Rich soil is a gift...

It is more than a place for plants to root, it is a living super organism teeming with fungus, microorganisms, worms, insects and much more.  The building blocks of soil are minerals and broken down organisms.  This black, brown, or grey layer is what we connect with when we eat food.  It is our mission to maintain this food connection with very healthy soil. 

Our farming practices begin with respect for the soil.  Soil covers only a small part of the earth, and what we have has been built up over millennia to become the life-supporting substrate that we can grow food in.  It is teeming with organisms, all of which work together to become a nutrient-dense matter that supports plant life (along with sun and water).  We work together with these elements to grow vital foods for you. We seek to farm with a balance of efficiency and sustainability.  We farm on a small scale; this leads to less reliance on large-scale equipment as well as increased human interaction with soil and plants. 

Something we keep in mind is that human health depends on a healthy internal biome much like the soil itself! Our vegetables, grown in thriving soil, supports human health!

Organic No-Till

We have transitioned 139 of our 100’x6’ beds to a no-till method of growing (that’s 83,400 square feet altogether!). This minimizes disruption to the amazing and delicate eco-system beneath the soil. We work hard to make sure that more nutrients are going into the soil than out.  We do this by: 1) cover-cropping (for example our pathways are covered in a living perennial ground cover and when the beds are not being used for crops we seed them with cover crops like rye or buckwheat) , 2) deep mulch application of compost 3) supporting biological life with worm castings, compost teas, mineral balancing, bio char and keeping the ground covered as much as possible.

For more on our no-till, read this blog post here.

Pesticides

We are Organic.  This means any substance that we incorporate into our practices needs to meet the standard (see: CAN/CGSB-32.311-2015) set by government and non-government organizations –  a group of people wanting to make food and food production strong and healthy.  Within this standard, there are a number of fertilizer and pesticide options.  For example, we have used pesticides that are biological organisms to discourage Colorado potato beetle and cabbage moth (caterpillars in cabbage, broccoli etc.)

Weeding

Crop rotation and soil fertility management affect how food plants compete with weed plants. We also use hand hoes, long and short, skinny and wide hoes, and some with wheels. These are small-farm tools.  One advantage of using these tools is that we can maintain awareness of what is going on with the plants as they grow.