Sardis – Seed Barron Farms is under the umbrella of Terra Flora.
They run pop up markets in a regular basis in the summer and another is happening Saturday August 8. On Luckakuck near the railway overpass.
Seed Barron Farms is a no till, regenerative beyond organic, garden lab in the Fraser Valley, the Valley’s original melon farm since 2021.
Andrew and Jane moved to Chilliwack in 2017 from the city looking for a change. Chilliwack is a beautiful farming community in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia offering a truly super natural experience of mountains, rivers, lakes and produce.
Founded in 2019, Terra Flora started as a market garden growing food in what is known as no-till permaculture style, growing and using deep mulching composts for fertility. In trying to grow without the use of chemicals and sprays, Andrew discovered that no one was making good quality compost that had strong fungal activity, complete soil food web or was minerally balanced. Many, many market garden operations repeatedly demonstrated to Andrew that there was a missing link in their operation, they were spending money bringing fertility in, instead of producing the fertility on site using their own waste streams. Thus, Terra Flora Soilworks was born and we began to farm compost worms, produce high quality worm castings (vermicomposts) and produce deep mulching composts along side growing food..
Since 2017 Jane had been working as a floral designer in the weddings and events space where she had gained attention internationally through features in industry magazines like Wedding Sparrow (Instagram: @weddingsparrow), Wedding Chicks (Instagram: @weddingchicks), WedLuxe (Instagram: @wedluxe), and Amber & Muse (Instagram: @amberandmuse_hochzeitsguide). Jane and Andrew observed that flowers were not subject to the same pesticide regulations as food products and that due to the pandemic and other logistical issues surrounding the global nature of floral production her orders were regularly being shorted making planning weddings and events increasingly stressful and unsustainable.
In our first year we grew mostly brassicas and lost a lot of food to the cabbage fly moth, and the following year it was slugs decimating our produce. In the third year, crop loss fell under 10% from pest pressure. The solution? We started adding flowers known to attract pollinators and predatory beneficial insects and planted shrubs and trees. In turn, this attracted small birds and began allowing herbs and vegetables to bloom in our market garden which leveraged the powerful, natural, and free integrated pest management system of nature. Jane started to integrate blooms from our market garden into her arrangements and quickly realized there was a void in the market for cleanly produced high quality stems for florists.
We now completely had the true embodiment of our name: Terra Flora.
Our mission is to provide sustainably produced soil, food and flowers in a regenerative way storing more carbon in the ground than we extract. We believe that regenerative agricultural practices are at the heart of the climate solution and are proud to be contributing to our community in this way.
