FARM NEWS

We’re shutting down the farm!

The light has changed, the temperatures have shifted and the leaves are starting to turn colour. This signifies the beginning of the end for our growing season. Our summer crops are coming out and are being replaced with black landscaping fabric. Soon we will start harvesting our winter crops. Who’s excited for winter squash!?!

NEW PRODUCTS

Roasted Tomato & Lime Salsa

Description: This salsa is a labour of love for us. It's a long and laborious process to make it. We start by harvesting paste tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, garlic and cilantro from our farm. After we prep the vegetables we then roast the onions, tomatoes, jalapenos. The roasting caramelizes the onions, bringing out their sweetness while giving the tomatoes and jalapenos a beautiful smoky flavour. All of the ingredients are then added into giant pot and cooked down for hours. We patiently waiting as the chunky red soup bubbles and spurts. Once the flavours have melded together and the salsa has reached its perfect thickness, we can it.

The salsa is thick and slightly chunky. It has a savoury tomato flavour with smoky notes and a hint of organic lime juice that really makes the flavour pop. It takes all season to grow the ingredients in this salsa and a jar of it can be eaten within minutes. We hope you enjoy every bite!

Details: Sold in 24 oz (750 ml) jars. This is a canned product

Ingredients: *Tomatoes, *purple onions, *hot peppers, *garlic, *cilantro, organic lime juice, organic cumin, brown sugar, pink Himalayan salt, (*from Confluence Farms)

Jalapeno Cowboy Candy

Description: For our Cowboy Candy we started by picking fresh red and green jalapenos from our pepper patch. We then made a simple sweet brine with a hint of organic lime juice. The jalapenos have a nice crunch. The flavour is sweet with a hint of lime and finished with a pleasant spicy burn on the back of the palate. That classic sweet and spicy combo makes these one of our favorite pickles. If you bring these out at a BBQ we assure you they won't last long!

Try it with nachos, tacos, wraps, hotdogs, burgers, and Mac & Cheese.

Details: sold in 250 ml jars. This is a canned product.

Ingredients: Jalapenos (from Confluence Farms), organic apple cider vinegar, organic lime juice, sugar.

Sugar Rush Peach Pepper

Description: Sugar Rush Peach is a mildly spicy pepper that is slightly sweet and has fruity tropical notes. They are a bit hotter than a jalapeno but not as hot as a habanero.

Sweet Dijon Zucchini Pickles

Our Sweet Dijon Zucchini Pickles now come in a smaller 500 ml size!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT 🍎

The Price Of Responsible Food

This week we made our first batch of our Roasted Tomato & Lime Salsa. This salsa is very special to us. It’s made mostly from ingredients that we grew on the farm this year. The paste tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, garlic and cilantro were all grown by us. The tomatoes in particular take a very long time to grow and ripen. They come in right at the tail end of the season so we have to patiently wait all season and pray that disease and weather don’t ravage them.

We ran out of salsa many months ago so we were really excited to bring this product back and to share it with you all. If you’ve ever made salsa you know that it’s a laborious, all-day event. We spent a total of 9 hours making our salsa. We prepped all of the ingredients, roasted all of the vegetables and cooked it down for hours to get the perfect thickness. Once it was ready we had to then fill almost 40 jars and then quickly get all of the jars into the oven for a steam bath.

Once they finished in the oven we took the piping hot jars out of the oven, placed them on a cooling rack and anxiously waited to find out if they would seal properly. POP!… POP!… POP! The sweet sound of success! All of the jars we made sealed with that classic sound. Mission accomplished.

The last step we had to do was the cost analysis. We tallied up the cost of goods, the cost of the kitchen rental time and our labour. The number for the total cost was deflating, disappointing and expensive. As farmers and food producers we try our best to do everything the right way. We don’t degrade our soils with heavy machinery and ruin ecosystems with pesticide and herbicides. We don’t use exploited immigrant farmers to grow and harvest our crops. We don’t dump pollutants into the air, rivers and land. We don’t use fossil fuels to transport our food across the globe. And because we don’t do all of these things the products that we make are MORE expensive.

Does that make any sense? Why does growing and making responsible food cost more? It’s because the industrialized food system doesn’t have to pay for making our world a worse place to live. This is know as externalizing the cost. They’re able to make cheap food because they foot the bill to us in the form of a lower quality of life from polluted air, water, and soil.

The price of food at the grocery store is artificially low. We’re not paying the true cost of what it takes to produce that product. The reason the food that we make ends up costing more is because we internalize our costs - it’s what food should actually cost. Growing food takes a prodigious amount of effort. And we obviously didn’t become farmers to become rich. All we want to do is to make the best food that we can, to share that food with our community and to make a modest living. Our products are just a reflection of the true price of responsible food.