Tulips in the high tunnel
We’re excited to return to the Dieppe Market for the year, beginning this coming Saturday (April 27th)! It has been a wet spring for sure. Our fields are extremely well-draining but it’s still too wet to do much digging or driving around with our tractor. Luckily, our work is mostly done by hand so we’ve still been able to get some planting done. We didn’t have any hoophouses covered with plastic over the winter (we usually have at least 1) and we had a really windy spring, so it was a bit later than usual for us to get the […]

See you at the Dieppe Market on Saturday!

Centaurea 1
When we first started growing flowers 8 years ago, we didn’t realize that there would be some differences from the vegetables we’d been growing for years. In our first year growing flowers, I bought a handful of seed packets, including one called Cut Flower Mix. This was a mixture of flower seeds that were good for cutting. That’s all I knew. I planted them out directly into one of our field beds. Basically the same as I would have done for mixed lettuces – except given the broad diversity of seed size and shape of these various cut flowers, I […]

Growing flowers: What we Learned Over the Years

Join our Market Food Club 2
There are a lot of things that make it tough to eat the right foods.  Especially for people who give a fork. What do we mean by “give a fork”? Our customers tend to care (or give a fork) about the same things we do: Health The food we eat is connected so strongly to our overall health. Healthy bodies is the #1 reason we grow what we do, the way we do. Eating an abundance of fresh vegetables, especially a diversity of different ones, helps prevent diet-related illnesses and is the commonality found in different food recommendations. We choose […]

Eat Like you Give a Fork

small-scale compost spreader 1
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 led us to our newest favourite tool on the farm… Our Self-loading Compost Spreader! We’ve been getting lots of questions from other farmers about it….and promising […]

Broadfork Farm’s Self-Loading Compost Spreader

Raspberry foliage 1
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 on water run-off; it’s also spring-fed. Spring had warm days but also cold nights. We had frosty nights until the summer solstice (June 24th), about 3 […]

Year-in-Review: 2018 at Broadfork Farm

organic farmers photobooth 2
  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 begin our ritual of farm conference-ing. One of the “guiding principles” we’ve identified for our life (and so by extension, our farm….since our farm is principles […]

It’s Farm Conference Season. What did we Learn?