We bought 3 wasabi plants three years ago. We left them in pots outside and deer ate them. Wasabi is spicy. We thought deer would not like them… The following year, we saw one of them had a little shoot so we transplanted it in our garden. Last summer it was crushed by a huge fuki leaf and died, or so we thought. We just noticed it is still alive! One day, we hope, we can harvest fresh wasabi!

Spring seems to have arrived at our farm. We have been busy sowing and starting spring crops both out on the field and in the propagation house last week. 

We have sown snap peas, radish, arugula, turnip and beets outside with floating row cover, and also in the greenhouse sown radish, arugula and komatsuna green.  Spring temperature greatly fluctuates so we are not certain that the timing is optimum or not, but nevertheless, hope they survive this week’s cold snap, germinate and give us early spring crops.  For us new farmers, spring sowing is still a gamble.  Last year we had to sow snap peas three times until they finally germinated and grew.  It would be a great success if last week’s peas smoothly grow!  

Our farm is frequented by deer.  As temperature goes up, they seem to become bolder and lose their fear toward humans, maybe because we do not care as far as they do not come into our garden area (yes, its fenced and we make sure gate is closed all the time).  Last year we had a young buck and even younger one and sometimes they sleep just under our bedroom window (outside!).  One of them ended up suspiciously dead in the nearby forest and our neighbour and we thought he was a victim of a cougar since he was not alert at all (he was sometimes in deep sleep beside our house…)  We hope our new deer visitors are alert enough to escape whatever dangers they encounter around here..

Our market schedule is as follows:

• Island Roots Farmers’ Market: Beban Park, 2300 Bowen Road, Nanaimo, 3 – 6pm on Wednesday
• AGI Market: AGI Hall, Gabriola, 10am – 1pm on Saturday

Have a beautiful week!