Spadina House – the house of apple action. Well, actually, all the action happens outside.

The gardens are set up in a rectangle split into four, with vegetables hiding behind tall flowers in each quadrant. It’s a very hierarchical set-up, with Victorian flowers ruling over vegetables. Some veggies – like squash and turnips, referred to as “coarse vegetables” in the archival material – aren’t even nice enough to make it in the main garden and are instead tucked away behind the raspberries and currants. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. The servants were also treated by this philosophy, staying in separate quarters and allocated hidden paths to make their way around the property. One market-goer told us that there are even underground tunnels for the servants to travel to the main house, but we’ve yet to check that fact.

Since the produce is grown mostly just to show what these Canadian colonial gardens were like,  they sometimes have to be a bit obvious about wanting to be picked. These onions, for example, had heaved themselves up from the skin of the earth, just begging us to pick them! And so we did.

And yes, we also picked some apples. But just some. Bronwyn and Chris were both there to lead the apple picking and encourage us all to keep testing the wares just to make sure they were ready for public consumption. Yum.

Today was Farrah’s first day helping out with not far from the tree. I’m a bit behind in the blogging so I can tell you now she’s already proven herself to be one mad apple fiend.

At the market, we sold out in a couple of hours. It was a bit hard to get rid of the cabbage because they were so damn huge! A number of potential customers asked if we had a knife as they could only handle a half or a third. The hot problem-solver that he is, our friend Alex took one of them home, cut it into three, and returned with pieces for Farrah and me.