Did you all enjoy clear autumn days in the past week? Even after working hard removing poles and trellis for pole beans and preparing beds for lettuce transplant, I did not feel exhausted like I did during hot summer days. I see thick morning dews and found most of our green plants in the garden did not need irrigation. Open pollinated variety of Komatsuna, Japanese mustard green, which were transplanted a few weeks ago are growing. I will transplant their F1 cousin to outside sometime this week. We are looking forward to seeing the difference between the two varieties when they are mature and tasting them.  

We are still harvesting lots of lettuce, arugula, mizuna and radicchio for our salad mix, collard greens, chards and potatoes.  Our cucumbers and eggplants seem to be ending soon, so please come to the market and get some while they are still available.

This afternoon I dug up a few Gobo plants to find out how they were growing.    

They were not like thin and long Gobo we find at grocery stores in Japan but when I cooked Kimpira Gobo, it tasted really good! Only problem was how difficult it was to dig them up from our rock-filled garden!! It took me a pickaxe, spade and hand shovels to dig a few plants out…. I still have some time to start harvesting for the market so need to find out the best way!.

I made a few changes in our baking. For our sunflower seed loaves and sesame loaves, I toasted seeds longer at lower temperature to extract more of their aroma.  Also, in order to make our raisin loaves a little more moist, I now re-hydrate raisins overnight before incorporating into dough.  I hope you noticed and liked these changes.

In Autumn in Japan, major event happens at schools all over.  It is called “Undoukai (運動会) or Sports Day.  Star athlete kids in the class really like this event and others who are not into sports are not looking forward to it.  The day is filled with different athletic games such as relay race, short sprint, tug of war, obstacle race and beanbag toss.  At some schools, parents show up with Bento box, cheer their children and sometimes there is a competition among parents!  The original Sports Day event said to be the one held at Navy School in 1874 in Tokyo, and similar event day have spread across colleges first.  Interestingly, when it was introduced to elementary schools after 1885, one of its objectives was to draw children to school from home when many families considered that school education, at that time focused on catching up to western countries, was irrelevant to their daily lives.  In my school days, it was almost a recreational event.  I did not like short sprint race (I was not a fast runner), but liked tug of war.  I looked up a few articles and statistics about Undoukai and learned that many schools now hold this event in the spring because it is still too hot in October!  Climate change affects Undoukai, too.  ,

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 your support and reading our newsletter. Have a wonderful week!