Nature and Living started as a bi-weekly newsletter written by Chris and Christine (and our mom and dad for the Chinese version) in Vancouver area with a goal to educate our readers about the nature around us and local hidden attractions. We dreamt of living in harmony with nature and being self sustainable hence the big move out to Maple Ridge in 2008 to fulfill our family dream!

Although no one in our family had any formal education in the agriculture field, we enjoyed growing great variety of flower shrubs when we were living in Vancouver. The land we started out with in Maple Ridge was more of a rural retreat not anything close to farmable land. Through three years of reworking the land and building our own compost, we were able to grow enough vegetables for our own family and even take some to the local farmers market!

Today, we have chickens that help control pests and weeds in our vegetable patch and provide us with wonderful eggs. We also have ducks to help control slugs and other big pests that the chickens don't care for. In addition to that, we have a growing herd of Finnsheeps that helps keep our lawn nicely trimmed! Of course, the vegetable patches also expanded to keep up with our growing business as well as provide food for our animals and ourselves.

From May to early November, we can be found at the Haneys Farmers Market. We continue to look for other crops and livestock that we can add to our farm to keep our land use diverse.

Our farming philosophy and practices

We strive to provide our customers with high quality produce year round grown locally right here on our farm using a strict NO SPRAY farming practice. We strongly believe that farms CAN achieve great harvest by using various natural farming methods such as companion planting, crop rotation, composting, raising beneficial animals for pest control without even the need for organic certified fertilizers, herbicide, or pesticide.

On our farm, weeds are manually picked out or foraged by our chickens. Pests are regularly controlled by our trusted troop of Pekin ducks who would trade anything for a feast of slugs! Fertilizers for our greens are derived from our mushroom manure, chicken manure, sheep manure and plant compost. By planting diverse variety of crops we are able to keep pests and diseases to the minimum.

Our animals are all raised with their comfort and safety as our primary concern. Our chickens and ducks are raised without any use of medicated feed, vaccination, and hormones. They freely roam around our property in the daytime and are returned to their roomy coops in the night for protection against coyotes. Our sheep are also treated with great amounts of care. They are given none chemically grown hay for feed and no growth hormones are used on any of them. The sheep are regularly moved around on the property so that they can graze on variety of grass and get a different scenery every now and then!