Ecology
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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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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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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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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… Continue reading
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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,… Continue reading
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New Camera, New Journey: Sharing the Life on the Farm
First, welcome to any new readers from the Selkirk Horticultural Society. Over the last couple years since I’ve started doing workshops and farm tours, one one of the things that stands out to me is how difficult it is to communicate just how much life you can attract to a farm or garden, and the… Continue reading
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Documenting Biodiversity on the Farm
This summer I’m going to start a new project, documenting the biodiversity of what we have at the farm. I’m working towards doing it in such a way that I can share what I find with you. What that will look like exactly, I’m not sure. But I’m hoping to invest in some new gear… Continue reading
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Our Little Orchard Story
***sorry to anyone trying to comment, it seems comments were held for review, but I’ve changed the settings so hopefully that doesn’t happen anymore*** About a year after we started the no-till experimental acre in 2018, I got the idea to start planting apple trees. I was pretty ‘green’ at the whole professional farming thing… Continue reading
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Beautiful Rhizosheaths
After quadrupling our cover crop area this year and changing a few operating procedures, it was super exciting to leave those cover crops digesting in the last weeks of fall (more on the cover crops and treatment this season here). However the cover crop story for this season didn’t stop there. Yes they were shredded… Continue reading
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All The Life In The Compost Bin
Last year I was able to successfully harvest 600L of worm compost and repeat that this season. It worked pretty well, and if you want to read about why we’re running our waste ProMix through a worm bin you can read that post here, and on the second go-round I tried to make some improvements… 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.
