Greetings from Swallowtail Farmstead!

Hello from Swallowtail Farmstead (Greg, Karin, Maya & Finley)!

We wanted to share a few updates about our new small farmstead with you, our friends/family/neighbours.  As you probably know, we moved to Manitoba last summer, searched for several months & found our property in the fall, then started our farm business this spring. We have met many lovely people here, and have had the help of various other local farmers as "mentors" to all our start-up questions, delivering loads of strawbales, local wool and more (thank you: Almost Urban, Longway Homestead, Awaken Herbs, Ferme Fiola Farm, Seine River Shepherds, Big Oak Farm, and Direct Farm, also Fertile Ground Farm back in Ontario!)

We have new weekly CSA food box subscriptions!  Please feel free to share our website with others and help spread the word!

About the Farmstead
We are on 7 acres, along the winding Seine River, about 30 minutes SE of Winnipeg.  We are just outside the town of Ste. Anne, not far from the TransCanada Highway. 

The land has already given us many nice surprises:

• abundant wildlife (we regularly see foxes, deer, coyotes, bald eagles);
• beautiful soil for growing vegetables (we believe this land has not been sprayed or treated with chemicals in over 25 years+); 
• the river brings many birds (we see herons, sandpipers, ducks, geese, eagles, hawks);  We can canoe on the river, or skate/walk/ski on the frozen river in winter. 
• the forest has wild berries, wild plums & apples, mushrooms and herbs for foraging.  Trails for walking, logs for sitting and contemplating.  Wood for firewood.  Maple trees for tapping.  Oaks, ash, maple, poplar, willow, spruce, pine, tamarack.
• friendly neighbours who are very supportive and generous.  Dropping by to say hello, bringing us raspberries, inviting us over.
• beautiful landscape where we are not far from the Whiteshell area, with boreal forests, trails, provincial parks and hiking spots.  It is a beautiful spot!  We invite you to come visit us sometime, on what we think is a pretty magical little place.

About Swallowtail Farmstead - What are we growing?

We are establishing an ecological small-scale medicinal herb & market garden farm business.  We are currently growing 40+ varieties of herbs, and many types of vegetables in our gardens.  We will be offering a short CSA food box program this summer, and planning a more extended version next year.  We use only organic and non-GMO seeds, organic growing methods, soil regenerating practices.  If you need ecologically grown veggies (either food box subscriptions, or bulk things like garlic, basil, tomatoes, beans, zucchini, pumpkins etc) please get in touch or join our newsletter to get weekly farm store updates!  We also hope to create a small outdoor teaching space next year, so we can host hands-on workshops and events here at our farmstead.  In the spring we will have organic/heirloom vegetable seedlings available by pre-order.

With the amazing help of friends and our extended family we have been able to accomplish quite a bit in this first spring/summer: we put up deer fencing around 2 acres of our gardens; we built a hoop house (unheated greenhouse) to grow vegetables year-round; we built a chicken coop for our 30 hens; created 50 permanent raised bed garden rows; planted a 100' pollinator strip with perennial flower seeds; planted nearly 100 trees as shelter belt; started an orchard with over a hundred berries, fruit trees, and nut trees for the longer term.  Thank you so much to all of you who have come out to help us with farm projects so far! 

The name Swallowtail represents for us "hope & new beginnings", as well as being symbolic of the community we want to foster with this farm.  We have many swallowtail birds here, we see purple martins and barn swallows in the skies every day.  They are natural pest control since they eat insects.  They represent community for us, because they live in groups.  Read more about why we chose our farm name here.