09/04/2026
"How to Grow on a Rock"
By: Brent Keough
I stopped at Papa’s Farm recently,
and somewhere between the trees,
the soil,
and that little sign hanging there,
I thought about how impossible
this place must have looked
two hundred years ago.
My ancestors came to this island
with no guarantee the land would feed them.
No rich fields waiting to be turned.
No easy soil.
Just rock, wind, salt,
short summers
and the stubborn belief
that somehow,
something could grow here.
And it did.
But first,
they had to learn the land.
They learned where the sun stayed longest.
Where the wind hit hardest.
How to pull stones from the earth
one aching handful at a time.
How to turn scraps into compost,
seaweed into fertilizer,
and a patch of stubborn Newfoundland ground
into enough potatoes, turnip and cabbage
to carry a family through winter.
Think about that.
We talk so much today
about having the right conditions
before we begin.
They had almost none.
They grew anyway.
Maybe that is the inheritance
they left us that we don't talk about enough.
Not the land.
Not the houses.
Not even the names.
The belief that difficult
does not mean impossible.
That sometimes you don't inherit fertile ground.
Sometimes
you inherit rock.
And your job
is to figure out
what can grow there.
For generations,
that knowledge passed quietly
from hand to hand.
When to plant.
When to harvest.
How deep.
How far apart.
What the clouds were saying.
What the frost might do tonight.
Nobody called it expertise.
It was just survival.
A father showing a son.
A mother showing a daughter.
A neighbour leaning over a fence.
And slowly,
an entire culture learned
how to make abundance
out of almost nothing.
But something is happening now.
Those gardens are disappearing.
The old fences are falling.
The root cellars are emptying.
The hands that carried this knowledge
are getting older.
And every time another garden grows over,
we lose more than vegetables.
We lose memory.
We lose a little piece
of the conversation
between this island
and the people who learned
how to live upon it.
That's why places like Papa’s Farm matter.
Because keeping a farm alive here
isn't simply agriculture.
It is preservation.
It is saying
there is still value
in knowing where food comes from.
Still value
in putting your hands into the soil.
Still value
in planting something in spring
with no certainty
except the hope
that autumn will answer.
Papa’s Farm is keeping that conversation going.
Between the old Newfoundland
and the Newfoundland still becoming.
Between the hands
that cleared those first stones
and the hands working the soil today.
And I hope we understand
what a beautiful act of defiance that is.
Because traditions rarely disappear
all at once.
They disappear quietly.
One garden not planted.
One skill not taught.
One story not told.
Until someday
we look around
and realize we no longer remember
how our grandparents survived here.
So today,
standing at Papa’s Farm,
I wasn't only looking at a farm.
I was looking at continuity.
Two hundred years ago,
my ancestors came to an island of rock
and somehow learned
how to make things grow.
And two hundred years later,
there are still people here
putting their hands into that same stubborn earth
and saying,
we haven't forgotten.
Maybe that is what honouring the past really means.
Not preserving it behind glass.
Not turning it into nostalgia.
But taking what they taught us,
putting it back into the ground,
and giving it another season.
Because the greatest tribute
we can give the people who came before us
isn't simply remembering
what they grew.
It is making damn sure
something is still growing.
