This is the English translation of an article in Taschengarten 2025, a guide for political gardening.
Aerial view of our market garden with pond. Google Earth, 2024
My wife Kristine and I operate an ecological farm and market garden in Southwestern Ontario, nestled in the heart of the Great Lakes. Our farm is certified organic, and we sell vegetables to a CSA of around 75 families. In addition, we’ve diversified into producing commercial seeds, willows for basket-making, and native plants for homeowners looking to re-naturalize their gardens.
Our market garden occupies a field that slopes from the southeast down to the northwest. As I mentioned in my chapter in Taschengarten 2022, our farm has been challenged by increasingly variable weather. Our previous tillage-based production methods struggled as spring and summer became either too dry or too wet. We couldn’t irrigate enough to ensure healthy plants, and our weakened crops often fell prey to pests. We reached a crossroads: we either had to stop market gardening or change our approach.
After attending a workshop on no-till vegetable production at Singing Frog Farm, we decided to overhaul our system. To suppress weeds, we now rely heavily on landscape fabric, cover crops, and cardboard. We avoid tilling entirely, having realized that our soil is the source of vitality. It is composed of a network of mycorrhizal fungi—”fungal information cables”—that communicate with plants and transport nutrients and micronutrients to where they’re needed. In exchange, plants feed these fungal partners and other soil organisms with sugars produced through photosynthesis. Tilling disrupts this network, which is fundamental to plant health.
Immediately after switching to no-till production, we saw signs of improvement. These continued in subsequent years, giving us hope and confidence in our agroecological transformation. However, we soon discovered the limits of soil management alone: we still faced pressure from fast-growing pests. While pests multiply rapidly, predator populations take much longer to build up. This applies to insects, slugs, and even mammalian pests like voles and mice. If predators aren’t already established when pest populations grow, the pests can become a significant problem. We needed permanent habitats for our longer-living predators—like insects, spiders, frogs, toads, snakes, birds, and small mammals like our resident weasel.
With funding from Carrot Cache and ALUS, we embarked on a wetland restoration project. We situated the pond in the lowest area of our market garden, which would often flood for several weeks each spring after the snow melted. This standing water caused soil anoxia, compromised soil health, and promoted the growth of weeds like quackgrass. Additionally, the nearby Field C was too wet in spring, as evidenced by the weeds that signaled excess water. We dug out a pond and used the topsoil removed from the pond area to raise Field C by about 30 cm.
The pond covers about 700 square meters in spring, shrinking to about half that size during the dry summer months when groundwater levels drop. Its deepest point is 8 feet (2.5 m) in spring, reducing to 5 feet (1.5 m) in summer. A grant requirement was that the pond include multiple levels, flat areas, and hiding spots—creating a wetland habitat for amphibians, turtles, and insects. We also planted and seeded native vegetation around the pond, added rock piles, logs, and brush piles, and introduced a few trees and other habitat features. This work was completed in the early days of the COVID pandemic, in March 2020.
By the wet spring of 2022, the pond had filled completely. That May, a late frost struck, and the pond provided our first layer of resilience. Cold-sensitive transplants in nearby fields survived, while those in Field A3 all died. The pond acts as a large reservoir of heat, buffering temperature fluctuations and protecting the surrounding area from extreme cold and heat. It enhances the climate resilience of our entire garden!
In the third year, biodiversity impacts were noticeable. I had initially feared that the pond might lead to a mosquito infestation, but instead, we gained an army of allies—thousands of dragonflies now patrol our fields, keeping mosquitos in check. By the fourth year, tree frogs, turtles, and thousands of field frogs had moved in, and we even discovered fish in the pond! I learned that fish eggs can hitch a ride on the feathers of waterfowl, which transport them from pond to pond. Toads, some as large as 15 cm in diameter, are now a common sight in our fields, and at least three species of snakes help control voles and other rodents. We’ve even spotted the remains of a rare long-eared owl, hunted down by a large hawk. We have water birds visiting, including two species of herons now frequently visit the pond to dine on our fish and frogs. Weasels find refuge in the brush piles and help keep the rodent population in check.
Yes, we still have pests—rodents, moths, plant pests, slugs, and the mosquitos that thrive on human blood. But the pest populations are now manageable, and we’ve experienced minimal economic losses due to pest pressure. Five years ago, pests would wipe out our crops whenever adverse weather weakened them. Today, our no-till soil supports healthier plants with better watering and stronger immune systems, while the presence of predators helps keep pest populations in check. The pond provides a permanent habitat for these predators, offering year-round access to water, ample hiding spots, overwintering sites, and nesting opportunities.
What we have learned, in our transformation from a tillage-based organic practices to a truly agroecological, regenerative farming system, is that we need to understand our field as a complex living ecosystem, a symphony of many organisms. Every organism has basic needs: food, water, and space. It needs room to procreate, to hide and recover, to hunt and overwinter. Soil management, habitat enhancement, nutrient management, and water management all play crucial roles, working in concert to create a resilient and productive system. Without our pond, how would our predators find year-round habitat? Where would our pollinators drink, our frogs and toads lay their eggs? Agroecology is a strategy of “a thousand little hammers.” Yet water is the essence of life, and without it, healthy ecosystems cannot prevail. When prioritizing among the thousand hammers available to us, let’s give early thought to water. The excavator, once a tool of destruction, becomes essential in undoing the damage to our watersheds and restoring the lifeblood of our ecosystems. Our only regret: The pond should have been even bigger and deeper!
Leave a Reply