Zócalo Organics
5881 Third Line N0B 1Z0 Erin, ON, Canada

Did you know we got a little yurt up and running again? Come stay at our farm in "The Onion" https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/45732083

Friends! The CSA season is done for the year and we are so grateful to everyone who was able to support us in this strange year. We still have veggies for sale and have just REOPENED our online store where you can pre-order produce for pick up on farm or @guelphfarmersmarket (Thanks for the amazing photo of our barn behind the yellowing asparagus patch Meghan Weber-Lipton)

Farmers and farm-workers - take note!

It’s market day @guelphfarmersmarket Usually we move indoors at the end of September but we are staying outside as long as we can this year (as long as the veg won’t freeze) because #pandemic times call for pandemic measures. Please say a big thank you to our market Manager Alex - she’s been working her butt off to make this table beautiful all season long. Come enjoy some of these fall delights!

Want to reduce/eliminate tillage in your Home Garden? Cover your garden with Cardboard (overlapped well with plastic tape removed) and leaves in the fall. In the spring you can do two things: ... 1. rake the leaves and cardboard into a compost pile to decompose, and plant into the bare soil left under the cardboard. Or.. 2. Cut holes in the cardboard and plant your transplants right into it (you can drop your compost in the holes too for crops that require more fertility)! On a farm scale we use large plastic (re-usable) sileage tarps and straw for mulching. We mow our crops and then cover the area with the big tarp, or if we want to plant something new right away we cut the plants an inch below the soil, put them in a compost, and replant right away in the same garden bed. Have fun!

Some dreamy looking vegetables went to homes of the people today This is our second year of using no-till/low-till methods in the garden and already we are noticing a reduction of pest pressure due to improved ecology. A couple examples: our carrots usually have a lot more damage from a pest called Cartot Rust Fly; and our Napa cabbages usually have more aphid damage. ... Farmer Seb says he has also been noticing way more hover-flies than ever before (a beneficial insect). Why does NOT TILLING make our garden/farm ecology healthier? Someone once said to me that tillage is like going into New York City and bulldozing all the buildings - it basically erases all life so that you must start over. There is already so much present in the soil to help our plants thrive and the moment of tillage destroys all these brilliant webs of life- bacterial, fungal, and micro-organisms. Tilling means we have to start over to build healthy ecology every year! We are just in the process of selling our tiller and power harrow because we are officially a low-till farm. Hooray! If the world were open maybe we’d have a party just for this milestone!! We actually still do a bit of surface tillage for seeding salad greens with a tool called a "Tilther". There are some crops we haven't yet figured out how to plant entirely no-till. I’ll share some No-till tips for your home garden in my next post!