As Usual, There Were Mistakes From Which to Learn

Every time I look at how things are going, the mistakes I have made jump out far more brightly than the successes. 

As the weather begins to cool, plans for the next growing season are already cementing in my mind. First is to maximize the amount of land available in my village lot. This season, I worked with 25 foot beds that cross my property. The reason was mainly that short beds were easier to add one at a time and it was visually appealing. However it has been clear to me since very early on that fewer long beds would be able to produce far more than many short beds. The reason? Fewer beds = fewer paths. Fewer paths = more growing space. Obvious, I know, but these are the things you overlook when you go from a kitchen garden to a market garden.

Second, I have a whole new garden in my backyard! The 30'x30' space beyond the shed was completely overrun by incredibly invasive Japanese Knotweed. While I planned to have the space cleared of this weed by July, the plant proved so aggressive that we are still pulling it out to this day. However, each new generation is weaker than the last and I am prepared to plant this area of the garden next spring. This increases the growing space hugely!

Luna, enjoying a romp in the perennials that make up the wildlife garden.

Third, when I only have 7 long beds, setting up the entire area with drip tape will be much easier and more cost effective. Being able to irrigate without hopping between rows with a sprinkler all day to water the whole garden will mean I can water more often in dry spells. With more water I can get certain crops to maturity earlier, and increase production from other crops. Water results in more food with less space. Perfect!


Fourth, I purchased another 'greenhouse'. Really, it's a carport that I'm going to buy greenhouse plastic to cover, but what's the difference between friends? My 20'x13' greenhouse produced beautiful tomatoes and cucumbers. With a second one, I can dedicate one to just producing tomatoes, and in the second grow peppers, aubergine, and cucumbers. While reading a book about greenhouse production it also dawned on me how stupid I had been with my greenhouse rows. Instead of 4 single rows, I should have grown 3 double rows! More food, less space. I am thrilled that I have the chance to make these mistakes while I still have the safety of an off-farm income!

Finally I am delighted that the orchard will finally have access to water! In the spring, I will bite the bullet and get financing to drill a well and purchase some major irrigation equipment so that my investment of fruit trees and asparagus may finally produce a crop. There is still a large section of field at the bottom of the slope where I plan to have a large plantation of haskaps (after buying the initial 30 plants, I am propagating new plants from cuttings until I can fill the field). This is where I will expand the annual vegetable production next year. Long season crops that do not require picking several times per week will be planted here. Winter squash, garlic, melons, brussel sprouts etc. 

That's the plan! With my financial goal reached for 2018, my goal for 2019 is to double that amount. Maybe by 2020, I will be able to pay myself for the labour I put in! Wouldn't that be novel?

Happy planning!

Summer of Market, Photo Diary

Nobody got into farming because they liked record keeping. One short-cut form of record keeping is taking photographs. These photographs serve to remind me when certain items came in season, and remind me visually what I had on offer on the weeks when I had the highest, and lowest sales. 

Here is some of Eden's Rise first year at the market, in easily digestible form. There are three weeks left, come to Metcalfe Farmer's Market Saturdays 9-1 to say hello!

July 28

August 11

August 25

September 1

September 8

September 22

Growing Orchard

Changing the pH of the soil is slow business, but the blueberries continue the fight. Enough flowers this spring to feed my hungry face with blueberries this summer! Maybe next year the soil+age of the plants will = surplus available for sale!

Grapes have been unimpressive in my poor soil, but this year their roots finally seem to have established some dominance against the stubborn grass. After two years, we see some top growth. (Grape plants have since been weeded)

The orchard will produce its first grapes!

The lonesome Kiwi survives. Two of her sisters and her mate have died. Without a male, these plants cannot produce fruit.

One of five blueberry varieties in the orchard.

There will be a huge amount of currants coming my way! I am excited to have a crop to harvest. Growing perennials is a game of patience, seeing results is a gift. One of 50+ currant bushes at the orchard...yum!

A few Haskap/honeyberries have already ripened. Unfortunately the 30 plants I planted last spring have produced collectively 8 berries. Here's hoping next spring will prove more rewarding. In the meantime, I have planted a further 25 haskap plants this spring and continue to propagate new plants from cuttings.

Saskatoons ripening in the sun. I purchased two varieties of Saskatoon. Lee 8 (pictured here) is producing fruit on every plant. The Martin variety has not produced a single berry.

Gardening for Butterflies

After my last post I received an excellent question: apart from leaving milkweed in my garden, "How else can we encourage the monarchs?"

Milkweed is known to be critical for monarchs as it is the only  plant upon which monarch caterpillars can feed. The adult monarch butterfly however, can feed on any nectar producing flowers. If you want to give them a nutritious pit stop, plant flowers in groups. This allows butterflies to hop from one flower to another using relatively little energy while getting a full meal. 

Here are five great flowers for attracting butterflies.

Coneflower

Purple Coneflower

Aster

Aster

Black Eyed Susan

Black Eyed Susan

Bee Balm

Bee Balm

Lupine

Lupines

This is a beginner's guide as the truth is any flower/plant is useful as a habitat or source of food for an insect. Clumps of grass are great shelter during rough weather, for example. There are flowering charts and extensive lists of flowers and plants that attract butterflies for those who want to be meticulous.  If you aren't interested in having a binder of study material rest assured that having a diversity of plant species is guaranteed to attract winged visitors. Hummingbirds will certainly be attracted by the red flowers of your bee balm.  The only way to go wrong when planning a butterfly garden would be to create a lawn or to use pesticides. 

Biodiversity is the best thing you can offer. Try having perennial flowers that will flower at different times during the season, so that there is always a nectar source. Indigenous weeds are awesome when your gardening budget is low, letting them grow to flower before pulling them up is a great way to create a mini habitat with a huge amount of biodiversity. Indeed, these plant might be host plants for caterpillars from other species of butterflies.

Simply put: have a garden! Your garden is a space you are sharing with wildlife and insects. It is a refuge for these species from the acres of conventional fields and from the pavement and buildings that cover our cities and suburbs. 

Lastly, do them one huge (obvious) favour; don’t cover the plants and soil with pesticides and herbicides. The land might be in your name, but the earth cannot belong to a person. Animals and insects constantly have their food poisoned for something as superficial as a 'perfect' rose bush.

Go forth and make Eden rise! Really, it is that easy.

The Us Versus Them Bias

At lunch break my colleague expressed sorrow for the people who saved up money for a holiday and had to come home early because of hurricane Irma. Another colleague said yes, but they were lucky because she knows that some people weren't even able to book another flight-- they had to stay for the storm.
I frowned over my lunch and quietly said "yes, it is a shame for the rich people* who have gone on vacation. I think it's probably worse for the people who actually live there."
They immediately agreed, but it hit on a theme I had been thinking of for a few months. 

I remember in middle school we learned about the rainforest in science class. The ongoing destruction of this delicate forest for more farmland. What they didn't teach us was that this farmland was used to grow crops that would feed livestock and that by eating meat we were contributing to the destruction of forest ecosystems. They also didn't teach us that Canada's forests are also continuously being cut down and burned for agriculture. Instead, they taught me that people in these almost imaginary far off lands were less educated than our class of 12 year olds. They were cutting down these precious forests because they didn't know any better. 

By that age I knew enough about Canadian history to know that all the farmland around my school had once been a mature forest. It seemed that if we cut down forests in the past, that was okay, but people cutting down forests now was bad. And since all our forests were cut down a long time ago, we can no longer take any of the blame for ongoing climate change.

Last year I worked as an organic farm inspector. Before I go on, I want to point out that I do believe in organic farming and that all farming should be organic by default. Pouring poison directly on our shared planet and directly on the plants that feed us is frankly horrifying. But here is something problematic I discovered during the course of my work.

In order to avoid the three year transition phase for a conventional field to produce organic food** farmers were clearing forested land in order to plant their organic crop and earn certification in their first year. Because this land had never been farmed conventionally there was no need for a transition period. 

This is the problem when ethics clash with capitalism. Farmers are business people. They want more money for the business. That forest is not generating any income, we need to downsize the parts of the business that do not generate income and expand into new product lines that do. Hence, cut down the forest to produce organic buckwheat, hemp, corn, soybeans. Of course, this goes against the philosophy of organics, but it is hugely wound in our society's way of perceiving money as Good above all else. We worship the thing that makes us slaves.

Blaming people across the world for practices we ourselves perform, and then feeling sympathy for our own when natural disasters (exacerbated by our thirst for carbon and our destruction of perennial vegetation) is all part of the same problem. We see Us as something different than Them.  We are all humans that share one planet. If we could do away with borders, maybe we could see that more clearly. What affects one person in our global community affects us all. 

It can be overwhelming as an individual to realize our way of life is being attacked by capitalism and climate change from all directions, and yet we do have power to change things. Want to fight back against capitalism? Stop consuming more than what you need. Want to reduce your impact on the earth? Stop participating in practices that are known to contribute to climate change. In the meantime, we need to stop blaming the Other and start holding ourselves and our neighbours and our communities accountable for what we have the power to change.


*I know that not everyone who goes on holiday is rich from the lens of someone who lives in Canada. Compared to their neighbours they may not consider themselves rich, but compared to the global community, they are.

**Farmers want to avoid this transition period as the first years of transition have lower yields and as the crop is still considered conventional, they cannot demand the higher prices that make organic production competitive.

Why Does my Tree Only Bear Fruit Every Other Year?

Last summer someone wondered aloud to me that there were not many wild flowers. This year, walking through the forest and wild meadow on the way to the orchard flowers are exploding from the ground, trumpeting life and the air buzzes with insects. I knew that 2016’s drought was a heavy one for our area, but the stark contrast with 2017’s wet spring is shocking.

My fruit trees are growing like fireworks, currant bushes I planted as twigs in May have quadrupled in size. The blueberries I planted this spring have already outgrown the ones that struggled to survive the dry summer. The grass last July was brown and flattened against the earth, now it makes a solid green curtain reaching my navel. It has turned the orchard into a maze where I have to guess the general direction of my Honeyberries to find them. The grass is taller than most of my berry bushes, but they don’t seem to mind. They all have a small radius where I have weeded and mulched the 'root zone'. After all the rain we’ve been having and my application of manure last week the orchard is singing. A monarch butterfly flutters past, floating above the tall grasses and flowering milkweed.

This week I’d like to address a question sent by a reader asking why their apple tree did not flower this year. I commonly get asked about this sort of fruit tree behaviour. The alternate version of the same question is: Why does my fruit tree only bear fruit every other year?

Trees run on a two year cycle when it comes to flowering. Trees want to produce fruit and seeds in order to create offspring. Imagine this year your tree is not producing any fruit. It is going to put a lot of energy into creating flower buds which will be able to produce fruit next year. Fast forward to next year, the tree is loaded with pollinated flowers and it is using all of its energy to ripen its immense load of fruit. This means that during this second year the tree has not been able to invest energy into next year’s flower buds. Year three we are back to a tree with no fruit.

In commercial orchards farmers control the fruit set by spraying the trees (in both conventional and organic agriculture this is a permitted practice, though the chemicals and techniques differ) in order to make them drop two thirds of the potential fruit load. This means the apples, or peaches, or plums that are left on the tree will ripen bigger and more flavourful.  At the home scale you can thin fruit by hand and ladder. My second year working in agriculture I spent a few days in spring thinning fruitlets on peach trees in a greenhouse in northern Ontario.  It is a slow process, but it improves fruit quality and ensures a harvest for next year.

Once trees have gotten used to biennial bearing, it is very difficult to restore them to annual bearing. As far as I am aware it is not impossible, but the ease at which you can bring those trees back is largely affected by how long they have been allowed to bear fruit in this way.

Your berries won't need thinning, they are pretty good at self-regulating. You should thin your grapes to improve flavour. The amount of grapes you leave on depends on the vineyard, the use for the grapes (wine or fresh eating), and the climate. Go with your gut, trust your instinct. Often when it comes to plants the power of observation will lead you to the right place.

Hoping you enjoyed a lovely summer solstice, have a lovely week.

-E.V.

Restoration Agriculture

When I started planning my orchard, I had never heard of Restoration Agriculture, or Mark Shepard.  During the course of the summer when I worked as an organic farm inspector, the words Restoration Agriculture and Mark Shepard kept popping up at the most interesting farms I visited. My personal interests make this a biased ‘most interesting farms’. I love perennial crops. Fruit trees, asparagus, perennial herbs, nuts, and perennial veggies. You get the picture.

What is Restoration Agriculture?

Restoration Agriculture is a way of farming that has the ability to produce many human staple food crops on fields that are unusable to, or have been depleted by annual crop production. It is a way of farming that aims to restore or improve the health of soils, microbiology, wildlife habitats, and waterways that are connected to the production site. How? It relies heavily on imitating the natural ecosystems that were in place before modern man changed the face of the planet. By imitating the indigenous ecosystem of a region, the hope is that we can choose crops that function well in a climate without needing constant attention and coddling.

How do you imitate the natural ecosystem to create a farm? Mark Shepard mainly focuses on the oak savannah at his own farm. To oversimplify things, he has rows of perennial crops with space for cattle to graze beneath. He can grow oak, apple, currants, raspberries, pears, grapes, hazelnuts, and animal flesh and eggs on a hill that if it was under conventional management would be useless for growing corn and could only support a handful of grazing animals. He argues that despite the individual crop yield being lower per acre than a conventional farm, the overall yield if you add the crops together will bring a higher caloric yield than a field equivalent in size that grows corn or soy.

All the while, this system uses no sprays. Animals graze down the grass that competes with the trees and pests are controlled by tree frogs, bats, and ‘good’ insects. Pruning trees is performed by cattle and wild deer. The apples do not all end up looking like the ones in the pyramid display at your local supermarket. The best ones are sold for fresh eating, the rest can be juiced to make delicious cider.

Maybe you’ve started to notice similarities between me and Mark Shepard? Mmm, cider.

Corn needs to be planted, sprayed, weeded, and stalks plowed under every year (despite no-till getting more and more interest). Vegetable crops need to be covered by row covers, hand weeded, or chemically sprayed, protected from insect, frost, wind, and rain damage.  Agriculture is an awful lot of WORK and the returns are not often what anyone would call ‘profitable’. There is one chapter in his book that Mark Shepard begins with the sentence “On the whole, unless someone has special circumstances, nobody is really making any money in agriculture”. He has a few examples of farmers operating at huge losses until they go out of business.  

I don’t want to use sprays on Eden’s Rise, or get too obsessed about things being perfect. I do want it to be an Eden for humans and animals alike. The most exciting moments this summer were when I either got to eat a berry or discovered an amazing new bug or animal in the field.

During the course of my farm inspections I visited a few blueberry farms. One had netting over their entire crop. The farmer explained to me how they had just come up with a new way to set up the netting that took half the time (still several days of labour for the whole team, and that doesn’t include taking it down again), and also complained about being organic because they had to spend 30 hours squishing caterpillars that were ravaging the crop. By contrast, another blueberry farm I visited had no nets, and apparently no pest problems. The farmer said he couldn’t be bothered with the nets, his harvest was able to pay all the bills, and his personal thoughts were that birds prefer protein over sugar. The birds were probably eating as many bugs out of the blueberry plants as they were eating blueberries. When labour is a huge cost in your business, cutting out a useless practice like this could save you a lot of money. Sure, you probably will get a smaller harvest. But a smaller harvest with fewer expenses might actually lead to greater profits.

Mark Shepard also talks about a process of selection whereby he plants a lot of seedling trees and lets the ones who want to die, die, and the resulting trees are strong and capable of surviving his unique environment. Eden’s Rise is only one acre, and I don’t have the capital to get crazy planting thousands of trees and hoping 5 of them will be incredible performers. What I did was similar, albeit I let other people do the work of selecting varieties for me. I planted a wide range of different fruits, and different varieties of the same fruits in order to discover who does well on a shallow, heavy site. I will see what survived the first year and be able to start a second shopping list of the crops and varieties that I will be planting more of in 2018.

If you have any intersecting interest between agriculture and conservation, or an interest in permaculture, I would recommend watching a couple Mark Shepard talks on YouTube. He can be pretty condescending, self-aggrandising, and evasive on the certain subjects, but what I enjoy the most about him is that is stirs in you a new permission to dream up your own way of solving the ‘problems’ of your site without relying on the usual Big Ag expensive ways of ‘fixing’ what doesn’t work for a specific crop.

Have a lovely week!

Hidden gifts

The past few weeks have been wild, both for the garden and for myself. After days of pain I went to the hospital where they kept me for a week and eventually let me leave having confiscated my gallbladder. They said I'd be back at full activity within a week, but no digging or strenuous exercise for two weeks. 

My 300 flower bulbs arrived in the mail the day I went in to the hospital. Poor Eden's Rise, I thought, but lucky me to live in an age where such a surgery can occur so quickly and the wounds can heal and be forgotten almost immediately. It only took four days for walking to become natural again, and I went to see how Eden's Rise fared with my two week absence.

Interesting news: the deer have found the field! Ends of branches have been nibbled off, and entire branches were shaved clean of leaves. Oh what a pickle. 

Having gone through a near death (and if not 'near death', then 'near to wishing for death') experience calms and places things in proportion. 

"The deer had a little to eat, okay, but this year was all about promoting root growth anyway. All those leaves that were eaten weren't important," I tell myself and hope that it is true. "If anything this will be good for the plants as it will encourage them to grow taller branches next year to get out of reach of the deer."

This positive thinking is no reason for inaction, however. I returned home, washed my hair (and let's face it, with my gut still covered in bandages and changing clothes being challenging, washing my hair was somewhat overdue anyway), and then I cut my hair. I placed the cut hair into a bag. Then I brushed my cat's long luxurious coat and collected her fur too. Then I was tired so I had a nap.

Fast forward a bit, now all the trees that had been nibbled in Eden's Rise have a few strands of hair hanging from each branch. 

I am not a hippy!

The smell of soap is a known deer deterrent, as is the smell of humans. I am not sure my cat's fur will deter deer, but who knows, maybe the mice will think twice about gnawing at the bark. 

My two weeks mandatory digging-free rest were over on Saturday, and I planted two thirds of my flower bulbs. On Sunday we had a gentle rain. 

What a glorious time to be alive and healthy. I wish the same to all of you. 

Welcome Mantis, bring your friends

I kept my word and have been watering my plants every evening, when possible. I had to miss a night here and there due to either social events or back pain, but overall my plants have been spoiled these past two weeks and they love it!

I see lots of new wood, new leaves, and the largest surprise of all- a few days after I started regular watering, the insects that were eating the leaves nearly all disappeared. One exception is one apple tree was attacked by several hundred miniature caterpillars, but after a bit of squishing they seem to have disappeared too.

Best of all- it finally rained yesterday. A welcome relief during our summer or drought.

There haven't been many pictures lately of Eden's Rise and that is because of how brown, crispy, and dead the field looks. The only colour comes from my trees and the particularly drought resistant golden rod that has taken possession of the bottom of the field. 

And yet life carries on. I don't know anything about snake life cycles but there are some miniature snakes hanging out near my asparagus and I assume they must be some recent hatchlings. I love snakes, and I am happy that having left the grass long means that they feel comfortable having a habitat in my garden. 

There are also voles, or some kind of fluffy round ball animals. They make holes and run away in a flash of dark fur when I approach them. They don't seem particularly destructive, but I don't appreciate when they make their holes right through the roots of my newly planted trees. They likely don't appreciate me planting trees right through their newly dug holes.

Today I made a new friend: a praying mantis! 

At first I was horrified, all my knowledge about praying mantises came from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Xander was nearly eaten by a large Praying Mantis Demon Lady. Still, I had an idea that it was probably not eating my plants and likely even a welcome visitor for my garden. A quick google search when I got home confirmed it. It seems they have enormous appetites for aphids, mosquitoes, caterpillars, and a bunch of other bugs I have no immediate love for. Suddenly I love my new freaky insect friend, and I hope she invites all her friends over for a party! 

Have a lovely week, and take some time to look at nursery catalogues. If you want to start your own orchard or want to plant flower bulbs, then fall is a great time to plant. 

Lessons

Things have been a bit bleak lately. My plums are being massacred by insects, my strawberries are being ripped up by neighbouring horses, my blueberries look like they're burning from the leaf edges, my grapes are stunted. 

It's all my fault.

I frequently visit other people's orchards. Usually they are an abandoned side project and I've been proud to see that for the most part my trees look like those in orchards that were planted several years ago. My bubble burst when I visited my best friends who planted their orchard at the same time as I planted mine. Their trees have at least twice as much new wood, three times more leaves, and no apparent evidence of insect damage. 

I hated them.

Only briefly. (C'mon, a little jealousy keeps you human!)

Their orchard is very near their house, which allows them to water it daily. They need to. Their soil is sandy and has trouble holding water. Daily water and the endless heat and sunshine that we've had this summer are the perfect recipe for plant growth. 

I've started a new job this summer and with the busy whirl of finding my feet in a job that has me travelling around the province I've been neglectful of my orchard. I've only been watering Eden's Rise once a week, sometimes even less. No wonder my trees are being ravaged by insects, curling their leaves up, turning yellow, and my two weakest plants (weak since being planted too early and getting a hard knock by the frost) have finally died. 

I realised that far from being on par with those older orchards, I was on the road to having my orchard stunted and looking much as it does now even 4 years from now when ideally I should be in full production. Tough love is not what these young trees need.

Like a procrastinator who has realised the deadline is now only 2 days away I've been pushed into action by panic. I have been watering my orchard every day for 4 days now. To see change overnight seemed too good to be true and yet change is here!

My elderberry plants have added an inch of new wood in 3 days, my plum which had lost 60% of its leaves to insect damaged has now sneezed out a huge tuft of new leaves which totally hides the half eaten massacre within. The blueberries with crusty leaf edges are pushing out some fresh green leaves and the grapes which have been lacking in action nearly all summer have finally sent enough tentacles to reach the first wire of my trellis (about 4 feet) (not all of them, some varieties seem to be struggling more than the rest). 

Seeing an immediate result to my extra work is exactly what I needed for morale. I should have known thirsty plants don't have the energy to fight off predators, etc.

Things will be back on track now at Eden's Rise. It may take 2 hours a night to water my orchard, but let's face it. What else would I be doing?

Have a lovely week!

-Eden