Your organic farm in the Eastern Townships
This week’s topic is anything but bucolic, yet noteworthy nonetheless. In short, we spread manure last weekend: heavy (nay, stinky), but necessary, work to guarantee quality organic produce throughout the season. The manure is delivered by the 10-wheeler, 15-tonne truckload, deposited in an odorous dark brown swath along the field’s edge. To the uninitiated nostril,…
The timing of this post is an indication of the kind of weekend we’ve had. Another crazy race, this time against the heat. Which means installing sprinkler systems to water new transplants and rolling out drip irrigation lines where they had yet to be set out. You must be thinking, as you read this — following…
Nothing better to lift sagging spirits in soggy fields than a high tech happening at the farm, i.e. the arrival of a gleaming new tractor, a Case 95 HP… While I am not particularly mechanically inclined (or perhaps because I am not so), I finally gave in to the lure of a new tractor. Several…
We had to do it. And do it fast. You see, the rain was coming. And so, Friday and Saturday, we weeded EVERYTHING: the herbs, the baby broccoli, the kohlrabi, the beans…the list went on and on. We also planted EVERYTHING — more broccoli, more kohlrabi, and a few other things left on our greenhouse…
We spent the past week twiddling our thumbs and praying. The thumb-twiddling was because of the rain…needless to say, there was a lot of both (thumb-twiddling and rain) as we waited for the sky to clear and prayed for the rain to cease…visibly, praying has its limitations, as it was only by the weekend that…
They came, they planted, they left. By some amazing organisational miracle, we were lucky enough to have an entire Secondary 2 science class from nearby Massey Vanier high school (Cowansville), accompanied by their teachers and a few outstanding project coordinators, come plant 400 shrubs in a couple of hours; their good humour and energy proved…
It’s been several years since we’d seen anything like it: an early May that looks more like a late July! While it’s the kind of heat wave that lifts the sagging spirits of many a Québécois as winter (finally) draws to a close, it does nothing to smooth the furrowed brows of farmers. Our workload…
After last week’s proverbial April showers, we were hoping not only for May flowers, but for drier days propitious to planting. So far, though, May has been a disappointment: a short sunny break (four days), followed by diluvial rains since Tuesday noon. For farmers with loamy soils, a few days without rain will not suffice…
We awoke on this April 9 morning in a somber mood, feeling that Mother Nature had overstepped her bounds in teasing us yet again, this time one time too many. Her wintry taunt was spectacular, though, a freshly fallen layer of snow blanketing everything in sight, a marked contrast to the green backdrop for the…
The 2015 season at Arlington Gardens has indeed begun! We’ve completed everything — placed our seed orders, drawn up our field plans, submitted our annual organic certification filings and launched our ‘new and improved’ website. All that remained was to say at your keyboards, ready, set, go! We are now accepting online registrations for the 2015 season.…