In terms of what we do here, we work very hard to be stewards of the land. That’s what Murry Johnston and his wife Wendy Hogarth believe, that we are here just to protect the land for future generations. So their mandate is to leave as few footprints as possible, we try very very hard not to threaten the animals the live here and all of this environment contributes to the quality of what we grow. Cranberries, like the acidity of a wetland environment so if we start messing with that we could be compromising our agricultural product.

We have a number of sources of water for the Cranberry Marshes, this whole area, Muskoka Lakes, is just massive wetlands. For the old marsh which is just over here, the source of the water is primarily Borneman’s Pond, which is fed by Medora Lake which is fed by Concession Lake. Over on the south marsh the water source is little Orville Lake and the east marsh, it ’s a whole bunch of wetlands and I’m not quite sure what the source is.

In terms of protection of the water ways and the water resources, we have 27 acres under cultivation supported by a land mass of roughly 325 acres. So a large amount of waterways are actually on the property. The lakes are uninhabited by humans, some of the lakes so in terms of controlling the water safety and the quality there’s nobody there other than the animals.

Some of the species that live on the property are: moose because they’re the biggest ones, and white tailed dear. We have beavers and fox, hog nose snake, blanding turtles, snapper turtles, painted turtles, blue herons, every once in a while, about every four or five years we have sandhill cranes, we have barred owls and this is actually one of the fun aspects to the job, as soon as we see something - oh yeah there’s wolves here! As soon as we see something, we’re all out taking photographs and checking things out, telling everybody else and sharing our pleasure in where we live and what we do.