agriculture
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3 Strikes for the Caterpillar Tomato Tunnel But We’ve Still Get Tomatoes
You probably know at this point that my preferred method of learning is to learn by doing and learn by repetition. There’s nothing quite like the school of hard knocks, real situations, and mother nature to smack you around. And there’s nothing like repeating the same task over and over…until you burn out the overthinking… Continue reading
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Using Plant Immunity to Fight Potato Beetles
Would you believe this field has millions of potato beetles and larvae? I can barely believe it either. These are extremely promising early results from our trials on using foliar-applied nutrition in conjunction with xylem/phloem sap analysis to get our plants to fight the beetles for us. Let me back up a bit. Since switching… Continue reading
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Crazy Weather! The No-Till After 80mm Rain
First, welcome to all from the East Kildonan Garden Club, thanks for having me out to speak during some pretty intense weather. Just like gardening, rain or shine! I certainly count myself as lucky, between the tornadoes, multiple funnel clouds, hail, and winds, many areas of Manitoba this morning woke up to flooding, crop damage,… Continue reading
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Beautiful Rhizosheaths
After quadrupling our cover crop area this year and changing a few operating procedures, it was super exciting to leave those cover crops digesting in the last weeks of fall (more on the cover crops and treatment this season here). However the cover crop story for this season didn’t stop there. Yes they were shredded… Continue reading
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All The Life In The Compost Bin
Last year I was able to successfully harvest 600L of worm compost and repeat that this season. It worked pretty well, and if you want to read about why we’re running our waste ProMix through a worm bin you can read that post here, and on the second go-round I tried to make some improvements… Continue reading
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The Way The Weather Goes
This short blog hiatus was unplanned. Fall was mentally difficult and I think I just checked out of agriculture a bit early this season. Even though there was a lot of positive things going on, the farm received over 120mm of rain in October, effectively shutting down our season. The one thing we have (until… Continue reading
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No-Till Soil Demo: Let Plants Do The Work
Wow, did I ever get a nice big surprise this week when shredding all the beds. Finally, winter is coming, so down goes all the above-ground plant mass. We take our compact tractor and flail mower and shred all the plants down to the surface. This methodology allows all the below-ground plant mass to stay… Continue reading
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No-Till Bed System Fall Prep 2025 Version
Next year will be our 9th attempt at this…can we finally utilize the entire system? We’ve never maxed it out. (For a quick recap about where we were last season, and two seasons when we converted to 100 feet), and for this season, we had the capacity for a 58-bed system, but in practice we… Continue reading
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Problems With Parsnips
After trying for 4 years or so, I think I’m finally giving up on this one. The general problem with the Parsnips is that they anchor themselves into our clay soil and are nearly impossible to dig. I’ve also noticed they send out enormous side shoots, which I thought anchored them even further. Luckily I… Continue reading
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Exciting Cover Crop Results, Second Attempt
I had a pretty exciting week with this project, so lots of pictures today. Suddenly it was time to do a big job: deal with the first set of cover crops we planted. I went from feeling a bit down from reaching the “apex” of the season to being over the moon at the success… 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.
