About Us

We have a 36000 square foot greenhouse and 9 acre garden. We also work closely with other Alberta farmers:)
I Dawn own a 36 000 square foot greenhouse East of Didsbury. We sell as Shirley’s Greenhouse. We grow 2 different types of cucumbers, 8 types of tomatoes, butter lettuce, kale, eggplant, hot peppers and bell peppers. This year we also added a 2 acre garden plot to grow a variety of other veggies. We grew mostly potatoes, carrots, zucchini, onions, beets and lettuce. 
I grew up in the greenhouse industry. My parents greenhouse was west of Airdrie and they grew mostly cucumbers to sell wholesale. They made a great living at it. 10 years ago they sold and we built intending to do the same thing: cucumbers for wholesale. The only problem is our costs were higher and cucumber prices had dropped. Selling wholesale everyone elce takes large pieces of the pie. The last straw was when the wholesaler said he would pay us $5.25per dozen in the winter when our gas bill was at it’s highest. We then found out they were charging the stores $10.50and not passing the savings onto the customers. We decided then that we had to change something.
We now sell mostly at farmers markets and directly to 3 local stores. Selling to the stores is great. The stores are super exited to get fresh local produce and we are able to move a fairly large volume at a time to each store. Selling to the stores we have more control over price which helps us pay our bills. 
I happen to love farmers markets and thrive on talking to people. I’m better talking one on one than public speaking. I love talking about food to people and letting people how we grow and what we do. I love it when people eat our tomatoes and tell me that that’s how tomatoes should taste. My absolute favorite is when customers come back week after week because they need groceries and when they depend on me for their food. Selling at market we get 100% of the price to be able to pay our bills. It comes at a bit of a cost as I’m away from my kids a lot in the summer but is the only way we can make things work for our farm. Last year we joined our first year round market Symons Valley in Calgary. There we have turned the tables a bit and work with other farmers selling their veggies as well. 
Many customers come to our booth and ask if we are organic and our answer has to be no. BUT 
On our farm we grow a little bit differently than many other greenhouses. We grow without pesticides. In our growing we don’t use incecticides we use good bugs to eat bad bugs. I think one of my pictures is R rated lady bugs. We don’t use fungisides unless they are certified organic and herbicides kill our plants. A couple of years ago we lost our tomato crop to herbicide that ran off into our water system. We now have charcoal filters to get rid of the garbage that may get into our water. We want our kids to eat off of our plants and never worry. As well none of our seed is genetically engeniered. All of our seed comes from the Netherlands where most greenhouse seed comes from. The reason we are not organic is we still use elemental fertilizer. We send water samples away, get them back and add in exactly what the plant needs to grow, right down to the trace nutrients. Plants need sunshine, water and nutrients to grow. 
Having the greenhouse we get a longer growing season. In Alberta we have winter 6 months of the year. Our plants are seeded in Novemer at a propagating greenhouse in BC, we get them in January start picking cucumbers in February, baby tomatoes in March, and large tomatoes and peppers in April. We pick right through until the end of November when we shut down our greenhouse, clean it out, let a crop of bad bugs hatch and starve and start all over in January again. It is so much fun to have a huge garden in our back yard to make great salads 10 months out of the year!
Another thing we have done this year is all of our scratch and dent produce we have taken to a local resteraunt to be preserved as pickles or salsa. It’s all of the little value added things that make our farm work. 
One thing I say to each customer everytime they leave our booth is we stand behind our product 100% if you’re not happy we’re not happy and let us know. I also say Thank you for supporting our farm. Without our customers we wouldn’t have a farm