farming
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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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Pushing for Spring Production
New year, new season, new schedule. As I always like to say, this is the best time of year for farming…because nothing has gone wrong yet. It’s all the purity of the platonic farming season, where everything grows perfectly, everything goes to plan, harvests are abundant, and perhaps most importantly, there are no weeds. I’m… 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
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The Way The Weather Goes
This short blog hiatus was unplanned. Fall was mentally difficult and I think I just checked out of agriculture a bit early this season. Even though there was a lot of positive things going on, the farm received over 120mm of rain in October, effectively shutting down our season. The one thing we have (until… Continue reading
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No-Till Soil Demo: Let Plants Do The Work
Wow, did I ever get a nice big surprise this week when shredding all the beds. Finally, winter is coming, so down goes all the above-ground plant mass. We take our compact tractor and flail mower and shred all the plants down to the surface. This methodology allows all the below-ground plant mass to stay… Continue reading
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No-Till Bed System Fall Prep 2025 Version
Next year will be our 9th attempt at this…can we finally utilize the entire system? We’ve never maxed it out. (For a quick recap about where we were last season, and two seasons when we converted to 100 feet), and for this season, we had the capacity for a 58-bed system, but in practice we… Continue reading
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Problems With Parsnips
After trying for 4 years or so, I think I’m finally giving up on this one. The general problem with the Parsnips is that they anchor themselves into our clay soil and are nearly impossible to dig. I’ve also noticed they send out enormous side shoots, which I thought anchored them even further. Luckily I… Continue reading
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Exciting Cover Crop Results, Second Attempt
I had a pretty exciting week with this project, so lots of pictures today. Suddenly it was time to do a big job: deal with the first set of cover crops we planted. I went from feeling a bit down from reaching the “apex” of the season to being over the moon at the success… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… 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 