We started Godfrey Brownell Vineyards in 1998. Fourteen of its sixty acres are plantred for wines and twenty-five acres have been set aside with TLC support for conservation purposes and are run as a perpetual harvest woodlot; this includes all of the support lands for the Glenora Creek as it passes through our land on its way to the Koksilah River. Eventually we will have about twenty acres of grapes here, eight acres of olives and seven acres of mixed farming plus space for our small village for processing.

At Basking Turtle, our second vineyard up on Mount Prevost, ten acres were fenced and planted three years ago and again there is a protect area for the Averill Creekrepresenting about ten of the forty-five acres. The other twenty-five acres will be given over to a blackberry vineyard and mixed farming.

You will notice lots of "weeds" and compost piles on both properties. Our philosophy is multiculturalism for plants and fauna. Even the lowly broom and dock have a role. We do referee and we do feed our friends but we never scour with herbicides or pesticides. In a richly varied environment, the invisible diversity is far greater than the visible diversity. Monocultures, in our experience, encourage frentic efforts to maintain control and breed their own demise.

It is not our intent to ever make more than 4,800 cases of wine a year, from our 105 acres. Both farms have natural watercourses on them and so forty percent of the land is given over to protecting those waterways and salmon and the many species found naturally in this habitat. This still leaves us room to experiment with other crops and habitat development. Our two current major experiments are growing olives and evaluating the benefits of herb cover crops in the reduction of powdery mildew in the vineyard. On the new farm, we will be investigating the design and structure of blackberry vineyards on non-irrigated hillsides.