We'll be posting "Letters from Home" (sent to Topsy retirees) periodically. Thanks for reading.  Hi Chris, Dianne, and Don This is certainly a challenging time. We’ve cancelled public events until the end of May and will reassess then. We may lose the whole season. Retail sales have slowed dramatically, although yarn is still selling. Knitting is a popular isolation activity, apparently. We can apply for some of the subsidy programs but that will take a while to kick in. Leah is on top of this thank goodness, and the lack of visitors is giving her a chance to catch up on all the accounting. She is very much looking forward to the day when she can get back out onto...

The Ice House history is an interesting one. Before electricity came to the Island during WWII, farmers who milked cows had a dilemma. They had to keep the milk cool before hauling it by horse and buggy or wagon to one of the two Island cheese factories. Our farming predecessors cut lake ice in the winter in big blocks and stored it in the small building, packed with sawdust to keep the milk cold as the ice melted. When we took over the farm in 1971, the old ice house with its dirt floor was showing its age. It had become just a place to store stuff too good to throw out. Needing a work shop for machine repair, we poured...

Alice, Bill, David, Ian and Randi purchased the farm on the northwest corner of Amherst Island on December 31st, 1971. Seeking a different lifestyle, we formed a commune called Headlands Community. We planned to tear down the old barn to build a geodesic dome, move in, sell the farmhouse, and pay off the mortgage.

Topsy Farms wanted a dry stone wall, so we invited Dry Stone Canada to hold its annual festival here on the farm this past September. The plan: to harvest stones from our farmland to build a functional barnyard wall. Field stones are a staple of modern, urban landscaping. Field stones are a challenge in […]

Farm volunteers make a huge difference in the workload at Topsy Farms. This is particularly so during the lambing season, when we welcome so many visitors. (There were 1156 this year in 22 days.) Their task is to ensure every person who comes has a chance to learn and to enjoy. They also need to […]

My first memory of bee keeping is hazy. Here’s my father pulling a frame from a brood box perhaps in 1948 – the year that we left our farm in PEI. I’m sure that I would have been underfoot during the extraction. Dad didn’t have bees in Ontario, as there was a mountain of work […]

This is the story of how an old granary transformed into our shearing floor – recycling on a grand scale. In the late ‘80’s, our rapidly growing sheep farm needed a proper shearing floor area. Our sheep deserve the top quality shearers; for efficiency, the workers need an adequate setup. Our farmers investigated other Canadian […]

What folks become adoptive parents for our vulnerable babies – and what does that mean? We birth a large number of lambs on pasture every year (nearly 1400 in the past couple of years). With all those babies, there are inevitably troubles. We ‘rescue’ from our own flock those who just won’t thrive: • Smallest […]

We had a tractor fire in one of our old Allis-Chalmers, but we were lucky. We narrowly missed burning down our workshop. A huge cloud of smoke, then flames, shot up from the workshop as the ewe lambs and farmers moved down the road towards the barn. Will stashed the sheep; Christopher moved vehicles; Kyle […]

About 25 Snowy Owls are on Amherst Island, mid-January, 2018. You will find a Snowy Owl by open fields, sometimes on the ground; other times perched up high. Most often people sight them at the Township Roads office on the Stella Forty Foot, at the Bird Sanctuary on the south east corner of the Island, […]