatoes have a lot more taste and certainly carry more zing than a standard grocery store red tomato.

Adding some sea salt to one of our fresh tomatoes makes for a great snack. For those of you growing tomatoes in the garden, dehydrating is a great way to preserve that rich tomato flavour into the cold months.

Can you believe that tomatoes are one of the earliest plants to start in the spring? These were started in March, and only now at the end of August do we start to enjoy them.

A mixed pint of tomatoes: Some red, some orange, and some yellow. It’s been exciting to grow tomatoes in the greenhouse for the first time. Some of the plants are really full of these little beauties.

If you’re patient, let them go red in your refrigerator or on your kitchen counter.

Yar nice and smooth kale. Deep greens. Enough said.

Super kale in the garden! Take one leaf off at a time, and this kale plant will keep giving you kale throughout the season. Super hardy and nutritious! Great in any garden in Schomberg.

If you plant it near your house, you can cover the plant in winter and have kale into the new year! Ask me how, and I can show you. Go kale, go you.

Toscano kale is easy to grow, harvest, and clean. It’s also simple to cook. I like baking these with olive oil, but they’re also nice in soups. It’s nice in a lot of dishes! Two or three plants will give you a happy amount of kale. 🙂

An early spring green. Cook it just like spinach. It kind of looks like spinach too. This is a gift we can enjoy during the hardest part of the year to get fresh vegetables. This plant took all that cold Schomberg spring and grew nicely.

These onions are quite a nice crop. While no one I’ve ever met eats onions on their own, few people avoid onions altogether. We find them in lots of different meals, creating that tasty flavour we crave.

These yellow onions are from our friends at YMCA Cedar Glen Farm. I can’t wait to try some fresh yellow onions in my cooking. I’ve never grown them before, so it’s a first for me.

Fun colour and look. I think the yellow zucchini tastes better than the green version, and I certainly like its bright colour better. I’m actually becoming a fan of this one. I’ve been cutting them into thick slices, drizzling them with olive oil and Mediterranean herbs, then popping them in my toaster oven. Done. Delicious.