Urban Garden!

Check out this urban garden in downtown Vancouver, its great to see these popping up all over in the city, hopefully it keeps happening. Apparently Vancouver city planners want to have 2010 urban garden by the year 2010. You can check out Vancouver Park Board's website for a publicly accessibe garden in your arera...

Poor man's tractor!

We got our tractor today, and we're stoked, this thing looks like it will till the land up like crazy. After a lot of research and thinking we decided not to get a 4 wheel tractor because they are a lot pricier, they compact the soil and they aren't as versatile for a farm the size of ours (5 acres). So we got a BCS 853 with an 11 hp Lombardini diesel motor from Joel at Earthtool. It has a PTO and can spin a whole bunch of different implements. These tractors are commonly used all over Europe for small-scale agriculture. For breaking up new land that has waist high hay and grass growing on it, and that hasn't been tilled in over a year, we will use the Berta rotary plow (shown above). Check out this video of the Berta plow at work. We'll post again once we start using it.

Breaking in the land

Anna Helmer came over to help us with the tilling, she brought her John Deere and rotovater over to get things done a bit quicker, so we can get our cover crop in soon.

We're starting a farm!

Here we go, we got some land to use and we're diving in. We've been dreaming about this for years and working towards this reality and it's finally paying off. We are so thankful to the land owners, who are letting use a good chunk of their land, which exists in 2 separate parcels of about 5 acres, in the Pemberton meadows. The land itself is beautiful, fertile soil. It is sedimentary loam from several millennium of flooding from the Lillooet and Ryan rivers, draining from the Lillooet and Pemberton Ice Caps. It is literally teeming with nutrients, and has never been sprayed or treated with chemicals. So now we are getting ready to prepare the land; cover crops and tillage, composting and planning out our fields... Alisha is still in full on school mode, as she works through her last full course load (7 courses!) at UBC in Agroecology, and Delaney is getting his hand dirty on the farm as he finished his degree last year. Its almost October so we have lots to do to get ready for winter to ensure we have good, usable land come spring planting season...