You can tell flower season is in full swing because Lakefield’s Summer Roads Farm is filled with summer blooms.
Located northwest of the village of Lakefield on Selwyn Road between Bridgenorth and Young’s Point, this seasonal farm specializes in cut flowers and raised meats. The flowers are grown by hand using regenerative agriculture practices that rejuvenate the soil and enhance biodiversity, all without the use of pesticides.
Beatrice (Bea) Chan, owner of Summer Roads Flower Company, has been busy planting, weeding, and harvesting them into stunning arrangements for her hand-picked bouquet subscription program, where bouquets can be ordered in advance and picked up at the farm or delivered straight to your door.
A full-season subscription consists of 12 weekly bouquets from July to September, while the partial season subscription consists of four bi-weekly bouquets from July to August. With constantly changing flowers in bloom, no two bouquets look the same.
Though the farm property, which is owned by Bea’s parents Sue and Ben, is now filled with 50 to 60 (or even more!) crops, the flower gardens began as a restoration project. Five years ago, Bea was living with her parents when they needed a section of their driveway regraded because it had caused flooding in the family’s basement.
Bea, who studied ecological restoration and was working for an agriculture-based not-for-profit organization, took it upon herself to turn the discarded driveway fill into “something more productive.”
“Learning how to restore ecosystems from a degraded state seems like a great skill set, something that’s needed,” Bea says.
The restoration process required organic matter and thermophilic composting, wherein biological waste is broken down with heat-loving bacteria and fungi. The heat is produced via friction from reproduction, either through the dividing of bacteria cells or through the fungi’s branching of hyphae.
“It’s very much managed based on heat cycles and recipes to maximize the soil biology in the compost, then putting that in our beds and getting the plants back in so that they start breaking up the compaction,” Bea explains.
She adds she had to make the bed using a pickaxe because of how compact the fill was.
“But now I can plant everything with a butter knife.”
When the beds were created, she scavenged her cupboard for leftover flower seeds to plant, like cosmos (a flowering annual in the sunflower family).
“I wasn’t thinking of them as a cut flower — I was just thinking of trying to get living plants in the ground and getting them growing to try and increase organic matter,” Bea recalls.
A few years later, she began selling bouquets of her flowers — and the rest of Summer Roads Farm expanded from there.
“That restoration project is where I still grow most of my flowers, so I’m literally growing in driveway fill.”
Today, the farm continues to grow and Bea has brought more livestock to the pastures, including lambs, sheep, and laying hens, and she’s even about to get more 50 more meat birds.
The concept of regenerative farming was instilled into Bea and her three siblings at a young age from her mother, an environmental and pollination biologist.
“I was very heavily impacted by her knowledge and what she would pass on to us and point out to us while we were on walks or in the yard.”
After living in cities across the country, Bea and her family first moved into the 10-acre lot (much of which remains uncultivated) in 2007 when she was still in high school. Though she’s the main hands-on person working the farm, in the years since she began her business, Bea has enlisted help from the rest of her family including her siblings who no longer live on the land.
Her mother helps with the gardening, her older brother Pablo helps with problem-solving and business management, her younger brother Christopher is the bookkeeper and accountant, and her sister Margaret is the on-call veterinarian who checks up on the farm animals.
Along with her flower bouquet subscriptions, Bea has a farm stand where she sell her bouquets and other farm products, including free range eggs, honey, jams, preservatives, and more.
She also chooses to stock the shelves with products from other local farms and businesses, including maple syrup from Puddleduck Farms in Millbrook, handmade cards from The Critter Co., and handmade jams from the The Jam Cupboard.
Even more local vendors get to show off their items at the end of the year when Bea hosts an annual community holiday market at Summer Roads Farm. For the afternoon, she redesigns the farm stand as a walk-through space where people can pet the sheep and gather around a warm bonfire.
“It’s just lovely,” she says. “People really enjoy it. They come and they hang out and buy local things and then they go on their way. But it seems to be growing every year and it seems to be something that people are coming back to and enjoying both as the vendors and as the customers.”
The idea to host the market began during the early days of the pandemic when many small businesses were unable to sell their goods. Though her farm was deemed an essential service, she was not allowed to sell at community markets since she wasn’t a food supplier.
Running the holiday market has also been a way for Bea to connect with her rural neighbours.
“I’ve been meeting so many of my neighbours who are stopping in and buying eggs or buying jam or just saying ‘Hi’ and ‘I’m your neighbour, I’m so glad that you’re doing this.’ So, it’s been a really great way of meeting my community and getting to know them and being able to serve them with agricultural products from our farm.”
Though this is one thing she loves most about her farm, she admits that she’s largely drawn to the job because she’s able to spend her days outside, and because of the diversity of tasks she completes on a day-to-day basis.
She begins each morning by feeding the animals and doing “intensive rotational grazing” to ensure the chickens and sheep are always on fresh grass. From there, she could spend the rest of her day collecting eggs, harvesting flowers, trellising tomatoes, caring for the animals, and anything in between.
“My days might have similar tasks in it, but it’s always changing,” she explains. “It changes with the season. It changes with the day. And I love that.”
Though the business is expanding as Bea plans to bring in more livestock, she’s constantly reminding herself to stick to the basics and to remember that first regenerative project with the driveway fill.
“We always talk about going back to the fundamentals,” Bea says. “Once you manage water and soil, your plants will be happier and then you can stack livestock on top of that and grow your livestock component. If you manage that part well, it will feed your soil again and then it just cycles in a positive way.”
To sign up for Summer Road’s bouquet subscription program, visit www.summerroadsflowerco.com or visit the farm stand at 1922 Selwyn Road in Selwyn Township.
To see the vibrant flowers, follow the farm on Instagram and Facebook.
