Discussions with Local Farmers

Today I had the opportunity to share a great conversation with local Saltspring farmer Jade at Backwoods Farm. He has been farming his space for 9 years with the mission to grow intensely delicious and nutritious produce for Island locals and their families. He grows everything without chemicals or pesticides and successfully grows thousands of pounds of food each year. Here are some of the pearls of wisdom from our conversation.

Q: What is the best way to prep a new farm area?

A: Remove large weeds (blackberries, gorse, broom. wild rose, etc) and use a silage tarp to tarp the space for a full year. Then stake out the beds and add the 4″ of compost and amendments.

What are the sizes of your garden beds and pathways?

We like 32″ garden beds which fit major market gardening tools. When we started we added 4″ of compost. Now we add 2″ of compost for each new crop. We use 12″ pathways which sometimes are a bit tight to work with, but add an extra couple beds of production space.

Q: What do you do for pathways? Do you weed them or use woodchips?

We keep our pathways weeded every couple of weeks. We go around and weed the pathways with a wheel hoe, and we use a weed wacker on all the edges around the garden. We haven’t invested in wood chips. I think chips are a good idea, but the economics haven’t made sense on land we don’t own. We also pull the silage tarp over our beds at the end of the season.

Q: What seeder tool do you use?

We use various seeders including the Jang Seeder, The Earthway, and the 4 Row seeder from Johnnies. We also use the paper pot transplanter. We also do some things by transplant. The JANG seeder seems like the best all-around seeder

Q: What Compost do you use and how much do you apply?

For brand new beds we use 3-4″ of compost to start. For existing beds, we add 2″ Compost each new round of seeding. We use the double sifted compost from Stan Hope Organics.

What do you use for organic fertilizers?

We use feather meal, fishbone meal, and Seaweed. We prefer feather meal over blood meal as feather meal lasts longer in the soil and there is less risk of burning the plants. When we were getting started we also used lime to increase the calcium saturation. However, our soil tests indicate calcium levels are good now. We do soil tests each year to test what we need to add.

A big thank you to Jade at Backwoods farm for sharing his info. Check him out at https://www.thebackwoodsfarm.com/