farming
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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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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
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State of the Farm: May 14th
The cold went away but then we got the gales of May-vember, which I think is how the lyric goes. Cold and wind are causing issues, and I’d say that it’s been a challenging springtime, but when is it not? The part of farming you both cannot control or anticipate is the weather. Cold might… Continue reading
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Brrr! The Cold is Over?! (maybe)
It’s not exactly fun planting in cold weather, but things have to go forward. Any sunny day or decent weather we went ahead with early planting… Things are okay as long as it’s nice enough to irrigate, and we put row covers over our seedlings, they can get through a -5C night (or colder) no… 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
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.
