Reading Time: 3 minutes In the white and grey of a Saskatchewan winter, Kristen Raney was thinking about rich chocolate browns, peaches and soft pink tones. As owner and operator of Shifting Blooms Flower Farm, the flower farmer, blogger and author uses the winter months to prepare for a successful growing season. In December, Raney was looking into wedding […] Read more
The butterfly effect of floral planning
Summer Series: Decisions made months before summer arrives affect the seasonal success of this floral business
A new SPIN on urban farming
CANADA: Here’s a Saskatchewan farm that defies all your preconceptions
Reading Time: 8 minutes Wally Satzewich learned from his mother at an early age how to pull weeds and tend a garden, and was grateful for those skills when he started his own urban agriculture project many years later. His parents were first-generation Ukrainian immigrants who had come to Canada in the early 1950s and settled in Saskatoon, where […] Read more
Five tips for eco-friendly gardening
The word eco-friendly can be used in many areas of our lives: at work, at home, at play. Being eco-friendly in all these aspects is quite a simple concept with incredible opportunities for creativity. The bottom line is eco-friendly is all about working with nature, not against it. As gardeners we play an ever-increasing unique[...]
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Look north for fruits and vegetables
These Saskatchewan farm projects are winning converts in some surprising places
Reading Time: 6 minutes The northern village of Cumberland House seems an unlikely place to find a farm or a farmer. For starters, it’s remote — 450 kilometres north east of Saskatoon at the end of Highway 123, a notoriously bad road that spring can turn into one long mud-hole. The village, established by the Hudson Bay Company in[...]
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Family brand
In turbulent times, your family brand can be the foundation for business success… like when Jim Hole and brother Bill decided to take the farm in directions no one had anticipated
Marketing experts say your farm already has a brand, and regardless of whether you give it a moment’s thought, and regardless of whether you try to manage it, that brand is your farm’s identity. It’s how you are perceived. Indeed, the people who devote their careers to thinking about these things have an even simpler way of making their point: Your farm is your brand. For most farms, your brand is conveyed by your last name — a reputation shaped and seasoned by multiple generations. The question is, can you manage your brand to give a boost to your farm business? In the case of Alberta brothers Jim and Bill Hole, their greenhouse business has been built on a brand of trust garnered by their much-loved mother. Today, the brothers’ challenge is to leverage that brand in order to build sales among time-stretched, next-gen customers. Here’s how they plan to do just that.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Winter is disappearing in a swirl of warmth and sunshine in St. Albert, on the northwest edge of Edmonton. Airseeders are poised about the countryside, and calves are nuzzling their mothers. This is the kind of day when Canadians rediscover that their heritage rises from the soil, thanks to the sweat of farm families. Across[...]Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
