Sweet acres heritage farm

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SWEET ACRES HERITAGE FARM

by Elizabeth Irving

Laura Shirriff and Ralph Tiemann marvel at the way Sweet Acres Heritage Farm has responded to their organic management. They operate a four-acre market garden, are developing an orchard of heritage and rare varieties of fruit trees, and are planning to expand in the direction of small fruit. A few chickens, cows and pigs, kept mainly to provide manure to keep the farm’s soil in top condition, sometimes turn a small profit from eggs and meat. The farm has been certified for two years now by OCIA. Through careful selection of the right equipment for their needs and by judicious recycling and reuse of many materials, they are able to make a comfortable living from the farm without holding off-farm jobs to supplement their income. Both feel strongly that the farm needs their full, balanced, year-round attention to thrive.

When Laura bought the run-down 25-acre farm in 1990, behind the house was a neglected apple orchard, long used as a dumping place for old machinery, broken glass, barbed wire and other garbage. The two back fields had grown nothing but corn for many years and were suffering from repeated atrazine applications. Laura had gardened organically in Victoria and Montreal, a necessity for her because of her allergies to chemicals, and she rose to the challenge of bringing the farm back to health and making a living from it.

Vegetables

That first summer’s farming activities were simply mowing the field as it came back to life and turning the weeds under to help the soil recover. The following year, the back field was disked and planted to sweet clover to improve the drainage. "You couldn’t even grow your own food on this property, there was so much atrazine!" Laura says. She used tomato plants as indicators of soil health: within two years, when they stopped dying, she knew the soil was ready to grow food.

In 1992, they had their first market garden in the untainted soil of the small kitchen garden area and sold produce at the farmers’ market in nearby Kemptville. Laura’s enthusiasm for organics had convinced Ralph, a conventional cash cropper who was becoming disillusioned with chemicals, to become a partner in the market garden venture. "I couldn’t have a crop rotation because of chemical residues on my farm," explains Ralph, who came to Eastern Ontario from Germany in 1985.

In 1994, Laura and Ralph started to develop a formal market garden in the field closest to the house; they completed it in 1996. It is divided into two parts to accommodate each partner’s different approach to growing. In the front two acres, Laura has a series of small beds, like a formal English garden. They are all five feet wide so that they can be reached easily from either side, making stepping in them and compacting the soil unnecessarily. Aside from tilling the beds in the spring or fall, she uses hand tools to cultivate and weed and relies heavily on mulch. In the back two acres, Ralph plants and cultivates long, straight rows with a tractor and other power equipment. Potatoes, corn, legumes, vines and onions are grown in Ralph’s part of garden, while Laura’s beds are more suitable for smaller crops such as lettuce, carrots, spinach and tomatoes.

Keeping detailed and careful records is an important aspect of the market garden. By recording crop(s), varieties, amount sown/transplanted, and date of planting & harvest for each numbered bed, Laura can plan a rotation to maximize production and soil health. The rotation, a minimum of five years depending what crops grow in a bed or area, roughly follows this plan:

1. Peas, beans, sweet peas (Leguminosae)

2. Spinach, beets (Chenopodiaceae)

3. Sweet corn, grains (Graminae)

4. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes (Solanaceae)

5. Lettuce (Compositae)

6. Carrots, parsnips, dill, parsley, fennel, celery (Umbelliferae)

7. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, radishes, turnips (Cruciferae)

8. Squash, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons (Cucurbitaceae)

9. Onions, garlic, leeks, chives, flower bulbs (Amaryllidaceae)

Laura finds she can get two and often three succession plantings from the same bed over the season. For example, in mid to late April, she sows radishes in a bed and at the same time sows lettuce in the hot bed. By mid May, the radishes have been harvested and the lettuce is transplanted into the bed. After the lettuce comes out, by mid June, the bed is seeded down to carrots.

Composted manure from their livestock is the mainstay of the garden. "By OCIA standards, we can’t use manure that has composted less than six months," explains Laura. As their manure decomposes, they simply add garden and kitchen wastes and turn them in. The amount of finished compost applied to each part of the garden depends on the amount of fertility required by the crops being grown there. Radishes and carrots, for example, do much better with less.

Pest control is not a big problem in their market garden. Laura feels that sprays undermine the natural balance which their diversity, rotation, compost management and other organic techniques bring to the garden. She and Ralph have left wild hedgerows at the edges of the fields to attract birds and beneficial insects. On one occasion, in 1995, they sprayed rotenone, a permitted but restricted substance under their certification, to control a huge infestation of Colorado potato beetles. Since that single application, they have kept the beetles at bay by hand picking, helped by predator insects.

Weed control in the smaller beds is done by hand or by hoe, and Laura uses a mulch of rotten hay once the soil has warmed up. Ralph prefers mechanical cultivation between his long rows. With potatoes, he moves the soil into bigger hills at intervals of one to two weeks over the season.

Their produce from the 1994 and 1995 seasons was sold at the farmers’ market Morrisburg. In April, 1996, Laura joined the Ottawa Organic Farmers’ Market, and she has continued to be a regular vendor every Saturday, year-round. Ralph and Laura do some farmgate sales, but only if people call ahead. Whatever doesn’t sell is welcomed by the pigs, a key part of the farm cycle.

Fruit

The orchard at Sweet Acres Heritage Farm is different from most other orchards in four ways: it is completely organic; the varieties grown there are all heritage or rare; the trees, when mature, will all be standard size as the life expectancy of dwarf trees in Eastern Ontario is relatively short (20 years for dwarfs versus a century or more for standards, Laura points out); and fully one-third of the apple varieties grown there are cooking apples, which won’t turn to bland mush when cooked.

Laura started grafting heritage apple trees in 1991 so that she would have stock ready to plant as soon as the field had recovered from atrazine. She uses hardy Russian rootstock, ‘Antonovka’, available from Groen’s Nursery in Dundas, Ontario. The young trees were nurtured in the old orchard until it was finally all cut down and cleaned out by late 1994. At that point, the field was ready to be planted with the new orchard. "All the new trees here are either heritage or what I would class as ‘rare or unusual’," says Laura. For example, ‘Surprise’, a green heritage apple that is pink inside, is a parent of ‘Pink Pearl’ (1944), another variety she grows. While ‘Pink Pearl’ is not a heritage variety, it is certainly rare and unusual. The 80 varieties grafted so far include ‘Rhode Island Greening’, ‘Wismer’s Dessert’, ‘Howgate Wonder’ and ‘Wagener’. Scionwood for ‘Yellow Transparent’ and ‘Early Harvest’ both came from the old orchard on the farm. About half Laura’s scionwood came courtesy of Margie Luffman, Curator of the Canadian Clonal Gene Bank. Other sources have been Shelley Paulocik/Woodwinds (Ontario), Fred Jansen/Pomona (Ontario), Bob Osborne/Corn Hill Nursery (New Brunswick), Richard Fahey/ Christian Homesteading Movement (U.S.) and Bear Creek Nursery (U.S.). They also have a few plum, apricot and sour cherry trees.

Laura believes that trees will develop natural immunity if they are raised as organic from the start. The only two of the young trees to produce so far have borne flawless apples without even a dormant spray. Laura is keeping notes on each variety to see which are more prone to scab than others. "It doesn’t make sense to spray the whole orchard if only some of the trees are having problems." Soon she will be planting bulbs and wildflowers as part of the diverse cover she has planned for the new orchard floor.

"There’s a market a mile wide for fruit," notes Laura. In addition to the apples and plums, they grow blackberries, rhubarb, currants (red, white and black), gooseberries, saskatoons, strawberries and raspberries. They now sell their fruit fresh at the market, but would like to expand their offerings and perhaps do some processing themselves.

For more information, contact Laura Shirriff and Ralph Tiemann at Sweet Acres Heritage Farm, R.R.#3, Winchester ON K0C 2K0, phone (613) 989-3364, voice mail (613) 989-1231.

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