Seems like all I’ve been reading lately is depressing, anger-inducing stuff.
I just finished Just Food; more than once my fiance caught me muttering into it’s pages in disgust. Frustration with the short-sighted and narrow-mindedness about food abounds. At times I can’t help but wonder how on earth we will ever turn this mess around.
And then I saw this article on the kitchen table at work. While all of us adults are busy writing and researching and arguing about how to solve the current food crisis and feed the hungry – this little girl is doing it. What a breath of fresh air.
11 year old Katie grew a gigantic cabbage – and with it made 275 meals at a local soup kitchen. That moment made her realize that if she could feed that many people with just one cabbage – she could do a lot more. She has started a number of gardens and with a team of volunteers, many of whom are other kids, has provided 5000 pounds of fresh veg to local soup kitchens.
The great thing about her story is it shows that solving our food problems needn’t be complicated. It is not surprising that it would be a child to cut through all the b.s. She sees the problem for what it is – she doesn’t need to know about the USDA or Agriculture Canada or taxation schemes or farm subsidies or commodity prices or the risks and benefits of international trade. She saw a cabbage in her garden, a soup kitchen full of hungry folks, and drew a straight line between the two. No muss, no fuss. Just simple, uncomplicated inspiration.
She makes me think about our individual circles of influence versus our circles of concern, a concept that’s talked about in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Most of us have a circle of influence that is far smaller than our circle of concern. We spend a lot of time and energy worrying about things in our circle of concern that don’t fall into our circle of influence. That kind of worry is wasteful. Instead, if all of us, like Katie, just focused on doing what we can, where we are, with what we have – we might find that, like Katie, our circle of influence suddenly expands exponentially. She has gone from one, albeit giant, cabbage in her backyard to the pages of People magazine and is filling a lot of bellies along the way.
On the cover of one of the landmark books of the locovore movement, the 100 Mile Diet by Smith and MacKinnon, our favorite local environmentalist David Suzuki boldly proclaims:
“Eating locally isn’t just a fad – it may be one of the most important ways we save ourselves and the planet.”
What a lovely sentiment. I must admit that for me, the warm and fuzzies of the local food moment has been a huge draw.
Like most people I have felt completely overwhelmed by the doom and gloom messages about the peril our planet is currently facing. It seems like ever since the tipping point moment of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, we have all suddenly become consumed with concern for the environment. The slow food movement was alive and well long before good old Al got going, but it seems that was the moment that catapulted what was previously the stuff of scientific crack pots to the realm of accepted public opinion.
For me, the local food movement offered an opportunity to face the problem rather than bury my head in the sand. Rather than feeling overwhelmed, books like the one above offered individuals an opportunity to make concrete change through positive joyful action, one meal at a time. By eating locally we were saving the planet, stickin’ it to the man, big business and those awful agri-industry monsters. Easy peasy, right?
Maybe too easy. read more…
front yard raspberries
Remembrance Day today. A time to remember. The fiance and I took time out today to go to the ceremony on Commercial Drive. Strange to notice how few old boys were there. Like my Pa, many of them have long since passed on and soon there will be none left to tell what they’ve seen. Strangely though, today was different for me because suddenly, at 28 years old, many of my friends and former classmates are now veterans. That fact is discordant with even my own notion of what a veteran looks like – the shaky old fellow back in his old uniform wiping away tears at the service – but now the veterans are the guys I drank beer with in university. Odd and sad in a new way. It was, however, lovely to hear the squeals and laugher of children playing on the nearby playground during the moment of silence. A nice reminder of why all those men and women make the sacrifices that they do.
As I was waiting for my ride to the service I poked about the garden and was shocked to discover heaps and heaps of raspberries on my canes along the neighbour’s fence. They were absolutely heavy with fruit. November 11th!! I couldn’t believe it. And not only my “Fall Gold” were fruiting – three of my six plants had beautiful berries on them. At this time of year you can easily pay 5 dollars or more for a tiny handful at the market, so I felt like a complete glutton, but what a treat! Despite the miserable weather they were sweet and juicy and tender. What bliss.
Tonight we are having family over for dinner of roasted beet and goat cheese salad, roast chicken and potatoes and butter and brown sugar carrots. As I was cleaning the carrots I couldn’t help but think about the first harvest back in the spring. My family was over and I was pulling carrots over beers in the backyard. I pulled out a handful and exclaimed – Look at how straight they are!! Whoo! To which my sister rolled her eyes and made some cheeky remark about the obviousness of my statement. And I said – Spoken like someone who’s never tried to grow carrots!
That’s the great thing about the garden. Here I am, mid-November, pulling and washing carrots from the front yard marveling at the fact that they are actually straight. The garden makes you realize that many of the things we take for granted – like straight carrots or fresh raspberries in November – really are minor miracles.
Great news on the backyard chicken front – Vancouver’s draft hen bylaw is ready for public input!
Check out the bylaw and some recommendations for tweaking from farm folk city folk here.
We can’t wait. The fiance slaved away in the worst heat of summer on our backyard chicken coop / garden shed. It has four lovely laying boxes, a great big potting area for me, and a green roof that will be full of strawberries come June!
Already the ladies in my office are calling dibs on any extra eggs, and the young girl next door has already offered to come hen-sit when we go on vacation. I am doing my best to figure out where we can get only 4 heritage breed chickens. I figure if you’re going to have your own chickens in the city you really should have some that will lay lovely coloured eggs, right? Isn’t that half the fun?
Tonight the fiance is taking me out for my birthday dinner at Raincity Grill. We have never been disappointed with the food or the service, and they do a lovely job of promoting local farms. Everything is seasonal and during the annual Dine Out Vancouver they even had a 100 mile diet menu. It was to die for.
Already this evening we have been drooling over the menu online . . . The fiance is thinking lamb but I have my eye on the bison, maybe with biodynamic greens, beet and goat cheese salad. Yum. They have a spectacular wine list as well. The last time we were there we discovered Blasted Church out of Okanagan Falls, BC and their gewurtz. Yum.
We certainly have worked up an appetite. Being Saturday we had our “practical” master gardener class. Which usually means doing something in the pouring rain, and today was no exception. We spent the better part of the afternoon pruning – and I cut down a tree!! With a hand saw! It was totally crazy and absolutely exhausting. But more on that later.
There is a beautiful piece of bison downtown with my name on it!
a lovely breaky of homegrown herby roast potatoes and fresh local eggs
If you’re into the local food movement or the politics of food in general, you’ve probably heard the famous Wendell Berry quote: “Eating is an agricultural act”.
The simple question “What’s for dinner?” has implications far beyond our dinner plate. The popular success of books like Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food have brought the issue to the mainstream. When even Oprah’s talking about it, you know it must be Big.
More and more regular people are starting to realize that what they put on their dinner table has the ability to send a powerful message, or a pathetic one. Do we choose real food as Pollan suggests, or are we eating fake food? Have our choices supported a small family farm or a huge international conglomerate? How far has our food travelled? Was it grown sustainably? Did the animal live a short, miserable, unhealthy life? Did our organic mixed greens come all the way from Arizona in a refrigerated truck, creating heaps of pollution on the way?
It’s easy to get confused, and give up. But we can’t. Because Berry is right. Eating IS an agricultural act. Our collective choices in our kitchen impact farm land and the environment just as much as the choices the farmer makes. One thing the slow food movement emphasizes is that as consumers, we need to realize that really – we are co-producers.
Which is why I garden and why a recent article in the Vancouver Courier made me sick to my stomach. read more…
fallen kale leaves
When the fiance and I started our Master Organic Gardener certification class, we were told that what we were about to learn was going to be a change of perspective more than anything. A paradigm shift. We’ve learned a lot about gardening; how to test our soil, understand the biology and chemistry of soil vitality and how to make compost tea. But at the end of the day, the most important lesson I will take away from all of this is how to see my garden in a completely different light.
Now don’t get me wrong – we were already practicing organic horticulture before we dove headfirst into this class. I certainly wasn’t running around with Roundup in my hip-holster. No sir. But boy oh boy have I had some revelations. The biggest one being – the best way to a fantastic organic garden is to not garden so much! See – told ya, wrap your head around that!
spent leaves
fall rye & crimson clover
Another gorgeous fall morning. November first, I can’t believe it! We have had some rainy weather this past week or so and one of our first proper fall storms. Here in Vancouver we have typically mild, but yucky winter weather. On Friday we had one of those winter storms where you get the wind blowing in such a way that an umbrella will do you no good; the rain falls sideways.
That’s ok though. My cover crops need the rain. And now the sun is out they are sure to take off today.
As you can imagine, growing a yard full of vegetables has its draw backs. There are lots of biennial and over-wintering veg – garlic, onions, winter greens, the kales and cabbages . . . But most veggies are usually grown as annuals which means lots of big bare brown patches of earth in the yard come fall.
This is a problem for a number of reasons. The fact that it’s pretty boring and ugly is probably the first to come to my neighbours’ minds . . . But for me I think – Eek! Unprotected soil!! read more…
materials for sheet composting: browns
This fall the fiance and I have been on a new gardening adventure – we’re in the process of becoming certified as Organic Master Gardeners through SOUL and Gaia College. So far it has knocked my socks off. Spending 6 hours in “school” a week might seem like a bit much on top of a full time job and life, but it has been well worth the time. We have surprised ourselves not only with how much there is to know, but even more by how much knowledge we’ve already gained through our reading and endless hours in the garden.
The program is split between evening in-class lectures and Saturday afternoons in the garden. Our last Saturday was spent in the pouring rain learning how to compost and picking worms (you know you’re a hard core gardener when). Thankfully today, halloween, the sun came out for us for our garden bed installation class.
Sheet composting is the lazy lady’s way of installing a garden bed. My goodness if I had known about this before we ripped out the lawn . . . I can’t help but shake my head at how much digging I could have saved my poor little arms. Basically rather than going to the bother of ripping up the lawn or making a pile of compost in a corner somewhere, you’re killing two birds and making the compost right there where you want the bed. read more…
garlic in the garden
There is only one thing in the garden that rivals my love for tomatoes – garlic! I’ve always loved garlic, nearly any way you can slice it, fry it, bake it – I’m on it. It is delicious AND good for you. Bonus. When I have a cold coming on, my home remedy is a whole bulb of roasted garlic, sweet from the oven. Yum. (If nothing else, no one else will get close enough to me to catch my cold!)
I was absolutely floored when I realized that I could grow garlic at home. I have no idea why I thought it would be difficult or not possible. I didn’t realize until I started reading how little I actually knew about my beloved bulb. I didn’t even know what the plant would look like! Thankfully, garlic is one of the easiest things to grow in the garden. read more…
garden bed preparing for winter
It has been a hectic summer. At the beginning of the season we’d said – this summer we’re just going to take it easy and hang out in the garden. We sure spent a lot of time in the garden, but I’m not sure how well we did on the taking it easy part.
The past month has been spent madly harvesting, canning, drying, preserving, cooking, bagging, freezing and eating the spoils from the garden. It has been incredibly gratifying and completely exhausting. I have one, maybe two, more batches of tomatoes to can and a couple of bags of peppers to string up to dry and that will be the end of it.
It will not be, however, the end of the work in the garden.
If you’re anything like me – by this point in the gardening cycle you’re ready to curl up on the couch with the cat and some knitting and not so much as look at another weed for at least 6 months. Unfortunately this is no time to succumb to the couch. My garden needs my attention for just a little while longer.
