When & Where: Saturday April 28th, 4pm – 10pm
- 4:00pm: Bench Grafting Demonstration & Red Barn Produce Farm Tour @ 671 Kurtz Road, Cawston BC
- 5:00pm-ish: Farm Tour of Joshua’s Trees (just down the road) @ 253 Beecroft River Rd, Cawston BC
- 6:00pm: Community Potluck and Party @ 2284 Newton Rd, Cawston BC
RSVP: It’s a free event, but we love to know who’s coming! Join the facebook event & share with your friends 🙂
Join in for a tour of two great farms, a bench grafting demonstration, and an awesome evening of community potluck and music. Joshua’s Trees is an organic tree nursery and garlic farm on leased land. Red Barn Produce is a family farm growing mixed vegetables and fruit, and has a bustling value-add vinegar production facility and shop.
About Joshua’s Trees Farm:
Josh Brown farms on several patches of leased land to run and grow his certified organic tree nursery and garlic operation. Josh has been living and working in the Okanagan for the past 10 years, and through the years has met and helped build a vibrant community of other farmers who have supported one another in so many ways. In his case, it convinced him that this is where he’d like to be, and that this is where he’d like to farm. For the last few years, he has dove right in.
Josh has a small and expanding nursery, where he grow trees for orchardists as well as the retail hobbyist and backyard market. This year’s production will be 5500 trees of 26 different apple varieties. He also has a small garlic crop next door, where he leases an acre to rotate around 1000 lbs of garlic each year. Everything he grows is certified organic through SOOPA and sold within the province of BC.
About Red Barn Produce:
Erik Knechtel has been farming here for 9 years now. At his farm they grow almost everything from apples to watermelons and sweet potatoes. The farm is almost 7 acres in size. They also produce Wine Vinegars, and dried herb blends. 99% of our produce is sent down to Maple Ridge to his parents farm to sell from their farm and the Coquitlam Farmers Market. He grows the hot loving stuff and his parents grow the cool/wet loving stuff like lettuce and broccoli. They aren’t certified organic, but do practice it and have been looking into getting certified. They grow a broad range of vegetables and fruits. Erik has over 10 varieties of apple including a few red flesh varieties. At the time of the tour he will have over 20000 onions!
Learn more at: www.thegarden.ca
The Farm Tours & Bench Grafting Demonstration
We’ll start off the farm tour at Rd Barn Produce on Kurtz Rd, where Josh’s cooler and grafting room are located. Josh will give a demonstration of how to bench graft, and then Erik Kneckel (owner of that property) will be give you a tour of his farm. We’l check out his newly planted onion crop, weird apple varieties and garlic. Then take a look at some old tractors and their use in the fields, and finally a tour of the vinegar shop and vinegar production area.
From there, we will head down the road to Josh’s other two lease blocks on Beecroft River Rd., where he’ll show you the nursery and rotation fields, and the small garlic patch next door.
Afterwards, we will head down the road to 2284 Newton Rd., where Josh will be hosting a potluck and party for the community, as we have a few birthdays to celebrate that weekend.
What to Bring:
Stay for the party in the evening, there will be live music, tons of amazing food, and you will meet an exceptional community of farmers here!
Dress for the weather, and bring your questions! Josh and Erik are happy to answer them or do demonstrations. For the potluck, please bring a dish to share, cutlery and a plate to eat with.
Let us know you’re coming – join the Facebook Event and share it with your friends!
This event is made possible with funding from the Community Foundation of the South Okanagan|Similkameen and funding provided by the Governments of Canada and British Columbia through Growing Forward 2, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative.
