Market Gardening - A New Project

Our first spring has come to the new farm. We were excited to begin planting both the fields and the large market garden. It was pretty intimidating when the seed orders began to arrive and we saw just what we had bitten off in the pursuit of growing our own food.

Seed prices have definitely seen an increase over the past 5 years, especially some of our preferred varieties. To our advantage, buying larger volumes of seed (30 000 to 60 000 in some cases) does come with a slight reduction in per seed cost when compared to buying smaller amounts. We did limit some of the items this year to only one or two varieties until we learn how the soil in this garden grows when compared to our previous garden.

This space is very different. It is a lot of peat with dark clay hidden underneath. Our old garden was clay and gravel - very inhospitable to plants until (literally) tonnes of manure was added. We will continue to fertilize with composted manure from our farm to reduce the input cost of fertilizers and the benefits for soil health. We have not sent soil for testing at this time, but will be doing so later on this year as we feel it is a beneficial cost to have a proper scientific analysis of the soil nutrients for both the vegetable market garden and the fields used to grow our animal feed.

On that topic, the oats and barley are both planted and the hay has begun to grow well. We will be revitalizing an unused field for further hay production. The reason it has not been used recently is that the trail to the field is difficult to traverse for our equipment. Hopefully we are able to improve all the access drives to all areas of the farm in the near future.

We are looking forward to having a mostly self-sufficient farming operation with good systems of waste management and soil fertility while feeding our animals, ourselves, and our local communities in a healthy and environmentally conscious