Of Fields and Feasts
A Year in the life of the Farmland Trust - from the Executive Director
You know when you’ve planted a garden — beds built, weeds pulled, seeds watered — and then… nothing.
Growth feels slow. Slugs dine. Then: you go to sleep one day and wake up to find everything suddenly flourishing, thanks to rain, sunlight, and all the unseen magic underground.
That’s how my time with the Farmland Trust has felt.
Though I have been the Executive Director since only May of 2025, I got involved in 2013: way, way back near the beginning, when the farm had been acquired but the Root Food Hub was just a vision inscribed on the pages of the Area Farm Plan. Back then, tasked with building the first website, I sat with volunteers who all had this shiny glow of belief in their eyes… as they tried to describe the community benefits of something that did not yet exist.
Fast forward 13 years. By the time I came (back) along, the Root was fully built and operational as a community Food Hub. It’s a hive of activity: Ox Eats Grass serving highly addictive meals, Bangin’ Chai and Salty Burgers getting saucy in the shared commercial kitchen, and Sweetgrass Catering offering their wildly popular Thursday night dinner pickup. Add to that the Seed Sanctuary protecting, cleaning, and distributing seeds from out of the barn, and the Root facility has become a strong incubator for local food businesses.
Nestled in the Burgoyne Valley, our farm hosts 90 community gardeners, who farm 1000 and 500 square foot plots. Folks have built little hothouses, planted raspberries, tend potato patches and creatively collaborated to produce food for their families. A common area with tool share, picnic shelter, native plant garden and new composting toilet creates an inviting space for gatherings.
The farm is the nexus of partnerships: we’re growing with Salt Spring Island Community Services’ Harvest Kitchen, the Abattoir’s Community Composter, and an Agro-Voltaic research project that is pioneering a mix of solar generation and food production for Salt Spring Island. A planning process to chart the next decade of land and water use was launched at the end of 2025: we look forward to hearty conversations with experts near and far to inform the path forward.
In 2025 our learning series bloomed into the Root to Bloom Centre. We brought renowned Salt Spring experts together with keen students for hands-on workshops in everything from Seed Saving to Indigenous Foodways. With overwhelmingly positive feedback from students and prospective teachers, we were able to plan a jam packed calendar for the 2026 season.
This year, our partnership with Royal Roads at the Bloom Estate property on Beddis Road moved forward as the university engaged the community in deep consultation to understand what programs and facilities people hunger for here on the island. We are planning curriculum that pairs the deep, emplaced knowledge of Salt Spring Isladn experts Royal Roads researchers in the sciences and humanities to deliver the kinds of programs islanders hunger for.
Any farmer will tell you that it takes a village to raise a carrot. And any Farmland Trust collaborator will affirm that a meeting without eating is cheating. Anyway: it is totally true that everything we pull off at the Farmland Trust happens only because a dedicated group of very caring people come together, again and again, in service of a vision that was once just a tiny seed.
Thank you. However you feed this wonderful organization, I hope it also feeds you.
Andrea Palframan,
Executive Director P.S. Read our full Annual Report
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