regenerative agriculture
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No-Till Soil Demo: Let Plants Do The Work
Wow, did I ever get a nice big surprise this week when shredding all the beds. Finally, winter is coming, so down goes all the above-ground plant mass. We take our compact tractor and flail mower and shred all the plants down to the surface. This methodology allows all the below-ground plant mass to stay Continue reading
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No-Till Bed System Fall Prep 2025 Version
Next year will be our 9th attempt at this…can we finally utilize the entire system? We’ve never maxed it out. (For a quick recap about where we were last season, and two seasons when we converted to 100 feet), and for this season, we had the capacity for a 58-bed system, but in practice we Continue reading
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Exciting Cover Crop Results, Second Attempt
I had a pretty exciting week with this project, so lots of pictures today. Suddenly it was time to do a big job: deal with the first set of cover crops we planted. I went from feeling a bit down from reaching the “apex” of the season to being over the moon at the success Continue reading
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State of the Garden, September 4th, 2025
The “apex” of the season is always a tough one I find, psychologically. It’s a point in the season when there’s nothing you can do, no action you can take, to get things to turn around or do a little better. It’s all baked into the cake. On top of that is the accrued mess Continue reading
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Soil Principles Are Soil Principles: Doing a 180 on Greenhouse Management
It’s been an amazing first year in the new greenhouse and while we’ve been blown away by what we’ve been able to achieve in our first season, it’s come to the time when we need to think about turning it all over for fall production. And it’s necessary to go through this process so that Continue reading
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Thistle Be Gone: Allowing Nature to Transform
There has been an opportunity for me to observe something quite extraordinary. The observational experiment began several years ago after an acre of arable land close to the farm was abandoned. The field was quickly covered in thistles…an entire acre of thistles. The rhizomes and billions of seeds billowed out from this festering situation ever Continue reading
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Soil Science At The Farm
We’re going to break format here with the first-ever Thursday post. I was a bit exhausted after a 14-hour day yesterday which, frustratingly, ended in sprayer nozzles plugging up from a compost extract while trying to do a foliar nutrition trial as the sun was setting. But I still wanted to write about something exciting Continue reading
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Hot, Dry: Decision Making On The Fly
Well that was quite the couple weeks there, hitting 35C and 30C+ on multiple occasions. We’ve had, in total, approximately 25mm rain since the beginning of May, which isn’t much. And for us, 90% of what we grow is not under irrigation (or what is known as “dry farming”). So here’s an update on all Continue reading
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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
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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
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 