Wow, 2025 was quite a year for Abundant Acres! We are so so so glad we dug a large pond in 2023 to add a 6th to the chain of 5 ponds in the middle of the farm. It came in very handy during the drought this year. We were not able to irrigate as much as we wanted to, but we had enough water to irrigate most crops, most of the summer. We did have some disappointments though. We had to give up on our main crop of carrots because we didn’t feel we had enough water to germinate them evenly, so we cut our losses, tilled them in, and planted a cover crop. We learned that we didn’t give our red peppers enough water for them to absorb enough calcium, and 90% of them got blossom end rot and we couldn’t sell them. We did have some major successes though. One example was arugula. I hope people noticed we had really nice crops of greens (including arugula) all season long, even through the drought. Steph and Rachel noted in 2024 that the greens needed more air circulation, and they reduced the planting each week from 6 rows to 5 rows in each bed. This worked beautifully! Also, 2025 was the first year that Andrew M got the treffler tine weeder to really work well. He was able to use this amazing piece of gear to weed transplanted crops in a fraction of the time it would take to weed them by hand.
We were very happy that our farm and Market teams have risen beautifully to the challenges that come with a growing business. Their work was largely self-organized and self-directed. The Market staff did their best to handle a larger number of farm shares, and a larger volume of sales over all. They hired and trained new staff, and increased the open hours of the Market from 4 days/week to 7 days/week. They organized the transition so that they could more effectively deal with very crowded cold storage spaces. We are planning to move our Market to a larger space, a 5 minute walk from our current space, in March or April. Having a larger space for cold storage will be a huge relief to our staff, and having better parking will be helpful for our customers.
The farm team was able to increase yields significantly in 2025, despite the drought. We brought a rented piece of land into production this year after cover cropping and preparing it in 2024. Luckily we had a reel and pond in that field that we used for irrigation. The team integrated and trained four new people, but two of them were unable to do farm work for most of the season because they were needed for other projects. We are planning to hire two to four new people for the farm team this year as well. We are expecting a growth in sales in 2026, and we hope the farm team can keep up with demand.
Farm team on their way to lunch after weeding in the fieldBecause of the dry summer, we had a great tomato crop, with very little disease!Sometimes people would show up for work and realize they were twinsPart of the farm team helped the local store owner clean out his garage, and hosted a fantastic live music event in September. Here are the McMillan Camp Boys and lots of dancing!Farm lunch in the sunOlivia keeping the weeds under controlIn 2025 we bought a used Kubota with widely-spaced, narrow tires specifically for vegetable cultivation. We also bought a ‘ripper’ attachment that helps increase drainage in the fieldCrop planning. This year, it was completed in early December and the seed order went in shortly after. We had a particularly good beet crop in 2025. We learned at a field day in New Brunswick that beets do better where boron levels are adequate. These beets were grown where boron showed up on the soil test, but our levels could be betterOlivia and Andrew were preparing a field tunnel for planting. Here they are broadforking to loosen the soil. Were they competing??The dry summer gave us an unusually good zucchini crop!! The squash bugs and cucumber beetles had a hard time reproducing in the dry soil so they didn’t destroy the zucchini.We hosted a great Open Farm Day for farm share members We produced some amazing transplanted crops in our new, rented field near our farm. In between the vegetable beds are ‘biostrips’ filled with clover. We were able to weed it with the treffler tine weeder, and harvest on to a platform on the Kubota tractor.This is the treffler weeder with adjustable tines. David is showing it to Warehouse Market staff who were visiting the farm.Isleville St was resurfaced, and the curbs and sidewalks were re-done. This really affected access to the Warehouse Market. The city worked on this for 12 weeks.Here is the farm teamThis is a shot of the Warehouse Market team at a staff meeting. They are looking over the plans for the new store at Richmond Yards, a 5 minute walk from the Isleville St location.In 2025 Robert built a new cooler space in the barn basement. Andrew L and Steph are bringing in the first few bins of produce. Here is the cold room a few weeks later looking kind of full. We thought we were going to have so much room!Here Sean is working on the used forage chopper/blower we will be using to harvest forage for home-grown mulch. Oh! Triplets this time. In the background, oaks and maples in their fall glory. In the foreground is the area we prepared for increasing fresh herb production.Sarah and Rachel moving insect net and row cover in the late fall after harvest.In the winter, we have a smaller farm team, so we move farm lunches inside to the employee house.Harvesting kale in the snow. We generally harvest kale until December or even January.We invested in a wood chipper so we can make our own wood chip mulch for greenhouse soil improvement.We are planning to build two new climate battery greenhouses in the spring of 2026. There are so many parts!
