Every farm is run a bit differently, with different priorities in mind, different motivations and different goals.

It is difficult to express in words what we do with our farm. The ideal scenario to communicate this with you, is for you to come down to the farm for a visit, spend some time in the fields and see the forest surrounding the fields. We do have an open invitation once a week during the warmer months, check out our page “A Place of Fruition” for more info. In lieu of that, I will try to put it into words here as best I can.

Our farm is run with the natural world as our highest priority, what does this mean? This means every action we do on the farm is done with how it might impact the natural world in mind. This means we use no pesticides of any kind on our vegetables. It means we don’t use any chemical fertilizers. It means we try to eliminate food waste any way we can.

There’s an important thing to talk about - food waste. What does that mean? It means something that was grown or raised up until the point that it is edible and ready to be used by humans… but then isn’t, for whatever reason. One huge contributor to this is the non-use of a vegetable with “blemishes”. The modern conventional model for vegetables has the absolute perfect looking vegetables for sale to the buyer: no bruises, no insect bites, nothing mis-shapen. Anything that does not meet these unnaturally high standards is considered a “2nd” if it does end up available to a buyer, however they are just as often simply left in the field - wasted. Many people have been trained by this system to only buy produce that looks perfect. If you’ve ever grown your own food, you know that a perfectly straight carrot takes the same amount of time, energy and nutrients to grow as a crooked one. And there is no difference in taste or nutrition. On our farm, we give you veggies with blemishes because they are still high-quality and it is a waste to simply throw them away.

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When you see that apple looking perfect in the grocery store, what you don’t see is all the pesticides on it, or the layer of wax on the outside of it, or the thousands of miles it travelled to get there, or all the fuel it took to get it here, or the living conditions of the people who harvested it, or the history of the land it was grown on - what nature, people or animals it displaced, you don’t see how cheaply it was sold to the all the middlemen between the farm and the store, how the store makes more on it than the farmer - and you don’t see all the apples at didn’t reach these high aesthetic standards to be on the shelf beside it. When you buy an apple from us, it is just an apple, no pesticides, no wax, no people being taken advantage of, and it was grown close to you. It may have a worm hole, a scratch or a bruise, but 99% of the apple is still great to eat, and I promise you it will taste better because it’s fresher. 

You may ask - how can we as small farmers compete with large grocery store chains that sell perfect looking produce? The first part of the answer is education, what you are reading right now! When we talk about the reality of the food system we’re living in then we get other people thinking about it, the more people are thinking about it the more they in turn talk about it, and the more people use this information to make informed decisions. Just like all the commercials and ads you see on a daily basis, we are spreading ideas, but these ideas are rooted in the truth of the situation and not just “buy our products”. What has helped our farm survive as long as it has is by communicating why we’re farming the way we are, spreading the idea and realization that it can be done this way, and other people like you talking about and spreading it by word-of-mouth. With all the millions big companies spend on advertising, you’d think they’d have realized by now that by creating an honest and good product, people will talk about it and awareness of it will increase even better with word-of-mouth.

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Another way way we can compete is by flavour - our veggies taste better than grocery store veggies and I can say that with no ego, it is simply a fact. People often say that tomatoes from the grocery store taste like cardboard. If you try one of our tomatoes it is a world apart from that. Our tomatoes are grown in the fields, fertilized naturally, ripened on the plant, harvested when ripe and brought to you within a day. It is not hard to compete on flavour with produce from the grocery store, however you as the buyer must taste it in order to know the difference. Yes, our large heirloom tomatoes often are uniquely shaped or have scabs on them, but they taste amazing!

You, the person buying our veggies, in the end determines if our approach works. We could grow all the things we want, however if no one bought them then our farm would not have survived very long. We owe our longevity completely to the people that support us, and without that support our farm would not exist as it does today. We hold this truth close in whatever we do, and this gratitude informs us in many ways in our business decisions. An example, a few years ago people started asking for plastic-free shares in our Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) program. Reducing plastic use is of course something that is very important to us as we do it as much as we can in growing our veggies, however we were worried that delivering veggies completely in paper bags would leave customers with wilted or less fresh food. As we started putting the requested customers' veggies in paper, we realized that they had no complaints at all, so then we switched to mainly using paper bags for delivered veggies. Another example is that people have asked for more choice in their veggies for the CSA, and while we knew we couldn’t give them free choice for everything (the logistics were just too much), we figured out that offering choices here and there, as well as having an “opt out” option for specific veggies they didn’t like, that it worked out well as a balanced approach. In giving up a little control here, we gained the valuable information of seeing what people like and don’t like, and also seeing that it’s not all the same between people. Not everyone likes sweet potatoes and not everyone dislikes sunchokes! There is a mutual benefit - which we like to see happen in all our relationships, no matter if it’s with people or nature!

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We always pick our veggies fresh and get it to you fresh, this is just part of our values. Veggies taste better when they’re fresh, they last longer, they’re more nutritious, they look better and more vibrant. We get to taste string beans right off the plant and we want you to get as close to that experience as is possible! Harvesting a large quantity of veggies at a time and then storing them refrigerated for a long time just doesn’t work for us, we are a small operation and so harvesting more than 20lb of something at a time just doesn’t happen very often. We often pick in the mornings so if you need something a certain day you’d have to order it the day before. The reason for this is many veggies wilt in the heat of the sun, so having them inside to wash before then is much better for the quality of the veggie. This doesn’t apply to winter storage of veggies however, and that is simply the reality of farming in the winter season in Nova Scotia.

Our vegetable farm started from a small personal garden in 2011 and expanded to what it is today. Many farmers start with industrial farming then switch to organic or spray-free, but we had a different progression. We’ve never used pesticides or chemical fertilizer or a mainly mechanized production. What this means is - we grow veggies very much like you might in your own backyard garden. We do most activities by hand: planting, fertilizing, weeding, harvesting, washing, and packing, and it has been mainly our own hands since we have only have had a handful of employees over the years. We see with our own eyes what is going on in the fields and the environment, we notice what the plants might need or not need and in this close observation we are able to grow without a lot of the things that modern industrial farmers use. Even though this means we produce less quantity than a farm with many hectares and lots of machinery, the advantage it gives us is quicker and greater adaptability in the face of issues that may arise from pests or climate change, drought or extreme temperature fluctuations. It allows us to grow better quality vegetables - not in looks, but in everything else that goes into it- nutrition, sustainability, and fairness. We are better able to connect with the people eating our vegetables, hear what you need and value, and let you in on the details of what we do. Growing like this gives us more agency, we do not have to meet unreal aesthetic standards and instead go after the quality we see as more important - the health and wellbeing of the natural world, including people.

We are “anti-system” on our farm. Why we are antisystem is because once something is standardized it gives people a tendency to go into autopilot where they stop consciously and critically thinking. We don’t want to end up doing that on our farm, we want to be adaptable and able to face any issue in the way it needs to be faced, not how we want to face it. For this reason we use mother nature as our guide, she has been doing all of this way, way longer than anyone we know so we think she knows best. It’s worked so far!

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Saving tomato seeds is fun and easy! We wanted to share a step-by-step process with pictures so you can save your own tomato seeds if you wish. Knowledge is power!

Step 1 - Select a ripe tomato. If you are growing your own tomatoes, leave it on the vine as long as you can - you will get more viable seeds. If you are buying a tomato from a local farm, look for soft tomatoes which deep, rich colours- these will be the most ripe. Tomatoes from the grocery store are not recommended for seed saving because they are harvested when green and then artificially ripened with ethylene gas - this means the seeds would not be mature. 

Step 2 - Place tomatoes in a container. This can be anything from a mason jar to a 5-gallon bucket, it just depends on the amount of tomatoes you are saving seeds from

Step 3 - Squish the tomatoes! You can use anything from a hoe to your hands. The idea here is to break the skin and expose the seeds. You can remove the skins at this point if you wish as long as you've removed the seeds from them. This step is messy.

Step 4 - Add water. After your tomatoes are mushed up and mostly liquid, add some water - atleast the same amount as the liquid tomatoes.

Step 5 - Wait. Whenever you've eaten tomatoes before, you may have noticed the seeds each have a little gel around them. This gel needs to be removed for best results growing your seeds next season! Luckily the tomatoes have everything they need to do this themselves. All you need to do is wait for 24-48 hours and the tomatoes will naturally ferment the gel from around the seeds. Once the gel is dissolved away from the seeds, the viable (aka "growable") seeds will sink to the bottom of the container - if you are doing this in a glass container you will see this for yourself, if not you can reasonably assume that by 48 hours it will have happened. Fermentation is a smelly process so there will be a bit of an odour! You may want to let this happen outside.

Step 6 - Pour off the mush. When you look at your tomatoes again you will see that all of the goop and skins and undeveloped seeds will have floated to the surface, your viable seeds will have sunk to the bottom of the container. You can now gently pour off the top layer of goopy water but make sure not to pour out your seeds!

Step 7 - Rinse off seeds. Next you will want to keep adding water and pouring it off the seeds. Once you add the water each time, the seeds will rise in the water but just wait a moment and the seeds will sink again. The point of this is to wash off any remaining debris from the tomato seeds, the cleaner the seeds are, the better they will store for you. This may take 4 or 5 "flushes" and you are done when the water is clear.

Step 8 - Dry Seeds. Once the seeds are clean, try to pour off as much of the remaining water as you can. Then you can lay out your seeds on a surface to dry! I find what works best for us is simply using a plastic lid to dry the seeds on. If you use paper towel the seeds can stick to the paper and it's not easy to remove the paper from them. You could also use an old cotton towel, the seeds will still stick to it but atleast you won't have paper stuck to them. Drying can take anywhere from a couple days to a week or two depending on temperature and humidity. Be sure to dry them either inside or somewhere mice can't get to them, mice love tomato seeds!​

Step 9 - Store your seeds. Once seeds are completely dry, keep your them in a cool, dry place out of direct sunlight. Paper bags or envelopes are preferable to let the seeds "breathe", however you can use plastic as well - just leave the top open for a couple weeks at first, even a little moisture could make them mold if you close it right away!

You now have your own saved tomato seeds that will be good for the next 4-6 years of growing! 

It feels very empowering to save your own seeds. It's something that most of our ancestors would have done every year. Now you know how to continue the tradition! Best of luck and happy growing!

Do you have some old rotting logs on your land? How about some branches and leaves? Add some compost and you can make a wonderfully sustainable garden bed to grow vegetable, herbs, flowers and other things in! The benefit of adding things such as logs and leaves is that they decompose slowly, releasing nutrients into the soil by the action of naturally occuring fungi and bacteria. This underground ecosystem mimics what naturally happens in a forest and grows incredibly healthy, happy plants! 

The hugelkultur bed below was built over sod with no plowing or tilling. We laid down cardboard to stop grass from growing up through the compost, then we put a layer of rotting birch logs, then filled it with old cow manure compost.  This was so simple and easy to do, and provides so much beauty to us everyday and it a hotspot for pollinaters. There's lots of information online about hugelkultur if you want to get into the science of it!

Now for the pictures! :)

One our farm, we started with 10 lbs of tubers in 2016 and now have hundreds of pounds of sunchokes per year. We haven’t brought in any other tubers since the original 10 lbs. This is a food crop that multiplies itself very easily! In a world where food security is ever more unstable, having a nice sunchoke patch is a great way to ensure there will always be food nearby.

The type we grow is known as “Passamaquoddy Potatoes” and was developed on Grand Manan Island by the First Nations there. They have magenta skin with bright white flesh and the best flavour of sunchokes that we’ve tried. When digging sunchokes, this bright colour helps you see them amongst the soil - another big plus of this variety.

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If you’re interested in growing sunchokes, the best time to plant them is during the spring. Just dig a hole 6 inches to a foot deep in a sunny location, throw in the tuber and cover it! They prefer sandy soil, but honestly they will probably grow anywhere you plant them. By late May or June you will have the green growing tips poking up through the soil and they will continue growing through the summer to reach heights of 6’, 8’ or even taller! Then by the end of September you will see them growing yellow flowers at the tops of their stalks that resemble small sunflowers. As said before these are much loved by bees for their winter food stores. Once there’s a frost and the plant starts to die, then the tubers will not get any bigger and you can start harvesting them. You can pull up the stalk and there will be many tubers growing from the roots which can then be pulled off. You should also bring a shovel because the roots can grow a few feet before producing a tuber, so just dig around in the immediate vicinity of the plant and you’ll likely find some more. Many people wait until the spring to harvest sunchokes as they tend to get sweeter over the long winter dormancy, it’s up to you! Any tubers left in the soil will sprout again in the spring and start another generation of plants. And honestly even if you think you’ve harvested all the tubers there will probably always be some that you miss that will grow, sunchokes are masters of survival!

If you want to try sunchokes for eating or for growing you can order them:
HERE---> WFM2go
Our farm as well as Moon Tide Farm (who we got our first 10 lbs from) both have the Passamaquoddy variety available on there.

Happy eating and growing!


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