Nourishing Circles Food Collective

When you say yes to Nourishing Circles, it isn't only Nourishing Circles you're saying yes to.

Our products need berries.

Onions. Garlic. Peppers. Herbs. Honey. Maple. Mustard seed.

And as we grow, we're staying fiercely committed to finding opportunities to purchase those ingredients from smaller growers.

So yes, after three days of talking about relationships, I'm going to shamelessly ask you to buy the jar. 😉

Because every time you say yes to Nourishing Circles, it gives us another opportunity to say yes to a farmer.

Already on board? Tell us where you're shopping! 💙

📍 Masstown Butcher Shop
📍 Sterling's Truro
📍 Uprooted Market & cafe
📍 Noggins Corner Farm
📍 Arthur's Urban Market Halifax
📍 Ebbett's Tatamagouche
📍 Whistleberry Market & Cafe
📍 Brook Village Grocer cape breton

And if you're extra committed to the mission and you spot our shelf looking a little lonely, send me a message. 😉

I'm still a one-woman show, and I genuinely love hearing from you when it's time for a restock.

You help me keep the shelves full and that helps me keep saying yes to farmers.

Weaving a collaborative tapestry,

Tawny

This is what relationship looks like.

Today we picked up onions, garlic and peppers from Amy at Amy | Snowy River Farms .

They're ingredients, yes.

But they're also the result of someone's soil, labour, knowledge, risk and growing season.

And as Nourishing Circles grows, I'm becoming more interested in a different kind of question:

What could a small farm grow if they knew someone was waiting to buy it?

Because I don't just want our growth to mean buying more ingredients.

I want it to mean more opportunities to say yes to small and medium-sized farms.

More conversations before planting. More opportunities to plan together. More of our purchasing dollars going back into the hands of the people growing food here.

Today, it happens to look like a whole lot of beautiful onions, garlic and peppers.

But really?

It looks like relationship.

Weaving a collaborative tapestry,
Tawny

There are a lot of questions behind growing food.

Long before food reaches a market table, grocery shelf or someone's kitchen, a farmer has already made countless decisions.

Am I going to use a spray on this crop? If I don't, how will I manage weeds?

How will I monitor insects and pests? What's my plan if I find a problem?

How am I managing this piece of land for the future? Are there competing trees or vegetation to think about? Predators to consider?

What growing practices make sense for this particular piece of land and what I'm trying to accomplish?

How might my choices affect the soil, water and ecosystem around me?

And maybe my favourite:

What will I be most proud of about the way I grew this food?

These are questions I ask myself about the land I steward and they're often quietly running through my mind when I'm choosing the food and ingredients I buy.

Because agriculture is complicated.

Different land. Different crops. Different pressures. Different goals.

Good farming can look different from one piece of land to the next.

A label can tell us something.

But a relationship can tell us so much more.

Weaving a collaborative tapestry,

Tawny

Why does spray-free matter so much to me?

For me, this one is personal.

In 2011, after being very sick for a long time, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and pernicious anemia. As I learned how to live well in my own body, I also began paying much closer attention to food.

I learned that my body can be incredibly sensitive to certain residues on food. One of the ways it lets me know is pretty unmistakable — my mouth breaks out in painful canker sores.

So I started asking more questions.

Where was my food grown?
Who grew it?
What did they use on the land?
How did they manage weeds and pests?
And what did all those different labels actually mean?

Eventually, my curiosity about food and farming became big enough that I went back to college to study agriculture.

And one of the most important things agriculture taught me was this:

There is no single story about farming.

Farmers make incredibly complex decisions based on their land, their crops, weather, pests, economics, equipment, labour and the realities of trying to make a living growing food.

For me personally, though, choosing food grown without sprays whenever I reasonably can became important.

That's one of the reasons I care so much about knowing the people who grow the food that becomes Nourishing Circles products.

Our wild blueberries aren't anonymous ingredients.

I know the field.
I know the farmer.
I can ask questions.
And I can tell you the answers.

That's what spray-free means to me.

Not judgement.

Relationship. Knowledge. Choice.

And really, that's what I hope for all of us when it comes to food.

Whatever farm you're buying from, get to know the people growing your food. Ask questions. Learn about their practices. Understand their choices, and make the choices that feel right for you and your family.

Choose farmers. Choose relationship. Good food grows from there. 💙

Weaving a collaborative tapestry,

Tawny

We keep getting asked the same question:
"Why are you moving?"

BC is the most expensive province to farm, with the most expensive prices for land.
Farm land on Vancouver Island currently exceeds around $100,000 per acre when there is a house on that land, which means a 20 acre property costs over 2 million dollars. With a minimum down payment that brings the mortgage to approximately $10,000 per month. There is interest on top of that, meaning that same farmer would be paying approximately $3.9 mil - $4.6 mil in total by the time that mortgage loan is paid off.
That dollar amount doesn't include utilities, food, insurance, vehicles, gas, repairs, loss, fencing, startup costs, property tax, seed, livestock, feed, vet bills, interest, or property tax.

If that farmer paying $10,000 per month mortgage has one bad month, one bad week, one bad day, they could lose everything.
Their house, their animals, their belongings, and the dream that they worked so hard to keep afloat.

The reality is, young farmers are becoming more and more unable to purchase farm land in BC.
Farm land is disappearing into the shadows and once it's gone it is so hard to get back. When farmers age out and retire they cannot afford to retire without selling their land, and the younger generations cannot afford to buy it.

Every time you buy produce or meat at the grocery store, that store you buy it from is making more than the farmer who grew it while working in the hot sun, rain, wind and snow.
Convenience comes at a cost, and farmers are paying the price.
When farmers can't afford farm land it severely threatens food security making communities dependent on vulnerable ferry or shipping routes and accelerates the loss of active agriculture and shifts land use towards luxury estates rather than food production.

Choosing to buy local meat and produce is a direct investment in the resilience of your own community. Every dollar spent at a neighborhood farm stand or local butcher stays nearby, directly supporting the families who brave the elements, high land costs, and grueling hours to put food on your table. Beyond strengthening local food security, choosing local means enjoying fresher, higher quality produce harvested at peak ripeness and meat raised with care and transparency. When you cut out the long supply chains and middlemen, you do more than just feed your family better food. You help ensure that local agriculture remains a living, breathing reality rather than a memory.

Nothing changes if nothing changes, and staying put means watching our dream get swallowed by numbers that simply don't add up enough to allow us to be happy and enjoy the life we worked so hard to create.
Moving isn't about giving up on our passion, it’s about choosing a path where a farm can actually survive, thrive, and feed people without being one bad month away from losing it all. We love this community, but to keep growing food for the future, we have to plant our roots on different soil so we can properly flourish and thrive long term. It wasn't an easy decision to move 6000km away, but it is the best decision for us and our animals long term to ensure we will always have a home.

- Celina & Nick

Yesterday I was reminded that we are never too small to make a difference.

While I was at Uprooted Market & Cafe , an older woman came in with her son for coffee and lunch. She was unsteady on her feet, and while her son was getting her coffee, another woman noticed her struggling.

She stopped.

Put down what she was doing, offered her strength, helped her to a table and stayed for a moment to talk with her.

It was such a simple act.And it brought tears to my eyes and my son was watching.

Later, the older woman came over to speak with me. She had been listening to us at our table moving wild blueberries.

She told me that in the early 1980s she began advocating for clean food. For decades she heard versions of the same thing:

What difference do you really think one person can make?

She never believed them. She believed one person making one better choice mattered.

She told me she doesn't have the same fight in her these days. So now one of the ways she continues that work is by choosing where she spends her money.

She asks her son to bring her to places like Uprooted.

She has her coffee there.
She eats her lunch there.
She shops there.

Because supporting a small business that supports small producers is something she can still do.

She had been sitting quietly with her son listening while I talked with people about our food, the farms we work with, why those relationships matter to me, and why I believe so deeply in building a healthier food system from the ground up.

She wanted me to know that she saw the work and that it mattered.

We both got a little teary because I got to tell her something too.

I was grateful for her son.

Because while she was watching me carry forward a little piece of something she started fighting for more than forty years ago, my son was watching hers.

Watching a son make time for his mother. Watching a stranger stop to help. Watching people choose to care for one another. Watching where we spend our dollars become an act of stewardship.

Maybe that's how change actually happens.

Not always through enormous acts.

Sometimes it's a coffee. A hand offered to a stranger. A farmer choosing another small farm. A son taking his mother for lunch. A woman who started advocating forty years ago choosing to keep voting with her dollars and a ten-year-old quietly watching all of it.

Never underestimate the difference one person making one good choice can make.

Sometimes those choices ripple farther than we'll ever get to see.

Weaving a collaborative tapestry,
Tawny

Do you know Emma? 💙

If you see her, give her a little extra encouragement today. And if you know anyone on the Uprooted Market & Cafe , give them a pat on the back too.

Stores like this are such important allies to small producers. We can't be everywhere seven days a week and without independent shops willing to make space for our food, tell our stories, and connect us with their customers, small producers simply couldn't thrive the way we do.

There aren't enough words to say thank you to Emma and this whole team for welcoming us in. 🫐

And today is a special one the very last day of our fresh wild blueberry pick from Balmy Acres Farm for the season!

🫐 1 lb containers are here until they're gone
🫐 More 5 lb freezer boxes will be coming
🌱 Our berries are grown without chemical sprays from start to finish — no herbicides or pesticides are applied to the field during the growing cycle.

We're also here sampling today! Come say hello and try our wild blueberry preserve, salad dressing, and meat marinade — all three are carried right here at Uprooted year-round, tucked in beside some pretty wonderful local cheeses.

Good food needs farmers. Farmers and small producers need good stores. And good stores need communities that choose to support them.

That's the circle.

Weaving a collaborative tapestry,

Tawny

Wild blueberry season tastes really, really good at Ebbett's Meadow Brook Farm 🫐💙

We’ve basically decided the theme is: what can we put wild blueberries on next?

🥩 Pork tenderloin, roasts and skewers begging for a drizzle of our wild blueberry marinade.
🥞 Beautiful spelt flour + fresh berries = wild blueberry spelt pancakes tomorrow morning.
🍞 Wild Roots sourdough starter + berries tucked into the freezer = sourdough wild blueberry muffins or blueberry loaf somewhere in your delicious future.

And for right now? Free butterscotch biscotti samples with our wild blueberry preserve while supplies last. 🤤

The 1 lb fresh Balmy Acres Farm spray-free wild blueberries are moving like hotcakes, and we’ve got 5 lb boxes for the pie makers, bakers, freezers and serious blueberry people.

We’re here for the day saying hello — and Caden, our resident rock star, has even set up his artwork thanks to the beautiful support of our local grocer. 💙

There is something pretty special about watching people taste a wild blueberry and seeing the reaction — whether it brings back a memory, it’s something they wait for every summer, or they’re experiencing wild blueberry season for the very first time.

Come hungry. Come say hi. Come show some local love.

Wild blueberry season is happening right now in Tatamagouche. 🫐