Our Culinary Farm
Our Culinary Farm recognizes and honours the traditional and unceded territory of several Mi’kmaq First Nations. The first farmers, the Mi’kmaq people, have lived on PEI for thousands of years.
Every day our love of sustainable farming nourishes our soil, fills our harvest baskets and inspires our menu. We’re proud of the tireless efforts of our farm team and the more than 200 different fruits and vegetables we produce every year. Our fantastic house salad features more than 50 different sustainably grown greens, tender shoots, leaves, herbs, and flowers every night!
A Farm First
The Inn at Bay Fortune is a farm first. We grow what we serve yet harvest far more than impeccable produce from our soil. Our Culinary Farm led by Farmer Kevin Petrie encompasses 8 fertile acres, multiple herb gardens, various permanent farm beds, 5 greenhouses, a small orchard and an ever-growing knowledge of our own unique eco-system.
Unique Terroir
As our farm has matured our own unique terroir has emerged. You can sense the vitality as you wander the rows, you can smell the primal health of the earth, you can see it in the plants. Best of all, you can taste it. Subtle at first but gaining strength with time, we’ve developed our own particular flavour. It’s something more than ripeness or freshness. It’s our own terroir and it’s become powerful enough to add real intensity to our farm’s flavours.
Global food system
There are many types of farms on Prince Edward Island, all part of an intricate global food system. Our culinary farm shares the landscape with large commercial mono-culture farms, smaller market-garden farms, single-family subsistence farms, vineyards, orchards, dairy farms, livestock farms even fish farms. Each has an integrity of its own, yet our focus is particularly unique and challenging.
Flavour First
As a restaurant with its own farm were naturally focused on flavour. Since our ingredients are harvested perfectly ripe and served impeccably fresh they obviously taste amazing. Our harvest is not chemically encouraged or picked under-ripe just to survive an arduous trip to market. But there’s a lot more to learn about flavour and a lot more to a farm than just its harvest.
Regenerative Agriculture
As farmers we understand that our first responsibility is to our soil, to the earth around us. We naturally focus on the life of our plants, but they come and go while the life of the soil endures. We’re inspired by the circle of life: the ongoing connection between healthy soil, a healthy environment and healthy, happy humans. We know that the more nutritious an ingredient is the better it tastes and the better the earth it came from. Our systems continuously strengthen the incredibly diverse and productive microorganisms within our soil. Organic is just our starting line, with one foot planted in the past and another firmly in the future we deploy a wide array of fascinating natural techniques to ensure long-term vitality.
Our Farming Practices
Permanent Raised Beds | Drainage Paths | Edible Multi Species Cover Crops | Occultation | Non-Destructive Soil Care | Low-Till Systems | Companion Planting| Beehives & Pollinator Beds | Sequential Planting | Crop Rotation | Mushroom Patch | Permanent Perennial Production Beds | Collaborative Farm Projects
Lifecycle Harvesting
One of the most fascinating aspects of culinary farming is being a part of the plants life from start to finish. We learn respect from the hard work of nurturing the seed to harvest but we also find creative inspiration and new flavours every step of the way. So many of our plants are unexpectedly delicious throughout their life cycle offering many distinct flavours and textures as they grow, often from different parts of the plant than traditionally harvested or long after the traditional crop has been harvested. Most importantly we’ve learned to instinctively regard our ingredients as alive, not static or dead.
Diversity
One of our farms purposes is to offer our chefs and guests as many different ingredients and flavours as possible. We grow multiple varietals of every vegetable imaginable, every herb we can source and as many types as possible. The obvious and the obscure. Hundreds of different plants every season and new ones every year. Our chefs love creating with new flavours while our guests appreciate the amazing variety and the many unique ingredients they’ve never encountered before. Our farm benefits from the diversity since each plant brings its own particular strengths to our ever-growing ecosystem.
Innovation
We are a living laboratory not limited by normal farming constraints. Our continuous improvement and eyes-open approach encourages experimentation. The overwhelming diversity around us is an ever-present reminder that there’s always a better way. Every season we improve what we already do. Every year we add a laundry list of new plants to the mix and always introduce a new challenge. An early season herb house, tender microgreens and seed sprouts, cultivated mushrooms, egg-laying chickens, a windmill, solar power grid, closed-loop mariponic systems producing plants from living fish effluent, the list goes on!
Education
Our farm gives us far more than food, each and every day we learn more and more from our soil. In turn we share that knowledge every way we can. It’s part of our DNA. A day on our farm begins with the entire chef’s brigade and their daily Farm Project. Our farmer leads the way and we genuinely learn something daily. In turn 10 cooks can get a lot done in one hour. This shared time of toil and triumph has inspired many a budding career. As the sun slips away the day ends with a well-attended farm tour as our guests spend an hour absorbing the intricacies of culinary farming. Their conversation continues into the evening as our farm feeds their body, mind and soul.