Friday, August 28 2009
Catching Up
They call 'em cherry tomatoes, but they're sweeter than cherries
Whew doggies! It's been a busy month this week. Limited Edition looms, there are conferences to get ready for, gardens to harvest, apples to pick, friends to visit, visitors to befriend, bread to bake, DVD's to edit, PowerPoint presentations to finish, and so on!
The garden thing looms large. At the beginning of the gardener's year it's all spade and hoe work, with very little to show. Come harvest time and it's all frantic attempts to pick, eat, share, preserve and enjoy the fruits of your labours. We've been eating tomato sandwiches for three meals a day, and fortunately we're able to keep up. However, when the cherries really come into their own we're going to be making and freezing pomodoro sauce like nobody's business. It's looking great too:
Leafy greens, an important part of a good breakfast
We're finished the corn, all but one of our zucchini plants (moments before we reached a permanent state of zucchini poisoning) and the berries, but the broccoli is still delivering, along with the chard, the lettuce and now the tomatoes, with the squash and grapes set to deliver very soon. There's great blackberry picking around the garden as well, and last Sunday we wound up with a decent haul.
I can't mock vegetarians any more: I haven't eaten an animal in weeks!
But some things we plant not for ourselves (at least not directly) but for others who share our gardens with us. Every year we grow a hearty crop of Borage. There are lots of supposed uses for it, including salads, garnishes and drinks (Pimm's cup is supposed to be garnished with borage: you only use cucumber in the off-season) but we plant it for our friends the bees. There has been a lot of talk about bee health in the news, with colony collapse disorder and plummeting bee populations. A respected apiarist of my acquaintance says it's due to monocultural crops (growing only one thing in vast acreages) and synthetic fertilisers. Monocultures mean that the bees don't get a wide vareity of the micronutrients they need to thrive, and synthetic fertilisers kill the soil, reducing mycorrhizal mass. These soil fungi live in symbiosis with plant roots, extracting carbohydrates and providing soil minerals that the plant otherwise couldn't access. Bees taking nectar from synthetically fertilised crops are living on a diet of junk food, according to my friend--no wonder they're getting sick. Our garden is organic (I checked out the biodynamic thing, and it's interesting but a little goofy) so it's my hope the bees are bulking up and getting strong on our plants. Every time I go there I see several hundred bees moseying about the borage, the asters, and every other flower-producing crop. Funny thing, I've never been stung in all the time I've gardened there. I sometimes have to shoo the clouds of bees away so I can work, or let them out of my shirt (and once, memorably, out of my nostril where I had inhaled a poor worker!) but they seem to be happy with the situation. Works for me, and I've yet to have a plant fail to pollinate!
Plus, I like the company of bees. Their purposefulness and calm character is soothing and almost meditative.
You go aunt Bee!
Okay, gardening aside, I've been very busy with Limited Edition work. In less than a month we'll be presenting the 5 varieties to our retail partners, and that means I have to have the package ready to go: PowerPoint, DVD, 'How to Hold a Tasting', all the stuff necessary for launching the five very special and cool varieties we're bringing back for our 20th anniversary Limited Edition program.
No, it's not Michael Chicklis! It's Jeff from Maverick, doing mad edits
Jeff and I are almost done the edits on the Limited Edition DVD. It has to be done early enough to get the artwork and the reproductions ready for super-secret shipping out to retailers and conferences, and French translation and suchlike. Jeff has done his best to make me look good, but I can never watch myself on TV without going into a perma-cringe. I can only see flaws and mistakes, although other people who have helped with edits like it. We'll see, but just in case, we've got some other cool new things on for this year, including a shadowy project involving a new website, some sort of contest where you can win things, and a skill-testing quiz about wine. You'll hear it here first when it's ready to go.
Schmeltzle and Vandergrift, peas in a pod
One thing that helped break up the week was getting to see David Scmeltzle from Vintner's Circle in New Jersey. I first met David a couple of years ago on his home turf and was impressed with his vision. Vintner's Circle is a home winemaking centre. It's a bit different than the Canadian Wine On Premise, where customers must make up the kit, pitch the yeast and return to the store to fill, cork and label the wine, but operators are allowed to transfer and clear the wine in between, or the standard US model where the operator obtains a winery license and then can either sell batches like Canadians, or sell wine itself by bottle, glass, case or carboy (they're a winery!). New Jersey laws require customers to do all the steps. David and his staff help folks at each stage, from choosing the wine to helping pick out custom labels, and in return customers get to rack, stir, fine and clarify the wine, going from picking the kit to drinking the fruits of their labours in only four easy steps.
David's a smart cat. Of course my judgement is influenced by the fact that he pays attention when I talk and believes what I say, but he has a background in business, software and IT and is one of those relentlessly energetic people who make me feel lazy and slow by comparison. That aside, (heh!) he's good company, and it was great to get a chance to show the place off to him and talk about future goals and store programs.
Safe journeys David--see you this fall in Jersey!
Oh my, I've got hotels and airflights to book, and I haven't quite finished the limited package. Back to the grind!
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