Two EE's Organic Produce

The name goes back to before the Second World War, when Emil and Elizabeth Kowalski worked this land as a dairy farm and roadside stand and made a name out of the first initials of their own. The bus stop on the highway outside was called the Two EE's.

In 1960 the farm passed to Henk Schoen, a young horticulturist trained as a florist in the Netherlands, and his wife Jenny. They decided the future was in fruit and vegetables rather than flowers, sold the cows, and brought in bees and chickens instead. Henk had been trained to use the chemical fertilisers and pesticides that came out of the war years, and after an illness he was certain had been caused by them, he set out to grow without them. There was nobody to ask for advice in the 1960s. He worked it out by trial and error, trying cottonseed meal, fishmeal and blood and bone meal until the soil came round.

In November 2000 the family took on twenty-five more acres nearby and called it Two EE's Organic Produce. Henk's grandson Justin Vanderploeg runs it and lives on the property with his wife Jackie and their three children. What were grassy fields in the spring of 2001 have been certified organic by the Fraser Valley Organic Producers Association since 2004.

Justin farms the way he was taught, having never worked any other way: crop rotation, cover cropping, compost and mulch, alfalfa meal where the soil asks for it, and weeds pulled by hand.