About Us
How it Started : The First Seed
Growing up in Fonthill, just a few doors up the street from what is now FFFF, at that time known as William’s Orchards, with the same creek running through the property and nature trails abundant in the area I was unknowingly raised in an idyllic bubble filled with nice people and easy access to a wealth of flora and fauna in relatively well preserved ecosystems. With the St Johns conservation area around the corner and the less tame paths of Short Hills also close by a lot of my time was spent outdoors, developing a deep, lifelong respect and appreciation for nature. Also, Jim’s fruit was so good that it left a lasting impression on me, and I’ve harboured an above average appreciation for fruit in general since childhood.
Although other pursuits led me to live and work in Toronto, pursuing musical dreams with learned and practiced skills in recording engineering and years of playing and performing in bands and solo, my moniker; The First Seed, reflecting my connection to the land. The city was exciting, the variety of people and food and entertainment was invigorating, for a while, but it soon became apparent that trying to make a living from my passion for music was either going to drain my love for it or be completely unsustainable. While working various sound related gigs I also did construction, arts telemarketing, security, and teaching English as second language (which was actually a decent job). However, after a decade of juggling multiple jobs to just barely scrape by, the realization that city life wasn’t for me hit hard and I ended up moving back home, in Fonthill.
Fortunately the family were supportive as ever and my mom actually connected me with Jim Williams, and I started working at the orchard and learning as much as I could as I found the work work satisfying and despite the low wages, very rewarding. Working towards something that has intrinsic value to others beyond yourself makes for a worthy pursuit and compared all the other jobs I’d done (aside from teaching) this was also left me the with the least guilt for engaging in the capitalist system. With the work only being seasonal I also took on other construction related jobs and eventually started teaching ESL again, however, with Jim in his 80s he was trying to sell the farm and it looked like my favourite gig was coming to an end. My ‘plan’ was to work there until the bitter end as my philosophy had changed from the pursuit of happiness to the appreciation of where it can be already be found and I couldn’t fathom of something being a better use of my time for any amount of money.
There was interest in the farm, and Jim had propositioned me as a manager, we had meetings and discussed plans and possibilities, it was exciting but a bit daunting as although I’d basically worked every job on the farm, there was still a lot I didn’t know. However, as time went on they couldn’t quite close the deal and then Covid happened and everything changed.
My mother and father had retired from their prosthetics and orthotics business a number of years prior and had been going slightly stir crazy, and while loving every minute of babysitting their grandchildren during lockdown, family discussion floated into the possibility of making an offer on the farm. With many long hours of conversation, strategic allocation shifts, very careful planning, and help from the gracious Metis Nation of Ontario Voyager fund the Fonthill Family Fruit Farm was established in 2022!​
How its Growing: Planet Over Profit
Learning how to farm fruit from Jim was invaluable. My unintended apprenticeship covered so many aspects of the business that I felt well prepared to manage the fields with a solid comprehension of the potential problems and solutions. As an owner of the orchard, I attained my pesticide license from the University of Guelph so that I could continue with the conventional spray regiment that had been in place for decades in order to maintain the production of marketable fruit. I knew that I wanted to shift into organic production but I didn’t know enough about that process to risk the plunge for our first season. The fruits all produced relatively well that year but the ever vicious fireblight and apple scab were also prevalent. We had decent yields and our second season was similar but with blight still decimating our old pear and more susceptible apple trees, and the other conventional growers telling me I need “just spray more” knowing that spraying also spreads the infection I recognized the tragic flaw in this system. Also, I was increasingly concerned about all the runoff as the site drains into the 12 mile creek, and the growing body of evidence that all chemical/synthetic amendments to the soil or trees, were in fact devastating to the natural microbiomes under the ground and detrimental to the ecosystem as a whole, let alone the impact of long term human exposure, albeit through ingestion or otherwise. The reputation of apples (and pears) being some of the ‘dirtiest’ fruit in the industry interns of pesticides used in commercial production is well earned. Even certified organic growers in Ontario can still use chemical pesticides to produce fruits, just in less amounts.
The industry’s reliance on chemicals is in part because the public is unaware of how harmful they are, as well as the consumers demand for what they perceive as ‘perfect’ fruit. Perfection and absolute uniformity which commercial growers strive for do not exist within nature. By accommodating unrealistic superficial consumer demands to deliver premium fruit many bigger producers have been completely hooked on the use of environmentally harmful pesticides that often loose efficacy over time demanding higher volumes of application or even more additional products to get the same results, from trees that have been bred to become so weak they can’t grow good fruit otherwise is a failing system that is unfortunately very well propped up by existing infrastructure.
Especially frustrating is the fact that apple trees can be bred so easily, its not hard to realize that if we hadn’t become so reliant on industrialized practices and endless clones we might would have much better naturally disease resistant and likely more flavourful fruit right now. With my growing knowledge of the failings of the industry and my deep love and respect for the natural world I decided that we were going to grow beyond organic and embrace holistic natural growing practices to try regenerate the soil and land under our care to its highest possible health. The healthier the soil biome, the better the trees absorb nutrients, the better they are at defending themselves against pest and pathogens, as well as producer more nutrient dense, and thus tastier, healthier fruit. The caveat is that they won’t look perfect. The reality is that naturally grown fruit is going to have some spots on there and even a bug every now and then. The natural bacteria and fungus that grows on apple skins are actually probably good for your own gut biome and don’t really affect the flavour (even eating a bug every now and then is good for you). Another supremely important aspect of growing the healthiest fruit is enlightening people to this reality that our naturally imperfect fruit is actually the healthiest fruit being grown commercially in the area.
This, our first no-spray season, was a big intimidating step, that initially I was very apprehensive about. Despite the many nay sayers and shocked seniors that vocally expressed how they’d ‘never seen apples so bad’ there were equally as many that openly expressed how happy they were to see we made the change. Many customers returned to purchase more of our naturally grown fruit and refused the conventionally grown produce we offer from other farms. Often, peoples fears of the spots were dismantled upon the offering of a fresh slice to reveal perfection on the interior and expressly delicious flavour. Also worth mentioning, some trees, like our plums, Bosc pears, and Northern Spy apples, produced crops that were about as good as they’d ever been in terms of appearance (we had a low yeild year over all due to a late frost).
The resulting fruit and condition of the trees has also pushed the FFFF New Fruit Development Initiative into more direct focus as the lack of available disease resistant varieties of fruit is very small compared to the spray reliant cultivars commonly selected for commercial sales and selective hybridization of fruits being relatively easy it made sense to start trying to grow our own better, site-specific fruit. We’ve got about 100 unique apple seedlings, mostly the result of select hybridizations through hand pollination, now in the ground, and another 100 freshly germinated in our grow room waiting to be planted this spring. Plum seeds are also stratifying in the greenhouse in hopes of growing some new plums this season too. The practice of growing out seeds from your best fruits was common and an integral part of farming in the past that has fallen out of favour since industrialization and led to the current relative bottleneck in available fruit genetics. With big industry in control of what the public has access to most people aren’t aware they could likely grow their own decent apples from seed. Getting people to grow their own is a stated goal of the FFFF NFDI, as well as create our own unique, tough, reliable, and fantastically delicious varieties.
In moving beyond certified organic practices and embracing truly holistic growing we’re including aspects of agroforestry, permaculture, regenerative farming, in our planning and plantings while focusing on encouraging biodiversity and the orchards natural ecosystem to develop and balance itself out without human over management. We’re actively trying to reduce our reliance on machinery and make the spaces oriented around the living beings within. In the near future I’m hoping to offer workshops as well as guided tours, maybe eventually even a summer day camp. I truly feel that education through exposure to the joys and reality of natural growing will be a truly valuable experience to offer people, and that connecting people in natural spaces is a worthwhile endeavour to help those that live lives separated from nature altogether recognize the intrinsic wealth that growing produces.
The era of human dominion over nature needs to come to and end and we must redevelop a respectful, mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship with the land, and the beings it supports, so that we may all thrive together.