agriculture
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The Final Fall Push
Here we are, arriving in September, and now we get the final push of our short 120-day growing season in Zone 4. There’s a bit of tension from switching from the insane go-all-the-time mode of June/July/August. There’s nothing left to plant. All that’s left is to collect….and prep for Spring 2025. But even in Zone Continue reading
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Learn By Doing II
Back in June we were just getting started with an entirely new and exciting learning curve with the beehive. This is a sequel to that post. We’ve had a lot of frustrating things go on this summer, and we have entered a zone of discomfort. This is a sort of grey zone where you are Continue reading
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Compost Squash Insights into Soil Function
The reason I love watching things grow in compost piles is that it’s a very visual and clear example of how plants respond to high microbial activity and organic matter. There’s an overflow compost here, a sort of secondary pile where anything extra I can’t process through a worm bin first ends up. It’s a Continue reading
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Our First Cover Crop: Update
It’s been about 5 weeks since we seeded our first cover crop. The initial post is here, if you want to review our installation. We got the rain overnight following the seeding, and the cover crop germinated. Here’s a before/after: It’s pretty exciting to go through this process for the first time and have such Continue reading
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Lettuce Protector
One of the things I love most about our no-till permanent beds is the abundance of life that is embedded in the field. While harvesting lettuce this week, baby Gray Treefrogs were jumping from Romaine to Romaine. I was lucky enough to get a really amazing photo at about 7:30AM. These little Lettuce Protectors and Continue reading
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Swallows & Honey
For the past few weeks, we’ve been treated to quite the display as we are working in the field. The sight of two Tree Swallow parents flying about all day and the sounds of hungry hungry Tree Swallow babies was really captivating and a joy to see. When I left for a couple days for Continue reading
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Under The Canopy
This week I was able to get away from farming for two days and went camping in Nopiming Provincial Park. The heat had finally arrived and after going non-stop since the end of April, with the cool season we’ve had the heat hit hard and fast. There’s no point to getting heat exhaustion this early Continue reading
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Why Are New Generations Leaving Farming?
This morning I was asked to be on local CBC Radio One to speak about the higher than average rainfall and how it affects vegetable growers. At the end of the brief interview, I was asked by the broadcaster why I wanted to farm, despite the broad trend of young people leaving the farm behind. Continue reading
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Our First Cover Crop
Today was the day we installed our first-ever cover crop. We’ve been talking about it for years but today was the day. It is likely to rain soon, and as such we were able to prepare an unused field for seeding. After numerous seasons of drought (and as farmers who largely farm without irrigation ), Continue reading
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Re-Designing Our Zero Till Bed System
One of the infrastructure projects for this season is an on-the-fly re-design of our no-till experimental area. It’s a ton of work and it’s adding a lot of hours tot he weekly schedule, but on the whole so far it has been very rewarding and we’ve been able to keep up. For several years we 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 