Grouse House Farm is a small, home-based diversified vegetable farm located in the territories of Cas Yikh of the Gidimt’en Clan, home of the Witsuwit’en Nation, in Smithers, British Columbia.
About
About the grower
Gavin Smith was working on a small farm in France when he decided to pursue environmental law. He apprenticed at a small farm on Vancouver Island before training as a lawyer and practicing for 14 years in the fields of environmental law and Indigenous rights. But he never stopped growing food, and he never stopped thinking of that feeling of working in the soil and (sometimes) the sunshine.
That’s how Grouse House Farm was born.
About the farm
When Gavin and his partner moved into a small cabin on the edge of Smithers, he began a garden that supplied much of their household produce. Grouse House Farm is an expansion of that space into a home-based market garden serving the Smithers community.
The farm is intentionally small-scale and low-tech, aimed at keeping things simple to grow as much high-quality food as possible on a small footprint, while prioritizing the well-being of the soil and surrounding ecosystem.
From yard, to home garden, in transition to market garden.
How we grow
Grouse House Farm currently operates on one-eighth of an acre of permanent raised beds, which are not tilled after the initial ground-breaking. The beds are regularly mulched with compost and other organic materials to support active soil life. We generate as much fertility as we can on the property or locally, which includes composting a lot of leaves and wood chips from our surrounding four acres of forest, as well as running a residential compost pickup program in Smithers.
We mostly use hand tools and we never use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. After all, it’s our backyard. Literally.
About the grouse
We began calling our home grouse house because hardly a week goes by that a ruffed grouse isn’t bursting out of a bush, wandering across a footpath or hanging precariously from one of the aspens.
Aldo Leopold wrote that the grouse is “the numenon of the north woods”, a symbol of the “imponderable essence” of northern forests. The grouse offer us regular reminders of the abundance of the land we’re fortunate to share with them, and the connection between forest, field, and everything in between.
