garden
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Grower Error III: Incomplete Nutrition
One thing becomes clear after reviewing the various challenges or crop failures I’ve had over the past few years. There is a common denominator, and that common denominator is an inattentiveness to plant nutrition. For the most part I’m very lucky where the farm is, our clay soils are pretty good and if the weather Continue reading
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Grower Success II: Cover Crop
After going through last year’s photos again I realized one of our most solid crop installations was actually our cover crop. We put more forethought and action into prepping the site than we did our nearly-failed onion crop, which really goes to show what you can accomplish if you prepare and what chaos you will Continue reading
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Grower Success
What does it look like when everything goes well? Last week I detailed everything that went wrong with our onions. When you run into problems like that, it’s almost comical how many Grower Errors can stack on top of each other, compounding all the issues. On the other side of the coin, the side all Continue reading
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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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2025 Season Goals & Grower Error
A new season awaits us, and as I always say, this is the best time of the year – nothing has gone wrong yet! While we peruse the seed catalogues (and always on the hunt for new sources of seeds) I am also taking the first two months of the year to study up and 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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Building A Three-Season Greenhouse
It has been a few years since we began down a path that would lead us to a new greenhouse. As a full-time occupation, it became clear to us as Market Gardeners that the single item we were most sorely missing on the farm was a 3-season hoop-house-style greenhouse. We have a small greenhouse which 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 