Join Our 2023 CSA Program!

Don’t Feed the Plant, Feed the Soil!

Crooked Farmz is a small urban microfarm located in Toronto that produces high quality small-batch composts and vermicomposts for use in brewing fresh actively-aerobic compost teas. These are sold across the city by CSA subscription and at farmers’ markets for home gardening and urban agriculture use, as well as in larger quantities to professional gardeners and urban farmers.

We are passionate about the role that urban agriculture and horticulture might play in fostering biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and regenerative growing practice. Compost tea offers one important probiotic approach to building microbial health in soil and reducing the need for synthetic pesticides and fertilizers — plus so much more.

We are proud to be a new member of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO), an organization of like-minded farmers across the province committed to building resilient ecological farms and growing a strong knowledge-sharing community.

As part of our commitment to these goals, Crooked Farmz is launching a west-end satellite and research station with the Fresh City Farm Partners project in Summer 2023: the Compost Research Array at Downsview Park (CRAY@Downsview).

Crooked Farmz on Instagram

well, am excited to share that Crooked Farmz has set a new high of CSA subscriptions this season with 58..... given a brutal year-over-year attrition rate and acknowledging that some of these are work-trade options at Downsview, i'm overall pretty ecstatic that Crooked Farmz is gaining a good reputation around the city and that people are so willing to embrace the "community-supported agriculture" model to help mitigate risk..... it really does matter!

last market of this grueling 4-in-5 day stretch!!

verrrrry early one (4:30am!!) as i begin a new market today: Eglinton Way Farmers' Market | @eglintonway in the Forest Hill area of Toronto. 🥱😴

so my 8-year-old daughter is joining me the four times i'm at East Lynn Farmers' Market this summer with her own little farmstand: Butterfly Bakery.

and we begin my most brutal stretch of the entire season: 4 markets over the next 5 days, beginning with a market that will be new for us --- East Lynn Farmers' Market.

went and visited a grade 3 class today to make seed balls and talk about soil..... i left them with this question, and they're supposed to brainstorm on it and get their teacher to email me the responses.....

CRAY@Downsview report: finished primary tillage, 3 passes, cross-cut to one another, and the ground is SO MUCH softer than it was when i began.... hope this is the last time i ever need to till this space.

one of my experiments this year is to plant heavy-feeding nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, okra) directly into a living cover of white clover, which is a legume that can directly capture atmospheric nitrogen and make it accessible in the soil..... the hope is that the seedlings are advanced enough that they are already physically larger than the clover stand, which was first sown about 6 weeks ago, and that this "living mulch" can feed the plants and microbes in a companion relation, retain moisture in our increasingly dry summers, and hold the soil together so it doesn't erode.

hey y'all: we'll be at @lesliemarket today with our first issue of compost tea in the 2023 season: MYCO.

first batch of fermented plant juice (FPJ), made during our biopriming workshop a little over a week ago, is now completed.... FPJ is an important input in Korean Natural Farming methods, and involves harvesting the tips of vigorous plants indigenous to an area (sometimes known as "weeds") before chopping these up and mixing with brown sugar to form a ferment that contains the microbes from the surface of the plant matter as well as enzymes that are drawn out during fermentation..... it is applied in *very* diluted fashion, at least 500:1, so while it doesn't seem like we made very much, it will go a long way.