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Building for an Epic Tomato Year
We’re off to a fantastic start for our tomato plan. The hoop house is loaded with baby beefsteaks, the cherry toms are setting out their second tier of flowers and fruit, and the earliest field tomatoes are already in. As soon as the weather went from cold to hot, we started firing on the hot… Continue reading
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Collecting Rainwater & Installing RO
With the now-one-year-old-hoop-house, we’ve had to pay a lot of attention to water quality. Simple reason being that once you put up a piece of plastic over the ground, it will never again rain naturally on that ground….therefore it is up to us to provide 100% of the water needs of the crop. This presents… Continue reading
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State of the Farm: May 14th
The cold went away but then we got the gales of May-vember, which I think is how the lyric goes. Cold and wind are causing issues, and I’d say that it’s been a challenging springtime, but when is it not? The part of farming you both cannot control or anticipate is the weather. Cold might… Continue reading
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Brrr! The Cold is Over?! (maybe)
It’s not exactly fun planting in cold weather, but things have to go forward. Any sunny day or decent weather we went ahead with early planting… Things are okay as long as it’s nice enough to irrigate, and we put row covers over our seedlings, they can get through a -5C night (or colder) no… Continue reading
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Season’s First Direct Seeding
One benefit of no-till permanent beds is that in spring, when it is wet and mucky in a lot of other places, the compost mulch surface I leave for my spring planting is the first thing that’s ready to go. Yesterday I was able to direct seed carrots and spinach using the Jang Seeder, and… Continue reading
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Spring Weather Delays
Ah, the one force governing agriculture to rule them all: the weather. Last spring was warm and dry, so I was able to get carrots in the ground by April 15th. This year, tonight on April 18th we’ll be going beyond -10C at night. The beds are frozen and with some snow and freezing rain,… Continue reading
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Hnatiuk Gardens YouTube Channel Launch
Good morning to our friend, the classic Alberta Clipper. It’s a little chilly to work in the greenhouse today, with a nice layer of sticky snow covering it and struggling to get up to 10C, but we’ve got everything growing under wraps at a nice toasty 23C. It is hard to imagine that last year,… Continue reading
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Book Recommendation: Beasts of the Sea
This book was published a couple years ago in 2023 and I’ve been waiting and waiting for a translation from the original Finnish (since my Finnish needs improvement), and as of 2025 it is now available in English. Written as an account of Russian expedition to the east that lead to the Steller’s Sea Cow… Continue reading
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New Camera, New Journey: Sharing the Life on the Farm
First, welcome to any new readers from the Selkirk Horticultural Society. Over the last couple years since I’ve started doing workshops and farm tours, one one of the things that stands out to me is how difficult it is to communicate just how much life you can attract to a farm or garden, and the… Continue reading
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The Paradox of “Development”
I’ve always had a problem with the word development. As is the case with language, words can have many meanings. Yes, one can refer to a learning curve or gaining a skill set as development. Or, one could refer to an athlete’s progression as development, there’s even a phrase for it, draft and develop, in… Continue reading
About Graham
Graham is an ecologist-farmer from Canada working on educating about the wonders and beauty of the natural world, and how we can design biodiverse food production systems.
