For the past months we have been deep into evaluating beets! It has been a real pleasure visiting the farms and hearing farmers’ insights into the different varieties. The UBC Farm beet evaluation, which is the most comprehensive, was completed in mid-July. BC Seed Trials Lead Researcher, Alex Lyon along with UBC Farm Seed Hub […]
Saturday, July 9 was the tastiest day of the BC Seed Trials so far – The Unbeatable Beet Tasting! The tasting, held at the UBC Farm Saturday market, was a chance to showcase 10 of the beets in the trials and get consumer feedback on their favourite varieties. While much of the BC Seed Trials work happens […]
On June 30 we hosted our first official BC Seed Trials Field Day at Local Harvest Farm in Chilliwack. This was our first chance to bring in other farmers to view and evaluate the beet varieties and the first chance that farmers could find out which variety was which! It was a beautiful though windy […]
In the last week we have gotten our final two beet trials sown. One in the Courtenay area of Vancouver Island with Robin Sturley at Ripple Farm of Merville Organics and the other in Prince George by Serena Black of Northern Grown Consulting. Above, Serena and her partner Wyatt are finishing up their beet planting […]
Ok – so this post is a little late, but still relevant! On June 6 I got out to Westham Island Herb Farm to do a germination and vigour rating on the beets. These beets were actually planted on May 18, which meant data should have been collected on June 1. On June 1 […]
As we head into June we are now preparing for our second crop of the 2016 BC Seed Trials – Lacinato kale. We chose kale for the first year of the BC Seed Trials for a number of reasons. First, kale is a prominent and high value crop for BC fresh markets. It is […]
Over the past several months I have had the pleasure to order dozens of different seeds from seed companies all over North America. Just this past week we ordered our last seed requires for the trials – a lacinato kale seed from Italy. It was suggested by John Navazio that if we were going to […]
I had the chance to head out to Local Harvest Farm last week to check out the progress of their Golden Beet seed crop. We planted out the stecklings for this crop on March 19 and it has really been growing well ever since! We had really good growth on most of the stecklings we […]
Sunday and Monday saw two more plantings of the beet trials at Amara Farm in Courtenay and Growing Opportunities Farm Community Cooperative in Nanaimo. We still have three more farms which needs to sow beets and have already had our first data collection results for germination and vigour! More to come soon!
Saanich Organics trials are being managed by Lisa Willott. Lisa has also participated in our Seed Grow-Outs program and has been very active in the seed growing community for many years. Lisa coordinates seed production activities at Saanich Organics. It has been fun receiving notice from growers that they have planted their beets. I didn’t […]