Your organic farm in the Eastern Townships
For now, anyway, winter is back. After a month of yo-yoing hot and cold, the first half of February has seemed almost normal, with a cold snap followed by abundant snowfall – much to the delight of our kids who were finding winter particularly dull this year. The snow was so abundant, in fact, that…
After a two-month hiatus, which provided a most welcome break from almost everything vegetable, as the new year begins this organic farmer is yearning to get back at it, in a strange fit of passion and obsession. Indeed, as the greenhouse is not scheduled to fire up until mid-March, despite maddeningly fluctuating temperatures one could…
It’s been cold at the farm these last few days. So cold, in fact, that we’ve been huddling in the cold room (4⁰C) to bag your veggies and pack your baskets! It’s the inconvenient truth on an old farm : the buildings are gracious and cool during the summer, but come winter, everyone and everything is…
Having closed out our farmstand at Atwater and said good-bye to half our members as the regular season drew to a close at the end of October, suddenly our farm workload has lightened considerably. So much so that we even found a moment to attend our first winter concert at Place des Arts, a nostalgic…
This will be our first time delivering baskets in November, so we’ll all find out what it’s like together. Will we be harvesting beets in the snow? Will we have to wait until mid-day to harvest greens so they warm up a bit first? Only time (and temperature) will tell – but we do hope…
This week, we harvested the vegetables for our last regular season basket in t-shirts and with sweaty brows…a real novelty for us, accustomed as we have become over the years to shivering in the dark late-October-early-morning-chill as we dunk freshly harvested fall greens in ice-cold water. That said, we were hurrying to harvest the week’s…
We finally got our night below zero. After a few close calls and disappointments, the weather finally came within the range of average temperatures for this time of year, even if it only lasted a night. Minus 2 degrees celsius is enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, the annual from the perennial, the…
Although we’ve yet to feel the autumn chill, we’ve still felt the winds change as the rain fell this weekend – intermittently, but heavy nonetheless – before yesterday’s downpour, that is. This week’s harvesting has been done with our boots on and with water on our backs. It’s not like we have a choice : the…
I’d like to say we’ve crossed the Rubicon and that the cold nights we’ve been experiencing mean the end is nigh for all the undesirable flora populating the alleyways between, and in, our vegetable beds … but unfortunately, such is not the case. The temperatures have not yet dipped low enough to rid us of…
We’ve had sunset after sunset these days, and they’re all magnificent. Last week we pulled all stops, irrigation-wise – so summer’s last hurrah has so far been manageable. The only challenge has been in managing our irrigation schedule to ensure we don’t run our pond dry. Another week without rain will bring water levels perilously…