Edwin County Farms is located on the northern slopes of Prince Edward County in the area known locally as Solmesville. The farm covers almost 700 acres, extending southward from the shores of the Bay of Quinte almost two kilometers and encompassing lands that have been cultivated for hundreds of years. The ages-old, hand-built stone walls that border the fields and snake through forests tell the story of early settlers by whose sweat and heartache these lands were first cleared.
The towering oaks and maples that edge these walls speak of an even older tale, one that reminds us of the land’s first stewards: the Haudenosaunee and the Mississauga whose history on these lands is much longer. Coming upon these ancient trees— red oaks, burr oaks, sugar maples, many over a hundred feet tall— it is possible to get a sense of the land as it must have been when it was first wrested from nature. Now, in many of the places where nature has returned to take over, eastern red cedar dominates, growing in thick dark stands where fields have been too long abandoned. Hedgerows of tall ash and oak, hickory and hophornbeam, have become choked with new-comer species such as common buckthorn.
