farming
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Grower Error II: Ignoring Canada Thistle
There’s a lot of aspects of the farm I’d rather not show, at least the image one wants to project is that the farm is clean, awesome and everything is going well. But I think I’ll take January to exorcise our Grower Error demons. Perhaps by posting them I’ll be far more risk averse in… Continue reading
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On Canada’s Lax Pesticide Oversight
Many a time have I heard something along the lines of if it wasn’t safe, the government wouldn’t approve it. There has been exposed a global lobbying and sabotage effort by chemical companies to ensure the continued flow of their products and profits which I wrote about this past fall. But this issue keeps gathering… Continue reading
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Finality of Winter
Each season there is a point at which you can no longer do field work. That day has come and passed, and with it, the 2024 season is over. Humans do many things that are not tied to seasons, or seasonal changes. In my opinion there is great value in tying our actions to seasons… Continue reading
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Lettuce in November
This season I planned an 8th crop of lettuce, anticipating having built our greenhouse already. When it became clear we were not going to be able to build the greenhouse until fall time, I decided to go ahead with the crop anyway, and plant as if. My thinking at the time was to see how… Continue reading
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Making Better Compost
For years, I just made lazy compost. I put stuff in a pile, sometimes it would heat up, sometimes it wouldn’t. And after years, I still have yet to harvest any reasonable amount of compost. The piles go bad, I abandon them, and they end up as waste I have to deal with in the… Continue reading
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Our First Cover Crop: Fall Treatment
In the last update the cover crop was alive and looking really pretty (previous posts are here). A lot has happened since then! We have finalized our treatment strategy and we’ve now completed it, so that’s what this post is about. A late rain helped the cover crop go strong into September, and the thick… Continue reading
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Consolidating Space, Building New Strategies
After each season over the past few years I reach the same conclusion: that the farm area is too large and we need to be more efficient with our space usage. Why manage a 20 acre area when you could manage 10? When a new season starts fresh this conclusion seems to be forgotten. Maybe… Continue reading
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Science Will Win
Back in January I wrote a piece detailing the absurd reliance and insistence on widespread chemical usage in agriculture. There is something I would like to draw attention to: a stunning collaborative journalism piece titled “Revealed: the US government-funded ‘private social network’ attacking pesticide critics“ exposing the lengths to which the chemical industry will go… Continue reading
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Our First Cover Crop: 60-Day Update
It’s now been two months since we installed our first cover crop and the sunflowers started blooming. What a pretty sight! The previous posts are here if you want to recap. It has grown in quite thick and there’s lots of things going on in the understory, the sorghum is easily over a meter tall… Continue reading
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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
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.
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