Northbrook Farm Virtual Tour
Hey Fellow Apprentices, I thought it would be nice to give you a virtual tour of our farm, and fill you in about what we’ve been up to here. If we all give each other some background on our farms and the work we’ve been doing, maybe we can jump start the learning from one another when we do meet.
My partner, Jill, and I are apprenticing at Northbrook Farm in Central Saanich. Our mentor is Heather Stretch. She’s been farming for 10 years on this land and is a member of the Saanich Organics cooperative.
In collaboration with her partner farmers, she runs a box program, supplies produce to restaurants and sells at the Moss St. Market. As far as we can see, it’s a great marketing/distribution model, allowing three small farms to share costs, labour and provide a greater selection of crops. One benefit of this is that Heather only has to go to every third market, but her produce is sold there every week.
The farm is situated on a south facing slope. Roughly one acre is divided into nine fields of mostly rotating annual crops. Below is one of those fields, recently turned in by a spader implement on the tractor. This week we had a chance to use the two large tractors to spade and also to move compost with the front end loader.
Jill and I have recently been training young pear and apple trees, using ties hold the branches at a horizontal position. Below the orchard there are 40 egg laying chickens which have their own place in the field rotation, doing what they do best, eating, pooping and making eggs. At the very back of the photo, just past the greenhouse to the right, is about an acre of blueberries. 
We have spent a lot of time working on the blueberries since arriving here. The poor guys need support as they’ve been plagued by mummy berry. We’ve been pruning and applying various fertilizers and soon we’ll be working to install an entire new above ground irrigation system.
Below is our seed trays in Heather’s largest greenhouse. It currently has lots of salad greens and some pea shoots which are still quite young. And of course the seedling trays, which we’ve immensely enjoyed seeding, watering and thinning.
Here is our latest completed project, planting mint in most of the holes in this landscape fabric on this slope. It was a finicky job, it’s tough working through the fabric and so it was quite time consuming. Our neighbours are also planting mint, so it’ll be able to see what techniqes they use and what works.
Another great thing about Northbrook Farm is that there are several other operations using various different pieces of land. This includes a flower operation, a vegetable seed operation, a large greenhouse and a couple fields managed by Saanich Organics employees and former apprentices of Heather’s a running a great veggie operation a couple hundred feet away. There’s a wonderful community formed around this farm that we’re excited about being able to glean learnings from.
So that’s Northbrook, hope you enjoyed the tour! We’ll look forward to hearing about your farms and meeting you at the Apprentice Days.
John and Jill
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