Producer

Persephone Market Garden is 100 acres of forest, swamp, pasture and vegetable fields, located between Owen Sound and Sauble Beach. We strive to grow food that is good, clean and fair! We grow annual vegetables on 1.5 acres and have a small flock of sheep on 20 acres of pasture. We're experimenting with asparagus, rhubarb, blueberries and currants. In 2015, we planted our first apple trees and hope to add a variety of other fruit trees soon.

Having grown up on a farm, Kristine has farming in her blood. When Thorsten, originally from Germany, first chatted with Kristine in a subway he never imagined that through a few twists of fate he would land in rural Grey-Bruce in 2009. When moving back to the farm, Kristine needed to create her own job, and market gardening presented itself as the most likely path. She loves taking weekly walks through the garden to observe and plan what needs to be done and what is ready for harvest. Kristine and Thorsten love that farming lets them experience the seasons outside with their children. When not farming, Kristine and Thorsten like spending evenings at the beach, reading, cooking, hiking, and sometimes doing aikido and tango.

We practice intensive crop rotation and intercropping in the garden, along with rotational grazing in the pastures. This means that we don't plant the same kind of crop in the same spot every year and we don't plant large areas in one crop – that would be like serving our crops to pests on a silver platter! Instead, we move crops around from year to year and grow different crops beside each other to confuse the bugs. Our sheep are regularly moved to fresh pasture and receive homegrown hay in the winter. To feed the soil that feeds the plants that feed us, we use compost and cover crops.