Reflections from last season.

Maybe some of you are here for the stories, and don't worry - I haven't forgotten about you. It's important to get the marketing out of the way right off the bat (so I'm told by my youngest sister, an expert in these things). If you skip this part that's okay, too. We can still send you seeds.

2020 holds a lot of weight. It's impossible to reflect on the farming season without acknowledging that this was an historical year on so many fronts. Amidst a global sense of grief and foreboding, we were humbled by and grateful for our access to food through farming: as physical and mental exercise, as therapy, as connection to our community, as the most tactile version of hope. Something about the predictable unpredictability of growing food from seed kept us grounded through the chaos of this year.

Farming in 2020 was much like farming in 2019, and 2018, and 2017, and so on. The weather was weird. We ordered so much compost. We decided to broadfork every bed and cursed all the way through it. We finally won a years-long battle of  'Deer vs Lettuce' by putting up a very cheap but very effective deer fence (should have done that a long time ago). We had small and big victories like finally growing spinach and onions well and nearly doubling our seed production on half the amount of land. We had losses related to the cold spring, late rains and early frost. As our good friend Dan always says, "that's farming".

As usual, we are feeling just about rested by now and are itching to get going again. Planning the garden sounds like a pretty good way to be isolated this winter - don't you think?

~ Jamie

"A Seed Potato is a potato which has been grown & inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.  Although it is possible for gardeners to save seed for planting the following year, only farms certified and inspected can sell potatoes for seed.  Unlike many vegetables, potatoes are not grown from seed, but instead from a tuber (the potato).  This is done because a potato grown from the seed produced on a potato plant do not necessarily produce tubers identical to the mother plant.  Only by planting a potato can we ensure that the potatoes harvested are the same as the potato planted" (description from seedpotatoes.ca).
 

There are two very simple reasons why we don't produce our own seed potatoes at Bird & Bee: 1) the double-certification required is a rigorous and complicated process, and 2) we don't have the space or equipment required for large volume.