-
State of the Garden, September 4th, 2025
The “apex” of the season is always a tough one I find, psychologically. It’s a point in the season when there’s nothing you can do, no action you can take, to get things to turn around or do a little better. It’s all baked into the cake. On top of that is the accrued mess of the season, as the busyness of the harvest season dominates unpicked weeds and unkempt areas become the work for the next month. The apex is a time that shifts from what is this year, to what is next year. It’s time to look forward to improvements for next year, and to work towards that goal.
1. Early Frost. The chill from the arctic blast arriving last night was enough to turn in all our open-field dry farming crops: cucumbers, field tomatoes, squashes. Not super great, especially this early into September.
The good news is that the frost-sensitive crops in the no-till beds seem to be entirely unaffected. Did the patchy frost just not hit the field? No it seems, there was ice on the bee feeding buckets, and the neighbour’s squashes also say that it did get cold enough to do damage.
I believe more and more that we have achieved a higher level of plant health and biological resilience in the no-till. I have witnessed many examples of insect pest resistance, and now this morning, that tomatoes and peppers are still vibrantly green showing no signs of frost damage. This is a stark contrast to the open field, with pest pressures about and widespread frost damage.
This early frost will push me further into the no-till. It isn’t just the ability to take care of soil more intentionally in a smaller area, but also the ability to irrigate, and to continuously take care of plants through their life cycles, as opposed to hoping for good weather.
Biological resilience is not 100%. I still have insect pests, but they are not decimating the crops, so the plants can respond. There is still frost damage locally, but that 0.3C or 0.5C buffer zone – whatever the biological resilience is worth – was enough to stave off last night’s frost and keep fighting for another day.
2. The new hoophouse, turned over for fall production.
Update to the recent post about going in the wrong direction in the greenhouse, all the beds have been turned over, broadforked, amended and capped with compost. We were also able to take advantage of the rain a couple weeks ago and switch over from well water temporarily.
Already the clay under the compost is now consistently moist, and will not dry out with the compost mulch layer. The lettuces are off to a great start, and a full bed of radishes that is growing as if it’s not September.
Even with the frost last night, the greenhouse stayed at a comfortable 4C.
3. Great success with the tomato trial.
Two trellises of tomatoes in the beds have shown us a great way forward, and what the potential is. We didn’t get the harvests that would’ve been nice, but we learned what is possible with this system.
While I’ll have to move the trellis to a better location without overhead irrigation, the proof of concept worked beautifully. I really can’t be disappointed with this big leap forward. I’ve already started selecting varieties for next season, which may feature as many as 10 specialty varieties, and moving the entire tomato crop to the bed system.
Above is a Buffalo Sun F1 AAS winner (winner for a reason!) and below is Sonnenhertz F1, a beautiful and delicious Oxheart type that has won me over and is now my favourite specialty tomato.
4. Fantastic Cover Crops.
We got the cover crops in late, but then we got the rain, and then we got the heat, and they exploded. All 4 acres of them…up from just our 1 acre trial plot last season. Also worth noting the Sorghum, which is very frost intolerant, also survived last night’s little frost.
In the next week or two expect a bunch more updates on this. We applied calcium and sulphur in a biological form, and just letting the biology on this 10-way mix go nuts.
Shortly we will shred it, add more calcium, compost extract and soy hydrolysate. The results from last year’s cover crop was great, and we look to improve on our methods for this season, which is primarily shredding and incorporating it much earlier before the cold weather sets in. The goal now is to mix this all into the top layer of soil and allow the microbiology present to decompose and make available a lot of nutrients for next year’s crop, as well as developing our soil structure.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice -
Soil Principles Are Soil Principles: Doing a 180 on Greenhouse Management
It’s been an amazing first year in the new greenhouse and while we’ve been blown away by what we’ve been able to achieve in our first season, it’s come to the time when we need to think about turning it all over for fall production. And it’s necessary to go through this process so that we can see for ourselves, again, what is possible, and where we can improve for next season.
But as soon as I started working on getting it all ready for fall, a major issue showed up. The soil in the greenhouse, if it were left as is, and we continued growing in it in this manner, would face major problems in the future.
It was time to put the brakes on and stop immediately what we’ve been doing all summer.
We got one half-season worth of trial and to see how it goes, and it’s obvious we need to stop.
This is where our cherry tomatoes were until yesterday, but all of the beds are in a similar state.
There are two major issues here that need addressing ASAP:
1: The clay is exposed, which is to say, the soil is not covered. Being exposed means it dries out quickly, and in the greenhouse, that means we are responsible for watering it, but also that the water doesn’t go very far, as the moist soil evaporates, dries out, and compacts. It also means the soil is devoid of obvious life. Lastly, it makes it difficult to add amendments or fertilizers to help the plants continue cranking out fruit.
2: We must stop using our well water as irrigable water in the greenhouse immediately. The well water is leaving rings of calcium and magnesium salts all over the place. And we know this…our groundwater is over 1000 TDS, which, if you don’t speak units of water hardness, means our water is extremely hard. These minerals are not helpful for the soil or the plants, and over time it will cause major issues.
So…how to solve?
Moving forward, I decided the best course was to set up the greenhouse in a similar way that we set up our no-till bed system: to prioritize soil biology, and soil health, and to re-orient all of our efforts towards that goal.
For the greenhouse it means:
1. Broadforking each bed to alleviate compaction.
2. Spreading liberal amounts of alfalfa/gypsum.
3. Soil drenching with compost extract and AEA Rejuvenate.
4. A thick layer of mushroom compost mulch on top.
5. Watering with rainwater or RO water only.
This is what it looks like as of time of publishing.
The difference is already noticeable…the spinach, on the far wall, about a week in, the clay under the compost mulch cap has softened and I can stick my fingers in and pull some nice, moist, soft clay up. That is a far cry from the salt-stained open clay bed on the left.
I am thinking now till next season: keep living roots in the ground in these beds as long as I possibly can. This will allow photosynthetic root exudates to continue populating the soil column, and with it, hopefully bringing some life, earthworms, and all sorts of stuff along with it. It will be an experiment to see how long we can keep greens in the greenhouse anyway!
When those crops are done, I plan to apply compost extract and Rejuvenate a second time, and to cover the mulch with a layer of leaves.
Right now I am really thinking about tomatoes and cucumbers next season. I want to be able to apply fertilizer easily, so I may even keep a layer of leaf mulch intact all summer, to cover the soil, and cover the mulch. I know from experience roots of plants will actually grow on the surface of the soil provided it is covered. This means the plant’s roots are able to respire and spread over a much wider range to obtain nutrients and plug into soil life symbiotically.
It would also mean, if we were to run drip tape under the leaves, that our rainwater or RO water would go a very long way. Not only would we conserve more water, but it would be more available to the plants.
Lastly, it would mean an application of fertilizer on a bi-weekly basis would be easy….move some mulch out of the way, and sprinkle on top. The soil life will bring the fertilizer down and the plants will be able to absorb it. No wondering how to get plants to uptake dry fertilizer on top of rock-hard baked clay.
The greenhouse has been an amazing addition to the farm and for us to achieve high-level results, we need to work toward developing and taking care of our soil in the greenhouse, so it takes care of our plants. In an environment that relies 100% on human input and action to sustain plants in a controlled environment, soil health is even more crucial.
Graham
thanks for reading Complimentary Blueberry Juice -
The Tomato Journey
There are few crops in my farming career that I’ve learned more from, and made as many mistakes with, as tomatoes. To put it simply, I never respected this crop, how beautiful it could be, and I didn’t understand the “tomato people.” I thought that a tomato is a tomato.
Furthermore, I thought that staking tomatoes was too time-consuming compared to the short window which tomatoes are in season in Zone 4. To that end I simply grew bush field tomatoes.
All the while I also thought that the flavour differences between tomatoes was not enough to warrant my attention. It’s a tomato-flavoured tomato, I would say.
Several years ago we were growing some 2000 tomato plants. We threw them all in the field and waited. Bush tomatoes were good some years and not others, some cracked or were eaten but when you grow 2000 plants, who cares what gets wasted? Heirlooms never ripened and experiments with varieties were always concluded with nothing beats the bush tomato.
One year we did the math and found out we were making less than $2.00 per tomato plant.
That’s what got me to consider that everything I knew about the tomato was most likely very wrong.
And now here I sit in complete wonder at the tomato plant and am really wondering what took me so long
This season I decided to go all-in and change everything.
The first thing undoubtedly is respecting the crop.
I finally decided I would take care of them: I made sure they were perfect out of the greenhouse, I made sure they were planted into good soil with good foundational nutrition and calcium, and they were all trellised.
To do that I was also going to take advantage of our new hoop house, with drip irrigation, to prevent fruit from cracking.
And to test how many tomato plants I would actually need…I also would try growing the same field bush tomatoes inside the hoophouse.
That’s them sprawling all over the ground (next year…stake them!).
By next week we will have pulled over 1000 lbs of tomatoes from these few bush tomatoes in the greenhouse…making for more than $20 per plant, more than a 10x increase.
I have another set of bush tomatoes in the permanent beds which I am also expecting to yield at least several hundred pounds, and yet another set in the field (as per tradition). This means that we will have achieved more, with a higher quality and higher yield, with 400-500 plants instead of 2000.
My cherry tomatoes have a similar story.
Like bush tomatoes, we were planting some 400 cherries. This year I have been able to out-yield, out-flavour and out-everything with only about 150 plants.
It took time to make sure they were growing up the trellis properly (and still have improvements to make there too) and trim them, but the cherries exploded! I have never seen sets like this in the field. It’s incredible! It has also cut harvest time down from 1-2 hours of climbing and searching through plants, to 20-30 minutes.
Moreover, I no longer throw half of what I picked away as graded-out defects. Almost all the cherries are perfect, and the varieties I’ve been able to try are also really wonderful and tasty.
Next season I am certain that I can produce enough cherries with only a double-row in the hoop house, and get cherry tomatoes from June strait through September in Zone 4. That’s a big change from just waiting for August to roll around and hope for the best.
But surely there’s more to this than beefsteaks and cherries?
Yes, for the first time ever I have set aside an entire bed exclusively for heirlooms and seeing what I can do with the thousands of varieties out there. Surely there’s ones that will blow us all away!
Not only did I save a bed for this, but I also trellised all of them. I’ve had enough heirloom failures in the field, and even if I was still short on a few growing points, I would at least be able to taste them.
This has worked mostly well, with some tomatoes performing better than others, but my favourites so far are these little blush tigers, which have a fruity flavour when fully ripe. The bonus is that they set fruit like a cherry tomato…so at most I might need 20 plants? (Certainly not 2000!)
These specialty tomatoes all have their own nuanced flavour profile and I look forward to trying more of these in the future, improving the variety selection and seeing what works for us.
Above all, consistent watering in biologically active soil, combined with baseline calcium nutrition and a foliar stimulant for continuous flower production, has put these tomatoes over the moon.
There’s another whole bunch of things I will change for next season regarding tomatoes, to improve them even further. The higher the level at which one grows plants, the more and more nuances in how they grow, and how to best assist them in growing, becomes more clear.
And more fun.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice -
State of The Garden, July 31, 2025
Halfway through our Zone 4 season here and there’s a lot to look at and comment on so I’ll pick a few things and see how things are going. This part of the season feels like a vibe shift…the sun is up a little later, the mornings a little cooler, and we’re heavy into harvest mode. Fall crops are going in and in two weeks, we’ll be locked in for all our crops until the end of November.
1. On The Right Path With Tomatoes
I continue to be astounded by the quality and output of the Tomatoes in the greenhouse, and all the trellising going on in general. I’m almost convinced that only 85′ of cherry tomatoes would be enough for the farm.
We’ve also got an A/B test going on in the greenhouse, with indeterminate tomatoes (photo above) and determinate beefsteak tomatoes beside them (the ones we grow in the field). Like in the field, tomatoes get trapped under the thick determinate foliage, trapping moisture, leading to rotting and lots of spaces for insects and mice to hide and get snacks. I’ve thrown out quite a few of these already.
So going forward definitely going to grow exclusively indeterminates…not only to reduce the waste, but also for speed-of-harvest. Crawling around searching plants is not timely helpful at this point of the season where we are harvesting 25 crops at the same time.
2. Hail Mary Watermelons
Something weird happened to our watermelons…they all died after transplanting. Why? We have no idea. All the other cucurbits thrived after transplanting…our winter squash, summer squash, and cucumbers, are all off to the races. The watermelon were planted the exact same way but died. This one will always remain a mystery.
That didn’t phase me, in mid-June I soaked all the remaining watermelon seeds I had for 24 hours and went out and planted them. 90 day crop? Tight!
Well what happened was surprising…the late-seeded watermelon popped out of the ground and grew extremely fast in the heat. I can’t say I’ve seen leaves of this size on transplanted plants either. Some are even starting to set their first flowers. It seems the watermelon love the mulch that warms up the soil a bit, and all cucurbits hate being transplanted.
Next season I might just try the soak-and-seed-into-mulch strategy and skip the transplanting altogether. Still crossing my fingers we’ll get some hail mary watermelons in September.
3. Big Eggplant and Pepper Success
We’ve never had consistent success with eggplants, peppers or tomatoes. We typically just toss them in the open field and hope for the best, plant hundreds or thousands of plants to hedge our bets. Last year we harvested zero eggplants, few peppers, and a poor tomato crop.
This season we went all-out with the preparation and spared nothing. We had sized-up transplants, and we planted into a landscape fabric mulch to protect our top soil layer. We amended with extra calcium and sulphur. We trimmed all of them (which we’ve never bothered to do before). We give a foliar application of a compost tea, seaweed and soy hydrolysate every ten days.
Not only do they look amazing but they’ve been yielding already: we’ve picked eggplants for two weeks, and we will start harvesting peppers this weekend.
Like with the tomatoes, a little care and attention to plants’ needs goes a long way. I’m mostly happy to focus on a smaller number of plants grown extremely well than wait and wait, watching the sun set on the season and still hoping the plants can pull off one wave of fruit.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice -
Thistle Be Gone: Allowing Nature to Transform
There has been an opportunity for me to observe something quite extraordinary. The observational experiment began several years ago after an acre of arable land close to the farm was abandoned. The field was quickly covered in thistles…an entire acre of thistles. The rhizomes and billions of seeds billowed out from this festering situation ever since.
Due to the situation with the land, I knew that it might be possible – provided the land remained completely undisturbed by human intervention – that I would be able to witness the field evolve from the thistles. What I expected was that after a few years, the thistle population might slowly start dwindling, as it was replaced by other things.
What I did not expect was how suddenly and how completely total the transformation would be.
Last year, there was an acre of thistles, and nothing else .
This year, there are no thistles whatsoever…they have completely disappeared.
In their place is now an entire acre of extremely dense 2-metre-high sweet clover.
If only I had taken a “before” picture!
“Weeds” like all organisms on this planet have a purpose and niche role to play in ecology. These roles are erased when we assign these plants terms like “weeds” or even worse, the term “noxious” which regional governments use. These terms reduce the plant from what it can tell us to the basement-level nuisance which must be destroyed without any regard for what may be going on.
The thistles were there for a reason and the type of “weed” can tell us a lot about what is going on, or give us an indication of what might be happening below ground. In this case, the thistles are responding to two things: a) the natural tendency for our clay to self-compact and so the rhizomes pry it apart to create spaces, and b) a sign of low available calcium levels which is also natural in our high-magnesium clays.
Left to their own devices for several years, these thistles put themselves out of a job. They fractured the clay and made porous channels for water to flow, they cycled whatever calcium was there to scrounge up. They un-made the conditions that favoured thistle growth.
Now, it favours the sweet clover, a legume, with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
If I were to guess what happens next, the cycled nitrogen will favour the establishment of grasses, which will have long and deep root systems, following the canals and channels left by thistles and earthworms.
We live on a planet full of natural ecological wonders, and weeds are simply a term invented by us to categorize an enormous number of plants with important ecological roles as undesireables.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice -
Learn By Doing III
I’ve got a triple-whammy Learn By Doing post to make up for the slacking of regular Wednesday updates lately. The summer groove is settling in and pulling long hours in the field isn’t necessary anymore. Plus there’s a good three weeks of solid post ideas coming up and I promise I won’t miss on the Wednesday publishing schedule on those ones (and they’re already in the tube). Without further ado…
1. Trellising Hoophouse Cucumbers & Indeterminate Tomatoes
Until this year, I’ve avoided trellising anything at all. There’s many reasons for this. I did try it several years ago. But the idea of constantly tending to these things while other parts of the farm were going off the cliff seemed like a bad waste of time. So, instead I opted for the lazy way: determinate bush tomatoes. The other reason we didn’t trellis any tomatoes was a result of the “Hedging Your Bets” strategy of farming. That is to say, when one is not confident in their growing abilities, one may plant far more plants than is necessary in order to attempt to achieve the desired yield. To that end, we were planting up to 2000 tomato plants. When we crunched the numbers, we saw we weren’t even hitting $2.00 per plant in revenue (nevermind profit).
But the new hoophouse has forced the adoption of a new strategy, since space is limited. I am forced to confront my lack of trellising skills. When seeing the monumental task in front of me, I opted instead to….double down, and greatly reduce the number of tomatoes in the field, moving them to permanent beds, and setting up a permanent trellis.
Cucumbers on the other hand, was a crop that we had never even dreamed of attempting to have early. Cucumbers are the farm’s #2 crop in revenue and profit, so they’re pretty important to us…however this number is 100% pickling cucumbers, a specialty item. Greemhouse, or “english” type slicing cucumbers, are an entirely alien story.
Even though I watched tons of youtube and even read a vegetable-greenhouse-specific horticulture book, I’ve made many mistakes I will not repeat next year:
1. I let the cucumbers set tendrils. Why did I let the cucumbers set tendrils? Because I think they’re a fascinating example of plant intelligence, and I loved seeing them latch on to things. That endearing quality led me into nightmare mode, where tendrils everywhere were latching onto everything, leaves, strings, wires, stems, and cucumbers themselves. It took me 3 hours to trim just 90 feet of plants free of their self-imposed strangling. For Season 2.0 in the hoophouse, I will for sure remove all tendrils as soon as I see them, all the way up the plant tip.
Other than that I’m fairly satisfied with the cucumber performance, we are over 300 pounds in 4 weeks of production as first-timer-trellisers, the plants are 12+ feet tall, there’s no dieback, the fruit are perfect, we’ve fertilized and amended with nothing (we never have any issues growing cucumbers whatsoever…they must like my soil), and they’re over the mountain, which is to say, they are coming down the other side of the wire umbrella-style, right on schedule.
I fully credit the book I read for this strategy. This book is great for laying out all the potential options available to the grower new to protected growing culture. From that I was able to choose umbrella style as the way, and without having read common pitfalls with these strategies, I would have surely run into the wall. Or…in this case…run into the double-layer poly.
2. The greenhouse is way too high. The wire is set near the apex of the greenhouse, at least 10 feet. This is problematic! I’m only 5’6″. Even with an apple box, I’m 7 feet. If I reach high, I can get to 9′. So getting these vines over the wire for umbrella style – not to mention harvesting cucumbers at 8/9 feet – unreasonably difficult.
For this season I’ll have to deal with it (…learn by doing) but my trellising time could be cut easily in half if I didn’t have to constantly move apple boxes or ladders, and the same goes for harvesting. A full-size apple box at 12″ is easy enough to scoot along, but as soon as a ladder is involved, it is extremely cumbersome.
The problem to solve will be how to run a wire at a height closer to 9′ from end-to end.3. Trellising Indeterminate Tomatoes.
Since that took longer than I thought to explain, I’ll leave the Tomatoes for a separate post. They’re going super great, and we’re off to a really great tomato season. The short of it is: I can’t believe I didn’t grind through and learn how to do this properly several years ago, and the former version of me who thought planting 2000 plants was a good enough idea was very wrong.
2. Managing a Super BeehiveIt is a wild thing to be 14 months into beekeeping and have a super hive.
But…this was the goal all along.I never wanted more than one or two beehives. After all, there’s a farm to run, and I have limited time. The more beehives there are, the more work there would have to be devoted to it, and I just don’t have time for that. My maximum goal was to be able to check in perhaps once a week on what the bees were doing.
In Year One mistakes were made on the road to this goal. I spent tons of time in the first couple months just learning to see what was going on. There are so many things to get a handle on. What brood looks like, what the different bees look like, what the structures they build are and mean, etc. It’s overwhelming as a first time beekeeper pulling up frames and looking at all this crazy stuff. It takes awhile to sink in.
This year however I know what I’m looking for, and I know what to expect. The only surviving queen I had from last winter was the one I was able to produce myself in 2024. And so…with a really strong queen, I have been allowing it to grow, keeping the brood nest from swarming, giving it ample space to expand.
This hive produced 72 pounds of honey from May and June alone…not even the main honey flow.
After I took the 3 boxes of spring honey I added 5 new boxes to give them space for the expanding hive and in anticipation of the main summer honey flow. For the past three weeks I’ve been battling swarming behaviour…which is to say the hive has decided they have ample resources and not enough space, and will split themselves to reproduce. They’ve mostly filled approximately 3/4 of the 5 new boxes by weight ( a full box weighs about 70 pounds) and the queen has little room to lay more eggs.
This result is a testament to the incredible food source we have surrounding the farm (..and also learning by doing, but). There are several square kilometres of naturalized, untouched forests, meadows, wetlands, and treelines. The amount of natural flower sources and narturalized species that are entirely removed during suburban “development” as “weeds” or “unwanted plants” is an ecological problem our society has not come to terms with, and one that impacts our local ecology greatly.
Bees’ programming is largely to go find resources for the hive. I feel lucky to have this naturalized resource. Many commercial beekeepers are relying on agricultural monocrops to provide food for them, such as canola, or sunflowers. My bees do not rely on this, they are relying instead on mother nature and the results are astounding.
As long as I can keep my mite levels low and overwinter at least one queen I will have incredible honey and a fun side-hobby of beekeeping to enjoy.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice -
Soil Science At The Farm
We’re going to break format here with the first-ever Thursday post. I was a bit exhausted after a 14-hour day yesterday which, frustratingly, ended in sprayer nozzles plugging up from a compost extract while trying to do a foliar nutrition trial as the sun was setting. But I still wanted to write about something exciting that happened last week, which is that we had a real soil scientist visit our farm for a tour/workshop.
Of all the things I’ve learned about soil over the years, all the YouTubes and workshops and textbooks, and all the school of hard knocks (…which is, for better or worse, the way I learn what – not – to do), it was a lot different when someone of high expertise is digging holes in *your* soil on *your* farm. The same soil you become so familiar with over the years, it’s hard to imagine that soil can be any other way than it is on your fields.
Luckily for us, in our two acres on the farm property we happen to have two exciting things to talk about: one being the cover crop trial I’ve been running for about a year now, and the second being no-till beds on Red River clay.
The cover crop area is where I’m still learning the most. If you want more of the cover crop journey, go here, and the second part of the cover crop trial was planting potatoes this spring. The update as of right now is that these potatoes look great, and they germinated evenly, which did not happen in our conventional field. It also held moisture far longer than any other field, which helped immensely when it got up to 35C with no rain in this hot dry spring. So, so far, the visible observations have been all positives.
Marla dug up a section of our soil and explained how and why she felt we had a good aggregate soil structure, showing the fissures, cracks and fractures that occur when soil is healthy. Roots find the cracks and fractures and grow down these paths of least resistance to access more moisture and minerals.
What was most surprising to me was that these structures were still intact for her to see and comment on…we only grew one cover crop, from July through September last year…just three months of growth. But we also did not cultivate or plough this field. We opted instead to leave it as it was until we needed it, roto-tilling only the first few inches, which did not destroy the structure. I had thought for sure the structure would disappear over the winter and through a few months of growing, and driving a tractor and roto-tiller over it.
The roots of the cover crop decomposed and left behind small gaps, holes and crevices that can allow water to penetrate, and the next crops’ roots to penetrate and explore. Perhaps this is an advantage to us with our potato trial in a dry-er year.
photo credit Bryn Friesen Epp
Onto the no-till beds, Marla’s shovel sunk easily into our bed of Swiss Chard, and the difference between this sample and the cover crop soil was rather extreme. Granted, the cover crop soil sample had nothing growing on it, but still, there is no way a shovel would sink in that easily into a clay field. The no-till however, brought up a nice sample of soil to look at which was also teeming with earthworms trying to escape the uninvited sunlight.
Right away we could see big differences: abundant life, mycorrhizal fungi fuzzing over chard roots, and the soil crumbled and fell apart in the hand, as though it were a loose congregation of unassembled lego bricks. It was visually easy to see that in a living soil, how much more is going for you, how much more resilience you have. The pathways created by roots and earthworms for water and air exchange, and seeing the invisible. By invisible I mean micro-organisms, which if there are visible fungi present, there is likely much more. The soil is soft to the touch and has a beautiful aroma. These are the results of microbial interactions and molecular-level events.
This can be accomplished rather quickly, even in clay soil, as those beds were rebuilt in 2024. So we got there in only 1 year, with a thick layer of compost mulch on top, and that bed had one full-season crop last year (Kale) whose roots were left in the ground to decompose.
I look forward to furthering our trials with cover crops and learning more nuance about no-till soil health. As we continue to get better and improve, we can get a bit nerdier and hopefully boost all our crops to the top level.
Of course with nature there is always something more to learn, and the more you learn, the more you learn how much you don’t know. Nature always forces us to stay in the humble zone, but it’s really remarkable to see the amount of life that soil can harbour, and all the symbiotic relationships that come with it.
Life on this planet starts from the ground up.
Stay curious.
Graham
thanks for reading Complimentary Blueberry Juice -
One Month: Greenhouse Update
We passed the one-month mark since transplanting in the new greenhouse and the results are totally blowing our minds. It seems like each day we go in there you can see visible growth. The cherry toms are stretching up to their 3rd truss, the beefsteaks are setting fruit, the cucumbers have been trimmed and pruned to set their first fruit, the peppers are setting flowers, and the lettuce is just about ready.
There’s a few new varieties of cherry tomatoes being trialled here…so far, this is my favourite, some of these fruit sets are absolute MONSTERS with 40+ flowers. I had no idea this was even possible but it’s amazing what you can find if you go looking. If they taste half as impressive as they look I’ll be happy!
The beefsteaks are setting fruit already, and its wild to have the same variety we have in the field for comparison. When normally we would plant out in early June, and we did, our field tomatoes are just starting to grow and are weeks from setting flowers. The same variety in the greenhouse planted on May 7th is already setting fruit. The benefits of protected culture, warmer temps and keeping things out of the wind, is something the plants are visibly responding to.
Lastly we’ve got beets humming along and probably ready in 3 weeks. Typically we have a hard time getting beets going in the spring, we often are “looking” for a place to plant them, and waiting for rain, and we’ve had myriad problems over the years getting our first crop established. With a little transplanting we can get beets super early, and next year I will expect them by this time.
I’m also quite surprised by how little water we are using for the greenhouse. I thought perhaps we would need water every day, but the drip irrigation we’re using seems to be doing a great job and our watering is efficient and metered out to every 3 days or so.
And it’s all great for pictures, as we can watch a transluscent silhouette of the sunset through the far wall.
Grahamthanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice
-
Hot, Dry: Decision Making On The Fly
Well that was quite the couple weeks there, hitting 35C and 30C+ on multiple occasions. We’ve had, in total, approximately 25mm rain since the beginning of May, which isn’t much. And for us, 90% of what we grow is not under irrigation (or what is known as “dry farming”).
So here’s an update on all thats going on this 2025 spring season.
1. Holding Back When It Feels Good To Go.
It’s deceiving when the weather is in heat wave territory in May. Because the first wave came so early we couldn’t jump ahead, it became “slow and steady wins the race.” We waited out the heat waves for planting: transplants get extremely stressed if you relocate them under good conditions, never mind relocating them to the desert.
Over the last month we’ve waited out the heatwaves and planted when it was cooler, as well as taking the decision to delay further transplanting to water (by hand) the crops we had already installed. We are again in a cooler period, but it’s already June 4th so we can’t wait anymore. It’s go time, rain or not.
We will go slow, use liberal amounts of water with the transplants, and set them up with full nutrition as this week of cooler and less stressful temperatures sets in.2. The Smoke Is Really Getting Annoying
I’m very sensitive to changes in what’s going on as I spend all day every day outside…there is a sort of flow of energy one can follow. But lately we are downwind from horrendous wildfires, and the air quality reading from Environment Canada has been over 10+ multiple times this past week. I’ve taken to wearing a mask as my throat and lungs are feeling it.
Wildfires are at one hand, a part of a forest ecosystem’s journey, and on the other, exacerbated by human-caused climate change. This is now the 3rd on-fire-hot-above-normal-very-dry season start we have experienced in the past 5 years.
3. Experience Helps
Because this is now the 3rd on-fire-hot-above-normal-very-dry season start we have experienced in the past 5 years, we are now adapting to the decision-making process that follows. We’ve put in many safeguards to make sure things don’t fail in the event this sort of thing happens over the years, as the worse outcome is to simply lose the crop (which we’ve lost plenty of).
4. The No-Till Field Is Amazing
We are now at full-capacity over the 2-year rebuild project with the bed system, deploying a total 58 beds. The irrigation has been re-installed and optimized (learning from our previous design’s faults), and we have finally succeeded in moving many field crops into the no-till beds which both eliminates our maintenance problems and also allows for irrigation.
Things like Eggplant, Tomatoes, Peppers and Onions were always things we wish we could have accomodated here but we had to take a few years of beatings from nature to get to this point in time.
This year we were able to reduce the number of eggplants and peppers favouring full nutrition program over bet-hedging, and it feels really good to be on the path of understanding what these plants need to succeed at a higher level. We also have for the first time, specialty, cherry and heirloom tomatoes in the same situation. Let’s hope there’s a big payoff this year for all the many changes we’ve made to how we manage these crops.
5. The Bees Are Insane
We survived our first bee winter, with only seeming to lose a queen. We combined the two hives, and used the queen swarm cells to make a split, bringing us back up to 2 hives. But the queen that survived the winter has been absolutely gangbusters awesome and we’ve got ourselves a giant hive ready for honey production at the beginning of June. Last year at this time, we had only had our tiny 5-frame nuc for two weeks!
This big hive capitalized on the early flowers out there. And that includes dandelions. I’ll never understand the near-universal hate for this so-called “weed” and the immense drive people have to eliminate it (even though it exists liberally on 6 continents) but it’s a big source of nectar and pollen in the spring.
In addition to that, the bees are also taking advantage of the massive amount of naturalized area around the farm. There exists a pocket of near-untouched forest, meadow and wetland for several square kilometres, full of all the things, like dandelions, that are not deemed desireable species in suburban settings, or in rural settings dominated by commodity agriculture. This naturalized area around the farm has wild plums, wild apples, dogwood, and all sorts of flowering bushes and plants that I have yet have time to identify. On my second season of beekeeping and seeing strong success out of the gate, my only conclusion is that this large area of biodiversity has a very abundant and strong source of resources for the bees.
This colony had already plugged out 2 honey supers, and each box weighed easily 60 pounds. This hive needed room fast, as both vetch and alfalfa are just starting to bloom now, which will fuel the honey flow even more. So I added 2 more supers in anticipation of the hive’s ability to keep going.Here’s some Vetch…it’s a pretty purple flower with a sort of vine leaf. The plant appears delicate but, if you try to pull it out, you will be able to feel how strong that little vine-like stem is.
6. Light At The End of the Tunnel
Transplating season is almost over….just a couple more days and it’ll be on to Weeding Season.
Grahamthanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice
-
Cover Crop Update:
It’s hot, real hot, record-setting hot, and tinderbox conditions have fires popping up everywhere from inside the city to our provincial parks, while the wind blows uncovered topsoil around enough to reduce visibility.
This would be a good time to have an update on our cover crop situation, whose soil is not blowing away. For previous cover crop posts and to see what we did last season, there’s more here.
This past week we opened up our cover crop to plant our potato trial. We weren’t sure how it would be…would it be hard to deal with the plant residue? Could we plant in it? Would it hold moisture?
Yes, it held moisture. Yes, the residue covered the soil and kept it from blowing around in our current dustbowl conditions. But the most amazing part was feeling the soil, to the touch, it was soft and it crumbled. With the potato hopper, the discs folded beautiful hills around our potatoes…which is not what happened with the other 8 acres of potatoes we planted into bricks and rocks of clay.
I have to admit I am thoroughly impressed and continue to be amazed by this experiment: all parts of it have gone above and beyond, from planting and installing it, to the fall treatment, and now, planting in it.
The cover crop has done and accomplished everything it was supposed to: it grew and suppressed weeds, it grew into the fall, it protected the soil, and it built soil structure. Lastly, it was a breeze to plant into.
In these record-breaking early May temperatures and while we look at a 3rd season in a row of climate-induced season extension, seeing the dust and topsoil blow off the neighbours fields (and ours) pretty much seals the deal here. Regardless of what happens with the potato trial itself, it is crucial that we cover crop as much of our operation as we can this season.
I’d much rather plant into 8 acres of cover crop residue, easy breezy, no problem, making perfect hills in soft soil, than watch our precious organic layer blow off and wonder if bricks of clay will cover enough of the potatoes so they can germinate.
I’m sure I will have many more photos and trials to share on this front throughout this season.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice
Home
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.
