Hot summer arrived ahead of summer solstice and everything is growing fast.

We finally started planting shishito peppers outside. Their seedlings took a long time to grow to the right size. We are experimenting different mulch materials for summer crops this year. No mulch, straw and raw wool.

We are fortunate to have a friend whom we can get straw and raw wool materials from. Our aim to use mulch is to keep the soil warm and retain moisture as much as possible. Our farm locates close to the highest point of this island and even in late spring or early summer it can be chilly at nighttime. Then once real summer arrives, the soil becomes very dry fast because it is sandy even after we annually add organic material. Last season we noticed our shishito pepper plants did not grow very well and we could not harvest as much as we wanted. This year we want to see if different kinds of mulch can give peppers more consistent heat and moisture for more harvest. Hopefully, this experiment will help us to bring more shishito to the market this summer and in future. We will conduct the same experiment with another summer crop, eggplant!

Our regular collard green decided to bolt… 

Last year collard we planted in spring kept producing delicious greens well into late fall, and we assumed the same result this year, but nature always defies our assumption. We guess that collards have been stressed by long chilly and relatively dry spring, and sudden arrival of summer created perfect reason for them to flower. We ordered a new batch of seeds and will sow them for mid-summer planting and fall/winter harvest. In the meantime, we still have plenty of another collard variety, pilgrim cabbage. It’s thick and large leaves are very flavorful and stand well in braising and cooking in stew and soup. Please pick a bunch at the next market.

Yoko and I met in a university in Kobe, Japan, and I graduated one year earlier and moved to Tokyo for work. Until Yoko graduated and also moved to Tokyo the following year, there was more than 500km distance between us. What connected us without a smart phone? Other than snail mail and occasional landline phone call, there was Shinkansen, highspeed railway network for us.

Have you ridden a Shinkansen in Japan? Shinkansen is a highspeed railway network of presently about 3,500km. Trains run at the speed of anywhere between 260km/h to 320km/h. It is safe (no fatal accident ever for more than 60 years), comfortable and very convenient (Between Tokyo and Osaka, train miraculously runs in every 3 minutes). The construction of the first section of about 500km from Tokyo to Osaka started in 1959 and its service started on October 1, 1964 just before the opening of Tokyo Olympics and I was 8 days old! The purpose of constructing Shinkansen was to address the lack of railway capacity during Japan’s rapid economic growth, but there was a visionary entrepreneur who proposed to the government the plan of connecting Tokyo and Osaka by highspeed railway back in 1907!

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 – 2pm on Saturday

Thank you for reading our weekly newsletter. Please enjoy wonderful summer weather!