Pow Wow

It’s a Monday morning in the middle of August and I’m sat here wearing thick socks, a scarf, and a bobble hat; the season must definitely be on the turn.  Either that or I’ve just been too mollycoddled by the summer heat and any drop in temperature feels icy in comparison.  But, it’s August for goodness sake, August is still summer isn’t it? Still, I’d rather take the cooler temperature over the blazing hot 40˚c days.  Anyway, I’ll stop whingeing about the weather like a typical Brit and move on…

There’s plenty to write about as I didn’t blog last week, so I’ll bring you up to date.  The second weekend of August was Garlic Fest at the Carp market  which was on both Saturday and Sunday.  It’s a significant event in Rainbow’s calendar, and one we’ve been building up to for a number of weeks; sorting, cleaning and braiding garlic and also learning about the different types of garlic.  So while we were at Carp all weekend, we were also at the usual Ottawa Farmer’s market on Sunday.  Three markets in one weekend meant A LOT of harvesting and processing on the Thursday and Friday, so it was a busy week to say the least!

All six of us went to Carp on the Saturday – Kylah, Zach, Matt, Jackson, Leah and I.  Zach and Matt manned a booth totally dedicated to garlic, while the rest of us ran a veggie booth double the size we normally have at Carp.  The market was fun and was really nice to do a market with Leah and Jackson, as I’d only been with Matt previously.  It was pretty busy and we sold a good amount of produce on the Saturday.  On Sunday Leah and I ran the veggie booth by ourselves while Zach ran the garlic booth and Matt and Kylah went to the Ottawa market.  Sunday wasn’t as busy, a lot of people who came just seemed to be browsing or just wanted to chat, which was nice too, I really like sharing enthusiasm for the veggies with others.

The four of us at Garlic Fest on Saturday

It was kind of a strange feeling when Garlic Fest was over as we’d been building up to it for so long, and it always felt like it was so far away, but now it’s been and done.  This past week has been a bit more relaxed, we’ve still continued to sort a lot of garlic and on Thursday we cut down the last bulbs that had been curing; which was a good feeling.  We still have a lot of garlic to go through, clean and sort into sizes, but now we’re pretty much ready for the next big even which will be the onion harvest in the coming weeks.  Those thousands of onions we planted on my first day of work need to be pulled from the ground and brought into the barn to dry.  If the weather is good onions can dry in the field, but we’re now getting regular rain (the grass is actually green again), so bringing them into the barn is a better bet.

Me looking ridiculous modelling a huge Tropea onion, an Italian Hierloom variety

This Saturday just gone, Leah and I ran the booth at the Carp market by ourselves again, which was fun.  It was freezing in the morning and is so dark now when I get up for market, I ended up putting my T-shirt on inside out, doh!  it soon warmed up to a perfect temperature by late morning and was beautifully sunny, great weather to draw the people out to market, and I think we did pretty well.

Yesterday (Sunday) was one of my days off and in the afternoon I went to a Pow Wow at the local native reservation.  A Pow Wow is the coming together of native and non-native people to drum and dance or just spectate.  I really enjoyed watching the dancing and feeling the drum beat thrumming through my bones, sending tingles down my spine.  The ceremonial regalia that the dancers wore was spectacular, beautifully intricate and so colourful.  There were also market stalls selling traditional native crafts and lots of other lovely things.

Apart from that what I’ve mostly been doing is eating lots and lots of watermelon, we’ve nearly harvested them all now and it’ll be a sad day when the last melon has been gobbled up. Yum yum

 I love the beautiful swirl pattern inside the watermelons

Until next time,

Much love

Becky x