Arcadia Permaculture Farm

06/07/2026

Our resident Painted Turtle was looking for a place to lay her eggs. Seems like the new potatoes are the spot. Hopefully we can find the nest and avoid disturbing it so we have some more of these beauties around our ponds.

06/06/2026

When you don't use roundup, you've got to do things the hard way. Worth it.

When we put the fences in, we were skint, having put everything we had into our down payment. We couldn't afford compost or topsoil to backfill, so we flipped the sod along the fence and mulched it heavily.

The grass came back.

We've been hand weeding ever since. Every year I dig out another 10-15 feet of fence line and pull every live root. It's slowly coming along, and we're getting our fence gardens back for beans, morning glory, peas, malabar spinach, and other climbers.

06/03/2026

Last few seedlings need a good home!

06/03/2026

Growing food means you get special treats that you can't find at the store. Real baby carrots are sweet, crunchy, and intensely carrot-y. The things they sell at the store are the fully grown carrots that weren't straight enough to sell whole, soaked in a mild bleach solution to preserve them long enough to ship and shelve.

05/31/2026

I turned two grape plants into 11 for free by sticking cuttings in the spring.

I'll plant these in the orchard to climb my nitrogen fixing plants, in the food forest, and along our walking paths so we can forage our land as we walk.

Now that I've tested the method, I can add 10+ table grapes and a vineyard next spring!

05/29/2026

It took a year and a half, and a lot of help from our friends - but we built our . Here's how we did it!

Now we're on to the fun stuff!

It took a year and a half, and a whole lot of help from our friends and neighbours, but we built the greenhouse on our permaculture farm in Zone 5, Canada.We...

05/28/2026

Fail reduction to 50%. And counting?

05/28/2026

Every time you buy eggs, you're voting for the type of farming you want more of in the world. We're accepting a few new egg subscribers this spring.

Eggs from pastured hens just plain taste better than from hens who live cages, or never leave the barn. Once you taste it, you can't go back. The bright yellow yolks are thicker and richer in flavour. The whites are firmer. If you make pasta, it will have a better texture and colour. A boeuf tartare (like the one pictured with grass fed beef) will be more luxurious. A simple weekend fry-up will disappear from your kids' plates faster.

This could be because pastured eggs have been shown in multiple studies to be higher in vitamin A, D, E, and omega-3 fatty acids, and lower in cholesterol and saturated fat than eggs from the grocery store. Your taste buds know what's good for you.

How a chicken lives is directly connected to egg quality. Most eggs are from hens that live their entire productive lives in wire cages. "Free run" eggs are from hens who spend their whole productive lives in a barn. "Free range" is like "free run", but they're allowed in an outside cage in good weather.

Our flock lives on pasture from spring to fall, with a mobile shelter and movable electric fencing for protection. They spend their days foraging for leaves and bugs, dust-bathing, and relaxing in the shade. They get a full ration of fermented organic feed, plus food scraps and all the bugs they can forage.

This all-inclusive chicken resort & spa takes more labour than a conventional operation. So why do we do it?

Our flock works every day to increase topsoil, improve fertility, and sequester carbon on our farm. They eat and trample plants, causing a temporary die-back of the plant and its roots (which compost and increase soil organic matter), and stimulating new growth which captures even more carbon. Their manure fertilizes the pasture.

When they've worked over one area , we move them to a new paddock so that piece of pasture can recover. Year after year, our hens help us to increase topsoil, just by doing what they were born to do.

05/26/2026

There's more to perennial vegetables than asparagus.

05/24/2026

No more frost in the forecast, so it's time to get these plants in the ground!