The Organic Farm
Vegetables • Fruit • Seed Saving • Cut Flowers
Farming the land has always been central to our lives here on Stowel Lake, and it binds us together as a community. In the last 5 years, under the leadership of Meghan, our head farmer, we have transitioned our market garden from organic to regenerative. We have done this by using no-till methods, reducing our inputs, interplanting, focusing on open pollinated varieties, surrounding every garden with pollinator gardens and planting more perennial plants. There are approximately 2 acres of market garden currently in production. We grow vegetables, flowers, fruit, berries and seeds. Everything we grow is sold directly to the consumer from our Farm Stand, used for retreats, or shared within the Stowel Lake Farm community.
Vegetables
Our garden produce changes with the seasons and depending on the time of year we’re growing salad mix, swiss chard, spinach, asian greens, scallions, radishes, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, cabbage, kale, peas, beans, zucchini and fennel, to name a few. When available, these vegetables are for sale at our Farm Stand. As for herbs, we grow and sell basil, parsley, dill, cilantro and fennel.
Our farm team pays attention to where the seeds originate from, the flavour of the vegetables and which varieties thrive in our growing zone.
Our farm is located in a temperate rainforest climate with generally mild winters which allows us to grow vegetables from March to November, feeding our farm and the surrounding community.
Cut Flowers
We also dedicate time and energy to cultivating cut flowers to sell at our farm stand and to use to beautify our retreat spaces.
Inspired by Lisa and her willingness to grow an incredible amount of flower starts, Jen and Liz began a small cut flower garden. Spending years selecting and collecting different varieties of flowers, there is now a beautiful and productive cut flower garden on the farm that gets picked for beautiful arrangements.
We love growing the classic cut flowers such as snapdragons, zinnias, celosia, sunflowers and dahlias. We also love using what we can find on the farm or in the vegetable gardens such as our cover crops phacelia, oats and peas or perhaps some treasures from the perennial gardens. It's evolving and changing each year as we explore the world of cut flowers.
Seed Saving
Organic Seeds
Saving our own seeds is a significant part of our farming operation. First and foremost, we save seed for ourselves to plant year after year in the market gardens. In this way, we can be self reliant and witness the complete life cycle of the plants that we grow. Our seed saving passion began with only a few varieties of lettuce and greens. After experiencing the power of the ‘seed to seed’ cycle we have been inspired to add and trial more varieties each year.
We also sell our seeds to the community at our Farm Stand.
