Indian Creek Orchard Gardens - theHumm February 2020

By David Hinks

“Five acres is not nearly enough”, opined Scott Sigurdson in a recent interview.

Scott is one-half of the dynamic duo that own Indian Creek Orchard Gardens near Pakenham. Scott and his life-and-business partner Marisa Buccione are bursting with growing ideas and new projects that have filled their homestead on the Indian Creek to overflowing.

Scott and Marisa abandoned their city jobs in April of 2015 when they found land suitable for an orchard and market garden — rich silt loam bottom-land on the shores of the Indian Creek in Mississippi Mills. Their business model is just about as different from the 100-acre fields of modern industrial agriculture as one could imagine.

Their business might best be classified as a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Consumers reserve their garden share and pay for it in advance. Scott and Marissa are responsible for the soil preparation, planting, weeding, watering and harvesting. All the share purchasers have to do is pick up their garden share once a week through the growing season. Consumers receive the freshest healthiest produce available as the weekly share is most often picked fresh to order either the day before or the day of the pick-up.

Consumers are partnering with and supporting the farm, which in turn strengthens the food resilience of the community — it is an alternative model of agriculture that allows for the producer and the consumer to share the risks of farming. This kind of farming operates with a much greater degree of involvement of consumers and other stakeholders than usual, resulting in a stronger consumer-producer relationship. Originally the core design included developing a cohesive consumer group that was willing to fund a whole season’s budget in order to get quality food. The system has many variations on how the farm budget is supported by the consumers and how the producers then deliver the food. CSA theory purports that the more a farm embraces whole-farm, whole-budget support, the more it can focus on quality and reduce the risk of food waste.

Indian Creek has to date focused on providing vegetables only. The orchard part of the operation is not included in the garden shares. The orchard only began producing commercial quantities of fruit last year and for the time being will be available at the farm stand days. Go to indiancreekorchard.ca for comprehensive information on how to buy a share and to answer just about any question you could think of. The well designed, up-to-date website attests to Scott’s background as a graphic designer.

In many ways Indian Creek is as much about building community as it is about growing food. As with many CSAs, a dozen or more subscribers exchange their labour in the garden for part of the cost of their share. A strong bond has developed with many of their customers.

Indian Creek is committed to organic practices and local sustainability and goes way beyond the prescribed standards. Although many organically derived broad spectrum pesticides are condoned by the Canadian Organic Standard, the objective at Indian Creek is to avoid their use altogether.

The organic practices start with the garden design and layout. The front line of pest deterrents includes cultural practices such as beneficial habitat, crop rotation, diverse inter-plantings, and various partitions (row covers, screened hoop houses and other insect barriers) to minimize pest problems. Vegetables are sown between rows of fruit trees, bush fruits and aisles of grape vines. Riparian areas along the creek and around their irrigation pond have been left in a relatively wild state and are home to a diversity of amphibians. Cultured lady bugs and praying mantis, parasitic wasps and a naturally occurring soil bacterium are all used when required as these have no adverse effect on their eco-system. The goal is to create a balance where the “good guys” keep the “bad guys” in check.Indian Creek makes every effort to build soil organic matter and to maintain the integrity of the soil structure by making extensive use of green manures and green mulches, by practicing minimal till or shallow till farming and keeping the soil covered.

Fertility sources include poultry manure from their flock of heritage chickens and truckloads of composted horse manure from local farms to help replenish the nutrients that leave the farm as produce each year.

Having grown up on a farm many decades ago, I find their approach to weed control much more akin to what I experienced in that era. The mechanical weeding methods include a small restored vintage 1948 Allis Chalmers model G tractor, a variety of wheel hoes and — when all else fails — hand-weeding on hands and knees.

Compost tea, disease-resistant cultivars and partitioning or putting distance between patches of plants are all strategies to deal with the threat of disease.

Indian Creek regularly plants more than their calculations would indicate that they need, as for a variety of reasons some crops do not produce as planned. The Lanark County Food Bank has been a major beneficiary as surplus produce has been donated — last year nearly a thousand pounds.

Scott is also keen on taking his ideas to a broader audience. He makes presentations on organic growing techniques to local horticultural societies, is active in his local business association, and most recently joined the Mississippi Mills Agricultural Advisory Committee where he shares the perspective of organic farmers who had previously been unrepresented on the committee.

In 2019 Indian Creek partnered with the Municipality of Mississippi Mills in a Pollinator Plant Pilot Project. Under Scott’s leadership, a couple of dozen neighbours and friends spread composted manure in the ditches along a two kilometre stretch of Sugar Bush Road in a carefully controlled scientific experiment to find methods of controlling wild parsnip and other invasive plants by restoring roadside pollinator habitat and eliminating the need to spray pesticides. Some of the people involved reported that it was a fun community-building project, and I believe that is where the key to the success of Indian Creek can be found — they are all about creating community!

In memoriam – Dr. Bill Buttle - theHumm February 2020

By Kris Riendeau

I honestly can’t remember when Bill Buttle first started contributing Artbeat cartoons to theHumm, but I think it was some time within our first year of publishing. So for the past two decades (give or take a year or two), his humorous take on the world of art and music has had pride of place here on page 2. On Sunday, January 19, Bill passed away peacefully in Arnprior at the age of 79, leaving behind grieving family and friends as well as legions of Artbeat fans throughout......

Indian Creek Orchard Gardens - theHumm February 2020