Linnaea Farm’s Homegrown Series kicks off at 10:00 AM this Saturday. This is a monthly series, which will be offered on March 23rd, April 20th, May 11th and June 8th, 2024. 

“I want to teach. I’ve had a lot of seasons under my belt now. 1995 was my first growing season, I was in Pemberton.  Then I did a garden program at Linnaea Farm in 1998. I just really like sharing  what I have spent a lifetime doing. I can share all these secrets. I’ve run a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) garden. I’ve done pure market gardening. I’ve done contract growing. I’ve grown food for sale in all the ways one can do it. So I can share this with anyone,” explained to Adam Schick, a resident steward at Linnaea farm on Cortes Island.

“I feel like a really rare bird. Since I was a young man, I have managed to have a career as an organic grower and farmer.  I’ve managed to do it, making my living mostly growing food. It’s been a real struggle, but a real joy.  Part of an evolution of myself is I’ve become more and more of  a plant breeder and seed saver. That is where my true passion now lies. If you give a man a carrot, you feed him for one day. If you teach a person to grow a carrot and how to save those carrot seeds, then you’re ensuring that people are fed forever.”

“I’m sure there’s new people out there who want this information. I would just love to share what I know. There’s classes and I’ll have a PowerPoint, but people can come with their own ideas. What do you want to learn?  I have a formula, but I don’t have to stick to it.  I’d rather share what I know  and answer  questions. This will be two hours per session at the maximum. Spend a little bit of time in the classroom here in our beautiful Education Centre at Linnea farm then, if it’s really nice, we might go wander around and look at some of the gardens. If it’s a really  brutal day, I’ll probably bring a few things inside. In an ideal world we’ll spend some time talking, and some time observing.”

Cortes Currents: How long have you been doing the home grown series? 

Adam Schick: “It’s almost 10 years since I did the first one.  I think we said in the first year there were 20-something people. In the second year, there were maybe 15 people. I was just starting to think about doing it again and then we had the pandemic. We couldn’t gather and we couldn’t do things.  As far as Linnaea and our trajectory of being a place where we invite people to share what we’re doing, have classroom settings and gather and teach,  it’s been a tough little run here.”

“The first time I did this homegrown series, I think it was eight classes. I’ve condensed it. Instead of wasting anyone’s time with eight classes, I’ve gone to just the most important bits.  There’s four classes and they’re all on Saturday mornings at 10 o’clock. Take them all or take them individually.”

“We’re calling the first one ‘a sense of place and phonology.’ It’s a ‘who, what, when, where, why ‘ to figure out what you want and where it’s going to go.” 

Cortes Currents: Tell us a little about the phonology of Linnaea Farm right now. 

Adam Schick: “Right now we have things happening out there.  The forcythia is blooming. There’s a plum tree in my garden. These are  the hands of the phonology clock. When I see  these plant friends doing things,  they tell me that I also should probably be doing things. When I do those things – when ‘that’s flowering or this is flowering, or the leaf is that big’ – I generally have success.” 

“One of the things I hear is ‘when should I plant my peas?’  Well, where do you live? What’s your garden like? What’s the conditions like? What kind of peas do you like?  You could say ‘Do you have any daffodils around your garden? Are they blooming?  Well, it’s probably safe to plant peas.’” 

Cortes Currents: Are you doing any planting right now?

Adam Schick: “I’ve had a few things going in the greenhouse, but this is  the transitional phase of my life.” 

“A market gardener has to be fast and early and everything has to be big because, for example,  right now California has all sorts of broccoli. As soon as I have broccoli in BC,  all that California broccoli starts coming to BC and the price just drops.”  

“If I can have my broccoli by May 1st, then I’m going to get $4, or $5, or $6 a pound for it.  Three, four weeks later, the price is down to $1.25. We’re competing on the small island with global food prices, global labor costs.  It’s really hard.” 

“As a market gardener, if you can get ahead of everything, then you can get those high prices.” 

“But as a seed gardener, I don’t want to try to push the plants beyond their comfort zone. I want to  encourage them to be a little earlier and get out there a little, be strong and healthy.  I’m not just looking for the fastest ones. I’m looking for a broad base of healthy plants that I’m going to be able to plant reliably in season and most likely directly in the ground. They’re going to mature, make seed, and they’re going to carry on.”

“A market gardener is doing a lot of stuff in a greenhouse right now. Getting stuff going and creating conditions so that it’s earlier than it is. 

There’s a push when you’re a market gardener.”

“The market gardener and the seed gardener both look at that giant lettuce, and the market gardener goes, ’ka ching, $4.’ The seed gardener goes, ‘Beautiful genetics, I want you to make the babies.’ I’m not just thinking about short term gain.’ I have to think about Coastal Romaine Lettuce, which is the Romaine that I’ve been growing for years now. I’m adapting it again. When you’re growing plants for seed, you’re growing out in populations where you have a diversity.”

“If you just keep one lettuce at home or two, you’re narrowing the genetics. I’m going to start with a thousand and narrow that down to four or five hundred in the garden bed, eat three hundred of the four hundred and leave a hundred for seed.  The ones I’m eating are the ‘not as nice’ ones.”

“At the end of the season I have a broad population and those make the most beautiful ‘next year’ of my life.”  

“So much of the breeding and the plant growing we’ve been doing has been for the commercial market, for the market gardener, because that’s the gardener that  is the marketplace.” 

“There are all these beautiful, locally adapted things that we’re losing.  It’s already lost, like this is ridiculous how many varieties of vegetables we’ve lost since the 80s. If you look back to the 1950s, it is even worse.”

“This is because we have a global marketplace, as opposed to a local marketplace. We’re breeding stuff for transportation, shelf life, ease of harvest, as opposed to taste,  local adaptability and the terroir of the area.” 

“Not too long ago, you couldn’t rely on food coming from far away. I’m 47  and in my lifetime, that’s changed  drastically.”

“Last year I was getting less money per pound for salad mix than I did when I started growing with organic food back in 1999 in the Whistler area. We were getting more per pound for salad mix then because there were less people growing it. Now, with an earthbound farm,  you can get salad mix from everywhere, but it’s a commodity.” 

“We live in a world where people have to buy powders of spinach and beet greens and take them every day. People go outside for walks and do things to exercise their bodies, where one could grow their own beet greens, get all the exercise they need, take it in, have whole food, and be a lot less reliant on things coming from four islands away.” 

Cortes Currents: Let’s keep going through the sessions. What about class number two? 

Adam Schick: “Class number two is ‘season extensions, rotations, cultivation, soil and compost.’ We’re moving out of thinking about it, to actually touching it and doing it.  These sessions are timed so that while  these classes are going on, similar work is happening in a seasonal manner. So not only will you hear about it, but you’ll see it. We all learn so many different ways. There’s visual learners, auditory learners, touchers, and hopefully we can hit all those different styles for everybody.” 

“Class three is ‘seeding, weeding and feeding.’ I just had to have something to rhyme. So I think that’s why I had those three, but it will be May 11th. We’re direct seeding outside.  We’re still doing stuff in the greenhouse. We’re  feeding plants. We’re feeding the soil and, of course, we’re weeding.  We’re going to manage the whole garden.” 

Cortes Currents: Talking about seeds, how is Linnaea’s seed bank doing? 

Adam Schick: “Seeds, if not stored correctly, depreciate. A seed bank where we keep everything safe in ‘a nice bank in Norway,’ isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is find local seeds, grow local seeds, and save your own seeds. That’s the biggest bank.  As far as a seed bank here on the farm, I need two more of me.”

“It’s been really, really hard to find young people that want to stick around and work for $3 an hour. That’s what we’re talking about when you’re taking up a profession of agriculture. If I didn’t live on Linnaea Farm, which is a land trust,  there is no way I would have been able to do what I do for as many years as I’ve been able to do it, raise a family, and  generally not hate life.”

“A lot of farmers out there are dealing with some real serious issues: like  debt, and lack of water.” 

“I have under three acres and was expanding beyond that.”

“One of my favorite authors, Masanobu Fukuoka says, in his really amazing way, that if you start having more than three acres your soul will grow thin because beyond three acres is more than one can actually touch and manage and have a connection with. Most of the food that’s grown for us is managed  by  individuals in tractors on  vast tracts of land.  That’s soulless food.  You can feel it when you eat it, at least I can, but  those small little niches where it’s been lovingly cared for, and again, the farm, we have cows.  I can make manure that comes from this place. It’s a whole system as much as we can, and even here we still bring in some stuff.”

“I think that’s why  I’m trying so hard to transition into the seed growing system because  it is about caring for individual crops and making them better. The seeds are our relations. They’re our brothers and sisters.  They’ve traveled with us.  It is my responsibility to look after them, because they’ve looked after us. I’m doing this work because I’m a person, but I’m doing this work for the plants. The plants and the planet are fine.  We just have to figure out how to work with them and listen to them. Observe more, talk less, do more and show no one.”  

Cortes Currents: Why do you say show no one? 

“You’re doing it because it’s good for you, it’s good for the seed and it shouldn’t matter if everybody else knows.”

“One of the most exciting things about seed, living seed and seed that you don’t put in a bank but you put it in the soil, is it adapts every year.” 

“We are supposed to change a little bit every year, just like the plants and everything around us.”

“So I’m adapting this program.  I hope that I can offer you some stories and shared experiences . I’m now at a place where I love to talk about all of my failures. I’ve had enough success , it’s more fun to talk about all the times that things went wrong.”  

Cortes Currents: Okay, tell us a story where something went really wrong.

Adam Schick: “Pig manure is really, really high in nitrogen. It’s very similar to the human digestive system. They eat, and it comes out. A cow has four stomachs. I can smear cow poop on myself, but with pig poop I wear gloves, and I’m like, ‘yuk.'”

“We used to build compost piles in the greenhouse. If you build a compost pile, one of the byproducts is heat. Now most of the time we put a little soil cap on top of this.  If it’s too hot and too much nitrogen gases get released –  I think it’s ammonia. This is  bad and it’ll kill stuff, but if you put  two or three inches of composter soil on the top of the pile, it scrubs and filters the gases.”   

“Well, I was working with a bunch of the garden students. There were 10 of us and we made this giant pile of pig manure. (Pigs were  newer into the farm system then.) We made this big pile, closed the greenhouse up, but failed to put that cap of soil on it. ‘Why does it really matter anyway?’  Well, that compost pile got really hot. It was over 150 degrees. A lot of gas  – ammonia or ammonium – was released and as the gas cooled it settled and basically filled all the low spaces. Most of the little plants were withered and dead in the morning, Almost the whole entire greenhouse. Whole flats were wiped out.  The greenhouse was just full of all the spring starters. In one night, we roasted three weeks worth of effort by not putting that little soil cap on.”

“Since that time, I always put a soil cap on top of the compost and maybe by hearing this story, you too will know you should put a soil cap on.”  

Cortes Currents: Now tell us a success story.

Adam Schick: “I think the fact that I can touch my toes is a real success story. There’s a lot of farmers that end up with really bad posture. It’s a physically brutal job. So the fact that I still feel a little bit of enthusiasm and can touch my toes, I’d say that’s a success story.”   

Cortes Currents: Tell us about class number four.  

Adam Schick: “Class number four, on June 8th, is ‘pests, produce and year round cropping.’ I find this is a time of year when there’s invasions by the forces, it’s a good time to talk about all those things and how you can manage them. With produce, you’re starting to deal with food and abundance.  How are you going to do it?  Of course it’s so busy June, but that’s actually when we’re really starting to think about all of the stuff that we’re going to plant so that we have a great garden for the fall and winter.”

“That’s one of the most amazing things about living on Cortes.  There is a way that you can be eating from your garden year round with little greenhouses, or a little extension. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to pull something out of your garden and. with things like a root cellar, year round eating on Cortes is very possible.”

“All the information I’m going to try to pack into four classes, you should already know in an ideal world.  We don’t live in the ideal world. We live in our homes and are confronted with our own shortcomings.”

“I find that for most people, the biggest thing is  how much time you have for what you’re going to do?  We all want to have the most beautiful big garden, but it’s easier to start with small successes and build on those over time.”

The Homegrown series is being offered at Linnaea Farm  between 10 AM and noon on the Saturdays of Mar 23, Apr 20, May 11 and June 8:  The cost for the entire four class series is $160 for Non-members and $140 for Members. Or you can take in Individual Workshops for $40 each for a non-Member and $35 for a member. 

For those who need it, there is also accommodation in the farmhouse @ $75 per night.

Links of Interest:

• Linnaea Farm homepage
• The Homegrown Series page
• Linnaea Farm Facebook page
• Articles about, or mentioning, Linnaea Farm on Cortes Currents  

Top image credit: In one of the garden patches at Linnaea Farm – courtesy Linnaea Farm Facebook Page

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