How We Work

What We Run

Three houses in downtown St. John’s that we own and look after ourselves — The Hill House, Hill Flat and LaCour House. And two acres on Harbour Drive in Harbour Main, Conception Bay, forty-five minutes west, where a small market garden is being built. The stand is open now with a short list; the first full season on the new ground is planned for 2027.

Soil First

Everything on the farm starts with the ground. Gardens on this shore were fed from the beach and the barn — kelp after the fall storms, caplin trenched in when they rolled, manure from the family animals — and the roots were in the cellar by the end of October. We feed this ground the same way — kelp, manure from up the road, even fish waste from the plant across the road, rendered into a liquid feed — plus a soil test. Cover crops between seasons. Good soil grows food that tastes like something and keeps.

Nothing Synthetic

No synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. Not this year, not when a crop is failing, not ever on this ground. When pests come we use netting, Bt and iron-phosphate slug bait — and no copper, though the organic rules allow it, because it builds up in soil. If a pest wins a crop anyway, it wins. We are not certified organic — certification is a cost and a paperwork load two acres can’t carry. Everything that goes on the ground is listed on the farm page, with dates.

Food You Can Trust

You know who grew it, where, and how. You can drive to the field and look at it. Nothing on this page will ever be a photo of somebody else’s vegetables. When we sell you a bag of potatoes in October, they came out of that ground the week before, and if a season goes wrong you’ll hear it from us first.

Looking After the Houses

Every message about the houses comes to one of us. We live twenty minutes away, we know which stair creaks, and we do the walk-through ourselves. That is the whole method. It does not scale, which is the point.

Small by Design

Two acres is what two people can look after properly around other work — one tunnel, twenty-odd beds, a weekly drop in town, roots at the gate in the autumn. Past that you need staff and a cooler the size of a garage. So the cap is written down: never more than two acres. If it ever changes, you will read it here first.