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Spectacular Sunflowers
Here’s a whole post on all the awesomeness of sunflowers, their many many strengths, and why you should put them in your garden or farm.
I mean, I love sunflowers. So let’s get the obvious out of the way…they’re stunningly beautiful.
With so many varieties out there, I typically order a multi-pack or a few different varieties, with some on the short side, some on the enormous side, single-head, and multi head multi branch sunflowers, yellow, orange, red, and otherwise. I seed them into 72-cell trays sometime in late May, so I can transplant them as I need them.
I use sunflowers as utilitarian “gap-fillers.” So maybe an eggplant dies, or a pepper plant gets knocked down by a cutworm, or I have a 50/50 bed and there’s a natural spot between two crops. So I randomly plant sunflowers here and there throughout the season. This also gives me a delayed flowering, so they’re not all flowering at once.
I also might keep planting them into July, not even expecting them to flower. Their taproots are very useful for soil biology, and they are also in my cover crop mix. The produce a large amount of biomass that can be shredded or knocked down later.
Here’s one in an Eggplant bed.
The #1 thing I use sunflowers for is diversity magnets. Even with just 5, 10, 15 or 20 sunflowers scattered randomly through our one acre of no-till creates little pockets of micro habitats and niches. Many, many things are attracted to sunflowers. Bees of course, but ladybugs and their larvae, hoverflies, frogs, and all sorts of things will be found using various parts of the vigorous plant structures.
They are also home to stinkbugs. Now stinkbugs might be a pain for you, if they’re sticking their proboscis into your otherwise perfect tomatoes….but they are around, and therefore, as an insect that is a potential pest, we need to offer a wider range of food for them, and also attract things that eat them so their populations can stay in balance.
This remains one of my favourite-ever photos I’ve taken…three little stinkbugs, marching in a row up a sunflower leaf.
In 2022, for some reason, my dad obtained a few kilos of random sunflower seeds. What would we ever use such an absurd amount of seed for? Well time for experiments, obviously! On two acres of pumpkins, I planted rows of sunflowers mixed in with the pumpkin rows. The result was, still, to this day, one of the most awesome experiments I’ve ever run. The amount of creatures attracted to this pumpkin patch was remarkable. Hundreds of birds eating seeds, and uncountable insects and pollinators.
Oh, and we also got boatloads of sunflowers!
Some of them were in excess of 3 metres! Here’s my (very short) mother for scale.
They are very, very useful for pollinators. In my case, I’m trying to get my honey bees a little extra pollen at the very end of the season. The bees take that pollen, ferment it, and use it to feed their developing larvae. So the timing here is really important…natural, real pollen near the end of the season, in September, really helps drive the building of a winter nest and as such, helps to successfully overwinter the bees.
I assume the same is true for bumble bees, because they’re also all over this late-season food source. I’m not so sure about bumblebee biology or seasonal timing, but perhaps it plays a role for the solitary queen to overwinter.
Lastly, in those cover crop mixes.
Sunflowers are not a big component of my cover crops, but they are there. The variety included in the mix is a shorter, single-head one. Usually by the time I’m shredding the cover crop, they are maybe only starting to flower, and they don’t go to seed. The larger seed size means everything else in the mix – the sorghum, millet, rye, and so on – goes through the seeder much easier than the larger sunflowers or peas. But in this context, we are looking for a multi-species mix to achieve a group effect on soil biology and nutrient cycling. They won’t get much more than one meter tall. Here’s a late-season cover crop from 2024, with a handful of sunflowers poking out among the grasses.
In conclusion, plant sunflowers.
Liberally, randomly, or in excess. Just plant them!
(they’re also great photo subjects).
There’s a new YouTube video out today as well, so check out what’s going on during peak season here at the farm!
Graham
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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 in your brain and find all the little things that are either superfluous or steps that can be skipped entirely (or things that need to be doubled down on).
And so we come to our tomato tunnel, which started off as a very exciting project. After it was finally installed and planted, we even had ceremonial beers to celebrate our grand achievement.
Promptly we encountered reality.
The rolled-up sides folded down. We had to roll them up and again they would slide down and again we would roll them up. This is a major problem as it can easily get 40C+ in there very, very quickly, and without end walls or doors like a proper greenhouse, it is mission critical that those sides stay up for air flow (and to not fry our tomatoes).
Then the plastic blew off entirely.
We pulled that plastic tight and locked down them ropes and set it up again.
Lookin’ good! Or so we thought. Then the sides rolled down and again we would roll them up.
And so on, and so on.
Then we thought hey, we need some way of holding this heavy plastic up, the ropes aren’t cutting it. So we shoved carriage bolts through every hoop. That finally kept things up (though some of the carriage bolts bent under the weight of the poly).
This is just the structural issues here! Nevermind trying to keep these tomatoes upright. Carl and Matt spent a lot of hours trying to weave them, but the combination of inexperience on this technique, the wrong kind of bale twine setup, and 6′ trellising posts, getting three weaves around the tomatoes was an achievement unto itself.
Then there’s the watering. While it was nice we got tons of rain and we didn’t have to bother with it at first (actually it caused problems), now that we’ve trucked a tank of water out there and slowly pump it out with a generator several times, because it isn’t hooked up to our irrigation as of now, this is becoming a real chore.
And finally, last week, we hit the last straw. The poly had completely come off. Again. And as far as I can tell, it wasn’t even that windy. So by July 20th, with a forecast of 30C+ weather and 20C overnights on the way, we just decided to give up (for now) and leave the plastic off, and try putting it back on toward the end of August or into September whenever the weather patterns change.
Here’s where the magic of gardening and farming comes in.
Even after all these “failures” we’re still going to get a boatload of tomatoes. The Cat Tunnel is just for now, for us, an under-utilized tool that we haven’t learned how to use yet. Just like if a crop gets over run with weeds you will probably get a crop, the tunnel itself was not the thing making or breaking our success.
After all, we planted the tomatoes. And we applied all our planting techniques and whatnot, and they grew. It’s quite the jungle now.
Here’s some Alice Dream tomatoes and Japanese Trifeles, and we’ve picked two almost-ripe Cherokee Carbons.
The important thing for us is to realize that the #1 thing about the Cat Tunnel is to be able to get these tomatoes in a couple weeks early, and keep it toasty in May, which allows the Tomatoes to grow quickly when there is still risk of frost. So at the end of July during a hot period, this isn’t needed. On the other side of the solstice, the Cat Tunnel allows us to have frost protection in September, and keep these specialty tomatoes which can be 70+ days to maturity to keep producing. We can even plan to remove the poly during peak summer next year.
The #2 thing is seeing why the poly blew off. The placement of the tunnel now is in a wide open area that leaves it vulnerable specifically to north-south winds. Next year we will move it to a sheltered tree line area, protecting it from these side-winds and leave it only vulnerable to a westerly, in which case it’ll hit the “head” of the “caterpillar” and be more “aerodynamic.” That’s what all caterpillars are known for, their….aerodynamics.
The #3 thing is nutrition and irrigation. Knowing we are going to move the tunnel next year means we can do some soil prep in advance. It’ll also be possible to tie it into some irrigation so instead of lugging a tank and a generator out, we can just turn a valve. Now if only I can afford the fertigation upgrade for next season…hmmm.
The #4 thing is trellising. Weaving these tall varieties is a waste of time, as we learned the hard way. But we thought it would be better than clipping and trimming all 266 plants individually, as we do in the hoop house. Next year we’ll probably do individual stakes for each and just tie a small string on each as needed.
The #5 thing is more cat tunnels. These things, we can see, can make us way more successful with crops that are otherwise only available for a few to several weeks a season. Eggplants and peppers could benefit from a similar system…and indeed we see our hoop house peppers absolutely loaded and thriving with the extra time to establish and get past the first fruit set. Extra tunnels would allow us to plan more, have better soil health programs, and let us rotate properly, without having to remove the tunnels and set up each season.
#6….looking forward to trying all these delicious varieties out!
Graham
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Hitting The Wall in Late July
We’ve come to late July, the part of the season where it feels impossible to keep up with the tasks and in the average market farmer’s mind, everything is behind. Everything needs harvesting, the weeds are supercharged with water and heat, there’s a pileup of plants that need to go in, there’s a pileup of seeds that need to be sown, the tomatoes need trimming again, and it is easy to feel like everything is out of control.
Us humans would like to keep things growing at a pace that feels manageable on our time scales, but that’s not how this planet works. And for farmers, who plant far more than they can reasonably take care of (ha!) it’s like juggling 100 bowling pins and watching them fall one by one, hoping there’s enough bowling pins left at the end so you can say you’re still juggling.
All you can do is keep on planting.
One thing I think we’ve done really well this season is keep on top of bed-flipping. I used to wait until an entire bed was finished, or harvest it gingerly and wait and wait to plant again. This year, as soon as something is finished, something goes in. For items like green onions, I plant as we harvest. For other crops, I’ve taken to harvesting the entire bed just so I can turn it over and get something new in. This has helped a lot not only with produce availability but it keeps the weeds down nicely, as every bed flip resets the “weed clock” to zero.
Here’s a bed of turnips that was pulled just yesterday, and already today, along with 4 other beds, were planted up and ready to start over.
Over in the peppers, we have some very weedy pathways that I’m not sure I can even get to at this point. So it might just have to be that way. I’ll see if I have enough landscape fabric left to roll some out and smother them, but with several pathways like this that’s easily an entire morning of work, which with a task list as long as it is, is an opportunity cost. Or maybe this is a job for the weed whacker just to knock them back a bunch. This is a great example of why putting things in fabric mulch is good, because the peppers are going to be fine.
On the other hand there’s supposed to be pathways in between these tomatoes! But I definitely don’t have the time to get them propped up. They’re bush tomatoes anyway. My biggest problem is going to be voles. Just running a vole farm here, and they won’t touch peanut butter, so if anyone has ideas for what to bait traps with for voles let me know. Varmints got 50% of my fall carrots last year and were even eating the hot peppers! The vole problem is an unfortunate side effect of growing all these nice crops in these no-till beds, its a perfect habitat for them with a gourmet buffet within scurrying distance.
The Parsnips! It’s been on my to do list for a month, but I finally thinned them out. Look at these beauts. Two more months, let’s see how much they size up and what they taste like. The Parsnip Saga continues.
It took me about 10 days of working an extra hour here or there to get the hoop house tomatoes under control. I’m happy to report that at least I can walk between the aisles now. We’re also getting monster harvests and there’s still room for improvement so I think the hoop house is doing just dandy in it’s second season. These cherry tom plants are easily at 4 meters by this point and learning the” lower-and-lean” technique has had some hiccups but that’s to be expected as I’ve never done it before.
It’s also baby frog season. Thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of baby frogs are emerging from the creeks, and it’s been a great year for frogs with all the rain. They’re hopping all over the place! Here’s a little tree frog perched on a sunflower leaf.
Well that’s late July in the garden.
Hope your garden is doing well and if you feel like you’re behind, just keep going!
Grahamthanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice
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The Wall of Japanese Cucumbers
A couple years ago we tried these Japanese Shintokiwa cucumbers. I had heard of them, but someone from our CSA gave me one to try and it passed the bar for trial. And so trial we did. That was actually our first trial with cucumber trellising, knowing that we would be building a hoop house in 2025, to get some practice in. It wasn’t pretty. So to make my life easier, I chose to do only the Lisboa F-1 parthenocarpic greenhouse cucumbers at first. This went pretty well, we got huge yields, and aside from getting used to how the plants behave, it was sucessful.
This season for our second crack at hoop house growing, I opted to trial the Shintokiwa again, this time in the hoop house, I planted 20 at the end. Now, we have a 10-foot-high wall of insane cucumbers.
This is kind of wild!
At first when I was training and trellising the Lisboas, I attempted to train and trellis the Shintokiwa the same way, but quickly realized that these were not at all the same. There were lots of flowers, but little fruit, also the plants were half the size and speed of growth of the Lisboas. This is not surprising, as Shintokiwa being open pollinated, lacks the vigor and other qualities selected for in the more refined Lisboa F-1. As for the flowers, well the Shintokiwa require fertilization, and the Lisboa do not.
On the advice of local seed guru at Tiny Monster Garden, I stopped trimming or caring about these plants and just let them go on their own. The branching and wildness would aid in the pollination, and Ryan advised that they would branch heavily and set fruit later. And here we are, some 5 weeks after harvesting the first Lisboas, we are in for a massive wave of Shintokiwas…from just 20 plants.
I find it crazy how these things, without any human help at all, have reached the top of our trellis and by next week will be at 12 feet. They have grabbed onto the lines and each other, forming a sort of stable wall.
Here is a photo of the flower sets, almost all the flowers visible are male flowers. But now, we’re seeing a lot more female flowers and a lot more fruit. With this huge leaf mass that has also built up, I think these plants are going to be supercharged for quite awhile yet.
For contrast, here are the Lisboa cukes from a few weeks ago after their first hard low-growth pruning. These are all a single-leader vine, with flower/fruit sets at every leaf. On the way up I take every second one off to prevent aborted fruit, and to not tax the plants too much. When they hit the ceiling they come down the other side, branching out and “falling” down with the weight of the cucumbers in what is known as “umbrella” style trellising.
In future blog posts I’ll have to go into trellising the cherry tomatoes as well, which is its own learning curve. So far it’s more in the jungle style, hopefully by next year it will be more civilized, after I make enough mistakes to know what not to do.
Still, I can’t believe the yields. This is just one harvest from yesterday. We’ll be picking twice a week until probably some time in September.
I also can’t believe that we used to plant 400+ plants in the field. These 120 are out-yielding the 400+ by a wide margin.
Learning better techniques lets us grow more in a smaller area. There’s some up-front learning with the trellising and such, but the trade-off for speed of harvest for me is worth it.
Now that it’s raining today I’ll go try to tame the cherry tomato jungle. Wish me luck.
Graham
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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 to organic production, we relied on organic-approved pesticides for potato beetles. The problem is that in principle, there is not much difference between conventional and organic, if the idea is to grow a crop and spray something on it. The result is the same, just with a different tool. Effectively we were running an evolution trial, and the potato beetles became less and less affected by the organic control. I saw this coming three years ago, and last year, our potato plants were completely stripped, and between no rain/weed pressure/beetles, our yield was down 50%.
There were two choices.
Either, we get a different hammer and in several years hit the same wall again the exact same way.
Or, we choose to get off the hamster wheel.
Two years ago I began trialing this method of crop management. But the learning curve was steep with this one. Not only did it require learning a new way of getting nutrients into the plants and how to apply those nutrients, it involved a new way of thinking about it.
The basic idea is that if the plants have what they need, they can provide immunity and defense responses and fight pests and diseases.
It makes sense…if you have scurvy (and I hope you don’t have scurvy) and you go to a doctor, the doctor does not douse you with chemicals and fungicides to rid you of scurvy. The doctor gives you a vitamin C pill or tells you to eat fruit. That single missing element is all your body requires to reverse the course. Something similar can be induced in plants, after all, they have not evolved to be the single most successful organism in earth’s life history without defense mechanisms triggered by predation.
The problem? Our crop systems and fertilizer choices. So the beetles show up to devour a plant…and they do so with such ease, because the plants are not functioning at full capacity and require our assistance to play the role of defense. So in go the chemicals (and the recent announcement by the Canadian PM to ease regulations for even more ridiculous chemicals is not helping facilitate the changes we need).
The first two years of results were failures. I didn’t mix the nutrients right, I didn’t set the plants up right, I applied the foliars at the wrong time, I started applying foliars too late, and I didn’t understand the test results I was getting back.
But I guess I didn’t go to University for nothing, with my background in plant physiology and botany and ecology, I studied up over the winter and took all those failures into consideration to try again.
This year we changed our base fertilizer program based on our soil analysis and took sap samples as early as I could possibly do so. And it was at this stage when I thought this idea was far fetched and maybe it wouldn’t work. Really the beetles on “Field B” were so bad, every single plant had multiple beetles on it, all 5 acres of them. We had to stop this beetle army, or else we have to get back on the hamster wheel.
The first sap test was taken June 15th.
The sap test showed undetectable levels of Molybdenum. This is the #1 key for us…this element is required to metabolize Nitrogen. Without it, Nitrates pile up in the potato plant, and the beetles looooove them some nitrate-filled leaves.
The #2 key was Calcium and Boron, Calcium for strengthening cell walls and structures, which is difficult for our plants to pull out of our soil, and because of plant physiology and biochemisty, Calcium requires Boron to become mobile in the plant.
The #3 key was Jasmonic Acid, which is a plant hormone that is released when a plant starts getting eaten. In a healthy plant, it will make the leaves “taste bad” to the bugs and slow them down, while also calling in beneficial insects as a signal that there’s food for them here.
And the #4 key was a source of sugar, namely molasses and soy hydrolysate, which give the plant immediate energy source to continue growing and metabolizing, even while being eaten, and even while diverting energy to plant defense triggered by #3.
Then we had to hold our breath for two weeks.
The first sign of positive success was this…I noticed brown tissue surrounding some of the eggs. It turns out that the plant is intentionally committing cell suicide, depriving the young larvae of any ability to start eating when they need it most (as soon as they hatch).
Crossing fingers!
We took another sap sample on June 29th, but unfortunately, FedEx tracking shows it is still, as of July 4th, sitting at the Winnipeg airport. Which means we don’t get the test data we want, so we had to go on the fly based on observation and inference alone.
Honestly, there are millions of larvae in this field!
But the plants are winning. The beetles are not on the older leaves, at all. They are completely undamaged. The beetles sit at the top of the plants on the newest leaves, which have not received a new foliar application. So we doubled down with a similar foliar recipie as the first one, adding a new signal to produce extra tubers for us while the plants are strong.
What I’m seeing is something I’ve just never seen before. I’m used to beetles stripping the plants completely, and harvesting the scraps the plant managed to produce. I’m used to seeing devoured fields. And at this point, seeing beetles of this size, on plants that don’t appear to have any consequential damage at all, is mind-blowing.
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This is representative of some 40% of the field.
Only 5% of our 8 acres of potatoes appear to be “stripped” but that isn’t even accurate…they still have some leaves and stuff on them, they aren’t completely gone. Last year, some 90% of our plants looked worse than this.
I have to stress that these plants are right beside each other.
Evidently, something is working. Apparently the sugar sources from molasses and soy hydrolysate are something that the beetles just don’t like. It screws with their system. Add to that the Jasmonic Acid treatment, and the beetles don’t die…I think this is am important distinction here….in this management method, the beetles don’t face death. They slow down, they are blocked, and the plant can out-grow the damage they cause, and force the beetles to relocate themselves to more susceptible parts of the plant. Perhaps even 10, 20, or 30% (I will never know for sure) of the beetles didn’t even hatch because of the aforementioned cell suicide.
So, with one more foliar to go, maybe we’ll see even these 5% “stripped” plants turn around! This will be interesting to watch.
Another 30-40% of the field is completely untouched. Which is wild to me, because in June when these were germinating, every single plant had beetles on it, and I got the same fear response I got from previous years.
I don’t want to say this is 100% yet, I don’t want to jinx it. But based on what I’m seeing, it’s really unbelieveable. I mean I’m seeing it with my own eyes and I’m still not really believing it.
These are the best potato plants I’ve seen in probably my entire farming career since starting back on the farm in 2017.
If the second foliar worked, by next week we’ll see even more lush growth, flowers opening up, and when we harvest, if the tuber set initiation application worked, we will see the number of potatoes per plant increase. We are used to averaging 4-8 Norlands per plant, maybe 10 on a good year, so we will see.
Another test will get shipped on Tuesday and all willing FedEx can actually get it to the lab this time, and I will share those results here, and likely make a full YouTube video on this topic alone. It’s a scary transition to get off the hamster wheel, and I’m sure sharing my results will help other farmers. Plant physiology is difficult to wrap your head around, but the truth is, plants are highly complex biological organisms, they are intelligent, they are interwoven with symbiotic organisms at the cellular level, they plug directly into their environment at the molecular level, and they can be influenced by our actions. It is the way agriculture must go, away from chemical inputs and genetic manipulation to enable more chemical inputs because we’d rather make a bigger hammer than use empathy to understand the plant as it already is.
If I’ve seen it happening with my first year going all-in on this method, I can’t imagine what I can learn in the next five years.
Here’s our “Field A,” getting the 2nd foliar application yesterday. The plants are unbelieveable, and Marty was even driving over potato leaves, as the plants extend themselves for more light and the canopy takes over the valleys between the hills.
All biology, no chemicals.
The scent of seaweed extracts, molasses and soy hydrolysate leaves the entire field smelling absolutely delicious.
One more test, and one more application to go!
I have a new YouTube video out as of today, July 4th, with a full farm update.
Graham
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Monarch Butterfly Survey: Biodiversity in Marginal Land
Lots of stuff going on at the farm, and a lot changes in a week or two with these long solstice sunlight hours. Things are booming, but the rain is also still coming (we’re up to 140mm on the month of June so far). There’s a lot of topics I could write about (and probably will write about soon), including a green infrastructure project, potato sap analysis and foliar nutrient applications, persistent pepper issues in the hoop house, the orchard project moving along, or a crazy year for spring honey from the bees.
But I thought today instead I’d share the results and some photos of a monarch butterfly survey that’s more on the fun side.
On the back half of the farm we have a problematic 2-acre piece of land that we are slowly trying to get into full production shape. The issue is tree roots primarily, so we have used this field for our first cover crop trial two years ago.
On the long northern edge of the field, I noticed quite a lot of milkweed growing just past where the cultivator doesn’t go. And then I noticed there seemed to be quite a lot of monarchs. So we decided it would be fun to take a sort of survey, count all the Milkweed and count all the caterpillars and see what we get.
Today we counted 281 Milkweed plants, and 55 Monarch Caterpillars.
It was really nice to see not only a healthy stand of Milkweed but also that the butterflies had found them. I will happily run a butterfly farm operation on the literal side (of the field).
But these are the places – the edges – where a whole host of interesting creatures thrive. Like Milkweed.
The edge cases, the fenceline, the treeline, are often the first to be scrubbed and sprayed for victorian lawn perfection. Often pesticides are the first to be mentioned when talking about insect or pollinator decline, but in the total ecological picture destroying habitat is just as problematic.
With insect populations plummeting and accelerating bird population decline, one of the easiest ways to prevent these things is to allow nature to do her thing. If a few hundred feet of a tree line can host 281 Milkweed plants and 55 Monarch caterpillars on those plants, what is possible collectively?
Monarch Butterflies are kind of like Orcas or Polar Bears…there’s these lucky creatures that we put on the top, that draw our attention or fascination, that just seem more visible. Thankfully at least butterflies and Monarchs in particular capture our attention that way, and by extension, their host plant. I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure a lot of people would be able to correctly state that monarchs feed on milkweed.
The lesser-known are not less fascinating!
What was surprising to me after a much more careful look at 281 plants was the amazing diversity of things that live on Milkweed…not just Monarchs, but ants, ladybugs, the milkweed stem weevil, and today I even saw my old friend the wasp mantidfly.
There she was, just sitting on a Milkweed plant. I found my first mantidfly last season…these are not wasps nor mantids. Rather these are predatory insects who appear like mantids via convergent evolution and whose larvae attach themselves to wolf spiders, and feed on the spider eggs.
They’re also just stunning insects and I was super excited to see one today and get these photos.
My camera has more powerful tools to get even better macro shots, so next time hopefully I’ll have a little more patience to try those tools out.
Planting Milkweed is quite easy and it should come back in following years and spread around.
Leave your Milkweeds (they also have quite pretty flowers) and all those unknown plants on the margins, they’re holding wonderful treasures.
Graham
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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, downed trees or perhaps buildings. The nature of these storms, now supercharged by climate change, will become much more normal. I’ve seen a supercell just about every season come close to the farm, and the very real risk of hail damage to crops is always a worry in the mind of a prairie farmer. So it’s extra important and incumbent on us to adapt and put into place mitigation strategies.
For me, that’s partly our one acre of experimental no-till.
The final total from yesterday’s craziness was 80mm, and I can now go to sleep knowing that my no-till field (which also I’ve been irrigating quite a lot during these early heat waves) can absorb 80mm of rain without issue.
While I’m not apt to test if this field can absorb more than 80mm, it probably can. The wonderful soil aggregates created by our plants are allowing deeper and more quick water absorption. On the far left in the first few of our beds there is a small amount of water sitting in our pathways, which we walk on and get compacted.
We can get back on to this field to keep working shortly after even a heavy rain dump.
For comparison, here is the conventionally managed modified soy field across the street, only a couple hundred metres away:
This is going to be the scene for much of Manitoba.
There are better ways, and preparing and planning management strategies for a rain event of 50+mm on the prairies is a must. Leaving a season to chance is simply not worth it in my worldview.
I was able to get a YouTube video up this morning as well, lots of great shots of the wildlife coming to live at the farm and I’m really enjoying learning to use my new camera.Hope all your farms and gardens are doing well after the storm, and let’s hope today and tomorrow aren’t too heavy with the rain as this system continues to move through Manitoba.
Graham
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Turning L’s into W’s
When the weather went from below-normal-cold strait to 30C we encountered a big row cover problem. We needed to switch out our frost-protecting row covers for breatheable nets. The problem? We used all of them! And bad planning on my part…I had half-rows of brassicas that need to be covered for flea beetles that I should have combined into one bed.
So musical row and net covers it was, but we needed more. Ordering them would mean at least a week in shipping.
But aha, I had some shade cloth I ordered last year! That netting should maybe be good for flea beetles. So we rolled it out, all pumped that we could cover another 3 beds with the saving-grace shade cloth.
But no! I ordered the wrong shade cloth! It was too short! Coming in at just 36″ it would not be able to be anchored over a 30″ bed, nevermind stretched over hoops. It only took a year to figure out this mistake!
So we racked our brains figuring out how we can MacGyver this, but to no obvious avail. Building some thing to stretch out this shade cloth and keep it anchored would be cumbersome, annoying, and time consuming.
But then! I realized we did have a solution….we had ordered a product a couple years ago to try it out – the Neversink LowCat Tunnel Hoop Kit – a row cover hoop design that does not require anchor weights and instead uses a sort of bungee rope to hold down the fabric, which would allow us to use a too-narrow fabric.
Bonus? The bonus is that we had a perfect use case: our spinach, baking and probably-soon-to-be-bolting away in the 30C+ sun.
The open side, is the north side, the closed side is the south side.
A bonus is we don’t have to hike up the cover to weed it, or harvest.
And it appears to be working…that spinach has doubled in size since installing the shade cloth.
So don’t despair if it appears like you’ve got a big L on your hands. It turns out that not only was this a solution, but this is working so good I’m considering buying two more tunnel kits to use indefinitely shading spinach, lettuce, arugula, any greens that would benefit from staying out of a punishing summer high pressure ridge bringing us 30C+ weather.
Maybe our greens are about to take a big step up!
These things are fairly easy to install which lowers the friction for us to use them or move them around. So the plan for this year will be to keep moving thing around the bed system and seeing how it works out.
Graham
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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 season crops.
Hoop House tomatoes, planted in April 20th and after their 2nd trimming session:
Over the years we’ve had enough difficulties figuring out how to grow tomatoes in the field well, and we decided to get serious about figuring that out such that we could be offering tomatoes for as long as we can, and also as many varieties, shapes and flavours as we can. After all, tomatoes are arguably the single most coveted fresh summer garden item. After a winter of saving money by ignoring perfect-looking cardboard-tasting nonsense from the stores, we’re ready to eat tomatoes until we’re just about sick (but not really).
Last season our specialty variety trial went okay, but this year we’re stepping it up, all the way to Building New Infrastructure level: we’re in the process of putting up a temporary greenhouse, or what is known as a caterpillar tunnel, to house our ten specialty varieties plus extra beefsteaks.
This 100′ x 10′ tunnel houses 266 tomato plants. That temporary greenhouse is going to be huge, because most of these are 70+ day tomatoes, which means they don’t ripen till at least August, and then the season is already done, giving most gardeners about 3 tiers, maybe 4 tiers, of fruit per season. Hopefully we can get it to 5 or 6 tiers, and have these tomatoes growing and ripening all the way through September.
Marty, Carl and Matt got all the design, setup and install done.
Today they all got planted, and all that is left to do is put the single-poly plastic up. This is – as we’ve learned on our tomato journey – an important addition, as controlling moisture levels is a really, really big key to awesome tomato production. The plastic keeps the plants sheltered and out of the rain, and controlled moisture levels mean we’ll get less cracking and better fruit. If we get a cold front and temps go down, we can lower the poly to the ground and keep it toasty.
Five varieties made the cut from last season, and we’re trying 5 new ones. Our selection as of now is:
Alice Dream (new)
Cherokee Carbon (new)
Copper River (new)
Japanese Trifele (new)
Mountain Magic (new)
Brandywine
Blush Tiger
Buffalo Sun
Sonnenherz
Fiorentino
My selection process for the new ones was probably unconventional….instead of looking for ones I *thought* would be good, I simply chose 5 not because I *thought* they would be good, but realizing that I have no idea what will be good and what won’t, and that my ability to predict flavour is non-existent. I went for a variety of colours and shapes that compliment the 5 that are staying in the lineup.
We hope to offer a wide selection of beautiful shapes and colours of tomatoes this season and I hope this all works out, that you get to try some and tell us what you think so we can improve the lineup for next season!
More reading:
The Tomato Gap March 2026
The Tomato Journey October 2025
Graham
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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 a problem when our ground water enters the equation, as our groundwater is absurdly, absurdly hard. There is a mineral crust over anything it touches, it will prevent shower heads from functioning properly and so on, and even the water softener guy keeps adding drops of reagent to the test tube, and more drops and more drops, before proclaiming “holy shit your water is hard.” Yes indeed our TDS (total dissolved solids) is over 1000. In case you don’t speak water hard-ese, that’s enough to make a reverse osmosis expert suggest that before running water through an RO system it goes through the softener first!
So, we have two options. One: collect rainwater. Two: install an RO system.
Last season we did collect rainwater, but in a drought year, this is where the problem with rainwater collection becomes obvious: you can’t collect if it doesn’t rain! So last year we relied heavily on the ground water, which lead to mineral crusty stains all over our greenhouse. I wrote about that and doing a 180 in the hoop house last season.
The good news is that from that first year of hoop house management we also learned how much water we actually needed to run the thing, and it turns out that actual required water was far far far less than we had originally thought. We are not watering every day, or even every second day. With a mulch and covering our soil, we can even be down to once a week. On super hot weeks, maybe every 3 or 4 days. And with drip tape, we are super efficient with that water delivery.
We are used to collecting rainwater, but this year we kicked it into serious mode. We have our initial collection off the shop roof, about 1400 sq ft, that holds 1000L, requiring a light 8 or 9mm of rain to fill. That initial collection can spill over into a 1000L tote, and that tote, can be pumped out to the hoop house into a third tote, for a total of 3000L holding capacity. A single thunderstorm bringing us about 27 mm of rain would translate into all three totes full.
I cannot emphasize enough how super great this is. Rainwater is just different. If you grow plants for long enough, you will know this intuitively. Plants do not respond to ground water or tap water or any other kind of water the way they do to rainwater. Rainwater is of course, full of nature…of micro nutrients, dust, bacteria, algae, in other words, plant food. And plants have, in their genetic programming, evolved to require rain to live. This means there are signal pathways to detect rainwater, and even a light dusting of leaves, some 1mm of rain, will have an effect on plants.
For our uses, it will take about 800L to water the entire hoophouse. From full capacity I would get three solid watering sessions with rainwater.
We can extend that even further by diluting the rainwater a bit with reverse osmosis water, and for that, we have now installed an industrial-sized RO system designed for horticultural purposes, which can process up to 3200L per day of reverse osmosis water, bringing our Total Dissolved Solids from 1000+ down to a mere 0030.
I’m sure our plants and mostly our soil will thank us later.
At least now I’m not worried about continually applying hard ground water to our protected culture plants.
We’ll have a new year of observation and seeing how things go, and what we can do next to improve our watering system even more.Graham
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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.
