garden
-
Cover Crop Update:
It’s hot, real hot, record-setting hot, and tinderbox conditions have fires popping up everywhere from inside the city to our provincial parks, while the wind blows uncovered topsoil around enough to reduce visibility. This would be a good time to have an update on our cover crop situation, whose soil is not blowing away. For… Continue reading
-
New Greenhouse! Now What?
The weather finally aligned and with a bunch of people helping wrangle a massive piece of plastic, we got the plastic up, locked in and inflated. That felt like a really big moment. This has been a few years in the planning and with the plastic up, it all felt finished. And then we realized… Continue reading
-
Greenhouse Rain Delay
Twice in a row we were thwarted by moisture trying to get the plastic up on the greenhouse. The tiniest bit of moisture on the ground would have made an absolute mess on the plastic, so we’ve had to punt for sunnier days. Cloudiness or rain can gum up the works sometimes. So the end… Continue reading
-
Transplanting Patience
We finally have some photosynthesis going on in the greenhouse! It’s nice to see green while there is still snow outside. This year feels a bit boring so far to start, but that’s largely due to me continuously moving seeding dates up. Partly because of our improvements in germination. I used to give 7-10 days… Continue reading
-
Let’s Talk Weeds in No-Till Gardening
I’ll be giving a little talk tomorrow, Thursday March 20th, at Little Brown Jug in Winnipeg starting at 7pm. The topic is managing weeds in a no-till permanent bed system. Hoping that after this talk I will follow my own advice and finally get better at managing them weeds! Graham thanks for reading complimentary blueberry… Continue reading
-
Managing Chaos: Creating a Schedule
I’ve been working at it for awhile now, but within the next week I will finalize the schedule for the entire farming season. It includes seeding dates, transplanting targets, and all sorts of reminders. I started building this about 5 years ago and I’m not sure I remember how to run a farm without it!… Continue reading
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
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 