Farm Blog

Today 11 apprentices or proteges from the New Farmer Mentorship Project came to my farm for a workshop on Buying, Leasing, or Sharing a farm.  We used a hand out from the local realtor who originally sold us our farm 25 years ago, Bruce MacMillan.  You can download it here: Buying Property to farm

We also took a look at the old LLAFF (Linkng Land and Future Farmers) manual.  Linking Land and Future Farmers Association (LLAFF) is a non-profit society devoted to promoting the best use of our agricultural land by getting folks on land farming and using community resources to do so. Through listing opportunities to buy, share, or rent land, LLAFF works to connect those looking for land with those who have land to offer. Originally started in 1994, and fallow for the past few years, LLAFF is coming out of retirement and could help you find land today, contact for more information. We lost our digital copy of the manual an only had a hard copy. Jen Girard’s dad was a tremendous help as he had a program that could scan the document and turn it into text.  Jen cleaned up the scanned document but you might find some typo’s.

Linking Land and Future Farmers Working draft

Here are Lauree Austin’s photos of the workshop:  They include making compost tea, setting up a makeshift cover for tomatoes to protect them from late blight, training tomatoes on a string, pruning tomatoes, watering in newly planted tomato plant (an essential part of planting), tomato seedlings at 6 weeks from seeding, tomato seedlings at 8 days waiting to go into 4″ pots, the green house heat tables, drying  tomato seeds that have just been cleaned, letting tomato seeds ferment to remove gel that slows germination, the longkeeper tomato on March 27th.

The participants of the workshop asked me to post photos of tomatoe  pests, a frost table for the Lower Vancouver Island area, and a recipe for the amendments I use when I transplant tomato seedlings into 4″ pots. Here they are: a cut worm larva, a cut worm pupa, and late blight on the stem of a tomato plant.

My recipe for transplanting tomatoes from seedlings to 4″ pots is:

3 litre bucket organic Sunshine mix

3 litres Sea Soil

1/3 C. dolopril

1/3 C. kelp meal

1/3 C. alfalfa meal

1/3 C. rock phosphate

Today we’re having a workshop on growing tomatoes.

Here is the handout I’m using.   Planting Tomatoes