April 10

As Spring comes and goes day by day we're getting ready! One project is getting soil ready - our seeding mix and our container mix. We have worm compost and we use it without worrying about a few items not being fully composted. Once they're in the soil outdoors they'll compost further and provide nutrition for all the growing things. Egg shells and pumpkin seeds, for example, take quite awhile to break down. We made a you tube video showing us mix our seeding mix. Marigold seedlings are growing well and will need to be pricked out and potted on in a few weeks so we'll have to make some newspaper pots soon. The onions are thriving, but we won't separate them until it's time to plant them in the garden. Mole dirt is a great soil base that we collect and use in containers. Moles eat the roots in the soil and aerate it so it's fluffy and lovely. We'll add vermiculite to improve drainage and compost for nutrition.

                       

March 17 & 24th

Some of the onions - the ones seeded earliest and in the most favourable situations - are ready to be trimmed. We say we're giving them a haircut :) Our livingroom window faces South and it doesn't open so it stays warmer there than it does in the windows that do open. We can leave the onions in the window no matter how cold it gets overnight so they also get the maximum amount of sunlight. In the windows that can feel a draft when it's windy we need to take the onions out on cold nights. Trimming the onions makes them grow sturdier stems when growing them indoors. When they're planted outside the onions seem to shed their extra stems and concentrate on the biggest, strongest stems when they're exposed to strong winds and beating rain storms. Just like with the garlic, the onion stems represent layers in the onions. We trim the onions also because they get quite lanky as they reach for the sun and where they have a shelf above them they get too close. A week after trimming we can see new shoots coming up in the centre of the onions. These stems will be really sturdy. The red onions pictured haven't been trimmed but we can see new growth in their centres also! The colour is so lovely.

            

March 2

The onions are coming along nicely and now you can see which ones will be red. The third picture shows red onions growing in the coir mix. We dropped a pot last week and the one good thing about that was we could feel how well drained the mixture stayed - that is to say it was evenly moist which we were happy about. Sometimes when watering the pots in the house we've found that water stays in the upper part of the pots without draining through very easily. We've had such cold nights that we're still taking the onions out of the windows overnight so they're opposite to what they'll be all summer - they're cold during the day and warm at night!

February 19

Onions (and garlic) are still great coming from storage. Some garlic bulbs dry out and aren't good but the majority are crisp and flavourful. We're eating Trekker onions now. They last the best the longest for us and they're so sharp and lovely still. The layers are tight and the flavour strong. We keep the little ones for ourselves to eat :) The onion seedlings are gorgeous in the sunlight aren't they? We found out one interesting thing about the coir mixture by accident. A pot fell over when we were moving them out of the window last week and we were able to feel that the coir felt damp right to the bottom of the pot - more so than the peat mixture does - which was interesting to us.

                 

February 4

We've been really happy with the progress of the onions in the coir mixture. They germinated right on schedule - around a week after being planted - and they're growing well. The coir mix shows when it's dry either by feel or by its lighter colour showing it could use a drink. While the onion seedlings are little we keep them moist. Once they're bigger - say 4-6 inches - and stouter - we'll let the surface mixture dry out a little and then give the pots a big load of water. Some of the onions are planted in fairly deep pots since the roots will grow to be quite long before we can plant the onions out. You can see in the picture that the soil at the bottom of the pot is quite dry. When we can take the pots outside during the day - sometime in May, hopefully - we'll water them until the water drains out the bottom. We prefer pots that drain freely so that we can tell when we've saturated them completely. In May and particularly June our days are so long that the seedlings will use quite a bit of water in a day. Once they're transplanted into the garden the roots can spread outward and downward so that they can draw on more moisture and nutrients. For a few months, though, the onions have to enjoy sunshine from inside where they're protected from the snow and cold.

         

January 17, 2024

Happy New Year! Has anyone else been curious about alternatives to peat? We seed tons of onions inside during the Winter because they need such a long growing season. When we were kids our parents planted onion sets which are great and definitely a good alternative, but we want to plant lots of onions and we want to choose our varieties ourselves. We plant a wonderful sweet onion which is excellent in the summer for eating raw with burgers and salads. It doesn't store very long but people who love it find ways to preserve some to use through the winter. We also have strong red and white hybrid onions that store exceptionally well - we're enjoying them now and they're so crisp and juicy still. We'll also seed tomatoes and marigolds early in the Spring. In the past we would combine Pro-mix with compost to make our seeding mix but we watch and listen to gardeners and environmentalists who advocate for using an alternative to peat-based media. The most compelling argument against peat is the enormous amount of time it takes to produce peat as organic matter slowly builds up. We want to know if it's possible to use a non-peat mix so we're experimenting with coir this year. As we learn how it works we'll provide updates.

When we seed onions, tomatoes and marigolds the plants stay in their seeding mix until they're planted outside in the garden. Tomatoes are usually 'pricked out and potted on' as Monty Don recommends on the gardening show Gardener's World from the UK, but there are too many onions to do this and marigolds are super-hardy so we just plant them straight out once all risk of frost has passed. Because the onions stay in the mix for four or five months the mix needs to be loose and nutritious. We use our own compost - either our own cow manure or worm compost from household vegetable waste. For the trial seeding mix we're using coconut coir. It comes in compressed bricks which we put in a plastic tub then added buckets of water. Once it soaked up the water it remained moist for a long time - it was weeks before we had the other ingredients together and just the very top layer had dried out at all. We used a little rake to fluff up the coir and added an equal amount of vermiculite. We've used perlite in the past but prefer vermiculite because it isn't as dusty. We're not sure if either of them does anything except provide good drainage and looseness to allow roots to grow vigorously. All of our seedlings have extensive root systems. We add compost last and our amounts are roughly 20 litres of coir, 20 litres of vermiculite and around 4 litres of compost aiming for roughly 10 percent compost. The mixture feels great and we'll see how the seeds respond :)

         

December 20

    

We'd like to share a recipe for black olive dinner rolls. We ate these at a restaurant in Calgary - Santorini Taverna - and theirs were the best. We wanted to have them for the festive season because we think they'll be a perfect accompaniment for charcuterie spreads. The recipe makes a ton of rolls - we made about 50 and had hoped they'd be fairly small but they weren't - next time we'll try to make them even smaller and possibly get 70 smaller rolls. We checked allrecipes.com and adapted a recipe called Mediterranean Black Olive Bread to make it similar to my Mom's wonderful Air Buns but if you have a favourite recipe you basically add black olives and substitute olive oil for the shortening or butter. Allrecipes said to use a water bath which we did and it did make the rolls nice and crusty. The cooking time was much longer than Mom's recipe and maybe that's because of the steam?

Recipe: Dinner Rolls with Black Olives

Combine 1 cup warm water, 2 tsps sugar and 2 envelopes yeast until frothy.

Add 2 1/2 cups warm water and 1/2 cup olive oil.

Mix together 6 cups flour, 1 tablespoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of sugar and gradually stir into liquids.

Add 1 1/2 cups chopped and well-drained black olives and mix well.

Incorporate enough additional flour to make a nice soft dough - around 3-4 cups.

Knead dough until it's smooth and elastic. Let rise until doubled (1-1 1/2 hours). Punch down and knead for a few minutes, then shape into rolls - using a small palmful at a time. Cover and let rolls rise until doubled (45 minutes). Put a tray of water on the bottom shelf of the oven and preheat to 450 degrees. Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

October 4

We're really happy with our wildflower experiment overall. The seeds we bought from Stokes Seeds and Westcoast seeds grew well, but instead of expanding our wildflower ditch we'll use the flowers around the house and gardens. They're beautiful and hardy which is what we need.

              

July 2

It's been a beautiful Spring and early Summer this year. Wildflowers have been abundant and we post pictures fairly regularly on facebook and instagram and here are a few: columbines with their distinctive seedpods (actually most seedheads are very useful when identifying plants), pink wintergreen which is so lovely - and not very common here. We see it only after a soaking rain. Next is the inelegant sounding cow parsnip. It's very hardy in the woods, growing from 1 to 6 feet tall and the majority are the tall ones. They grow close to trees for wind protection. Their flower type (umbellifers) have a multitude of small flowers bunched together and they are popular with pollinators. Pictured first you see their characteristic flat tops and then their flowers up close. Next is healall, wild lily of the valley, yellow asters and a harebell.

                       

June 2

Ode to Garlic

Irreplaceable without being proud, works of art without being pretentious and valuable without being costly – this is garlic. All the best cuisine – Italian, Indian, Chinese, French, Greek – absolutely rely on garlic’s rich flavour. Think of the fragrant healthy sauces and the elevation provided to dishes that garlic provides and the flatness they would present without garlic. Whether garlic is a signature taste or a subtle boost for other flavours in a dish, there is no replacement ingredient. The beauty of garlic is that it will excel at whatever role you ask of it.

A garlic bulb (and each garlic clove) is one of nature’s best works of art. Colour, texture and shape are perfect and unique. They are fit to be displayed as ornaments but we’re happy to use them as needed. Garlic is functional art.

With everything garlic gives us we pay a fairly modest price for it. We charge $12/pound and there are 10-12 bulbs in a pound – so much joy for your money!

Our garlic comes in a variety of strengths and sizes – something for everyone. For those who prefer a strong, full flavour there’s Tibetan with lots of cloves per bulb and Yugoslavian with a few massive cloves per bulb. Music and Russian Red have 4-6 cloves per bulb and a medium-strong taste. We have Rocamboles which are favourites with many cooks with their medium heat and richness of flavour when baked. Chesnok is our mildest garlic but it has very complex, lovely taste. Like most foods locally and naturally grown it has a definite, strong personality that sings.

The health benefits of garlic are widely acclaimed. We hear from many people that they eat garlic (some daily!) for their health – to help with high blood pressure, inflammation and digestion, especially.

Please contact us at farm@garlicgoodness.ca to order your garlic for the late Summer and watch our Instagram (garlic-goodness) and Facebook page to see when we start picking garlic, potatoes, onions tomatoes and peppers grown directly in our natural healthy soil.

This ode was inspired by The Atlantic staff writer James Parker, whose Ode to Barbecue Chips still brings a smile to my face :)

May 8

We've had a couple of calves and they are so charming! They're good buddies as you can see.

Wildflowers are emerging in the woods and it's interesting to see how they compare to the ones we've seeded. Herbaceous perennial make their largest and sturdiest Spring growth from their previous year's root system and they also put out seeds to start new plants and that's what we're doing, but they aren't as vigorous as the older plants. In the future we hope they'll continue to thrive and grow bigger each year. Pictured is sweet clover in the woods followed by our seeded one, aquilegia (columbine) in the woods and our seeded ones and yarrow in the woods and seeded yarrow.

                               

April 21

It's a picture update. We thought the star-shaped greenery was some part of the aquilegia when we first posted these pictures but after we looked closer we saw that it's a separate plant :) We had collected a few seeds from the woods this winter but none of them germinated when we planted them so we re-used their soil to seed some purchased seeds. We weren't that disappointed because we don't really want to take many seeds from below - the birds need them and we respect all the animals that survive in our tough conditions and we like to support native plant growers also. Probably then the seed germinated from the previous seeding. Possibly the star-shaped plant is an anemone. Anemone and cow parsnip were the seeds we collected and we think we'd recognize the cow parsnip because it looks like rhubarb when it comes up. It doesn't really matter what it is, fundamentally, because we'll pot the flowers on when they get a bit bigger and it'll have it's own newspaper pot and eventually we'll see what it is.

The great news that garlic is coming up - come on warm weather :)

                 

April 8

Planning for the wildflower driveway is continuing. We think we'll just use transplanted seedlings rather than broadcasting seed after watching the little plants grow. They would have a real challenge growing up among the grass. One of our daughters who worked in reclamation said that if an ecosystem evolved together you could have diversity (like we have in the woods) but that if grass is well established it's difficult for other things to thrive (except dandelions). We'll dig holes to remove some grass and plant the wildflowers with their newspaper pots so hopefully they'll have a chance to develop a strong root system before the native grass encroaches and then they can come back in future years since they're all hardy herbaceous perennials. Pictured are achillea, aquilegia, bergamot, gaillardia and sweet clover along with newspaper pots :)

         

February 26

It's been a very cold week but we're enthused about our wildflower grass verge along the driveway. We planted a few wildflower seeds in a seed starting mix (all our compost is frozen solid) and once the seeds germinate and grow we'll 'prick them out and pot them on'. Wildflowers emerge as such incredibly tiny seedlings that it's amazing that they survive in the woods. The last picture here is of Achillea (Yarrow) that has just germinated and that could grow to be 3-4 feet high at maturity. We're planning to broadcast some seed in the Spring and hope some germinates and also to plant some indoors that we'll grow into a size to transplant out later. We're doing this with the perennial wildflowers which we'll allow to go to seed in the ditch but will hopefully also come up from the roots if they're well established.

Also pictured are some of the amazing wildflowers that grow in the woods here along the Red Deer River. The profusion and variety of flowers is amazing. There seems to be a rhythm to the flowering cycle so that there's always something blooming: dandelions to start (and middle and finish actually), then flowering shrubs like wild roses, Saskatoons and chokecherries, swaths of anemone in the dry shade and buttercups in the damp shade, then goldenrod, gaillardia and yarrow late in the season. Grass also flowers providing food for pollinators and making seeds.  Nature is a great believer in 'right plant, right place' and here we try to follow that maxim and also to recognize that there's no sense in planting anything that the porcupines find tasty! The effect we're attempting is to look like these pictures from the woods - harebells, heal-all, fringed loosestrife, milkvetch, alfalfa, buttercups, yarrow, windflowers, gaillardia, seneca root, aquilegia, two grasses and finally the yarrow we seeded.

                     

February 11

We've been streaming a BBC show called Gardener's World with Monty Don and it's a great inspiration to us. We've seen amazing gardens and great ideas for everything from propagating plants to colour combinations and vegetable varieties.

The woods around us are very wild and we don't spray our weeds (herbicides or pesticides) but we're inspired by the show to expand the wild areas around our yard and gardens. We've seen a number of beautiful 'woodland meadow' areas which really are areas where grass is allowed to grow long and flowers are added for beauty and attraction for insect life (or wildlife as they call it on the show - here we tend to think of moose, deer and rabbits as wildlife, but we understand what they mean). This year we're planning to leave half of the driveway grass to grow tall and we'll see how it goes. Let us know what you think when you come by.

We have a rich diversity of insect life on the farm as well as a wide variety of birds. It's a healthy system - more bugs means more birds which means more different types of plants and shrubs in the woods. We'd like to do whatever we can to encourage and support this environment and hopefully leaving more grass longer will help.

                      

December 17

The stinging cold of recent days has turned our thought to the garlic we planted in the Fall.

Each year we cover the rows of garlic with organic straw and then wonder during the coldest winter days if we've  mulched the buried cloves enough to prevent winter kill which is the single biggest enemy of a vigorous crop at the farm. Last Fall was the biggest crop we've ever planted - demand for our garlic has basically doubled each of the last three or four years and much of it will be sold by pre-order early in the Spring.

We're hoping for a wet Spring which will reduce our need to irrigate and that is generally what we get here. This year we planted Chesnok Red,, high in allicin for the health conscious with a beautiful flavour and many cloves per bulb; German Red, a Rocambole variety with a gorgeous complex flavour and less pungent than some; the Canadian Music variety with big, beautiful bulbs, a strong taste and huge cloves; Russian Red, prized for its medium to large cloves and spicy flavour; Tibetan with a very strong flavour and also high in allicin; and Yugoslavian, strong flavoured with large bulbs and cloves.

Through the years we have seen that these are the favourite varieties of our customers and we have come to focus our efforts specifically on these six.

We may be having thoughts of garlic lying in wait in our good earth but, meanwhile, on top of the ground we have two more beautiful Highland/Galloway steers that are eating the greenest of some great  hay and will be fat and ready for processing in April/May. If you are interested in beef sides or quarters  you can reserve a one with a small deposit.

                                                                                 

September 28

Fall is in the air. Almost all of the garlic orders are gone and we've started planting, but more about that later. Today we're making tomato passata which is such a great staple in our kitchen. We used it to make a sauce with onions, garlic, carrots, chick peas and kidney beans that we freeze and then bring out to make minestrone and chili. There's a you tube video showing the method. We cook some celery, green pepper and green beans with small shell pasta and then add a pot of the mixture with oregano, thyme and basil to make a hearty and nutritious minestrone. For chili we saute mushrooms with peppers and add the mixture with chili seasoning to make a wonderful pot of chili.

        

August 16

The garlic is so ready to come out of the ground! The scapes have straightened out and the umbels are starting to open. The bulbil's curly tip has a true seed on its end. We are digging, cleaning and hanging it as fast as we can :)

              

August 8

Bring on the heat!!!!

And I’m not talking about our hot days and warm nights---though they’re helping our great harvest this year.

Tibetan Garlic.

Red hot in taste, red hot in smell and with a large, beautiful shape and many cloves, each one of them bursting with flavour and, well, heat.

Like most great things everyone has different ideas of what garlic has the best taste, is the most versatile, most cooking friendly, most medicinal. Some like big cloves, some small. All our garlic has a strong flavour from being grown in our great soil and all has some heat too but Tibetan with its thick, strong stems is the fireball champion in the garlic patch.

We try to grow varieties to suit all tastes and respond to all needs. Two years ago several of our heat-seeking customers asked us to grow some Tibetan which was rumoured to have some heat so we did and it was quickly snapped up last year.

So this year we grew more from selected top seedstock and the result has been a fantastic crop of Tibetan. Combined with steady early spring rains, our thick black soil and grown without the use of chemicals or fertilizers of any kind this year’s edition of Tibetan is large, with 8 to 12 cloves per bulb and brings the heat. Like all the garlic we are selling it at last year’s price of $1.50 a bulb, $11 a pound.

Some like it hot.

We respectfully suggest that we have the answer to that urge.

      

August 4

Woohoo! It's harvest time :)

The regular rains set our garlic digging time back a little but we are well into it now. We are busy digging, pulling, cleaning and hanging all the garlic in our barn. And what a good harvest it is proving to be. We sold out of Music and German Red varieties through pre-orders in the spring and now we are working our way through the Russian Red, Yugoslavian, Chesnok Red and Tibetan.

If you would like garlic right now for fresh eating (not cured) it's lovely and crisp. Chesnok Red and Tibetan are Purple Stripe types - high in allicin with 7-10 cloves in a bulb. Chesnok is milder in flavour than Tibetan but has an unmistakable taste and great aroma. There's Russian Red (Rocambole) which is spicy and has 4-6 cloves and Yugoslavian (Porcelain) which is strong with 2 or 3 very large cloves. Under its unassuming white wrapper is a gorgeous purple wrapper.

         

July 1

We began growing Yugoslavian garlic a few years back in response to customers who were asking if we had a variety that was high in allicin.

And boy are we glad we did!!

Not only is this Porcelain a very good source of allicin, a compound which research has shown has many health benefits including lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, improving heart and bone health and antibiotic applications, but the plant just loves our climate and soil. It is a hot, spicy garlic that is thriving on our wet weather this year and is used for a range of cooking and baking. And, of course, eaten raw by some people for medicinal or general health benefits.

Yugo bulbs have four to six cloves. This year the bulbs are going to be large because the plant is so vigorous – stems are already very thick and most of the plants will be well over three feet tall by harvest time. The biggest garlic on the farm is currently Yugo.

It’s a winning combination we think—eat Yugo because of its high allicin content and researched health benefits. And get a great, hot garlic bulb that is delicious, stores very well and has come from a large, strong plant that was grown chemical-free in our wonderful soil.

        

June 19

Hardneck varieties of garlic produce a green shoot from their centre. It curls around and it has an umbel at it's top -- a flower-like pod that has a number of tiny bulbs inside - called bulbils. Bulbils are small clones of the garlic bulb and they'll produce a seed if left to mature - it's on a little strand at the tops of the bulbils. Scapes are strongly garlic-flavoured and delightfully crisp. They can be used wherever garlic is used: in stir-fries, roasted with vegetables, grilled on the barbecue (awesome on top of steak this way), chopped, lightly sauteed in olive oil and served with pasta or squash with strong parmesan cheese.

Scapes can be preserved in a few ways - chopped, lightly sauteed in olive oil and then frozen for use in soups and stews, pickled, blanched and frozen or made into pesto, although we use most of ours fresh.

We have a few recipes to share: garlic scape soup, buttermilk ranch dressing, pesto and garlic scape marinade. There's a link to the recipe if you click on the name and there's a you tube video showing the marinade.

We expect to have scapes available early in July and they're so economical! Ten cents each or $4/pound and there's around 40 in a pound.

                                     

June 5

When you turn into our driveway here at Garlic Goodness Farm, likely the first thing you notice are our small herd of Highland-Galloway cows and their new calves. The second thing you notice is our healthy dandelion crop.

We use no chemicals, fertilizers or artificial inputs of any kind anywhere on our farm. We do this because we know that natural, chemical-free food is tastier, more nutritious and less harmful for us all, and because we also know that farming without chemicals is beneficial for the environment.

We live next to the Red Deer River and everything from moose to bees to eagles and tiger salamanders call our farm home. We’ve been farmers and ranchers for most of our adult lives and we have noticed that the health of the land can easily be known by the number of bees that frequent that land. We are happy to report that bees are very abundant at Garlic Goodness Farm.

Which brings us back to dandelions. Bees love dandelions. If we were to spray our lawn, there would be fewer bees on the farm as a whole. And, to us, that would be against the principles of our farm. So, we embrace the dandelions so that we can have the bees and the wonderful strong-tasting produce and garlic.

We’ve been growing garlic here for many years. Every few years we add in well rotted manure and till it into our bountiful black soil and so we end up with crops like this year’s – amazing.

The garlic is bigger than it has ever been, more robust and taller and with incredibly thick stalks. We mulched after planting in the fall and had almost no winterkill. In short it is an all-round bumper crop and with many more weeks of growing ahead we are looking forward to large, healthy garlic bulbs. To pre-order we have Tibetan, Russian Red, Yugoslavian and Chesnok varieties at 2021 prices of $11 a pound or $1.50 a bulb.

               

May 29

Life On the Farm Is Kind of Laid Back…

I was lying under our old (1963) John Deere 4020 tractor the other day, trying to re-attach a swing arm on the tiller hitch that had come unattached for the fifth time when the old John Denver song came on the radio. And of course I started humming Thank God I’m a Country Boy as clods of dirt and grease dropped down on my face.

I was thinking about our Yugoslovian garlic that I had just irrigated. We aren’t in June yet and the stems on the Yugos are the size of my thumb. There’s still a lot of growing there before scapes time and more after that which means the bulbs are going to be really big. Last year we ordered extra large bulbs from our regular seed stock supplier and it looks to be paying off. I’m tempted to dig one up and have a look but Lorraine likely won’t let me. I can see Yugos becoming very popular with our customers.

All of this was percolating through my brain when all of sudden I felt a little scrambling on my chest and looked down in time to see the red squirrel, which has a nest in the machine shed where I was lying, scamper over my chest and across the stomach of Dar, our German Shepherd who follows me everywhere and was sleeping in the sun at the edge of the shed. Things then went, ahem, very squirrelly. Dar jumped straight up, barking and growling as she rose, the squirrel jumped up on the faded green fender of the truck and started chirping at the dog and I let go of the swing arm which smacked against my arm, then the tiller and unloaded a huge clod of mud in my mouth.

     Lorraine came around the corner just in time to see me wiggle out from under the tractor.

      “What are you guys up to in here?” she asked.

     “Nuthin,” I said. “Nuthin at all.

     Kinda laid back….

May 25, 2022

It's such a busy time of year but we thought we'd take a break to share pictures of some of the new calves. Some might remember we had a black Scottish Highland bull last year and it's been fascinating to see the range of colour in the calves: tan, pink, grey, black :)

         

May 7, 2022

It's thrilling to watch life returning! Garlic, of course, but also leaf buds and blossoms are wonderful. We've seen quite a few lovely feathers lying around. You can see why 'feathering your nest' would be very luxurious, right? There's a gorgeous nurse tree in the woods with 3 new spruce trees thriving in its old roots. Nature is in such perfect balance -- as soon as the birds are back the bugs are also around to feed them. There are a few very early weeds flowering just in time to feed the early butterflies. Whenever we find insects annoying we think of how complex nature is and we leave them alone if we can. We'll be in touch with our email list before too long so if you'd like to be added to the list be sure to pop us an email at farm@garlicgoodness.ca.

                   

April 24, 2022

We feel like we're on the verge of warm weather and we're so ready for it! Our onion transplants are coming along well and they're enjoying the strong Spring sun during the day. We bring them inside for the night -- opposite to their summer life where it's hot during the day and cool at night. We're growing our usual varieties and we added a red onion that's supposed to have superior storage ability. We are so excited to see the garlic emerging. In the woods we see the early plants coming along. Bearberry is a robust ground cover that takes advantage of the early spring sun to grow quickly before the trees have their leaves and block out some of the rays. There are just a few berries left for the nesting birds but there are also an increasing number of bugs waking up to keep them fed.

                                            

March 27, 2022

We're having very typical Spring weather this year where the nights are below freezing but the afternoons are warm. The garlic patch is losing snow fairly quickly and we've started to pull it back so the soil can warm up. In the yard ice forms on puddles then some of the water underneath soaks into the slowly-thawing soil underneath, leaving one of the joy's of Spring for kids everywhere - cracking the ice in the morning :) Each Spring we hear the American Widgeon although we don't always see it. They don't stay on our stretch of the Red Deer River but they rest here for a few days at the end of March. They're remarkable because of their call - they sound like a rubber duck toy whee-whee. The picture isn't great but we don't like to pester them - we respect their wildness and don't want them to become accustomed to us really. Geese and Goldeneye are busy on the river right now also. We saw an enormous eagle in the woods by the river and wondered if it had it's eye on the large flock of waxwings in a neighbouring tree. Snow gets into the crevices on fallen logs and helps to break them down as it thaws and freezes - expanding and contracting to widen the cracks. Deer and bunnies enjoy gnawing on bark of young trees and bushes to get the rich sap that's starting to flow. Poplars are sending out catkins in abundance. The onions are growing fast and we're trying an additional red one this year that's supposed to have great storage properties. We find that our white onions are still firm and great at this time year and the red ones are good but are just starting to get some green in the middle. As someone said last year - it's still onion isn't it? 

                         

February 21, 2022

It's exciting to watch the onions grow. The majority of the seeds emerge together and spread into harp shapes before springing up as tiny spears. They strengthen daily although we have some challenges on cloudy days and on very cold days with a South wind as they sit in our south-facing windows. A few seeds poke up after the rest of their cohort as you can see in the third picture. This little harp is in the pot in the fourth picture so it's a couple of weeks behind it's group, but it should thrive and become a good onion!

          

January 30, 2022

Welcome, 2022! Pictured is one of the 2021 calves looking so sweet with her little horns. It's a good thing the Highland have such thick hair coats with the extremely cold weather we had over Christmas and into the New Year. Since then we've had much milder conditions but there's lots of winter left, of course. Our garlic is holding up well and we sure hope everyone is having that experience. We've been cooking lots of beef and made a short video of making pot roast if you'd like to see it on you tube.

         

December 16

Here are a couple of recipes that we enjoy every year over the holidays. Our son spent time in Australia and said that one of the best things he ate there were meat pies, so we adopted them and now they're a mainstay. They're really convenient because you can make an enormous batch ahead of time, freeze them and then simply heat them in the microwave when you need them. We made both chicken pot pie and beef Guinness pie together last week. Our daughter made gorgeous pastry and helped chop mountains of mushrooms, carrots and onions. The garlic is still in great shape, happily. The beef filling takes quite a long time but its flavour is fabulous.
           

December 7

We've gotten a bit of snow so the garlic patches have a blanket on top of their straw layer. So many things are more beautiful when covered with snow.

   

November 6

The garlic is covered with straw and we're enjoying the gorgeous fall weather. The local wildlife seems to be enjoying it also. The rabbits have turned white and so are easier to see against the lovely colours. There is so much to eat in the woods for the resident moose and deer. It's sweet to see how the berry season progresses - animals seem to like the same ones we like. Saskatoons, raspberries and strawberries are eaten as soon as they turn ripe, and chockecherries disappear once there isn't anything else available. Crabapples, which the birds must have planted in the woods many years ago as the trees are 25 feet high, get eaten in a single feast - here one day and gone tomorrow. The mountain ash berries similarly go in batches but there are more of these trees so they last well into the winter. Bearberries must be very tasty, although we haven't tried them. We feel like the birds and other berry-eaters need them more than we do! Rosehips last until next Spring which is good for wildlife since they provide Vitamin C.

              

October 15

The garlic is all in the ground! It's such a great feeling :) We planted a lot of garlic this year - the reliable strong varieties Music with its large cloves and Tibetan with its smaller cloves. We added a Porcelain called Yugoslavian which has enormous cloves and possibly the strongest taste. When we were splitting the cloves for planting we could smell the vibrant aroma and we can't wait to taste some next Spring! It's pictured below in the first picture. We have Red Russian which has large cloves and a beautiful medium flavour prized for canning and roasting. Chesnok Red is a Purple Stripe variety (like Tibetan) which has the highest allicin content, a lovely mellow taste and small cloves making it ideal for those who treasure garlic for health reasons. Our favourite Rocambole, German Red, rounds out the crop for 2022. It's a garlic that suits every purpose - a lovely taste for dressings and marinades and a rich flavour for roasting without overpowering your taste buds.

For those who plant their own garlic we hope to have a good idea next year of whether smaller cloves thrive in our tough Alberta growing conditions. In our reference books we've read that the smallest clove from a large garlic bulb has the genetics to grow a large bulb itself. We aren't certain that this holds true for us, so this year we didn't separate the tiny cloves if we could avoid it. You see below that sometimes two cloves are fused together. The outer wrapper doesn't separate the cloves although it looks like two bulbs could grow. Sometimes the wrapper does separate the two cloves but we left them together to see whether we'd get lots of 'twins' where two bulbs grow too close together and end up flattened on the side they share. For those that we did split we planted in a separate spot and we'll see if they thrive next year.

          

September 16

There is no match for tomatoes grown directly in the soil. Their flavour is strong and complex. Our ripe tomatoes are steamed and run through a tomato press to remove skins and most seeds. The resulting puree (passata as it’s called) is a beautiful, tasty base for so many delicious dishes – sauces, soups, rice and beans. We make the passata with a mix of ripe tomatoes: traditional romas, sharp cherry tomatoes plus sweet sub-arctic plenty and flavourful ultrasonic tomatoes all grown in our healthy soil without herbicides, pesticides or fertilizer. Only one ingredient: tomatoes.

We freeze it in a range of containers: 375 ml and 1 litre which would be good for single dishes or bigger meals, and 3.5 litres or 7 litres which would be ideal for those of you who are canners.

We use the passata in many dishes. For spaghetti and chili the passata is excellent and you can add the frozen tomato directly to your hot meat or bean mixture then simmer it until thoroughly hot. We love making Spicy Red Rice and there’s a printed recipe or you can look at it online here. Tomato kidney beans are a healthy and delicious side dish and the recipe is here. We make chicken cacciatore and the passata makes it so flavourful! There are three soups: tomato soup, vegetable soup and minestrone. A recipe we tried this year is homemade ketchup! It’s something we like the idea of – the recipe calls for much less sugar than commercial ketchups use and it’s much easier to control your portion size when you spoon it out of a jar rather than squeeze it from a bottle, and how gourmet. We adapted the recipe from one we saw in the Backwoods Home Magazine from January/February 2007 in an article by Jackie Clay. Backwoods Home website is definitely worth checking out :)

 

We’re using good quality containers that we’ll charge a deposit for and then credit back if you return them when you get more.

The tomato passata is $9/litre.

Size	Container cost	Passata cost	Total incl. container deposit
375 ml	$1.50	$3.38	$4.88
1 litre	$2.50	$9.00	$11.50
3.5 litre	$7.00	$29.00*	$36.00
7 litre	$11.00	$56.70**	$67.70

 *5% off 1 litre cost

**10% off 1 litre cost 

August 27

Nigel Slater shared a recipe for Tomato Tart in The Guardian on July 25th, 2021. That's when they have an abundance of tomatoes in England, but we're just getting to that stage now.

Pastry: 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 tsp of baking powder, 1/3 cup olive oil, a pinch of salt and 5 tablespoons of iced water.

Filling: 2 big mild onions or shallots (2-3 cups), 3 tablespoons olive oil, 2 tablespoons fresh thyme, 1 cup of small tomatoes, 1 or 2 cloves garlic.

Sift flour with baking powder and add olive oil and salt. Mix until it sticks together and put in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Chop the onions into strips and gently fry in olive oil until golden with the thyme and some pepper. Remove from heat.

Set oven to 400 degrees. Bring out the pastry and knead it a bit, adding a tablespoon or two of water if necessary. Place a sheet of parchment on a baking sheet and roll the dough into a large disc about a foot in diameter. Don't try to make too neat a job of it - it will look better if the edges are rough.

Leaving a 2" rim of pastry around the edge, spread the softened onions loosely over the pastry. Cut the tomatoes in thick slices over the onions. Peel and thinly slice the garlic clove(s) on the tomatoes. Trickle a little olive oil over, then season with salt and pepper. Roll up the edges and pinch a bit to hold up. Bake for 35 minutes. Remove the tart from the oven and leave for 5 minutes to settle then enjoy!

      

August 22

Ode to tomatoes! It's so exciting to watch and wait for the tomatoes to ripen. We'll eat as many as we can while they're fresh but we'll be happy to have lots of extras for making tomato passata to use all winter. We freeze them until we have enough to process through a tomato press that removes the skins and most of the seeds. We have many ways to use tomato passata: Spicy Red Rice, Chicken Cacciatore, Tomato Soup, as well as chili and spaghetti sauce of course. There are a couple more you tube videos of the rice frying and the rice bubbling.

             

August 19

What a busy time it's been between digging and hanging all the garlic and hosting Open Farm Days last weekend, but now it's calmer. As the garlic dries we're preparing orders. We've had some calves and they're so gorgeous and sweet. Our pasture has been terribly dry but we're fortunate to have hay on hand and have been feeding the cows all summer. We have a couple of animals booked into the abattoir for November 23rd if anyone has an interest in a side of beef, or a quarter. Robins nested right along our walking path this summer and 3 eggs hatched last month. We've had lots of wasps this summer and are watching one of the largest nests ever down in the woods. We'll pick it up this winter if it survives intact - we've also seen a couple of wasp's nests torn apart. The wasp grubs must be delicious to coyotes and birds.

           

July 19

Digging our first garlic is always an exciting time for us and this year has been no exception. From the time we plant the bulbs in the fall, then mulch them with straw, fret over them in the cold nights of winter, make sure the new sprouts are uncovered in the spring and begin the never-ending task of hand weeding, we always wonder how the garlic bulbs buried in the earth are making out. So when the scape season ends and we start selling fresh garlic right from the earth we are always keen to see how the whole process has played out and pleased when the bulbs look and smell great.

We got our first orders for fresh garlic late last week and, wow, what a great feeling when we saw how wonderful the bulbs look. And smell. We dug up some Music, Red Russian, Chesnok, Georgian Fire and Tibetan for a few customers who visited us and all of us were thrilled (well happy anyways) to see big unblemished bulbs full of firm cloves coming out.

In a roundabout way that brings us to our latest update. We have sold, via pre-order, roughly 75% of our garlic this year. It is gratifying to us that so many of our customers have placed orders with us in advance of the garlic ever seeing the light of day and we are very thankful.

We are sold out of Chesnok, Kyber, Aliah, German Red, Leningrad, Italian and French Roca varieties. Still available are Music, Tibetan and Russian Red and, in small amounts, Georgian Fire and Romanian. These are available either fresh from the ground (dug on the spot) or to pre-order, harvested later and cured.

We have dug a few of the Music, Tibetan and Russian Red and they look super. They, along with Chesnok, are the varieties we planted the most of and they are quite popular during Alberta Open Farm Days (August 14 and 15) when we hope to have 250 to 300 visitors at the farm.

We can tell the stages of the summer season by where we are in the garlic – now scape time is ending and fresh garlic is here. Soon it will be time to harvest the garlic and begin the process of curing and drying.

July 12

Ode to potatoes :)

Alberta is famous for tasty root crops and when you eat a freshly dug potato you understand why - the flavour is wonderful. A treasured cookbook here is Food That Really Schmecks by Edna Staebler and in a recipe she instructs us to peel potatoes and reserve the starch to thicken gravy. Why do we buy cornstarch? Her comment made me question something I heard about early potatoes containing more starch than later potatoes. I think it's the opposite. Early potatoes have a much higher water content and I think that's why they don't store very well. It's best to dig up enough potatoes for a couple of days then get more when you need more. As the summer progresses the potatoes can sit for longer and still taste great until at the end of the summer, potatoes have substantial skins that allow them to be stored for a very long time and you can buy pounds and pounds of them. The first picture is of one pound of potatoes (about 12 small potatoes) and that's a generous meal for two people who love potatoes. You can see about how big they are in my hand. We give the potatoes a quick wash and brush with a soft vegetable brush which we have in the barn for you to purchase ($1.75). We cut them into roughly equal-sized pieces and leave the little ones whole. We got a tip from a friend who's a fabulous cook -- she steams her potatoes and it works really well.

            

July 11

Scape recipes:

Garlic Scape Soup

1 pound garlic scapes

2 litres chicken stock

Salt & pepper to taste

Herbs to taste – parsley or whatever you like (basil, thyme and rosemary all taste great)

Cream – 1-2 cups

 

Heat the chicken stock to boiling. Coarsely chop the scapes into pieces (5-10 cm long) and add to the stock. Cook until just tender (10-15 minutes). Pour the stock with scapes into a blender and blend until the scapes are 1 cm or less, then return to the pot and bring back to a boil. Add salt and pepper plus herbs, heat until wilted if using fresh herbs. Add the cream and heat until hot and enjoy! A parsley leaf and a tiny scape make a great garnish when serving. This soup freezes really well.

Garlic Scape Marinade

1/3 cup soy sauce

½ cup vegetable oil

1/3 cup lemon juice (or apple cider vinegar or wine vinegar)

¼ cup Worcestershire sauce

2 or 3 garlic scapes

4 large basil leaves

2 large parsley leaves

½ teaspoon each salt and pepper

Put everything in the blender and chop and mix, then pour over meat. Refrigerate for up to 8 hours, drain marinade and cook as desired.

Buttermilk Ranch Dressing

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup plain Greek-style yogurt

1/2 cup mayonnaise

3 garlic scapes

5 big parsley leaves (or 1/2 tsp dried)

fresh dill (or 1/2 tsp dried)

chives or onion greens (or 1 tsp dried)

cracked pepper

Blend well and enjoy!

Garlic Scape Pesto

 

10 garlic scapes

¼ cup pine nuts

½ cup grated sharp cheese

¼ cup vegetable oil

Pinch of salt and pepper

Coarsely chop scapes in a food processor and add nuts and cheese and chop to combine. Drizzle in oil and salt and pepper. Enjoy wherever you’d use pesto – crusty bread, on fresh pasta or grilled meat or vegetables.

    

The above scape pictures are from previous years! And this year we finally found out the name of a weird growth on some raspberries and wild roses in the woods: Spiny Leaf Gall Wasp according to an excellent website called Insects of Alberta.

    

June 6

We are in the middle of super weather right now: we had lots of sun and now are getting some welcome rain. The garlic looks amazing and vegetables are growing well. We have lots of tomatoes waiting in their newspaper pots for planting out in the garden. It was too hot to plant them last week and we have a couple of cool nights in the forecast but then it'll be time to get them in the ground. Lettuces look good, although the red leaf lettuce was transplanted when it was very hot and it's suffered a bit. We'll see how many survive in the next week - we have a pot of red lettuce transplants that we could fill in spots if we need to. Lettuce needs so much room in the soil - a planter that gets seeded in the house in the early Spring takes a long row of soil in the garden. Last year we had a portion of the lettuce growing in the main garden and we found that once it got established it was really hardy and the taste was better when grown in the soil. A gardening show on the radio this week mentioned how they don't support using soil dessicants like Round-up to kill weeds before planting (or at any time) which we completely agree with - weeds might be annoying but they may be contributing to the health of our soil so we live with them as well as we can. We planted beets, carrots, peas and rutabaga in wide rows and they're coming along well. We have a couple of types of turnip that should have tasty greens and tender roots that will be suitable for salads and summer pickles! Potatoes are really growing well and the onions are coming on strong. It takes a few days for the roots to take hold once the onions get transplanted. We have dill, cilantro and parsley growing in the garden although only parsley is pictured here. The tomatillos are planted in the big planter and the weather has been punishing for them with the hot winds we've had that stripped them of lots of their leaves but they seem to thrive in hardship - we see their stems getting stronger and new leaves starting to emerge. We'll use our email list to let people know when things are ready to eat so if you aren't on the list and would like to be, please send us an email and we'll add you. We'll post of facebook and instagram also if you'd like to follow us there.

                           

May 24

There was a really thought-provoking article in The Guardian International online edition this morning (May 24^, 2021). Shop local was the main take away, but it was backed up by masses of statistics and discussion prompted by EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) talks. For us it was like a customer appreciation article, because the truth is that it has to matter to consumers for producers to farm in the best way for good health, beneficial soil practices, conservative green space management and proper animal welfare.

We don’t kill weeds chemically or spray out grass and weeds anywhere on the farm. We believe that the complexity of plant, bug and microbial life is beneficial to the soil and to wildlife and also that it contributes to great tasting produce. The variety and abundance of wildlife is evidence of the health of these practices.

We don’t use fertilizers. If the soil is healthy and we don’t crowd plants into every available space we expect that the natural fertility of the soil will be adequate. The taste of our produce is the most important thing for us, not producing the biggest.

Our cattle have an abundant, comfortable life. We do our best to work with their natural instincts and minimize any stress on them.

When our customers appreciate our efforts by supporting us that is the ultimate confirmation for us. That’s the power of shopping local – using your money to reinforce your values.

The article can be read here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/24/fewer-bigger-more-intensive-eu-vows-to-stem-drastic-loss-of-small-farms

One aspect of the CAP is that large, corporate farms in the EU are the beneficiaries of a disproportionate amount of funding, which was put in place to achieve the goal of supporting small farms. It’s difficult to get the outcomes desired for certain, but that just underlines the importance of individual actions like shopping local!

The goals of CAP probably match exactly with what most of us want. "Reforms to the CAP to be brought forward this week by the EU will include measures to encourage farmers to leave more space for wildlife, to adopt organic standards for livestock, to use less chemical fertiliser and pesticide, and to nurture healthy soils."

The beauty of our customers is that they encourage these values with their purchases. We do our part to reward our patrons by keeping our prices very reasonable. Because we don't fertilize or spray, we save that money and although we grow our produce organically, we aren't certified so we don't spend money on that either.

As consumers we can't rely on governments to make the right policies. We should make choices that conform with our values. We appreciate that our customers shop locally and support our efforts.

         

May 18

We're getting a good rain today, so we thought we'd update some pictures and share a picture of a tiger salamander we saw last week in the garden. It was really big and healthy looking. There's another picture of it on the photos page. We only have two types of salamander in Alberta (according to the Nature Alberta magazine Spring 2021 edition): tiger salamanders and long-toed salamanders, found in the mountains. We don't spray out weeds or add fertilizer to our vegetables, and the soil is full of worms, beetles, and seeds which probably appeal to the salamanders. Lots of onion transplants are growing outside now, along with parsley, cilantro and dill, but other transplants are waiting until the risk of frost is past - basil, dill, lettuces, marigolds, thyme and tomatoes, of course! Watch here for news of the lineup of vegetables coming this summer.

          

May 15

Now we're busy! Lots of seeds are planted, especially the root vegetables. We have a couple of new turnips that are great for fresh eating and the greens are super in salads or a stir fry. We've planted lots of beets and plan to use some panels to keep the deer from eating them, haha. We have a few types of carrots this year and a few types of lettuce. Salanova is a butter lettuce that we'll have this season for your enjoyment. We've planted lots of potatoes, including a new one for us called German Butterball! One big job right now is transplanting the onions. The red onions germinated really well this winter so we'll have lots of them, along with the Trekkers and Walla Walla sweet onions. We're watering them as we plant them because it's quite dry here right now, although we have rain in the forecast next week so we're hoping to get the onions all in before the rain starts.

     

May 6

It's a great time of year in the country - watching fall crops like garlic emerge and preparing to plant spring crops, seeing the woods and fields turning green (anytime now) and observing birds and animals getting ready for the next generation. A non-profit organization called Nature Alberta featured pictures of Saw-Whet owl juveniles in their Spring 2021magazine. The owls are gorgeous and they were noticed by someone out for a walk in Sylvan Lake - awesome! This week we saw a bald eagle in with the cows. It appeared to be gathering hay and straw for its nest and the cows were completely willing to share. On the photos page we put a few more pictures of the eagle since it's magnificent and some pictures highlight the fabulous feather details, or show how the eagle tucks in its talons in flight.

                         

April 24

We found a charming book while organizing the bookshelves this winter called The Pattern Under the Plough by George Ewart Evans (published by Faber and Faber in 1966). It's full of stories from East Anglia but they're universal to country and farm life everywhere. The author quotes an old proverb: farmers should live as though they were to die tomorrow and to farm as if they were to live forever. The author discusses the ancient belief of planting crops according to the phases of the moon which we had heard of before, but haven't put into practice before. This year we're going to give it a try. The guideline is to plant root crops when the moon is waning and above-ground plants when the moon is waxing. The calendar says we'll have a new moon on May 11th, so if weather permits we'll plant root crops before then and the tomato transplants, beans, corn, pumpkins, cucumbers and zucchini after the 11th. Much will depend on the temperatures in May of course, but we're interested to try it.

In the barn this year we'll have some books called Storey Country Wisdom Bulletins. From the publisher: they offer practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country-living skills quickly and easily. . . their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life. The titles we have are pictured below and just so you know, the Planning and Planting a Moon Garden doesn't refer to the moon cycles discussed above - it's about having a beautifully scented garden for people who work long days - but we aren't certain what the book contains. The bulletins were slipped into re-useable sleeves the day they arrived at the farm to keep them clean and to ensure that only their owners will flip through their copy. We have a few titles that will be available to look through when you're here so you can see how useful and interesting they are.

                        

April 9

For years we've planted onions from seed into a rich soil mix and then transplanted them into the garden in May. For a couple of years we've used the same method for lettuce, and this year we added marigolds and tomatillos to be grown this way. It takes the least amount of inputs and space and the plants are so vigorous that it works well. When we're transplanting this year we'll do some updated videos so people can see the strong root systems they plants have that ensure their success. Luminous basil, parsley and thyme are pictured below. We still start these in individual pots, then put them into newspaper pots before planting them in their final location.

Our moose family is back and there's a new picture of them on our photos page.

          

March 23

Newspaper pots are a big item here right now. Seeds are coming up and once they need the room to spread their roots they're so much better off in soil in the small pots. We use Pro-Mix with vermiculture compost and it's rich and healthy. It's also very much easier to gauge the water needs of the seedlings when they're in newspaper pots. It's a simple origami project and we made a video showing how we make them. There's also a video showing how they help you tell when a transplant needs water. Given that we don't get many newspapers in physical form we're trying a few pots using origami paper, although we're much happier reusing and reducing! The pots even get recycled into the garden during the growing season - so we'll continue using the newspapers we do have until we have to make a change. This year we'll find out if the heavier paper decomposes well enough. 

     

March 9, 2021

Even though we probably will have some cold weather yet, it's starting to feel like Spring and we're ready for Spring! The onions are growing well -- we have lots of Trekker, Ruby Ring and Walla Walla growing in the windows for transplanting when it's warmer. We found a basket of onions in the cold (cool) room today happily. We thought we were out, but when we went to see how the garlic we bought for Spring-planting was doing, there were about 20 onions we forgot about. They likely were put there for a picture and then just stayed there. The Trekkers are still completely firm and delicious. The Ruby Ring are getting ready to sprout so we removed the middle sections but found the outer rings still crisp and excellent. This is exactly what we'd expect and we should use the Ruby Ring and enjoy the Trekkers last. We didn't have Walla Wallas left for longer-term storage, but they aren't supposed to last until the new year and should be used in the calendar year they're planted. If the onions we found today had been strung up they would be in slightly better shape possibly, but they are really nice regardless. Unfortunately the garlic was bad, so we'll only have a bit of Spring garlic to plant. Maybe next year we'll save some of our own for a more proper, larger-scale, experiment.

     

February 20,2021

We made minestrone soup last week and really liked it. Its main characteristics are beans and Italian seasonings - otherwise it's a tomato vegetable soup. To make a more substantial meal add more beans and pasta. Usually when we use beans we boil twice or three times as many as we need for the recipe and freeze the extras for quick use later, but this is the last of our beans for this winter. The garlic is still looking really firm and nice, happily.

After the tremendous cold weather we had lately the onions are echoing our joy at feeling the sun's rays.

       

February 2, 2021

We're having soup weather right now. Our tomato passata makes a great base for soups and we've tried a couple of new (although obvious) soups. Today we made a vegetable soup that tastes like a canned version that's super but a home made version is tastier and healthier. It's delicious made with frozen vegetables which means it's also a really quick dish. It's good with fresh vegetables but will need more simmering or the crock pot which is totally fine. You may need to add water to keep your broth thin enough to cook the vegetables through. Years ago I read that cooked tomatoes have higher nutritional value than fresh tomatoes, which was surprising, but now that we cook with so much tomato I wonder if it's mainly because you eat so many more tomatoes when they're cooked into a sauce or passata? Either way, the tomato base is tart and strong and the soup is so flavourful! When cleaning out the cupboards last fall we must have gotten rid of the barley - put it out for the birds, probably. A quarter of a cup of barley would be a really tasty addition. Next time we'll make minestrone and share our recipe.

       

January 20

Happy New Year! We wish everyone the best for 2021 and let's hope we return to normal soon. Winter is seed ordering time and it's a great project for us and all gardeners. Dreaming of Spring and fresh produce is so fun, isn't it? We saw some charming newspaper articles from the UK showing the largest of different types of vegetables so we're going to try growing some big ones of our own for 2021.

     

December 27

The winter continues to be so beautiful (we don't really consider winter starting December 21st around here). We had a hoarfrost this morning that was spectacular. Last week when it was quite warm we saw piles of dissected spruce cones that squirrels had taken apart for their seeds which sit at the base of the individual scales of the cones. Squirrels must sit in the sun and patiently take the cones apart and store the seeds for when we have a cold spell.

      

December 14

This weekend we started using garlic that we planted in the Spring of 2020. We planted it in May as early as we could. It emerged quickly once we got some warm weather, which was later than usual in '20 and every clove sprouted, which was an excellent result of course. Through the season we worried that it was far behind the typical Fall-planted crop - the seed garlic for those Spring-planted rows was garlic that we had kept over for our own eating and it was mostly very small cloves, which we normally wouldn't use for seed. Nonetheless it thrived, and we picked it fairly late - around mid-September. About three quarters of the plants were differentiated nice garlic bulbs and about one quarter of the crop was undifferentiated rounds with quite a thick neck. We didn't keep these although we wish we had just to see how they looked now. Most of the nice-sized bulbs went to our final pre-order customer in the fall of 2020, but we had a small amount leftover for our use. Last week we noticed that the bulbs are really nice and firm. We cooked some tomato sauce with a few cloves and were impressed. The taste is completely the same as our fall garlic and the texture is perfect - crisp and juicy and as strong as the fall-planted cloves. We'll plant anything we have leftover this year again in the Spring of 2021 and treat it with a bit more respect (such as weeding it) and discover whether last year was an anomaly or whether planting in the Spring is a good alternative. The pictures show the Spring garlic in the garden in July, hanging in September and on the counter in December.

   

December 3

The new garlic-drying barn arrived yesterday! Thanks to Classic Barns in Spruce View, AB (west of us on Highway 54) for their good work. We can picture rows of garlic and onions, baskets of potatoes and tomatoes - can't wait for spring, haha.

    

November 24

Spanish Rice

3 cups tomato puree (tomato passata)

1 cup water

1 ½ cups rice

1 medium onion (or more to taste)

2 cloves garlic minced or sliced

2-3 tablespoons oil

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper (more or less to taste) this is fairly picante

 

Mix tomato, water, salt and cayenne in a medium saucepan and wait for rice mixture to turn on heat. Heat oil and sauté rice for about 3 minutes, until it’s turning golden brown, then add sliced onion and garlic and cook a further 3-5 minutes until onions look translucent. Add mixture to the tomato pot and heat until it’s boiling. We use a long grain parboiled white rice which then needs to simmer with a lid on for about 15-20 minutes, until the liquid is nearly absorbed, stirring occasionally. Then remove the pot from the heat source and let it sit for a few minutes to finish absorbing the liquid. Serve and enjoy!

It’s great with plain meat (fish, steak, chicken, pork chops) or with sliced meat cooked with a chili seasoning (cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, cloves, oregano, garlic) and with sautéed sweet peppers.

November 2nd & 3rd

Each Spring we notice the odd garlic clove sitting on the surface of the soil instead of sprouting like it should be. Why do they get ejected? We really don't know why it happens, but right now we have about two-thirds of the rows covered with straw so we don't know what's going on underneath and the remaining one-third are waiting for cold weather to return before we cover them up. We noticed a clove sitting on the surface of the soil this morning so we dug a hole to re-plant it and inadvertently dug up its neighbour and were pleased to see the root growth. Soil conditions are excellent with nice moisture and no frost, although before the recent warm spell we did have a couple of inches of frost. On Tuesday morning we found this skull at the edge of the woods. Months ago there was a pile of huge feathers close to this spot and we knew a big bird had been eaten but imagine finding the skull - it's gorgeous. We'll have it in the barn next summer for people to see.

   

October 15 

The farm's autumn schedule is mostly finished. And, although 2020 has certainly had its trials and tribulations, we had an amazing year at Garlic Goodness thanks to an excellent growing season and the loyalty and patronage of our super customers.

Our garlic crop was largely pre-ordered early in the summer and our potatoes, onions, beets, rutabaga ad carrots sold out as well. Tomatoes, always our last crop to mature and sell, were almost entirely sold this year before they even turned red and were popular in delicious puree. Our Highland beef sides sold out mid-summer.

One of our goals has always been to keep prices very reasonable so that our produce is accessible to everyone. We think we've achieved that.

This fall we planted our largest garlic crop ever with 12 different varieties. Along with Music (developed in Canada) and Chesnok Red we have back by popular demand the hot Georgian Fire, German Red, French Roca and Leningrad. New varieties come from places around the world and are new to us, and, we think, to Alberta. Making their debut are Tibetan, Italian, Romanian, Khyber and Aliah. In addition, we planted lots of Russian Red after receiving several requests for it. Each garlic type has its own characteristics and we sourced the seed bulbs from the highest quality sources available so we are excited to see the results in the spring.

We're wishing you all the best over the winter and we hope to see you all in 2021.

  

October 3/5/6
September is a busy month on the farm, I see. Cleaning garlic and getting ready for planting dominates our days, along with picking everything else! We got an early frost and brought in our tomatoes. As they ripen we've been making tomato puree and we'll share some recipes for using it. Last night we made chicken cacciatore. There's a you tube video showing us making tomato soup. The 'recipe' is to reduce 3 cups of tomato puree to about 2 1/4 cups and add 3/4 cup of whipping cream, heat through and enjoy. We perfected our recipe for Spanish Rice tonight.
           

September 2
Here's a summary of recipes this season:

Chipotle Mayo, Roasted Potatoes, Fried Onions, Fabulous Potato Salad, FPS Version 2, Traditional Potato Salad.

August 26

We're nearly finished picking garlic! For those who saw the rows of garlic that still had their scapes on this year so that we could distinguish between German Red and Chesnok Red here are pictures that show the big bulbils of German Red on the left and the smaller bulbils of the Chesnok on the right.

August 3

I was reading a psychology article that was making the point that our brains will make up a story to fit the situation in which we find ourselves. I can’t remember where I read it or I’d cite it. It’s fascinating to me because we want things to make sense, so we fill in logical assumptions. The experiment mentioned in the article had two groups: one had to work really hard to be allowed to join a group – pass tests and pay a fee, whereas the second group was given instant admission. The group they joined was the same for both groups – purposefully boring and tedious, a bit rude and obnoxious. After a time, the participants were surveyed about their impressions of the group. Those who had to invest a lot to join rated the group much more positively than the second group, which rated the group as boring, etc. The conclusion from the academics was that our brains assume that if we worked so hard to gain membership it must have been time well spent. The reason I was thinking about this was because we kind of take pride in our low prices, and we set them to be affordable for everyone while providing a decent return for us. Our quality is as high as we can make it. We don’t use any chemicals to spray weeds or bugs, or fertilizers to maximize yield. We feel like we have lots of room and we’d rather plant more plants if we want more produce on offer. We’ve read and attended lectures that say diversity of plant matter and an abundance of organic matter are critical for soil health so we attempt to maintain and improve our soil. We have clean, soft well water that we use if we need to water the gardens. We do pretty much everything by hand and by ourselves with help from our adult children when they’re free. For these reasons we could charge a premium price and there’s no question that the vast majority of our customers could afford to pay a high price like they would for boutique, exclusive items. We want to make some money from the farm and we set our prices so that we’re happy with our return, don’t get me wrong. But we want to have everyone able to afford our produce. What we don’t want is for anyone to think that it’s not awesome or amazing because they didn’t have to pay a multiple of the grocery store price for it! Remember we don’t have regular employees to pay, or pay rent for a store or a booth space, and for the most part you have to come out to our place, which we appreciate very much!

August 2

It's been a hot, hot week! It's really super weather for the garden. The beans are growing well and we'll have some nice dry ones this year. The corn is coming along and when you look at the tops you can see definitely that it's a grass.

   

July 24

We made some potpourri this week with beautiful-smelling sweet clover, mainly. To me it smells like the prairies. We have some linen to sew it into to make sachets.

  

July 17

We have Spanish onions growing this year and they're great! As we were told, they can just be eaten raw because they're so sweet. We tried them as onion rings and they were very good that way, too.

  

July 7

When our kids were younger and we'd have holidays where there were woods we'd often see an odd foam that looked like an animal had spit on the plants. It was so weird, but now we live with beautiful woods, and we see the spit often. It must be an over-abundance of moisture that gets forced out of the plant at a joint because the plant just can't grow fast enough? Kind of hilarious now to think of a bear or moose wandering around spitting on plants :)

Update summer 2021 - found out there's a bug called a spittlebug! Pretty much self-explanatory.

    

June 29

We planted a few seeds where the beet row was bare and it's very cool to see how the plants emerge: a hoop of fuscia, then the cotyledon leaves flatten out showing the distinctive purple veins. Golden beets have quite yellow veins. Next week we'll share a potato salad recipe that looks amazing - hot crisp potatoes on a bed of greens with a pesto-like dressing - yum! It looks fabulous, but we have to perfect the pesto once we have lots of scapes to work with. We haven't peeked at any potatoes yet, but the flowers are nearly open so we're getting tempted.

         

June 25

We're excited - scapes are almost ready! We've set up a table where we'll have the Square card reader so you can pick up your order and pay with tap. Your account will show 'SQ' or 'gosq' when you tap.  Email us: farm@garlicgoodness.ca or text 403-506-2129 with our order. If you prefer you can email transfer us - we have autodeposit so you won't need a password. If you haven't been to the farm have a look at the video showing a bit of the farm.

 

June 14

Getting ready for the season: lots of paper bags, scale is ready, card reader is ready. Vegetables are coming along. Pictured below are beets (red and golden), carrots and an onion. In July these will all be $2/pound, along with potatoes when they're all ready. Garlic scapes will be 10 cents and lettuce and herbs will be $1 per bunch. We're hoping to have scapes at the beginning of July and beets and potatoes in the first week of July, weather permitting and we'll email and message when we do.

        

June 5

Lots of signs of Spring now: violets and wild strawberries, the gorgeous common blue butterfly and haskap blossoms. There's a crab apple tree growing on the flood plain of the Red Deer River - birds must have seeded it there years ago and it's in full bloom. There was a bald eagle across the river from us this morning, and just the bits of a trout left on our side - it was probably waiting for us to leave to finish it off. It looked like a pretty big fish!

           

May 25

After years of wondering, I believe we know what the name of our first flower of each season is: palm-leaved coltsfoot (petasites palmatus)! Up close the flower is absolutely gorgeous.

      

May 25

Quick observation: now that the garlic has been growing for a few weeks it appears that the fall-planted cloves are significantly advanced over the spring-planted ones. Later in the season when we start picking garlic we'll be able to make a better comparison.

May 18
We've had some beautiful warm days this week and are expecting rain - perfect growing conditions. Here's a picture of the view to the river from above. We're waiting for green to emerge and take over.
 

May 7

A few signs of Spring -- moss and lichen are expanding and our version of the crocus is flowering. We haven't got any leaves out yet but this very early flower is out and thriving. Close up the flowers are gorgeous I think. And the beavers are busy gathering material for their dams. We still had snow covering the garlic field two weeks ago so we wondered when we'd see the garlic this year, and we finally have seen some emerge - whew!

        

May 5

We got our paper bags today! Without family visits it's taken awhile for them to reach us - our son and daughter picked them up in Edmonton and then our daughter from Calgary dropped them off after a distanced visit with her sister. They have a capacity of 10 pounds with a very comfortable handle. The 4 litre milk jugs are to show the size.

   

April 28

We have seen so many moose this year! They're a favourite animal here, but it's unusual to see them as often as we have this year that we've speculated that the matriarch is getting old and doesn't cover the usual amount of territory. We love to watch them from a safe distance. This week we've heard the peep owl and lots of frogs - sure signs of Spring :)
      
April 13

We have quite a bit of snow and the ground is frozen solid. We've looked in a couple of the pots but the garlic cloves haven't done anything interesting - yet! We've planted some Spanish onions called Walla Walla and they're really strong - I can't wait to taste them this summer. One of the containers we seeded into wasn't deep enough for the long roots that onions have, so we transplanted them into a better pot today. Plastic pots that we've saved from buying plants in over the years are great for growing our own plants, but their drainage holes are really big for inside use. We used some cheesecloth to keep the soil in the pot and some newspaper just to cover the hole while filling with dirt - it won't prevent drainage.

If anyone is waiting for new issues of The Garlic News please email or send a facebook message -- uploading the issues is a great job to do while watching sports, but too boring to do without sports! But if someone's waiting I could watch a movie or something :)

   

March 26

There were only three tomato seedlings in newspaper pots - the others were mostly in the compostable bags. We needed to get the remaining ones into larger containers but we're out of bags so we decided to improvise. We put a couple into cracker boxes and hope the light cardboard will dissolve over the summer. We're confident that the tomato roots will push through the cardboard since they're so strong. In the picture you can see how much stronger and bigger the tomato in the compostable bag is compared to the one in the newspaper pot. There's a video showing the cracker box tomatoes.

   

March 11

Here's a summary of the tomato trials with toilet paper rolls. Tomato seeds are so vigorous that they sprouted well in our soil mix in the rolls. Once they started to form their first true leaves we transplanted them into soil in compostable bags, hoping to give the plants access to lots of moisture and nutrients -- and not to encourage just a major tap root without lots of smaller branches. Once they went into the bags they grew really well, so tomatoes would definitely be a good choice for planting in toilet paper rolls. We tried cilantro and parsley also, but their emergence rate was very low, even though they are really vigorous and dependable when planted into peat pellets (which we did afterward with the same packet of seeds and had great emergence) - surprising! The next seeding we'll try in toilet paper rolls will be marigolds. They're also very strong and reliable seeds, and we love the gorgeous blossoms that attract a ton of bees and seem to discourage some pests. They have a very distinctive smell that I like but that bothers some people and most moles, for instance.

        

March 10  

This year we're working on dry bean recipes so that we can enjoy this healthy ingredient more often. This week we had Red Beans with Rice, adapted from a great cookbook called Easy Beans by Trish Ross from BC. The recipe is:

Saute 2 cloves of garlic and an onion until soft

add 1 1/2 cup of tomato (paste, puree or whole tomatoes)

add 1 cup of cooked dry beans of any kind

add lots of fresh basil or 1 tsp dried basil, 1 tsp of tobasco and a bay leaf and cook for 20 minutes

Serve over rice of any kind

The beans are from last summer – the cannellini lingot that grew very tall and had gorgeous pods with streaks of red and pink. We’ve been thinking of ways to separate the beans from the pods, but over the winter the pods have opened as they dried and the beans have been really easy to gather. Cooking the beans is simple – cover with 3 times their volume of cold water, bring to a gently boil, remove from heat, cover and let sit for an hour or two. We had to repeat – drain the water, cover again with cold water about double their volume and bring to boil again – remove from heat and let sit for another hour or two. They had a good texture at that point, with the skins still intact. A great tip from the cookbook (and elsewhere) says to cook more beans than you need and freeze the excess for a speedier dinner next time.

   

March 7

We looked at another clove in the growing experiment. We had to bring the pot into the house for a day because it was frozen solid. It doesn't look like there's anything happening yet - the snow cover and cold weather is keeping the cloves dormant, we think.

     

March 4

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The garlic news

February 27

The tomato transplants that went from toilet paper rolls (loo rolls) into soil in compostable bags needed a soil top-up today. There's a video showing the top-up here, and a video with captions here.  

     

February 22

Young plants are so beautiful! The cotyledon is the first leaves that emerge when a seed germinates. A picture of a statice cotyledon is first - statice is the blue and purple flowers we use as dried flowers with garlic braids and the plants have hardiness, drought tolerance, attraction for bees and other pollinators and interesting winter colour (copper-coloured stems and any flowers remaining stay quite blue). They're a fairly hardy wildflower that grows from seed each year, so they need a hard seed coat to push through the soil early and that's what the picture shows - the first pair of leaves push the tough covering through to the warm sun. The second picture shows that another set of plain leaves emerges to feed the root strength and then the true leaves emerge - saw-toothed with a bit of red. The tomato shows it's plain cotyledon leaves giving way to the true leaves, basil's true leaves are the recognizable middle-creased oval shape, annual dill resembles a tiny palm, true leaves of the thyme show the typical oval spade shape and the rosemary is still the first (cotyledon) leaves - still waiting for their true leaves. Onions don't really have a cotyledon - they come up bent over and then spring up and now they're developing extra stems to feed their growing roots.

      

February 13

We decided to plant the rolls to allow the tomato seedlings to spread out. The tomatoes planted in jiffy pots then into newspaper pots were growing faster than the seedlings in the loo rolls and we thought maybe the rolls were not allowing the roots to spread. We're hoping that putting the rolls into soil will help the roll soften and dissolve and the roots will grow. In the past we've used compost bags to hold transplants that get too big for newspaper pots, or to put a newspaper pot into if the pot gets too fragile, so we're hoping they'll work. When planted outside the bags decompose over the summer. 

February 9

We're going to do our best to make the loo roll experiment work out - then we can use the peat pots we've already bought, but minimize using peat as we go forward. With the next batch of seeds planted we'll cut the rolls in half - then when a root shows at the bottom we'll put the shorter roll into a newspaper pot to encourage wider root growth instead of restricting sideways growth (assuming the roll dissolves easily once inside a newspaper pot, which we think is likely but will find out!).

February 2

We've started onion seeds in the house and they're so cute - the bow shape is fabulous, then when they spring up they look so much more delicate. The first tomato seedlings have gone into newspaper pots - they're going to be the control for the loo roll experiment :)

  

January 20 + February 2, 2020

We’re doing a trial with toilet paper rolls (or loo rolls, as gardening guru Monty Don calls them) to see if we can use them for starting seeds. We love using newspaper pots for seedlings and the rolls might be similarly good – put to good use, dissolve into the soil and provide a good place for seeds to grow. This year we’ll try some tomatoes and herbs with long roots like parsley and cilantro – maybe marigolds later since they’re so vigorous. If they work out, we’ll use them more extensively next year. The soil is a mix of sterile Pro-Mix and rich worm castings from our worms last year. One thing I really like so far is that when you water the rolls you can see when the water is adequate – you can see the water mark on them, much like you can with the newspaper pots.

We’ve just started separating out the worm castings again. If anyone has any tips for this process or would like tips from us, please drop us an email.

 

Last season’s garlic and onions are still nice and firm. We have lots of garlic in the ground for this year, and we’re planning to plant lots of vegetables this spring – and we planted the very first onion seeds yesterday, so the season has officially begun!

   

January 7, 2020

We've had lots of snow this winter - should be great for the garlic! I've had lots of time for knitting and I think I'm happy with the design for the Scottish Highland motif cotton dishcloth :) I'm using Bernat 100% cotton Handicrafter yarn (made in Canada from American cotton) and I made the pattern myself. I may try to make a garlic motif cloth!

November 28

Check out the photos page - we had lovely soft snow falling this morning and it was gorgeous.

October 17

I saw a recipe on the Guardian UK website for carrot cake with beets (or beetroot as they call it). I tried it since we still had a few beets in the garden and I loved the colour - can't say the taste was much different from regular carrot cake, but that was good - I like carrot cake. I used my usual recipe and put half grated carrots and half grated beets. I thought the beets might make the batter pink so I stirred just enough, but you can see the cake doesn't look much different with the beets -- please drop me an email if you'd like the recipe.

   

Sept 14

Surprise! Lots of the beans that looked dead actually had big beans in their pods, so we've picked them and are waiting for them to dry. They're so beautiful - and hopefully tasty.

 

Sept 9

Recipe for basic Beef Stew

2 pound pkg of stewing beef, oil for frying it, water, salt and pepper, small clove of garlic, vegetables and herbs.

Brown the meat by frying in oil until it's cooked on all sides, then pour hot water over it just to cover it. Boil until the water almost all evaporates, then add water to cover it again. Boil again until water is almost all evaporated and taste a piece of meat. If it's nice and tender then you're happy - if it's still a bit chewy add another covering of water and boil again - this is the secret to stew meat that's tender - and it's a tip from a friend, Donna Arnold of the Henday Association for Lifelong Learning in Innisfail. Once the meat is well cooked, there's an infinite variety of choices, but the basic ingredients are garlic, an onion, bay leaves and parsley. Then add a couple of inches of water to the meat and cook the vegetables -- carrots and peas, potatoes until tender. If you like the broth/gravy thicker then stir a tablespoon of flour into 1/4 cup of cold water and add it to the boiling stew. My Mom used to make dumplings with our stew which we loved - send me an email if you want her recipe. 

Sept 3, 2019

We're so excited to have beans for drying! Our growing season was cut short by a frost on August 17th - shocking - but it was fairly light and the bingo beans in the garlic field survived. We'll plant more of them next year since they can prosper in our harsh conditions. They have a few gorgeous pods which we'll pick this week and dry. The beans inside are green and soft, but they'll dry brown with darker brown streaks. We're supposed to allow the pods to dry completely and then thresh them by hitting them in a sack to remove the pods :)

Aug 26, 2019

Our newest Youtube video is up showing our tried and true recipe for borscht.

Aug 19, 2019

We had a great time again this year at Open Farm Days - thanks to everyone who came out to meet us and look at the garlic growing. We're concentrating on watching garlic dry right now, haha - preparing for braiding and fall planting.

  

July 25, 2019

We have found a great way to use our beet greens! Beet greens are so lovely at this time of year and we're trying to find new ways to use this nutritious, plentiful ingredient.

The Baba Bowl is a mix of raw and roasted seasonal vegetables - a prairie spin on a Buddha Bowl.  For sure the leaves can be added to other greens in any salad, but for the Baba Bowl they're the main base. I left the onions raw because they're so awesome at this time of year. We have deer eating our peas this year, so if we want any, we have to eat them before they fill out, so we used them like snap peas fresh in the salad - but shelled raw or cooked would taste great. Then we roasted vegetables to serve hot on top and drizzled dressing over all. We made a basic vinaigrette, but I also think a hollandaise sauce would work with the Baba Bowl.

I put the recipes on the garlic goodness facebook page on if you're interested in them. The recipe name is a tribute to the great Ukrainian gardeners I've known - their ability to make everything they could grow to taste great and to never waste a thing!

July 5, 2019

We are eating garlic bulbs now!

They have a super great taste and texture – crisp and slightly milder than they will be when fully grown and cured, but so much better than garlic that’s been shipped from elsewhere. Local and fresh is the best, right? They're $1 each - same as they will be when they mature.

June 30, 2019

We are pleased to offer a small number of beef packages from our herd of Highland and Highland-cross cattle.

The Highland cross offers a superior-tasting well-marbled beef with a smaller carcass size than a commercial breed. There are well-researched health benefits to the Highland meat, including lower cholesterol levels and higher protein and iron content. We don't use any hormones and our grass is natural - no fertilizers or pesticides are used anywhere on our farm.

Please let us know if you’re interested in buying a side of beef. We have animals booked in for November 12^th, and with a 14-21 day hanging period it will mean end-of-November or beginning of December for pick-up.

Please email for more information or if you have any questions.

We are excited to have a few young highland cows with their calves at the farm. They are so beautiful.

If you haven't checked out our instagram feed please do when you have time - we're posting more regularly as of summer 2019.

June 24, 2019

Last week I attended a soil workshop featuring Dr. Kris Nichols hosted by the GWFA in conjunction with RD County. What a fascinating presentation – the value of topsoil can hardly be overstated and there’s a lot we can do to preserve and build up our soil. We want to add carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the soil – increase aggregates, create and encourage mycorrhizal fungi – and embrace diversity. Dr. Nichols said we need a brown revolution.

Everyone who’s been out here knows we don’t spray for weeds or pests and we have a wide variety of plants growing everywhere. Our inspiration is nature – in the woods we see so many different shrubs, flowers, legumes and grasses growing naturally among the spruce and aspen. We see mosquitos, wasps, bees, dragonflies, flies and so many different bugs – both pollinators and food for the huge variety of birds we see along the Red Deer River. Small animals like mice, weasels and rabbits thrive and support the eagles and owls – it’s a complex and hugely diverse system that we use as inspiration in our planting.

Dr. Nichols said that if you lose soil health you lose food nutrients – maybe we instinctively understand that, but it’s the first time I’d heard it said from someone who studies the matter. Vegetables grown in dirt taste great – and maybe they’re actually healthier for us! She has a soil consulting service and a website www.KRIS-SYSTEMS.com which I recommend, and for anyone local I highly encourage membership in the Grey Wooded Forage Association – they have a wealth of information and they host really interesting talks.