agriculture
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Parsnips, Finally!
It’s been a long Parsnip journey and this “ending” does not seem anti-climactic at all (because it isn’t quite over yet, there’s going to be a sequel!) I’m super excited to have finally successfully grown parsnips. Long time readers of this here Complimentary Blueberry Juice will have read about the trials and tribulations and many… Continue reading
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Chasing Perfect Sweet Peppers
Peppers have been one of my most consistently poor crops (if not outright failed crops) and it’s been quite the journey figuring out why. It seems like we’ve tried everything and over the past 8 seasons there were maybe two that we had great peppers, but even that comes with a big asterisk. This season… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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,… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… 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.
