Building a Farm

Our largest site is located at Pacific & Carrall, right next to the sea wall in False Creek. The land is a parking lot owned by the condo company Concord Pacific. We get the land for free and they get a tax incentive for donating the space. We also get a nice view of the backstage buses for all the concerts at Roger's Arena - we had front row seats for a whole day of Bieber fever. In total, we have 2 acres of production on this lot. 

At our first site we constructed 18 inch raised beds out of lumber, but for this expansion we needed a way to build a lot of beds in a short amount of time and on a tight budget. Seann and Michael went through many designs and considered lots of repurposed materials, eventually landing on this design. 

Each box made up of a used pallet which is covered in stapled landscape fabric (you can see the black fabric in the bottom of the image above.) The fabric acts as a way of keeping soil from falling out the bottom. We then used shipping collars to act as the side walls of the container. These collars are used in the shipping industry and are the same dimensions as a shipping pallet. They are hinged and can be laid flat and stacked. They made the set-up of the beds real easy - we would drag over pallets, line them all up, roll out the landscape fabric, staple and cut, and then pop on a shipping collar. For 2 acres of space we had to set out 3,000 boxes. It took our team of about 20 staff 2 weeks to lay out the whole site.

We set up the rows so that they were in blocks - around 20 rows in each block. The irrigation is also set up in blocks so that we can turn on the drip for just one block at a time. This also makes the crop planning simpler as we can plant blocks at a time, and then rotate crops from block to block each season.

The soil was another story. To fill 3,000 boxes with a yard of soil would have taken us weeks to do by hand, so we had a soil blower come in to fill the boxes. It's a giant truck with a huge hose attachment that blows out soil - real noisy but real fast.

Our first harvest day at the Pacific Site! Greens were the first crops ready.