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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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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 mean staying away from planting certain things, but wind causes problems for me mostly in regards to irrigation. Sending water droplets into the air with gusting 60km/h winds means you’re just wasting water, which means another delay for transplanting. On the other hand, installing row covers to protect crops from the cold is impossible, and the row covers that are down need constant monitoring to make sure they’re still locked down.
The potatoes are all in as of today. This is about 2 weeks later than we usually are finished. There was no point to planting them early in such cold conditions. We’ve also changed our fertilizing program for the potatoes so it will be interesting to see what data we get back throughout the season.
The peas we got in early are still not germinating. Now after the cold start and the wind, we also don’t have rain, and we are dry farming our peas, so they’ll just have to wait. It’ll be a late crop of peas this season.
On the good news front, the carrots, russian parsnips, spinach and early radishes have all germinated. It took the carrots and parsnips three weeks, but they’re up and going.
Our early transplants green onions, beets and kale are going and so are the hakurei turnips, but they’ve got some flea beetles attacking them and a row cover that is flapping around in the wind (I’m watching it right now) that isn’t doing much to protect it against said flea beetles. Last year I planted hakurei three times after two failed starts, and this year I vowed to make it one and done, but I just can’t seem to get this crop going without at least one aborted attempt.
Our starter greenhouse is completely full, backed up and overflowing.
We started hardening off our broccoli, brussels sprouts, lettuce and onions to make room. However on a night where the weather channel said it would be 1C overnight, it was actually -4C overnight. There was some minor damage, mostly to the sprouts which were the last to come out of the greenhouse and therefore the least hardy. A great and early reminder that the weather channel is not to be trusted under any circumstances, and is at best, a ballpark guide. The difference between a 1C and -4C for many crops is fatal. I’d make a comment warning about handing our whole society off to “AI” and laying off all the experts to save money, but you already know what I’m going to say about it.
Our hoophouse is looking really nice. The tomatoes are in need of their first trim and training up their support lines, whenever we actually have some time to get to it, and our beefsteaks are setting out their first fruit. The cucumbers have a slow start, they’re not great transplants, but I thought why are we transplanting cucumbers in the hoophouse anyway? I can just plant the seeds strait in the ground, which is what I’ll try next season. The peppers are a bit stunted, but I’ve given them a bit of molasses and rainwater to see if that doesn’t perk them up. I had trouble with peppers in the hoophouse last season as well so not sure what I’m missing about protected culture peppers.
Lastly, I was transplanting late summer broccoli in the greenhouse the other day when I noticed something tiny moving. When I finally realized what it was I ran for my macro lens.
So here’s my tiny transplanting buddy, Mr or Mrs Jumping Spider. For scale, the big white fuzzy thing is a tiny piece of perlite from the soil mix.
Not sure what species this is – I’ll throw it up on iNaturalist later – but the jumping spider world is numerous and diverse. This little guy is only a couple millimeters in size at most. Luckily for me jumping spiders spend some time just sitting around (probably plotting their next move) so it was a fairly good photography subject, and no wonder that these spiders are a favourite of macro photographers the world over.
Back to the wind.
Graham
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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 problem. We did wait through these -4C and -5C nights, with daytime highs of 3C-5C. Hopefully the last of those nights is behind us, so we can go full steam ahead.
Row covers are really an invaluable tool in our cold climates to get us through planting season without having to worry too much about frost.Under all the covers is green onion transplants, hakurei turnip transplants, spinach, radish, carrots and parsnips.
Cold weather slows us down a bit and that means there’s a ton of stuff backed up. So one can’t wait for better weather…you have to keep pushing forward. It’s less of a “it’s too cold to plant” issue than a “time management” issue. All of a sudden there’s 1000 things to do, and those thousand things get pushed back, and in a week it’s 2000 things to do. A farming season is a marthon, not a sprint, so no need to burn out this early! Just keep planting.
The greenhouse is in desperate need of relief, and part of that is due to the fact that we’re just planting a lot more than we usually do, a lot earlier than we usually do. We’re trying to get stuff as early as we can this year. Even in the next few days there’s dozens and dozens more trays to be seeded, so we have to start getting stuff in the ground or we’ll create a space management issue for ourselves as well
Today (Thursday May 7) looks like a nice day and a few more to come, so in everything goes. On deck are onions, beets, kale, broccoli and cauliflower, pac choy, fennel, fall carrots, direct seeded beets, potatoes, brussels sprouts and lettuce.
Also, baby kales are rather cute.
Busy week ahead of us!
On the YouTube Channel is episode 3: listening to nature to guide us during a cold spring.
Graham
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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 the Parsnips went in by hand.
These special Parsnip seeds were handled a little differently…as it was quite an expensive seed to get to try, we only have this one package, a replacement is not really an option, and we really want this beet-shaped variety to work so I don’t have Parsnips that I can’t dig. The seeds were primed overnight (soaked in water with some compost) and then seeded by hand in rather crooked handmade rows. Without a ton of seed, using a seeder wouldn’t be a good idea as if I miscalculated the seeding rate we might not have a full bed, or still have extra left over. Adaptive Seeds has these Parsnips at a ~65% germination rate, which is a little low for my liking, hence the priming and also making sure we use every single seed.
So those three crops are good to go, and the compost mulch holds enough moisture that at least for a couple days here I won’t have to irrigate.
It’s another nice day today so I’ll look and see what else I might be able to get away with planting this early.
Lastly, the second YouTube video is up on the new YouTube channel. In this one we transplant plant the hoop house and reflect on the biggest lessons we learned with our first year of hoop house growing.
Graham
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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, there’s a lot of moisture out there. So this is both good and bad: the bad part being that we have to wait and be patient, the good being at least there will be a lot of moisture around. For our potatoes and peas and such, this will be a really positive thing. Hot dry conditions in spring have happened a few times in the last few years and in my opinion, that’s the most stressful way to start the season. I’d rather have freezing rain in mid-April!
I won’t lie, it’s frustrating to wake up every day to this. Yes sure the greenhouse is full of green things…but we’ve also punted planting in the hoop house. So there’s over 500 plants perfectly ready to go, scheduled to go in the ground April 15th. However with a few -10C nights and cloudy days, burning a whole bunch of propane to float the temperature to +5C seemed wasteful. Moreover, there seemed no point with these frost-sensitive crops like tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers to expose them to stressful conditions right after transplanting.
The longer we wait the more things get backed up, which might mean as soon as the weather turns for the better we’ll be busy catching up and firing stuff into the hoop house and out on the field.
Graham
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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, 7 days from now, I was seeding carrots.
I’m supposed to plant some stuff today, eggplants and lettuce on the schedule, but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow, or at least till the sun comes out.
There’s a few germination issues this year, with onions and rosemary. But these problems seem to come our way every year. Onions seem to have a hit-miss germination rate, with some varieties faring better than others. We plant them in trays of 192 cells, and when the germination rate is say 60%, it looks pretty empty. There’s a lot of spaces and at 50+ trays it looks pretty disappointing. The other issue is that we always, always get a chlorosis issue with onion seedlings, regardless of soil mix we use. So what causes that, I have no idea. But after about 6-7 years of trial and error on this I’m about done. The fix for onions is simple: order 2x as much seed as I require, and plant in flats instead, with a small amount of base fertilization. Rosemary though seems to be as famously finnicky as ever. We have enough for what we need but I wish I wasn’t biting my nails hoping they come up.Launching YouTube
Help the new channel out by subscribing and sharing with anyone you know would like to see more of what happens at the farm!
This first video is a sort of mission statement, but readers will already be on the up and up as I recently wrote about the new camera a couple weeks ago. I’ve been testing the camera out and enjoying it quite a lot, and so the the shots in this first video is all my new-camera-test-footage, which I think turned out pretty great.
At this time I’m thinking I’ll post a new video every two weeks, as I don’t want to get overwhelmed with shooting footage and pushing videos, especially as the season progresses and I have less and less time. I’m enjoying taking photos and videos for now and for the start of this YouTube project, I’ll just focus on enjoying that aspect of it, and finding a narrative in which I can show that footage. It will be a more visual way to see the life and beauty of the farm and follow along.
This blog won’t be going anywhere, as there is plenty to write about and problems and successes I come across during the season as I work through them.
Gotta wait for the snow to melt, the carrots won’t plant themselves!
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.
