garden
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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
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Under The Canopy
This week I was able to get away from farming for two days and went camping in Nopiming Provincial Park. The heat had finally arrived and after going non-stop since the end of April, with the cool season we’ve had the heat hit hard and fast. There’s no point to getting heat exhaustion this early… Continue reading
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Our First Cover Crop
Today was the day we installed our first-ever cover crop. We’ve been talking about it for years but today was the day. It is likely to rain soon, and as such we were able to prepare an unused field for seeding. After numerous seasons of drought (and as farmers who largely farm without irrigation ),… Continue reading
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Re-Designing Our Zero Till Bed System
One of the infrastructure projects for this season is an on-the-fly re-design of our no-till experimental area. It’s a ton of work and it’s adding a lot of hours tot he weekly schedule, but on the whole so far it has been very rewarding and we’ve been able to keep up. For several years we… Continue reading
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Journal Your Garden
For four years (going on five) I have been intensely journalling all the things on the farm. This is invaluable to all farmers, but also to hobby gardeners, backyard gardeners or plant nerds in general. It is useful for many reasons…but most useful is that in my pocket field journal, it is full of emotional… 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 