Compost is very valuable to us. On our farm, we use compost to provide nutrients and to increase organic matter in the soil (for water retention, reduce soil erosion, and prevent nutrients from leaching off the farm). Over the past few years, we have been trialing different methods to reduce tillage without herbicides (aka organic no-till). One of these methods has been using compost as mulch (to suppress weeds and prevent soil erosion). Which ledRead More
I’m going to start off with the weather. Yeah, yeah, people love talking about the weather. But this isn’t just small talk for us. It’s the greater context of our life on the farm. And it has an impact on everything. 2018 began with a less-than-ideal winter. There was some snow some of the time, but we had many freeze and thaws. Our new pond did fill up nicely though it doesn’t rely solely onRead More
Our life on the farm is so strongly associated with seasons. Spring, summer, fall, and winter play a strong role. But there’s also a seasonality to the business aspects of running our farm. We stop going to market at the end of October or early November. We have a few weeks to get the farm ready for the snow on its way (this year that was a VERY short window!). And then we beginRead More
Well, this coming Saturday will be our last week selling at the Dieppe Market this year. We’ll be inside at the market, near the entrance where the blueberries were. Then we’ll spend the winter planning, seed-ordering and bookkeeping. And we’ll be back in the spring – usually sometime in April, but the exact week always depends on the weather. Stock Up for the Winter A lot of our customers are interested in buying extrasRead More
Thanks to our great friend Katie for taking all these photos of our field day! This past Sunday (October 14th), we held a Field Day at our farm. While it was a bit late in the season to show the peak of abundance, the timing was strategic. It would be less likely that mosquitoes or black flies would overwhelm folks. It’s crazy beautiful here when the leaves are changing colour in the fall. We wantedRead More
The Canadian Organic Standards Revision Process has begun! This is required to happen every 5 years to keep the Standards relevant, legal, and to maintain equivalency agreements with other countries. The Committee that is responsible for the revision of the Canadian Organic Standards is called the Technical Committee (or TC for short). Under the TC, there are working groups for specific categories (Crops, Livestock, Processing, and Maple) and Task Groups (on Greenhouses, Sprouts, Poultry,Read More
