Your organic farm in the Eastern Townships
Surely you know the French expression — chassez le naturel, il revient au galop? In our case, it applies to a problem we face yearly in one of our fields. Even the flattest of fields is never as flat as it seems…and so it is that one of our seemingly flat hayfields harbours a sizeable…
We were expecting them at noon, they arrived at midnight, an F250 pulling a trailer loaded with 200 feet of greenhouse metal tubing in the dark of the night…They thought loading the trailer would be easy, but it proved to be major feat, considering greenhouse geometry, all horizontal arabesques and transversal bars piled to infinity.…
It’s a corner of the farm we refer to as “no man’s land,” our own “dumping ground between fiefdoms,” tucked away between the woods’ edge and the irrigation pond we’ve dug deeper and wider over the past few years. A natural landfill which nature is constantly reclaiming, where we (and the generations of farmers who…
We finally caught him. For several days, he had been teasing us, eating the first well-formed ears, nibbling at others as he ambled down the rows — early indications of ravages still to come. We didn’t know what to expect — a racoon, perhaps, or maybe a skunk? Finally, our nemesis let himself be tempted…
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…