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The Fragility of Water
The phenomenon known as “sea smoke” happens when temperatures drop. Relatively warm water meets very cold air, and we can see condensation occur, making it appear as though there is steam rising from the body of water. It is a strikingly beautiful thing, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to take amazing photos Continue reading
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Garden Futures: Designing With Nature
When I wrote last week’s post Art Can Show Us the Diversity We’ve Lost, I didn’t know that a couple days later I would be stumbling into the Garden Futures: Designing With Nature exhibit in Helsinki’s Designmuseo. The stated goals of the exhibition seemed to jar with my perspective as a farmer. It is not Continue reading
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Art Can Show Us the Diversity We’ve Lost
Anecdotally, everywhere one seems to look, humans appear to have an irresistible urge to clean things up, make everything tidy, neat and uniform. Anecdotes meet reality. This issue is supported by mountains of science and documentation: modern conventional corporate agriculture is a major driver of biodiversity loss for its preference of monocultures and deforestation, forestry Continue reading
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Targeted Farming Advertisements
Over the last year or so I’ve taken screen caps of the sorts of advertisements that are targeted at me (I guess I don’t hide enough cookies from the surveillance capitalism data thieves so they know I’m a farmer). Given that we don’t use any of the products that are attempting to woo our dollars, Continue reading
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Change Is Coming….Fast
Not talking about it, or pretending it isn’t real, will not help us prepare for significant changes the world will face in the coming decades. Not talking about it leaves our communities and societies weak, our businesses brittle, and unable to adapt in time. Not talking about it means we double down, triple down, quadruple Continue reading
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The #1 Resource in Farming and Gardening
At the end of every season there is time for reflection, and it doesn’t take too long to start getting excited about the next season. Among all the things you could grow, might grow, grow more of, grow less of…all the seed catalogues, it is all very enticing, and very easy to say “yes” to Continue reading
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Minimum Crop Space
One of the challenges of implementing cover crops in a zero-till system for our farm is that we still need to grow a lot of produce and keep the farm running! We need to figure out exactly what absolutely needs to stay inside a zero-till system. The rest, at least for one season, we can Continue reading
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Adding Cover Crops to our No-Till System
After admitting a little bit of defeat and looking at the positives of our system, we need to find a way to both be able to continue within the system while we work on a solution to the problem. The most obvious solution is to start over. If the weeds continue to return regardless of Continue reading
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What We Did Before Informs The Future
One of the more rewarding things about plant husbandry is watching things that you take care of grow. As skills and understanding get better, as developing science expands how we think about plants and how plants communicate with their environment, we too must grow as people to be able to absorb new information and apply Continue reading
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Looking At The Positives
Week two here of examining the Shortfalls Of Our Zero Till system, and maybe the first thing after admitting defeat should be to look at all the positives and see what lessons we can and should carry forward. This past 2023 season we saw a record amount of productivity out of the field…we were more Continue reading
About Graham
Graham is an ecologist-farmer from Canada working on educating about the wonders and beauty of the natural world, and how we can design biodiverse food production systems.
Complimentary Blueberry Juice 