agriculture
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Grower Error III: Incomplete Nutrition
One thing becomes clear after reviewing the various challenges or crop failures I’ve had over the past few years. There is a common denominator, and that common denominator is an inattentiveness to plant nutrition. For the most part I’m very lucky where the farm is, our clay soils are pretty good and if the weather Continue reading
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Grower Success II: Cover Crop
After going through last year’s photos again I realized one of our most solid crop installations was actually our cover crop. We put more forethought and action into prepping the site than we did our nearly-failed onion crop, which really goes to show what you can accomplish if you prepare and what chaos you will Continue reading
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Grower Success
What does it look like when everything goes well? Last week I detailed everything that went wrong with our onions. When you run into problems like that, it’s almost comical how many Grower Errors can stack on top of each other, compounding all the issues. On the other side of the coin, the side all Continue reading
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Grower Error II: Ignoring Canada Thistle
There’s a lot of aspects of the farm I’d rather not show, at least the image one wants to project is that the farm is clean, awesome and everything is going well. But I think I’ll take January to exorcise our Grower Error demons. Perhaps by posting them I’ll be far more risk averse in Continue reading
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2025 Season Goals & Grower Error
A new season awaits us, and as I always say, this is the best time of the year – nothing has gone wrong yet! While we peruse the seed catalogues (and always on the hunt for new sources of seeds) I am also taking the first two months of the year to study up and Continue reading
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On Canada’s Lax Pesticide Oversight
Many a time have I heard something along the lines of if it wasn’t safe, the government wouldn’t approve it. There has been exposed a global lobbying and sabotage effort by chemical companies to ensure the continued flow of their products and profits which I wrote about this past fall. But this issue keeps gathering Continue reading
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The World Happens On The Molecular
The five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. These are the ways in which humans perceive the world. We can further single out sight as a sense that likely does more to influence us over all the others. If we can’t see it, we don’t believe it. Or we do see it, and refuse Continue reading
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Finality of Winter
Each season there is a point at which you can no longer do field work. That day has come and passed, and with it, the 2024 season is over. Humans do many things that are not tied to seasons, or seasonal changes. In my opinion there is great value in tying our actions to seasons Continue reading
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Lettuce in November
This season I planned an 8th crop of lettuce, anticipating having built our greenhouse already. When it became clear we were not going to be able to build the greenhouse until fall time, I decided to go ahead with the crop anyway, and plant as if. My thinking at the time was to see how Continue reading
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Making Better Compost
For years, I just made lazy compost. I put stuff in a pile, sometimes it would heat up, sometimes it wouldn’t. And after years, I still have yet to harvest any reasonable amount of compost. The piles go bad, I abandon them, and they end up as waste I have to deal with in the 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.
Complimentary Blueberry Juice 