I was the first one to arrive today, and spent the first little while browsing the aisles of the garden, seeing what was ready to be harvested. I had a few visitors, like the hummingbird that enjoyed sipping from these beautiful red flowers. With so many tall and diverse flowers, the garden can support a lot of wildlife. Most of the wildlife is non-native because so are the flowers, so it’s not ideal for this continent’s ecological integrity. But it certainly beats the wildlife in the middle of most Toronto parks.

There were many scrumptious-looking apples to be found today, but most of them were not ready to be eaten. I bit into a few to test them out, and most were too hard or too chalky. I’m sure they’ll be amazing when they’re ready, I’m just not yet able to tell when that will be.

These are the reddest apples in the orchard. The maps we have to identify the different varieties are out of date and do not quite parallel the orchards themselves. So I’m going mostly by colour, ripeness, and location – all done by memory. Wendy, the Spadina House heritage horticulturalist who set this whole thing up, is working on an updated map for each of the two orchards. I can’t wait to know what we’ve been eating/picking/selling!

One variety we know for sure is the golden russet. Everybody who has come by is keeping an eye on them, waiting patiently until they’re ready for us to munch on. That will be a good market day!

Today I noticed that the grapes were ready. There are two rows of grapes dividing the two orchards. Wendy explains that they’re best used in jellies and jams, not as table grapes. Farrah and I tried them out, just to see, and we both agree with Wendy! They’re just a little sour. We didn’t end up picking any of these today but maybe in the near future?

Two new volunteers came out today, and they were extraordinary! Antonietta, with whom I used to work at the High Park Children’s Garden, and her little sister Francesca came along. Francesca’s just about to start high school, so she’s our youngest volunteer yet. She had never harvested a cabbage before, but she wielded that knife with such certainty!

We harvested red cabbage:

white eggplants (because of which I had a food connection epiphany – “That’s why it’s called EGGplant!”):

pear tomatoes:

and cauliflower:

My camera broke temporarily at the market itself, but we had a great turnout and lots of interest was expressed for not far from the tree. One interesting story emerged around our cauliflower…

The week previous, we sold all of our cauliflower almost immediately. People were very interested in the variety of cauliflower, how some of the fine tips were slightly purple or yellow in colour and how the florets looked so tightly packed. And they proved to taste just as wonderful. My partner and I took one home the first week and threw it on the barbecue just as is – not even with any oil – and it was delicious.

Midway through the week, Wendy at Spadina House got a call from a market customer. When she first told me this, I was worried we might have mistakenly poisoned somebody or sold them rotten produce. Quite the contrary. He had called to say how delicious the cauliflower was, wanted to know the variety, and could he please buy some more? It turns out he cooked some up with shallots and butter (and maybe some rosemary?) for a dinner party and everybody was raving about the cauliflower! He bragged that it was from the market and Spadina House (or so I imagine them sitting around beaming about not far from the tree) and promptly bought some more. He was at the market this week to inform us of the variety: snowball cauliflower.

Yet another anecdote to prove that local is better. It was planted as a heritage variety, it was picked by his neighbours, it was biked 1.3km to the market, it was cooked with love, and it tasted delicious. Take that, Monsanto and Nestle.