Occultation: Making More Garden Space Without Herbicide

The windy Alberta spring is well underway, and so are our plans for the summer gardening season. As we’ve charted out our veggie crops, though, we’ve come to the conclusion that we are (yet again!)  in need of more garden space. While we do have a fair amount of land fenced off inside our garden […]

Getting Lettuce to Market

The logistics of keeping lettuce fresh on the road and through a four hour market day is difficult – we want people who buy our lettuce at 1pm to get as good a product as the folks who bought at 9 am! Here’s what we do to ensure the lettuce we grow is always worth […]

Quack Grass Invasion

  Gardenerss like to plant into clean, weed-free beds, that have well-defined outlines.  But every spring, we go out to plant, lo and behold, the tidy beds that we left last fall have disappeared.  The quack grass has crossed the divide, and is happily ensconced in our garden. What’s a farmer to do?  The rototiller […]

Snow in April!

  It hasn’t failed me yet.  I put out the first new transplants of the year, and the next day  . . . .snow!   The forecast was for rain showers today, and a high of 8 degrees C. But instead, we got snow, and a high of 1º C.  You wouldn’t guess that just […]

Preparing beds for Planting

Spring is early this year.  The frost is gone from the top 18 inches of garden soil.  Even the bigger compost piles have little or no frost left.  The temperatures have been warm, some days as high as 20 degrees Celsius.  But it feels desolate:  there are no leaves on the trees and very little […]

Planting Flats

Flats of Veggies . . . I have planted 11 flats over the last two weeks.  Not a lot of flats in the grand scheme of things, but each flat has between 72 and 128 plants.  That means I’ve planted somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1000 plants.  That’s a lot of fresh veggies:  butter lettuce, […]