Murray Wood: Who's hot and who's not
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It’s the perfect weekend to take a peek behind the barn doors and into the heart of local farms.
Saskatchewan Open Farm Days runs on Saturday and Sunday, with more than 30 farms, ranches, and gardens opening their gates to give curious people a chance to learn and explore. Whether it’s a dairy farm, a grain field or a berry patch, there’s plenty to see and experience this weekend.
Read more:
- Successful Open Farm Days showcases the best of Saskatchewan produce
- Brace for soaking rains and stormy skies across Sask. this weekend
- From seed to stem: A Saskatchewan flower farm in full summer bloom
Suggested itineraries to plan a route can be found on the Open Farm Days website.
Seven Meadows Greenhouse is just outside of Regina Beach, and owner Ward Hefting is taking part in the event.
During an appearance on the Greg Morgan Morning Show, Hefting said his greenhouse is showing visitors how they utilize a high-wire hydroponic system for growing vegetables.
Listen to the full interview with Hefting:
GREG MORGAN: You’ve lived your life on the farm but left agriculture a few years back, and now you’ve become a grower using hydroponics and a high-wire system. Can you tell us more?
HEFTING: We have a commercial greenhouse here, where we grow a variety of tomatoes and peppers, and cucumbers, and we use hydroponics with grow bags and coconut husk. The tomato plants will grow up to 60 or 70 feet in length during the course of the season.
Technology that’s been developed in other parts of the world, both in Holland and in Israel, has really kind of pioneered a lot of this work.
There’s a gentleman here who’s kind of helped that to get us going. He’s now retired, but he was really instrumental in getting the greenhouse industry started in Saskatchewan. His name was Tom Wright. He was up in the Melfort area. He connected us to this greenhouse that had been operating in Birch Hills, Saskatchewan, for over 25 years.
We ended up going up and buying that greenhouse, dismantling it, bringing it down to Regina Beach, rebuilding it here, and building the facility in front of that.
We make homemade pasta sauces and cucumber salsa, which is kind of unique to Seven Meadows. We also make relish. But all the products that we grow in the greenhouse, we also bring into the kitchen, and magically they appear in a jar.
How different is it from your background in agriculture, from the fields to hydroponics?
HEFTING: On the field, you’re subject to all kinds of things that you have no control over. In the greenhouse, you have to be very attentive to what’s going on.
We are chemical free, so we use biologicals to control any pests that might come in, so we introduce things like a wasp or ladybugs or different things like that to control any predators that might come into the facility.
So as soon as the plants start to grow, we bring in seven different insects that we’ve introduced into the environment to protect that environment. It’s very different, compared to what you’d have in an open field.
How important is it for you to spread the word on Saskatchewan Open Farm Days of what it is you’re doing, and help explain how food leaves the farm gate and gets to our plates?
HEFTING: I think Tourism Saskatchewan has done a fantastic job of being able to connect the community of Saskatchewan, to allow people to come out and experience all the different ways in which food is grown.
Just to make that awareness creates quite a lot more of an intimate experience for everybody to the value that farms bring to Saskatchewan and to Canada, to see the diversity of what exists in Saskatchewan and the different ways that people are growing food (and) connecting to the community.
I think that when people come out here, they always marvel. They see these plants that are 50 to 60 feet long, that are growing to the roof, literally weighted down with all kinds of produce on them.
The whole idea of the Open Farm Days, which allows the community to come together to see how their food is growing, I think, is just a really wonderful event that Tourism Saskatchewan has put on.
