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.

While COVID-19 put a halt to many plans and activities, it also helped people find new hobbies, learn new skills, start up their dream businesses, and find new ways to build community.

Keene residents Ashley Foreman and Chris Duff experienced all of this firsthand when they began running their own hobby farm called Duff Acres — with an unexpected result.

In 2019, the couple built their dream home on the 50-acre property where Chris had been raised and which has been in his family since 1987. Two years later, after a year of online schooling due to the pandemic, Chris and Ashley wanted to do something to encourage their four children to get out of the house.

“We wanted to have something for our kids to do and give them a bit of purpose and teach them a bit of work ethic,” Chris explains. “And just have a little bit of joy in the times that we were in.”

So when a family friend had a couple of cows available, they jumped at the opportunity. They then built a pasture, added four chickens, created a big produce garden, and suddenly they had their very own hobby farm.

“At one point we started having too much to feed ourselves and be sustainable on our own end,” Chris says. “So we started putting that out and sold our meat and we had a great response.”

Though the couple began by just selling the eggs and produce they were unable to consume within their own family, now — only a year into the business — they can’t even keep up with the demand.

“We decided last year to try doing some meat chickens,” Chris says. “Again, it was for ourselves, and we were just going to try and sell a couple to cover the costs, but then we wound up selling every chicken.”

This year, the couple has “upped their game” by getting 90 meat chickens instead of the 40 they had last year. They’ve also recently added more hens to keep up with the demand for eggs and, on top of raising Christmas turkeys as they did last winter, they’ll also be raising Thanksgiving turkeys. They currently have 12 on the farm, two of which they will keep for themselves.

“We’ve never had such good food as what comes out of the animals that are in our backyard,” says Chris, adding that all the animals are pasture-fed. “Just knowing what we’ve put into it, and know what we’re eating, and being able to see the whole process — we think it’s really great for our kids and for anybody else that stops in to see it, too.”

Chris spent some of his early childhood helping on his extended family’s dairy farm and on a close friend’s beef farm. This was the only farming knowledge that either Chris and Ashley had — the rest had to be researched — and they’ve also learned by trial and error.

“We’ve had some failures and we’ve had had some loss too, but it’s all a learning curve,” Chris notes. “We feel like we learn something every day, and every day we get better. If we’re losing something or something’s not going right for us, then we learn from it and we move on.”

Ashley adds that other farms in the region have been very supportive in offering advice, especially when they were just beginning their hobby farm.

“That community has been totally different than anything I’ve really experienced before,” she explains. “We’re able to connect with other local small hobby farms too, and network and be able to basically help each other out. If we’re having an issue or they’re having an issue, we can help each other out and have a community network going on here.”

With Chris still working full-time in maintenance for Peterborough Utilities at the Riverview Park and Zoo, and Ashley running a daycare from their home, the couple relies on their children to help with caring for the hobby farm.

The couple estimates that 13-year-old William and eight-year-old James do 75 per cent of the work on the farm by watering, feeding, and cleaning up after the animals. Four-year old Evelyn and three-year old Charles also help out by collecting eggs and picking fruit and, of course, by keeping the animals company.

“They love interacting with all the animals,” Ashley says.

“They get to see that and know exactly what their chicken or their meat looked like eight weeks ago when it was just a little thing,” Chris adds. “They don’t just think that their food comes from the grocery store out of a box. They know exactly what goes into it.”

If four young children and a farm of animals isn’t enough to keep track of, Ashley also cares for a handful of children for her home daycare, Duff Acres Farm School. These children are just as eager to interact with the animals, and Ashley will often take them out for walks through the pasture or to watch tractors on the neighbouring farmlands.

“People love the experiences their kids can get here,” she says. “It’s totally different than centre-based care where I’d worked for years.”

Ashley explains that getting to watch her children care for the animals and appreciate where their food comes from is one of her favourite things about running Duff Acres. The other is the support and connections she’s gained from other local farms and surrounding community, something she didn’t anticipate.

“This local area of Peterborough County is just full of so many great small local businesses that are willing to help and support everybody because they were there themselves at one time,” Ashley says. “They want everybody to thrive and that and, in turn, that helps them to thrive.”

Like the life cycle of the animals they raise, the couple is giving back to their community in appreciation for all the help they’ve received.

Last year, when they had an extra Christmas turkey, they decided to do a “giftaway” and donate it to a family in need of a Christmas dinner. Community members privately messaged them nominations of people who were going through a hard time or could use something special around Christmas time.

Other local businesses chipped in to donate to the giftaway, until there was a whole package of goodies — complete with bottles of wine, home décor, butter tarts, treats, and more.

“We want to do that again this year too, and we’re hoping that we get just as good or a better turn-out from our local business community to be able to give back to somebody who needs something, because everybody’s gone through hard times,” Ashley says. “We’ve gone through hard times too. We’re so lucky with everything that we have here that to be able to give it back to somebody that could really use it. It was very heartwarming.”

Duff Acres is located at 784 Serpent Mounds Road in Keene and can be reached at duffacres@hotmail.com. You can follow them on Facebook and Instagram for more on the day-to-day life of a hobby farm.