Whitsend Market Garden

Update as of December 9th:

We still have produce in stock for sale.  For our CSA and occasional customers in Kanata, Stittsville, and Ottawa, I will be making deliveries once during the weeks of the 13th, 20th, and 27th.

Exact dates to be determined by the weather, I try to keep my best eather days for work here at the farm.

For custoemrme in the Lanark and McDonalds Corners area, please contact us by phone or email (prefferrred) to order and arrange a pick up time.

For honey or pork, please see the honey and pork pages respectively.  For other produce, check the Farmgate Store page.

Supplies for most of our produce stock, and certain cuts of pork are limited, so contact us soon.

Our jars of award winning gold honey make great Christmas gifts!

 

Hello Everyone:

Withthe pork to arrive soon, activity continues to ramp up here at Whitsend.  Even as the first snow flies, there are tasks to be seen to.  No time for winter reading just yet.

There are still carrots, rutabaga, garlic, and limited quantities of potatoes remaining to be sold.  Contact us if you are interested.

Our pork is arriving tommorrow.  As is our new freezer.  And the worst weather of the new season.  

For details, see the 'Pork' page at the tab above.

I'm sure my pork pick-up trip will be a bit of an adventure on the roads tommorrow.

In the meantime, we are saying good bye to the old farm.  Almost everything is out of the field except for my freshly harvested fence posts and a pile of smooth rocks I use to pin down row covers and insect netting.  

The barn has a lot of assorted stuff still in it, all slowly being packed while a new shed is hastily constructed at the Lanark site to put it all in.

Our field for the past ten years has finally begun to yield some very good results.  The last and probably biggest lesson I learned in deveping soil fertility was cover cropping, especially at the end of the year to provide for the next season's soil. 

One of the most unusual things I noticed this season was the lack of insect pests.  One potato beatle, no evidence of hormworms, very few lawn grubs and wire worms, and not a single squash beatle.  However, there were plenty common house finches, and several sightings of mature praying mantis'.  I was here almost five years before I found my first mantid, now the population seems to have established itself.  Hopefully forever...

This photo is taken of the earliest portion of the field that I grew vegetables on.  I have not used it for over three years, yet the outlines of the beds are still discernable.

The farm is now sold so everything must be out by January First.  Good bye first farm...

The new farm had some progress this season.  Our first vegetable field has had it's cover crops rotated for two years and now the new beds are being cut in.  

The first four to be completed were the garlic beds, seen here coverd with straw.

This is the next vegetable field to start work on after its first plowing.  I have started it now as I expect there will be at least one year of cover cropping.  While the cover crops break up the hard crust, smother weeds and feed the soil, I'll be cleaning and preparing beds in the first field.

Roof spacce is in very short supply here.  THis is my solution for storing straw.  I would have preferred to keep this in the large shed, but that structure is near black walnut trees.  Walnut trees proiduce a toxin that inhibits the growth of other plants, so I need to keep the walnuts out of the straw that I want to use as mulch and eventually compost material.

The problem with keeping stra bales near walnut trees is that the rodents like to eat the walnuts on top of the bales, thus spreading the rinds and shell (and toxins) into the bales.

So I have to resort to using some old tarps and whatever else I can find to protect the bales from exposure to rain and snow.  It's an eyesore, but it works.

Here is another temporary solution, a hastily constructed lean to covered in tarps. I hope it lasts the winter, in an attempt to keep building materials dry and as organised for quick retrieval as posssible.

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The foundation for the "hot nursery" is started.  For the past couoplk eof years I have used the main floor of the hexagon for seedling starting but the light is poor and the space not custom built to suit the needs. 

This will be the fourth nursery I've built, using everything I have learned from my first three nurseries at the old farm to improve the work spae of this one.

I will consider myself lucky if this gets built before the weather becomes impractical to continue.

Of course, there is much more to relate, but the sun is rising and that means tume to bundle up and head outside...

PS - Word from B.C. is that our two main seed garlic suppliers are ok.  At last word, one was without pawer and operating on generators and the other was on high enough ground to be out of the flood zone.  No doubt they still have their challenges.

It is very unfortunate that there will be a lot of soil remediation to be done.  One farmer I heard from remarked that after the water receded from their field, it left a scent of kerosene all over their land.  I wonder about the ecological and organic farms that have had their nieghbours herbicides such as round up wash over their soil.  This mess will be a long clean up.  

A drained lake is not land!