Community supported agriculture

Doelle also sells her produce at her Gilberts Cove farm, and the Saturday market in Belliveau Cove, but says the basket program is especially important to her operation.

In the parlance of Canadian producers the concept is known as ‘Community Supported Agriculture’ (CSA).

For Doelle, those twelve baskets are guaranteed sales: the families agreed, months in advance, to purchase a basket a week for 15 weeks. The people receiving their baskets also have a guarantee: Wild Rose Farm was recently certified as an organic operation and is the only such farm in Digby County.

Certification is in compliance with Canadian Standards, but in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and PEI, it is granted by the Maritime Organic Growers Cooperative. Doelle, an agrologist by trade, said she had to prove to them her Gilberts Cove property has been free of commercial fertilizers and pesticides for the past three years. She also had to submit a three-year nutrient management plan, a crop rotation plan and an appropriate pest control plan.

Doelle fertilizes her garden with compost produced on her farm.

Her 2008 pest control plan included the release, this Spring, of 4,000 ladybird beetles—bugs that devour aphids. She also uses plants that fool insects. “For example, I plant beets and swiss chard around my carrots and the carrot maggots don’t realize the carrots are growing there.”

Nasturtians similarly mask the scent of cucumbers, so cucumber beetles don’t realize their preferred diet is close-by. The students Doelle hires each year are trained to find the eggs laid by potato bugs before they have the opportunity to hatch.

Doelle’s plants are started from seed in one of her two greenhouses. One of those greenhouses is used not just during the spring and summer, but year round—and has the Doelle family eating freshly harvested produce even during the coldest months of the year.

Doelle says that around the time the basket program winds up—around mid-September--she will be preparing for Open Farm Day. September 27 more than 40 agriculturalists, including Doelle in Gilberts Cove, will haul out the welcome mat and invite the public to visit, to learn and to taste.