Your organic farm in the Eastern Townships
The week has begun with a chill and our activities have followed suit.We are cleaning up fields that have already been harvested and doing an early harvest of winter squash, even though the full process will stretch until mid-September. Most importantly, though, we are focusing on planting another large batch of leafy vegetables, which has…
I never thought that one day I would be sharing with you the alarming antics of a singular creature in our fields, the groundhog.What is a groundhog if not the most comical animal in the countryside? Comical because of its schizophrenic behaviour when it exits its burrow, a mix of hesitant waltzes and extreme wariness…
Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more –or more familiarly, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ The expression comes to mind as I observe my three sons readying themselves for the deer-hunting season. Preparations include the felling of a few cedars to build their caches, the installation of cameras to better appreciate the comings and…
They’re heading off to greenerpastures, our hens,the very ones whose eggs have graced your plates, whether poached, scrambled or boiled (hard- or soft-). It’s our usual routine every October, as the days grow shorter and the hens yearn for a more hospitable laying environment. So it is that we go to great lengths to find…
A glorious day is unfolding, cool and sunny, an upbeat start to a week that will be up and down, meteorologically speaking. My morning constitutional in our last vegetable patches reminded me of the second – slow – movement (The Lonely One in Autum) of Mahler’s The Song of the Earth, an ode to the fading beauty…
Although there are still one to two weeks remaining before we begin delivering corn in your baskets, the tension is rising in our corn patch. Long-standing farm members know whereof I speak : the rank smell I sniff when I walk through my corn field, a tell-tale cob here and there, gnawed bare. The pressure is…
After a few years of dwindling corn yields, I am pleased to announced that our stratagem seems to be working; as a result, you will be able to munch on your cobs shortly…Without going into technical detail, it seems that the success of our electrification scheme had less to do with the 110-volt hook-up, and…
Our corn is beautiful, tassled and growing fast…and yet, we worry about our corn nemesis, the raccoon – corn thief par excellence, this farmer’s Public Enemy No. 1, and most likely the bane of every market gardener’s existence. Following the havoc wrought on our 2018 crop by this pest – i.e., the total destruction of nearly 20…
We’re off to the races at last! Mid-June marks the start of our weekly missives detailing basket contents and providing tidbits from the farm as well as additional information you may find useful. We have sowed, planted, hoed, weeded, watered and prayed – it is now time to harvest. In this week’s basket we were…
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…