Willow Creek is a farm owned by Jay Mowat and Clare Booker. This year, they have decided to take on a new project and open their doors by leasing their land to two young inspired newcomers to the farming community. We belong to a new generation of non-farmers who are concerned about how we are producing our food and feeding our communities. We aspire to one day become effective producers of fresh, healthy, sustainably grown food.

But first, we have to learn how to grow! Neither of us had grown up on farms, so we weren't fortunate enough to have past generations hand down this valuable information. We've had to seek it out ourselves. Last year, we were able to participate in an amazing internship on Plan B Organic Farms through the C.R.A.F.T. Ontario Network (Collaborative Regional Alliance of Farmer Training). That was an incredible experience for us both as we were able to live at the farm for the season and eat everything we possibly could, while learning how to farm and earn a wage for the work we did! Imagine, some people pay to sit in classrooms to learn this stuff!

We met Clare and Jay every Saturday morning as we were neighbouring vendors at the Milton Farmers' Market. Towards the end of the season they approached us with the idea of using their land, equipment and business name for a year, and we really had to do a lot of thinking about it. Were we ready after one season on a farm to take on some land of our own? We didn't know anything about the managing, bookkeeping, or planning side of farming, let alone the sizeable group of crops we'd never grown before! But this kind of opportunity doesn't come along too often, in fact, maybe once in a lifetime if you're lucky. So we had to take the leap. We've spent our winter months with our noses buried in all the books we can find. And we've been working jobs in the city to bring in some operating money for the project.

The reason why we took all this on was really to build our knowledge base of farming. This season will allow us to try our hands at all of the winter planning, growing our own seedlings, managing and marketing the farm, growing, processing, selling and distributing our produce. This is going to be a pretty steep learning curve! But we've realized that the best way to learn is to jump in and try.

A successful season for us would be to break even on what we invested, and any contributions we could make to our future farm start-up savings account at the end of the season would be icing on the cake.


Willow Creek is beautiful hideaway northwest of Toronto in the quiet rolling hills of Erin, in Wellington County. We can be found on the 9th Line, just north of the 5th Sideroad. Our plant hardiness zone is 4b which means we have fewer warm days than a lot of our neighbours and a shorter growing season in general.

The Back Plot	The Green House	The Hoop House
The Full Back Yard	The Front Plot in January	The Back in January

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