Blog - Thompson Potato Farm - Thompson Potato Farm

Sweet Corn Fields

9/7/2023

Have you ever thought about how perfect sweet corn gets to your dinner table? We start planting sweet corn in May and continue weekly plantings for roughly 2 months. This staggered planting ensures that we always have a section of ripe corn. When it’s time to pick the corn, every cob is handpicked by our team of migrant workers. They’re experts at selecting the best quality corn.

This aerial video clearly shows our different sections of sweet corn and gives you an insight into how much sweet corn we grow annually. (I promise I’ll get better at using my new drone for future videos!) Don’t miss out on our September sweet corn – it’s usually the best of the season.

You can visit “Summer Sweet Corn Salad Recipe” for a truly tasty salad made from fresh local produce that’s available this time of year in Ontario.

What's Growing At The Farm Today

7/7/2023

What’s growing at the farm today? Plenty! All our potatoes plants are in flower which means tubers are forming (which means potatoes are growing.) Did you know that potato plants have different colours flowers depending on the variety of potato that has been planted? The plants with white flowers are our early crop AC Chaleur round white potatoes and the plants with pink flowers are our very popular Yukon Gem potatoes.

The sweet corn got off to a slow start due to very cool ground temperatures this spring, but I think you can see it’s really taking off now. Acres and acres and acres of sweetness coming soon! And last (but never least) the pumpkin seeds have germinated and the plants getting bigger every day. They take some time to get established, but soon they will be enormous plants sprawled all over the field.

So all in all, our crops are growing nicely. You can visit “The Flowers Of Our Farm” to see more pictures of our crops in flower during the summer months.

Planting Sweet Corn

6/23/2023

Hidden inside the yellow buckets of this planter are one of the most anticipated items we grow here at the farm. Sweet corn seeds! Our phones are already starting to ring with anxious customers calling in to find out if our corn is ready. Not yet. Curtis has been planting our sweet corn for many weeks now. He staggers the planting so we always have one patch of super fresh sweet corn to pick for our customers. Looking forward to seeing you at the produce stand in August! You can visit “Out-Standing In Their Field” to learn more about the men who hand pick all our corn.

The Weeds Of Our Farm

3/1/2023

Thoughts of spring are beginning to turn in our minds as we flip the calendar to the month of March. As we envision our fields full of beautiful plants, one thought is running through our minds: WEED CONTROL!

Weed control is an essential part of farming. Every year we learn more about weed control using best farming practices. Some weeds are difficult to manage, hard to control and impossible to eradicate. These weeds can look stunning, but they can do real damage to our crops.

The four weeds in these photos in order of appearance are:
Jimsonweed which is highly toxic when touched or ingested.
Bindweed which flourishes in our lawns and fields.
Thistles that line the edges of our fields and cause #IamMurray great grief.
Black Bindweed which has completely strangled the potato plant in the picture.

You can visit “The Flowers Of Our Farm” to see some gorgeous flowers on our crops.

Recap of 2022

12/31/2022

As everyone knows, farming is extremely dependent on the weather. Here are 10 photos that recap the wild ride we had with Mother Nature this past year.

#IamMurray and all the tractors were itching to get into the fields in the spring, but cooler than normal temperatures slowed us down. These cool temperatures prevailed during our planting season and into early summer wreaking havoc with weed control.

Below normal rainfall in the summer created extreme drought. We battled the drought with irrigation where we could, but it lead to a lighter potato crop than we had hoped for. On the other hand, the pumpkins thrived and we had a bumper crop.

Gorgeous fall weather lead to many stunning photo opportunities as we worked at the grain harvest. The featured photos in the slideshow depict our grain truck at sunrise, the combine at sunset and a magnificent rainbow.

The four of us are still standing at the end of the season after the whirlwind weather rollercoaster of 2022! While we don’t know what’s in store for us in 2023, we know that together we can ride it out. Happy New Year to all of you! You can visit “Wacky Weather” to see how we fared in 2017 with the exact opposite weather we experienced this year.

The Flowers Of Our Farm

8/15/2022

As you could imagine, the farm is in full flower during the summer. Here are some little known facts about our crop flowers in order of appearance in the photos:

Potato flowers are different colours depending on the variety of potato. These gorgeous pink flowers are a yellow variety.

Male sweet corn flowers are commonly called tassels and their primary function is to produce pollen.

Pumpkin flowers open every morning for only 6 hours and close during the heat of the day.

Wheat flowers are called spikelets and are often dried and used in bridal bouquets.

Alfalfa flowers are in the pea family and they can be found in our hay.

You can visit “Bugs & Blossoms” to see some other beautiful flowers that can be found on our farm.

Baby It’s Dry Outside!

7/11/2022

Baby it’s dry outside! Our crops are thirsty, so we pulled out the irrigation reel last week much to everyone’s horror. Irrigation is labour intensive and it runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every time one field pull is completed, the pipe needs to be laid again by hand. The irrigation requires constant monitoring to ensure there are no leaks or equipment breakages.

The reel needs to be turned off when it reached the end of the pull so there is no flooding. And no matter how carefully we calculate when the reel will be done, the one thing we know is that it almost never finished when we think it will be done. But there is always hope…there is rain in the forecast for tomorrow.

To learn more about irrigation you can visit “Inside Irrigation.”

Tractors For Every Season (Turn! Turn! Turn!)

3/1/2021

Sing along everyone. I know you all know this classic song:

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose under heaven
A time to plant
A time to reap

We use our tractors in every season and have implements for every purpose imaginable. Here are our tractors hard at work preparing our land for planting as they pull implements such as the fertilizer spreader, disc harrow, cultivator and manure spreader. The heavy duty tractors pull the large potato harvester and the smaller windrower during the harvest. And sometimes we even allow a special guest to tag along with the drivers to provide some company during the very long summer days!

To see videos of these machines at work you can visit “Tater Tales Potato Planter” and “The Potato Harvester.”

Sweet Corn Anyone?

7/24/2019

Sweet corn anyone?! This weekend we will be opening our sweet corn stand with Norfolk County corn while we wait for our own crop to be ready. We are also pleased to offer a selection of new potatoes hand dug by Johnny & Curtis to complement the first Ontario field tomatoes of the season. Come and enjoy the bounty of fresh, local food! To have a peek at one of my most popular recipes featuring sweet corn you can visit “Mexicana Sweet Corn Salad Recipe.”

Farmers Are Professional Gamblers

7/13/2019

“Farmers are professional gamblers.” True words spoken by a wise man I happen to know personally –RJ Thompson, my husband and owner of this farm. Every year we roll the dice and spend the same amount of money and time growing our crops. Will we spend the summer running very laborious irrigation or will we get just the right amount of rain for our potatoes? Will the sweet corn and winter wheat flourish under perfect conditions or will we battle excessive rains and flooding? Will there be destructive storms or will we see the rainbow at the end of the rain? Mother Nature doesn’t always give the best odds, but we persevere every year to harvest our crops. To see some previous weather challenges we have had here you can visit “Tater Tales Stormy Father’s Day” and “Tater Tales Wacky Weather.”