Sustainability

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” Unknown.

When you become a landowner, you take on the responsibility of being a steward of the land. For us this means being ever vigilant of the footprint we leave, protecting ecosystems, treasuring water, learning from weather patterns, observing nature in all of its forms and having a sense of reverence for the abundance that the land offers us.

Our children are keenly aware that the natural beauty that surrounds us is a gift to be respected and cared for.

No Herbicides & Pesticides

We do not use them! Historically, we have sparingly used a horticultural vinegar, but that is it. All of our weeding is done painstakingly by hand. By the end of the growing season, I have become very familiar with every 100+ foot bed of garlic.

To manage disease and pests, we never plant garlic in the same space back to back. We rotate our fields, maximizing the number of seasons before a field is sowed with garlic again.

Soil Building

In the years that a field is not sown with garlic, we use a variety of cover crops, carefully selected for the benefits and nutrients they bring to the soil. The order in which the cover crops are planted is determined by when a field was last planted with garlic. The result, we do not use fertilizers…and we keep our pollinators happy well into late fall.

Packaging

For a small business owner the economics of plastic packaging is so alluring. However, as an organic grower, it is incongruous for us to put our so carefully cultivated and hand nutured product into plastic packaging. When we first started on this journey we endeavoured to always find an alternative to plastic. So far, we have been successful in finding suitable alternatives.

Our dehydrated products and honey fermented garlic are sold in glass jars with metal lids…great little jars for our customers to find a new purpose for once emptied. The same can be said for our Aged Garlic Tincture packaging. While the dropper and lid are made of plastic, the bottle itself, is amber coloured glass.

Our scapes are sold bundled in natural fibre twine.

Bulbs and larger orders go in brown paper bags.

When you meet up with us at a market, please be sure to bring your own grocery bags, as we will not have grocery bags to supply.

Limited Fossil Fuel Consumption

We have a solar powered tractor. It is a 25hp diesel equivalent. We do whatever we can with this machine, however, it does have its limitations.

When the blue machine cannot do the job, we bring in the red one. This 33hp tractor can run all day long on a single Jerrycan of diesel.

But truthfully, our mechanical needs are limited with a garlic crop. Aside from breaking a new field and fall planting, everything from weeding to harvesting is done manually.

Harnessing the Power of the Sun

By the time we dehydrate scapes and bulbs, we have done a lot of dehydrating. When you live in the sunniest province in Canada, we thought we would experiment with something different. In the Summer of 2022 we finished the build on our solar dehydrator. We had a couple of set backs, which meant it was not ready in time for dehydrating scapes and the temperatures and dew points were such that we could not dehydrate bulbs in the fall. So this project is still unproven for us, but we are excited to give it a try this summer.

Incidentally, we also use solar power for our home.

Rainwater Harvesting

We have come to appreciate our heavy clay soil, but it took a couple of seasons to figure out how to work with it. Our soil is nutrient dense and holds moisture. We have learned that we have a lot of degrees of freedom when it comes to the moisture holding capacity of our soil. Even in the hottest and driest of summers we need to do very little watering, but when we do, we are using rainwater we have harvested off of our home and outbuildings.