2010 in Review

It has been a record breaking year at Eagle Creek Farms. Unfortunately on the production side there were very few record highs. The weather just was no on our side to give a favorable growing year.
However looking back there were some fantastic moments and I would like to believe we made the best of what we were given. To start the season we built a small greenhouse allowing us to start our own transplants on the farm. There was a wood stove to keep the plants warm on those cool nights. In 2011 we will be doubling the size of our greenhouse and adding a set of solar thermal heat panels to help with heating.

In 2010 I finally started a CSA. I have been thinking a CSA would be a nice fit in our operation for a year or two now. "CSA" Stands for Community Shared Agriculture. It is a way that families interested in local food can share the risk of production with a farmer. How it works is that families purchase a share, prior to the growing season, in a vegetable garden that we plan to grow. In return, throughout the summer, we harvest from the garden and make deliveries of fresh vegetables to the share families. This is a picture of our delivery in Calgary. We started with 66 share families this past year. It went so well that we will be expanding to nearly 300 families in 2011. There is loads of info on our website where you can learn more about our CSA and sign up for a 2011 share. We make deliveries into Calgary, Olds & Red Deer

Potatoes.... I love Potatoes. A friend asked me a couple days ago what my favorite crop is. "Most definitely potatoes" I replied. They are easy for new gardeners to grow, fun & quick for kids to pick, can be cooked in so many ways, and come in so many shapes and colours. My father has been growing potatoes for over 20 years and we now grow over 30 varieties. We sell our seed potatoes to home gardeners across Canada who share my passion in this fantastic crop. Anyone can purchase seed potatoes from our online catalogue between Mid December and April every year. You can view all 30 varieties we have available for 2011 on our potato website, seed potatoes.ca

Ultimately we could not have accomplished everything we did without our staff. The farm is humming with people throughout the year busy with planting, harvest, deliveries, working the farm store or spending time showing you around the Gardens.

Hope to see you all in 2011. I have a feeling it is going to be a great year.
John Mills

Sunflower Maze in Full Bloom

In a typical year our kick off the summer with our sunflower maze in full Bloom. However, 2010 has been one for the record books, only not in a good way. Well not for most crops. Our sunflower maze on the other hand has just opened into full bloom over the past week and is better than ever before.

I can't think of a better way to end August than with 100 000 smiling sunflowers.

As long as we do not get a frost in the next few days the sunflower mazes should be looking fantastic into the beginning of September. Our September hours for the maze are Friday & Saturday 11-6 and Sunday 11-5. We hope to see you out on the farm. Don't forget your camera....

Fantastic Weekend for Lily Festival

Once again we lucked out on the weather and the Lily Festival was an amazing kick off to the season.
1300 visitors came out to enjoy the flower fields, mazes and entertainment for the weekend and I didn't see a single family leave without a smile on their face. Even Flow our pot bellied pig had a great time getting his belly scratched over and over again.

One of the main draws to the farm are our thousands of U-pick lilies. To showcase the flowers we have a "U-pick Vase of Flowers" Sale, where visitors purchase a vase, then pick lilies and other flowers to create their own arrangement.

Thank you to everyone who made the lily festival another great weekend. Thank you to all our amazing family, staff who helped get everything ready and make the festival run smooth. Also thank you to all who visited the farm this weekend and enjoyed what we had to offer.

Website Down, but Lily Festival Still on

Hello everyone, our main portals of information to the farm, sunmaze.ca & eaglecreekfarms.ca seem to be down today.

Our festival is still on for today, Sunday August 1st from 11-5 then we will be open 7 days a week throughout august. 11-6 monday - Saturday then 11-5 on sundays. Here is a map to the farm, you can also call us today 1 877 224 3939 you can click on this image for a printable copy.

Lily Festival

Lily Festival July 31st & Aug 1st 11-5
I feel like I am in one of those home reno TV shows where every thing needs to come together before a given deadline, but it seems like most of the work is done during the last few long days. Our Crew has been working hard over the past couple weeks renovating our farm store, sprucing up the u-pick fields, making tons more signs. It looks as though all will be ready for opening day July 31st.

This year the Lily festival is also going to be the grand opening of the farm. Our U-pick flower & Vegetable fields are just getting started with Thousands of Lilies. Over the next 2 weeks more vegetables & Flowers will begin to be ready for u-pick 7 days a week.

We have a few new additions to the farm this year including Red, our miniature horse and Flow, a pot bellied pig. Be sure to say hi and welcome them to the farm.

I counted today and there were over 15 different colours of lilies in bloom. I also saw the first of the zinnias, a great collection of monkshood, ladies mantel and many more flowers in the u-pick.

Although you can visit the farm throughout August, the first 2 weekends are the days we offer our U-pick vase deal. How it works is that you purchase the vase from our farm store, then pick as many flowers as you can fit in the vase.

What does a farmer do in the rain?

After last season, I had totally forgot what it was like to continually start to the sky for the slightest ray of sun. However, this year on the other hand has been completely different. Another 3 inches of rain the past couple days. So here are some pics of what we do..

I can hardly believe it, but on July 13th I had to start up my stove in the greenhouse. the temp was dropping below 10 degrees, so to avoid developing misshaped fruit we had to start a fire to keep the temp up... On July 13th...

The next job was to see the damage in the field. Nothing too terribly horrible, however; I think these peonies will have a permanent kink in their stems after been blown horizontal.


Here are some pics of beans and swiss chard, which will definitely have to be washed before eaten. I think on some of the plants there is more dirt than chard. Not to worry, a couple days of sun after all this rain will make things grow like crazy.




I know this is going to sound really weird, but I was irrigating today as well. We grow all our lilies under plastic tunnels to protect them from the hail. The one downside is that on rainy days, the lilies do not see any of the moisture. This really bothered me that I have to irrigate on one of the wettest years in recent years, on the flip side the water reservoir probably rose more from run off than I was able to pump out today.

Then their is staff to deal with. We employ 8 people on the farm, some full time, most part time, all but 1 was in for work today and I don't think I would have been the most popular person if I were to make everyone work outside for the day. Fortunately we had loads of work to do rebuilding our farm store, signs for the maze, cleaning our potato storage & packing sheds and random cleaning jobs to get done. Everyone did a fantastic job and the place is almost ready for Summer. Anyone have an idea on when Summer is going to start this year?

Summer is here

Summer is here and so our our first veggies. I am always taken back when the radishes are ready for market because we quickly switch from planting and getting the farm ready for the public to harvest time. First it is the radish, second are the garlic scapes and then strait into flowers. It is hard to see but in this picture there is our first garlic scape poking out of it's sheith. This year we will be selling the scapes at Innisfail Growers Farmers Market Booths. You can use scapes just the same a garlic cloves, only earlier....

My girlfriend thought that we needed something red out in the U-pick for this season and I thought that a tool shed would be useful. so we married the two ideas together and came up with this, a red tool shed "Ray's Red Shed" We have most of the siding on, just need to frame a door and it will be ready.


It won't be long until the maze design for this year needs to be cut, but first we have to make sure the weeds are under control. Here we are using our "state of the art" wheel hoes to cut down some chick weed and lambs quarters. I think these pics were taken on Saturday and when we were out again this morning the sunflowers had doubled in size. It is hard to believe but the corn and sunflowers in the maze will grow up to 2-4 inches every day from now until we open the maze in 26 days.

Markets & Mud

It is June and June is the start of Market season. Unfortunately I do not have anything ready for the markets just yet. We should have radishes starting next week, if the sun decides to poke out of the clouds. Even though I don't have produce of my own, I was able to take fresh asparagus, rhubarb, tomatoes, onions, herbs & potted flowers all from the group of neighbours I work with, Innisfail Growers.

You can find an Innisfail Growers Booth at over 15 markets across central Alberta each week, where you can be assured fresh vegetables grown by local Farmers. This is a picture of me at Northlands market which I work every Tuesday from 3:30 - 7:00pm in the Calgary, Northlands Mall Parking lot. One of my customers and I are sampling some of Edgar Farms Fresh Asparagus and Rhubarb (don't worry Elna, I didn't really take a bit out of a bunch of your asparagus, but it did cross my mind...) Find a full list of markets Innisfail Growers attends at www.innisfailgrowers.com

Now for the MUD... We have lots of it at the moment. Anyone want to buy mud? I think this week it rained over 3 inches of rain, which happens to me more than we had all summer last year. But there is no point in complaining about the excess of rain, so I won't, as long as we get a bunch of sun to dry things out.

Excess rain isn't the end of the world. We had plenty of in door jobs for the staff. Our crew took out all the transplants and benches out of our little greenhouse and replaced them with cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers. I think they fit 90 tomatoes, 30 cucumbers and 20 pepper plants. Our CSA members will be enjoying these veggies in about 5 weeks. We will also be selling fresh fresh veggies in our u-pick and farm store this summer starting July 31st when we open our maze & U-pick.

Planting Season

May long is generally our key to start planting and this year was no exception. We did get the carrots, beets, parsnips and onions in last month, but once again our Alberta spring has been full of surprises. The first half of May was far warmer than what we are now experiencing, and that snow storm last weekend was a good reminder that their is no hurry getting those delicate vegetables into the ground too early.

But now it is June and everything, as usual, needs to be in the ground TODAY!!. We two boys from the local high school who work on the farm, planting a bunch of spuds yesterday, and our crew of ladies are busy planting and transplanting hundreds of perennials throughout the gardens.

This year we are growing 200 tomato plants to supply our U-pick, farm store and Community shared Agriculture Vegetable Delivery. Plans are to have the bulk of the plants in our greenhouses, planted directly into the soil. They are starting to bloom in their pots, so I think it is time to get them in the ground.

Finally for this post a note on our Tulips. They are looking fantastic, nice and tall, full of colour and are lasting for ever. Unfortunately we will not have any for sale. These in the picture are right beside my house, protected from Bambi, who ate the 4000 we had growing out in the gardens.. I am sure it would have made for a great picture, but not so great for flower sales. We might have to move all the tulips next to the house, or buy a really big dog next year to keep the deer away.

Greenhouse

It has been over a month since we fired up the stove in our new greenhouse and I am continually amazed at how well everything has been growing.

We are trying to do everything from seed to harvest with out synthetic fertilizers this season, so it has been a bit of a learning experience. I will have to admit that we did use up some old bags of Promix BX, which does contain synthetic micro nutrients. We only did this because I had the bags and didn't want to throw them in the garbage. We are now starting to create our own potting mix with a combination of peat and compost. I will keep you posted on how well it works.

I found a product called fish agri, which I am told is used to supply nutrients to the growing seedlings prior to transplant, which I was told is needed in greenhouse production. Admittedly I was quite skeptical that this brown fishy mixture was going to be the answer to growing without synthetics, especially after the first application stunk up my greenhouse for a day.. But sure enough the onions and zinnias, which were starting to look a little yellow, are now green as ever..

Last year one of our potato customers gave us some heirloom black tomato seed that he had been saving each year. We grew a number of these plants in our u-pick last year, absolutely amazing flavour, them kept a couple fruit to save the seeds for our selves. From the 5 tomatoes we took seeds from last fall we now have over 100 plants in the greenhouse. We will be growing about 7 varieties in all this year, but one I am most looking forward to is called Chocolate Cherry.

What does a farmer do in the winter?

Did you ever wonder what we farmers do in the winter? Everyone knows there are many long days to be worked during the summer. But when there is snow on the ground, there is very little that can be done outside. Well, here are a few of the projects which have kept us from sitting idle throughout this unusual winter we are now escaping.

I have mentioned before that we do not use any synthetic chemicals in our flower and vegetable gardens. To accomplish this we pull weeds by hand and fertilize our u-pick fields with Compost. In total on the farm we spread approximately 150 tonnes of composted manure each year. It takes quite a bit of work to properly turn 250 tonnes of raw manure into usable compost, so to make the job a little easier this season we built this machine. This compost turner will mix up the piles of manure a couple times during the year to create an excellent product to put on our fields. This project kept us busy for the better part of a month with over 50 hours of welding alone. It still needs to get a paint job this summer, but for the mean time you can tell that the metal parts came off at least 5 old, unused machines on our farm.

Another idea I have had in my mind since moving back to the farm was to build a greenhouse. For the past 4 years we have worked with Leona from the Jungle Farm at Innisfail to start many of our flower transplants in her greenhouse. Now that we are starting a CSA vegetable delivery program, it was time to start all our plants right here on the farm. With the exception of the plastic, the Greenhouse was built from extra metal we had on the farm. Instead of heating the unit with a natural gas furnace we built a heat exchanger on the top of a wood stove which circulates air and water throughout the greenhouse during our cool nights.

Finally, one of the less know operations on our farm is the selection of over 30 varieties of Mail Order Seed Potatoes we grow for home gardeners. Eagle Creek Seed Potatoes. We built this machine which rolls the potatoes as they pass by so we can make sure the potatoes we package have no blemishes. If any of you grow a garden, we will be selling and shipping potatoes until the end of April.