Belly rumblings and brain ramblings
The children visited the farmers’ market today. They got to ask the farmers questions, as well as buy a few items to make a salad.
A variety of greens and mushrooms from the farmers’ market, an assortment of herbs picked from the garden, freshly grated parmesean cheese, and black locust flower blossoms foraged from Riverdale park: Delicious!
Today I ordered coyote urine off the Internet and then went home to harvest worm poo from my worm bin. Well, more like worm diarrhea because I haven’t harvested castings in awhile.
Driving up to the farm
I had a most relaxing and wonderful time in awhile, having the opportunity to get away for a night to a mutual friend’s farm. Not to mention fun! After work on Saturday, Steven and I drove (in Liz’s car) to Tony’s farm Wheelbarrow Farm. Located in Sunderland, just north of Uxbridge, settled in the rolling and gently slopping hills of Ontario’s Greenbelt. Just amazingly fertile and beautiful country. I had been there last year, the first year that Tony was farming, but in July when everything was in bloom and the place was just bursting with greens, leaves, peas, root vegetables and flowers.
People meandering in around the hoop house
Not so much the case in May, but you could see how everything was just about to go in full harvest mode. I was really happy to walk around the premises and see what Tony has in store for this year’s harvest, especially since we got a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) this year for the first time ever. From June to October I will be getting a mixed ‘basket’ of organic vegetables and other goodies from what I have gleamed.
Tony’s farm is exemplary of a ‘mixed-farm’, and perhaps the closest thing I have seen that comes close to my grade 6 project in which I had to map out my dream farm (It was extensive and elaborate. I will have to find it so I can scan and post it in the future). On ten acres Tony, with the help of his interns, brother Chris and father Ken, is growing a wide array and variety of greens, root vegetables, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, peas, beans, corn(!), garlic, leeks, raspberries, strawberries, garlic, kiwi berries(!) and other things I can’t remember. Moreover, he’s also just recently started cultivating a fruit orchard (apples and peaches?!), nut orchard (”ready for 2012!”) and other endeavours that will certainly pay off in the future, hopefully.
Not to mention, Tony is raising heritage Berkshire pigs and silkie chickens.
Tony had invited a bunch of us to stay over for the weekend, a good mix of city and farmer folk. Some of us helped with some weeding and extending the pig pen. We fed the pigs and toured the premises marveling over the land. 
I spent some time trying to catch the silkie chickens and holding them. A bunch of us made dinner (salad from the farm, jerk chicken made by Steven, Guinness-coke marinated ribs made by Andrew, pickled eggs from Adrian, delicious vegan stir fry rice noodle dish made by Long, veggie burgers, grilled asparagus and roast sweet potatoes) and we ate, drinking laughing and conversing by the fire until past 1 am.
Liz and I managed to make ’sbananas’ as Tony calls them (chocolate stuffed
bananas made by slitting the fruit and peel) late at night and we cautiously ate the steaming fruit full of velvety melted chocolate (we BBQ-ed them) with our bare hands (except for Liz who somehow got a hold of a spoon).
The next day, after a breakfast of raspberry chocolate pancakes and a LOT of coffee, and cleaning, we went to visit the Alpacas next door.
Despite being sneezed and snotted on by one back in November at the Royal Agricultural Fair, I had no reservation getting close to them. They were so goofy looking with their poofy hair-dos and ‘leg warmers’. There are no photos, but they looked funny as they simultaneously looked up at us curiously, their long necks stretched out and floppy fuzzy hair cuts.
One of them was particularly friendly. And only gently nibbled on our hands when we fed him/her grass and petted its head.
We stopped for fried pickles on our way home, as per tradition.
After a short jaunt in Uxbridge, we decided to stop in to Richters before driving back to Toronto, basically a gardener’s wet dream with its massive greenhouse and variety of plants, and despite being crammed in the car with people and stuff, Liz and I got fig plants, and Kristin got a passion flower. The drive back was also fantastic and I felt particularly privileged to witness some of best agricultural land in the world. It just blows my mind, what can be grown not far from the city, but mostly also, that most people in Toronto or those living in urban centres do not get to see where or how food grows…
It was hard to go back to the city.
I threw an old and ragged looking black towel over my seedlings outside for the night as the temperature is supposed to be dipping below zero degrees celsius.
This giant towel was originally given to us by our landlord to use to cover our bedroom window at night to block the light in the alley that would come streaming in whenever activated by the late night revellers next door. But that’s never been a problem so we’ve had this towel kicking around.
Now it’s doing frost protection duty for my various tender greens and carrots that are just popping through the soil.
I haven’t had a chance to write about two Sundays ago, even though I keep meaning to. It was a jammed packed 12 hours!
Dave, fellow Dig In-er, picked me up at the Peterborough bus station and together we drove to Douro-Dummer, where this tri-country youth food sovereignty conference was taking place. The conference was held at this lovely cottage country inn on the water. Delegates from Canada, Jamaica and Nicaragua were coming together for a week to work on developing a collaborative policy paper, with both a global north and south perspective, to present to their respective governments on how to tackle food security issues in their countries and communities.
This ambitious project put on by Jamaica Self-Help and Horizons of Friendship is exciting, and we were lucky to be invited to do the opening workshop. As someone who is just slowly getting into public speaking and presenting, and who gets terribly, terribly nervous speaking in front of people, especially adults, I had a lot of fun. It definitely helped that Dave was my partner in crime. Our workshop, was an extension of the previous Dig In workshop we put on back in November as well as a nod to the Stomach This youth conference I helped Meal Exchange with back in March. Overall, we seemed to get a really good reception and it was interesting to hear the differing view points from the Jamaican and Nicaraguan in contrast to the Canadian delegates with regards to their visions of what a food sovereign society and community looks like from a local and global perspective. The Jamaican delegates for example had a vision of food sovereignty that included more involvement from the government.
Getting there was just as fun, as I have never heard of Douro-Dummer and have never seen that part of the province, saw my first wild turkey which we almost ran over (the turkey was walking so slow and seemed so unfazed that I think we could have just caught it with our bare hands and little trickery), passed and celebrated the scary 30, 000 mile/kilometre audometre in Dave’s car(nothing happened), “hey, look a unicorn!”, ate pistachio nuts of which many fell into the crooks and crannies of the old vehicle for Dave to find later when he goes on his road trip up North, and Dave is just good company all around.
I await the outcome of the conference and project. Will anything concrete come out of it?
Helen came up to me this week and in her hand she cradled a partially decomposed papery tomatillo husk, a remnant of last year’s harvest.
“It looks like a skeleton,” she murmured, marveling at the yellowed and bone-dry veins of the husk, the supple thin green skin long gone and shrunken in the palm of her hand.
“It does! It’s beautiful, ” I agreed.
“I am going to give it to my mother for mother’s day,” said Helen resolutely as she carefully placed the fragile intricate looking cage into her vest jacket pocket before running out of the garden as the bell rang marking the end of lunch.
Sometimes dinner entails eating half a can of smoked oysters and a bowl of Zoodles. I wonder what sort of cravings I’ll have if I ever get pregnant with child.
I only learned how much adults lack self-awareness.
I have done such a poor job of writing on this thing. I am ashamed because I have no real excuse except my own laziness to blame. I have ideas, experiences and questions in my head that I want to share or allow to develop a bit, like letting a stew simmering slowly on the stove (I love the French word for simmer “mijoter”. For a couple minutes I could not conjure the English word in my head and could only think of the French word), but I never get around to articulating them, and they are forever lost - or perhaps left as a line or two in one of my many notebooks I keep for cross-purposes: my little pocket lime green notebook which is my ‘carry-all’, my three floppy brown “professional” notebooks dedicated to different projects I am currently working on, my regular black notebook in which I write inane and random thoughts and feelings, as well as draw.
I think part of the problem for me is that I am not sure what exactly it is I am trying to convey.
I tend to think of moments, which for whatever reason, touch me in some way. But I am never sure quite why. Although I am sure it is obvious to some.
For example, last evening, Steven and I went out for Vietnamese food at Pho Linh. I had banh cuong, thin rice flour rolls filled with minced pork and mushrooms, with Vietnamese sausage, and nem chua, a pickled and fermented pork roll on the side(actually I ordered two, but the first one rolled onto the floor after one unfortunate bite). Steven had pho bo tai with beef tripe. As I tucked into my banh cuon, every bite with crispy fried onion and fresh coriander leaves, I couldn’t help but feel happy to see Steven digging into his soup with his chopsticks for more pieces of tripe slices to dip in his chili sauce. I felt at ease.
Those simple details and small interactions make me happy.
Sunday passed me an essay from the journal of Culture and Agriculture entitled A Season for Seeds: Notes from a Schoolyard Garden. Laurie Thorpe, chronicles her personal experiences working as a researcher and garden teacher in a Michigan school, with many immigrant, poor and underprivileged students and one which is deemed low performing academically in its district. She discovers that having a garden embedded in the life of the school transforms the school community culture positively and comes to the realization that benefits cannot always be measured by quantitative data and statistics.
We put so much emphasis and skewed importance on numbers and the measurable, and are blinded by what makes us so human, our relationship to nature, our ties to place and locality, our relationships to each other, our connection to community and culture.
Simply I see the garden as a tool (this word is so…reeks of school/communications-speak) that can help shape, form and supplement all different kinds of learning, those that are tangible and intangible. More so, it facilitates learning in a real life and real time kind of way. The science of plants and ecology are not taught in 30 minute experiments in a sterile environment. Gardens are a terrain full of ‘real world’ experiences, where you can control the environmental setting only so much and have to contend with predictable and unpredictable factors. Children have to anticipate and wait months for a good hearty basil harvest from seed to plant to pesto to mouth. And perhaps contend with extremities such as weather damage, a hungry raccoon or a squirrel that likes to dig out plants or people.
I am only just learning how to begin articulating all that I witness, having only been working in the school garden for one season. I anticipate the upcoming growing season and hope to expand on what I hear, see, feel and experience.