Your organic farm in the Eastern Townships
Incredible, but true – two days without rain! I wanted to do a little non-rain dance…instead, I harrowed. I tilled a full field of green manure, prepping for my fall brassicas. Perhaps you know my obsession with green manure – cereals and legumes that I grow for no other purpose than field fertilisation. Last night,…
Last night, we had to shift gears, moving into prevention mode. As I was inspecting our corn patch, to check on the plants’ progress and assess the silent presence of the nefarious corn borer, I noted some damaged stalks scattered throughout the patch, lying on the ground, felled at the base, unfinished cobs still intact.…
Lamenting the fact that it rained again this week would serve no purpose, so I won’t add anything stating the obvious. Instead, let me tell you about our decision to (finally) install protective netting in our blueberry patch. Some of you may recall plaintive emails of seasons past recounting forced sharing of our blueberry crop…
They say two things are certain in life: death and taxes. I would add a third: weeding. In organic farming, there is no escaping it. The formula is almost mathematical: rain plus warm weather, made worse by the technical unfeasibility of wheeling mechanical (i.e. tractor-pulled) weeding equipment into a soggy field – and there you…
Will you allow me to wax lyrical on lettuce? Lettuce so rarely merits more than a passing thought, but this week’s selection makes it worthwhile to pause and consider it. In truth, it’s pretty easy to overlook lettuce. Farming-wise, I mean, if not otherwise. Forget it in a corner of the field, fail to water…
The heatspell of the past two day has, as if by magic, erased all memories of the ridiculous weather we had been having up to now. We’ve turned the corner into full-on summer, and there will likely be no looking back until October, when we will have had our fill of languid summer temperatures. Meanwhile,…
We’ve had no choice but to weather the weather, so to speak – and to compensate for its vagaries, unpredictability and liquid excesses by throwing this year’s crop rotation out the window…Or so it seems, given the past few weeks at Arlington Gardens. We know a wet field when we see one, and a dry…
This month of April will clearly have been the wettest one in a very long while. The water levels in our irrigation pond are the highest we’ve ever seen, and our fields are sodden. Fortunately, we will be starting our earliest field plantings under the cover of our big greenhouse. I should no better than…
Spring is finally in the air, complete with rising temperatures and thawing soil. The fields are waterlogged and we’ve begun to spot the occasional intrepid cyclist, all telltale signs of the impending change of season. But none of that really matters, as we focus our undivided attention on the season’s prep: the greenhouse has been…
Confounding March…The last days’ rainfall has erased all traces of snow remaining in the fields. Everything is laid bare, exposed to nature’s vagaries and the bitter cold which continues, despite a fast-approaching spring (on our calendar page, if nowhere else). Temperatures dropped below -20⁰C last weekend and the forecast is for more of the same…
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