Sustainable mixed farming in the Annapolis Valley

 

He’s always been digging in the dirt,” quips Niki Clark about her husband, and farming partner, Ian Curry.

“I guess that’s right,” replies Ian. “My uncle worked the family farm in Wilmot. I helped over there when I was young. My father had a large garden. I helped with that, from planting to harvesting. We youngsters sold raspberries and strawberries to make some cash for stuff we wanted to buy. Mum put up the vegetables for winter food. That was how we lived in the country 60, 70 years ago.”

Niki, sitting on the other side of a long wooden table, in an alcove overlooking their large vegetable garden, nods her head.   

“My family was not a farming family. We did have a garden and we kept horses. Montana, where I grew up, has a short growing season, so we grew only the basics. Mum froze the vegetables we grew. She canned a lot of fruit. I feel comfortable living like this now—growing my own vegetables and selling the extra.” 

 

Roots in farming

During the 1950s, when Niki and Ian were children, preserving fruits and vegetables was a fall ritual. Whether the food came from a backyard garden or was bought in bushel baskets, pots and strainers came out in September, as many mothers set to work canning food for the winter. 

“For many of us, an agrarian background isn’t far back in the family—maybe as far as grandparents,” says  Niki. “It’s interesting how quickly the shift away from the farm happened.”

Niki and Ian left the rural life behind in their youth. Like many young people in the 1960s, they set off to see the world. Niki worked as an archeologist and anthropologist specialising in pre-historic fabrics, and Ian as a geophysical technician looking for geological anomalies for the oil industry.

They lived in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South America, and the USA before returning to Nova Scotia, Ian’s home province.

In 2002, they moved into a bungalow on 30 acres of land that runs up the side of the North Mountain in Granville Beach, near Annapolis Royal. There was a barn, a large garage and previously cultivated fields. They wanted to have a mixed farm with a wide variety of edible and decorative plants, some hens, and some horses. They were building a fulfilling lifestyle, growing most of their own food, living akin to nature. 

The couple started a landscaping business. Niki created an ornamental garden to demonstrate the plants that people might want in their gardens. Ian added greenhouses to propagate and nurture rare and exotic plants for the ever-increasing gardens. 

They put in a large vegetable garden plus fruit and nut trees, with a plan to sell any extra. The dream was to have a mature, self-sustaining small farm for their retirement.

“We’ve made no distinction between the farm and the gardens. Whatever we’re doing, our fingernails are dirty, we are sunburned, and happy,” says Niki.

“Before farming, my job required me to work in remote areas, digging and looking for minerals or evidence of oil,” says Ian. “There was something different every day, sometimes every hour of every day. It prepared me for farming, a job where you never know what might happen next; what might require fixing.”  

Ian’s job gave him experience drilling wells and working with water irrigation. Collaborating with farmers in several countries rekindled his youthful pleasure in working on a farm. He was certain that he could apply the traditional farming methods he knew, modified with techniques he learned in other countries, to his own self-contained farm.  

The now-mature perennial gardens with their many shrubs and trees are an everchanging source of delight for Niki and Ian.

 

Focusing on sustainability

As an archaeologist, Niki was always digging at antiquity sites, looking for hints and evidence of the activities at those ancient villages and farms. An expert in pre-historic fabrics, she examined the plants that created those fabrics and the associated farming methods. Niki felt confident in her abilities to combine the stewardship techniques of the past with her contemporary focus on sustainability.  

Sitting relaxed in their terracotta washed walls, with clay-coloured tiles underfoot, there’s a subtropical atmosphere that reflects the warm climates where they lived for many years. They display mementos and bits of the lifestyle and culture of the places they have lived. A Turkish coffee urn sits on the sideboard. Meals often have a Peruvian, Turkish or Spanish theme. Rice is a staple in their diet.

The couple regularly read agricultural news articles about farming developments. To their surprise, they learned that the rice they bought contained arsenic. Niki says historic pesticide use contributes to most of the arsenic found in rice, because it picks up trace minerals from the soil. Familiar with rice paddies from their travels, and knowing that rice grows on marginal land, Niki and Ian decided to grow their own rice. They thought their rice paddies would be an example for other small-scale farmers of a crop that can be grown, especially on wetter or marginal land.

“Once we realised the island of Hokkaido, Japan, is at the same latitude as Nova Scotia, we thought it would be a successful endeavour,” says Niki. They met with a rice farmer in Vermont and attended a seminar at the McCouch RiceLab at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. 

 

Growing rice in Nova Scotia

Their farm had some land that Ian thought would be perfect for rice paddies, so he excavated four paddies, and the crop went in. The first year was not as successful as they hoped. The paddies failed to hold water as necessary, needing frequent refilling. Ian moved the paddies to a wetter area with clay soil near the bottom of the slope of their yard. It held the water as required. This year they are growing rice from Japan (‘Akamuro Red’) and Italy (‘Tatanio Rose’).

Niki’s yoga friends help plant the seedlings.  

“It’s rice yoga,” says Niki. “Everybody bends and stretches while planting rice. Last year four women and Ian planted 4,000 seedlings in two hours. The lines were a bit wonky, but it was all just fine.”

Ian harvested a decent yield of rice from that paddy in 2021. He imported some machinery from China to help harvest, husk and polish the crop, and sells it in one-kilogram bags as fast as he can process them.

The rice paddy is the first crop that a visitor will notice alongside the long driveway leading to the house. On the right side of the driveway there are extensive ornamental gardens extending up to the house.

Niki planted these gardens 20 years ago. Today they are lush and mature, a place to enjoy the fruits of her labour.

 

Mixed gardens for food and décor 

Niki applies the same rigour to plant propagation and cultivation that she applied to her academic research—documenting what was planted, the dates, and the conditions. The gardens are beautiful, but they are also a continuing study in the viability of ornamental plants.  

These gardens are populated with many introduced plants. Niki says if she knew 20 years ago what she knows now, she probably would have done things differently, concentrating more on native plants and using fewer
exotic species. 

“The native plants are as rare and unusual as some of the exotics, now. I’m always telling people how wonderful and lovely our native plants are.” 

Niki cites examples of the native plants she grows in the midst of the exotic or naturalised plants in the garden. Several native Vaccinium species, including high-bush blueberry (V. corymbosum), low-bush or wild blueberry (V. angustifolium), cranberry (V. macrocarpon) and lingonberry (V. vitis-idaea) are intermingled in the ornamental garden. There is a native riverbank grape (Vitis riparia) as well as introduced European table and wine grapes (Vitis vinifera). A woodland species of strawberry (Fragaria vesca) is grown alongside hybrid garden strawberries. The growth habits of introduced plants are monitored in case they become invasive and take over a section of the garden.

“Let me give you an example,” says Niki. “A perennial spinach-like vine from the Caucasus, Hablitzia tamnoides, is now restricted to a site in the middle of a gravel path, with its roots at the base of a giant black locust tree. It was showing thuggish inclinations to take over in the fertile garden soil.” While working in her gardens, Niki honed an interest in saving seeds. She works with the Bauta Family Initiative which funds programs that match farmers who save seeds with people who want to learn seed saving for food security purposes. Independently, and with that organisation, she presents seed saving workshops, sharing her knowledge about plants with new farmers. 

“I’m always propagating plants, growing new ones from seeds, cuttings or rhizomes. I love trying to keep plants growing and flourishing,” she says.

 

The “livestock”

Ian’s passion is microbes, which he refers to as his livestock. They are single-celled organisms that consume waste in soil and replace it with trace nutrients. People with septic systems are familiar with the need to regularly add microbes to the tank to help break down waste.

“They are living creatures. I feed them, they multiply, then I sell them. That’s like livestock,” says Ian.

He imports microbes from the US and refines them into a multi-purpose product that adds nutrients and improves soil fertility.

Ian likes to speak about the variety of plants on their farm—rice, vegetables, nuts, fruits, and ornamentals. Their farm is sustainable and self-sufficient, an example of permaculture in action, producing a wide variety of products for humans and animals to eat. Manure and compost are used as fertiliser to enrich the soil. Plants and animals on the farm complement and support each other. 

“We are living with nature, not against nature. I like that. It feels fulfilling,” says Ian.

 

Perennial edibles and the future

Niki says a new generation is coming along who have a different way of looking at things and are interested in sustainable farming. More and more often she is asked about the perennial edibles that she grows, including asparagus, fiddleheads, strawberries, berry shrubs, and fruit and nut trees. Annual edibles must be grown from seed yearly, and the garden has those as well. Several times a year, young people who want to be farmers visit for advice and guidance. Farmers new to the area consult about plants, growing zones and weather patterns. 

“I’d like to see more people coming here. The younger people are starting to come back and are living their great-grandparents’ relatively self-sustaining, mixed style farming,” she says.

Living lightly, as Ian describes it, was a conscious decision. Their farm has been a place to apply what they remember from their childhoods, a place to learn sustainable farming, and a place to experiment with new and different crops. Now that they have retired, they are farming on a small scale, for themselves first, then selling extra vegetables, fruit, nuts, rice and microbes off farm. 

“We are always somehow working in the dirt,” Ian says. “At the end of the day I’m tired but I accomplished something. I’d like to see more people live that way.”