Just add sugar

In spite of the stinking cold weather of recent days, we are now harvesting our first field crop of the season. Just look at those glorious red stalks of rhubarb, makes your mouth water doesn't it! I must confess, rhubarb is not my favourite _______, hmmm, it must be a vegetable I suppose, definitely not a fruit, although it is best eaten as a fruit crisp....actually, I think you could argue that rhubarb is a herb! Why do I say this? Hang onto your seat belts, this blog entry is about to change into a philosophical question about the difference between a herb and a vegetable. Go ahead check out your dictionaries and Wikipaedia, but I think a herb is something you add in small quantities to your dish for flavour, and a vegetable is the non-seed or non-fruit part of a plant, and you can eat it on it's own. I don't think you can eat rhubarb on it's own. I think Rhubarb is a herb, that you add in small quantities to sugar!  
Asparagus (definitely a veggie) in a few days, if we ever get some heat!

In the Newspaper

Kathy Renwald wrote a great article today about our farm, specifically about Rafael Gonzalez, one of our Mexican workers. Everyone is talking about it, and it's well worth reading. Kathy writes a weekly column in the Hamilton Spectator, and you'll find the article on Rafael in the Thursday May 6th edition (GO section, pg 10), or you can download the PDF version here: Field of Dreams. Thanks Kathy!

Bring your own boxes

Is it safe to plant now? It sure felt like summer yesterday and again today, and with the trees in full bloom, the freshly mowed lawn, it even smells like summer. But what about that old rule of thumb: wait until the May 24th weekend before it is safe to plant? That's three weeks away! Hmmm. Now I'm not going to stick my head out and say it is safe to plant, but the 14 day 'forecast' looks mighty good :-)

• And we're off...
  It's official, we're open for another season! We're now opening at 9:00 in the morning (actually 8:53, when Alexander gets on the school bus). We're open every day, even Mondays until the second Monday in August (guess what day I'm looking forward to). Wendy and I were wondering if there would be any interest in us staying open late for flower sales. We were thinking just a couple of Friday evenings. Let us know, and if there is sufficient interest we can stay open, and as I said to Wendy, "I'm bribable!"
  
  
• And the winner is... Remember our speculations in the last newsletter concerning the first flower to sell out? Would it be Pretty Much Picasso? Calliope Dark Red? Or my guess of Raspberry Blast? Well, it was a geranium called 'Rocky Mountain Orange'. Not my pick, in fact none of us picked it to be the first one to go. Lots of Raspberry Blast Supertunias still available, btw.
  
  
• Farmers Market... Just a quick reminder, Wed May 5th is the first day of the Burlington Mall Farmers' Market. Gillian and Mike will have our truck filled to bursting with our flowers, so please drop by and say hello. Be gentle with Mike, he's still recovering from his first year at U of T.
  
  
• Flower Trays  In our last newsletter I talked about the surprisingly high cost of empty flower trays, and you had a chance to vote on our blog poll: Should we hide the cost of our flower trays, or price them separately? The results were overwhelming, you want the trays priced separately. So, the price for our 4½" pots (geraniums and everything else) will be $38/doz.
  I have good news and bad news. The good news: this price includes $4.37 in taxes. The bad news: this price does not include the price of our trays (they're $2.00 each). I have more good news: you don't have to buy our trays, in fact we don't want you to. Please bring your own boxes, bins, etc, or skip the boxes altogether, and gently lay your plants down in your car. Extra boxes? Leave them here, they'll get used!
  

It has been a busy couple of weeks in the greenhouses, and I can't believe I actually found the time to write this, but this newsletter is done! Hope to see you up at our greenhouses soon, they are bursting with colour, and the selection is outstanding (except for Rocky Mountain Orange). You'll probably find me at the end of a hose.

Bye for now,
David


P.S. The photo, taken this afternoon, features our 12" mixed hanging baskets: Bordeaux Supertunias, Gulliver White Bacopa, and Deep Purple Lanai Verbena. A beautiful combo we call 'Grape Expectations'.

Seascape Strawberries

We're just too busy in the greenhouses these days to do much blogging, but here's an entry on a new strawberry for us. We'll be growing them in the field this year (and we have a few extras left over that we've potted up to sell with our flowers).

Ahhh, strawberries all summer long! You can have your cake and eat it too with these Seascape berries. Introduced in 1988, this UC Davis berry has Californian size and appearance, with Ontario's sweet delicious flavour. Once it starts bearing fruit this July, it will keep producing until it gets cool in autumn.

Garden Performance: Great for containers or in the ground. Clipping off the first set of blooms, and any runners, will promote a more vigorous plant, and higher (but later) yield.

It's our Open (green)House

Sunday April 25th, 2010 1:00 - 4:00pm
It's too early to plant, too early to buy, but now's the time to plan your garden. Come up for a visit and a chat to see what's new in our greenhouses, and this year there is a lot of new stuff. The choice of flowers for your garden has grown exponentially in the past ten years. 2010 has even more choice than ever: full sun impatiens, the unheard of Lobularia, a petunia called "Pretty Much Picasso", and much more....

Your Favourite Flower

Everyone who comes to our open (green)house will receive a small flag. As you stroll through our greenhouses, place the flag in your favourite flower. Rebecca and I have already placed ours.

Our fabulous flower finder treasure hunt
Rebecca helped design this new game for kids to do when they're at our farm: what's the biggest flower, which one smells best....

Proven Winners

Proven Winners

We grow lots of Proven Winners flowers. Proven Winners is just a brand, by the way, and if you are into gardening, you likely have heard of PW. Of all the flower brands there are, PW probably is the best at branding, "Wave" petunias being the only other well known flower brand.
PW has a great website, with tons of information, photos, it even has little audio files with the correct pronunciation of all their flowers. I was looking up something the other day and discovered that you can now order plants online from them! I'm not sure if we can get them here in Canada -their website says something like plants ship to US only, $40 extra for shipping to Canada. huh?
What really caught my eye was the price! $7.45 or a 4.24" pot. Taxes and shipping extra. Wow. Of course the price is in $USD, so it's not like the almighty Canadian dollar.

We grow our plants in 4.5" pots so, I guess we win the pot size contest.

Hutchinson Farm News Vol. 14 No. 2

Here is our latest email newsletter:

April 17, 2010

Spring is running about three weeks ahead of time here in North Burlington, our grass needs mowing already, the forsythia is so full and 'yellowy' that it's almost painful to look at, the spring peepers give a beautiful concert each evening, and the cardinal....hmmm, actually we can't exactly say we're enjoying the cardinal this year. We've had this beautiful red male cardinal around our house for maybe a month and a half. Each morning he wakes us up with, now I know you're probably thinking the songs of the cardinal are lovely, but that's not how he wakes us up. Every day, just a few minutes after sunrise, that cardinal flies straight towards our bedroom window, and BONK, crashes beak first into the window. You'd think that might hurt. Apparently not. He does it about a dozen times at the bedroom window, then he flies off to do something else for a while, then he attacks our dining room window, then moves on to the playroom window, and throughout the day we'll hear him periodically crashing into our windows. Needless to say they are very dirty right now, but there is no point in cleaning them!
Alexander posted a video of him on YouTube: Crazy Cardinal

• 2nd Annual Open House...(open greenhouse) Come for a sneak peak at what's available this year in terms of our spring annuals. It's too early to plant, but it's not too early to plan. All of our greenhouses will be open for viewing Sunday April 25th in the afternoon, and just about everything will be blooming. We'll be on hand between 1:00 - 4:00pm for a chance to chat and show off the new stuff (such as Raspberry Blast SuperTunia, which you can see in the photo that I took earlier today in our greenhouse).
  
  
• Remember, no wagering
  We are quite excited about all the new flowers we have this year, and there is great speculation among us as to what we will sell out of first. Rafael's thinking it will be the Calliope Dark Red Geraniums, Wendy is thinking it will be our new 12" mixed hanging baskets, and Deb is leaning towards the new crazy petunia Pretty Much Picasso. These are all worthy contenders, and there are lots more that I haven't mentioned. Now, as the newsletter writer I have an unfair advantage in our little contest. All I really need to do is mention a certain flower in the newsletter, say Raspberry Blast SuperTunia, talk about how beautiful it is (a terrific deep pink with a light pink striped picotee effect, on a great shaped plant), maybe include a picture (like the one above), and casually mention that because this is the first year for them, I didn't grow very many (after all, they may not grow very well -I could have planted them at the wrong time! or used the wrong fertilizer! or grown them at the wrong temperature!). If I said stuff like that, then all you newsletter readers would start thinking about it, and maybe start wanting it, and I would win our contest. That's not fair to the other contestants, so I'm just going to keep quiet and not mention the wonders of Raspberry Blast SuperTunia.
  
  
• Flower Trays  In our continuing effort to reduce garbage we have been trying over the past few years to use less of our "Hutchinson Farm" flower trays, or rather, encourage our customers to use them less. The thing is, they are shockingly expensive, non-recyclable, and they may hold green things, they are definitely not 'green'. Our earlier efforts have helped a bit, but they were complicated, so we're going to do something different this year. We are thinking about charging for the trays separately ($38 for the flowers, $2 for the tray), instead of including the tray with your flowers ($40). We hope a lot of people will start using their own boxes, bins, etc. What do you think? Vote on our blog.
  
  
• Facebook  I'm not into facebook (is this a sign I'm getting old?), but I know lots of people are, so we have a facebook page: Hutchinson Farm on Facebook. We've actually been on Facebook for over a year, but I completely forgot about it!

Before I go, let me say a few more words about our "which flower will sell out first" contest. I mentioned a few other contenders, and they deserve some press space too:
Calliope Dark Red - it is indeed the greatest red geranium of all time, and we have over a thousand of them, that should be enough for everyone. Maybe.
Pretty Much Picasso with its green edged bloom (that's right, this petunia flower has green in it) is an oddball, and some may even call it ugly.
12" mixed hanging baskets These are our newest introduction, and we've never done anything like them before, so potentially it could be a big disaster. They were planted over the March break, are looking very good right now as they come into bloom, and we have a feeling they will look fabulous by early May.

Bye for now, hope to see you next Sunday (the 25th),
David

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