While I’ve been laid up, the garden has been going nuts.  Even though I couldn’t get out of bed, the garden gots lots of attention. Before they headed off to Winnipeg, the boys where great about watering the garden while I was stuck in bed.

Today, EB pulled a passle of these wacky Lemon Cucumbers out of the small front patch next to the driveway.

Sitting in the bowl in the sink, you’d almost think they were actual lemons.  At about the size of a hardball, they’re super tasty, and add an interesting colour to the salad.

We sure never had round cucumbers back on the farm when I was a kid.  This plant is plenty prolific, so I’ll be pickling these this year as well.

A bit of serendipity was involved with this one.

While on their way to interview Cam MacDonald in Mt. Pleasant, they passed a small corner store. Taking a peak inside they discovered a very unusual city corner store – packed with local products and oozing country charm.

It’s called the Home Grow-in Grocer, and it’s a place where trust trumps the credit card…

Runs 10:28

Podcast ISBN: 978-1-926758-01-5

photos and podcast © Robert Ouimet & Bigsnit Media 2009

The Home Grow-In Grocer is at 196 West 18th in Vancouver.
The owner Colleen refers to in the interview is Deb Reynolds.

For one thing, it doesn’t get any fresher than this.

I walk out the kitchen door into the side yard.

2 steps away is what I call the Salad Bar – a series of small cedar garden boxes (there are more greens in the garden out back, but these are closest).  It’s packed with a nifty salad mix  that’s been feeding us since May.

2 more steps in the other direction is a medium sized pot at the end of the driveway with lovely little Tumbler variety cherry tomatoes.   (EB thinks this variety isn’t quite as flavourful as some – they definitely aren’t the flavour explosion you get with some cherry tomatoes, but they are still pretty darned tasty.  And prodigious.)

I’ll sometimes throw in a couple of snow peas, they’re 5 steps in the other direction.

Next, a quick wash up and spin dry in the salad spinner.

I sprinkle on a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar, then a bit of olive oil, and crumble with some zingy paillot de chevre (goat cheese) and a bit of fresh ground pepper.

It’s all organic and aside from the cheese (oh, and the oil/vinegar/pepper), travels just a few metres from plot to plate.

Now if the District of North Vancouver would just let me raise a goat or two in my yard…

Today’s tomato harvest from the Pot At The End of the Driveway

Eating fresh vegetables and fruit from your garden – one of the delights of summer in Canada.

James Glaves’ recent post When Times are Hard, Eat Your Yard , and a podcast I’m working on with David Tracey, about urban agriculture, have certainly fueled my on-going quest to convert more of my yard into edible space.

But I do understand that for some people, starting a garden, even a small one, can be intimidating.

I  remember how tentative I was when I planted my first garden, so here are some thoughts to help you enjoy your new gardening adventure.

Lighten Up

I come from a long line of peasants, none of whom set the world of fire with their intellect.  But man could they grow stuff.

For them, it was about survival, plain and simple.  A garden was for growing food.  What I learned from my peasant heritage is this: gardening isn’t hard, and it isn’t serious.

Forget all those codgers who spend hours talking about the finer points of gardening, and who’s plots look like something out of a magazine.

If that’s your bent, great, but that’s not what a garden has to look like.  Experiment, and plant stuff that’s fun, and don’t worry if your rows aren’t straight.

There really isn’t any wrong way of growing food, so have a good time.   I can assure you, whatever you bring in for dinner is going to look like a million bucks on your plate.

Organic. Organic. Organic.

There’s nothing hard about growing food organically.  There’s no mystery about it, and there’s no magic about it.  Sure you’ll have some challenges with bugs and weeds, but the internet is full of great ideas on how to solve those problems.

Whatever you grow will taste amazing.

Plus, organic gardening is super sexy.  It’ll get you laid.  Really.

Use Your Feet and Your Hands

My grandmothers always gardened barefoot.  For one, washing your feet is way easier than cleaning those fancy sneakers.  And if you’re about to crush a small plant underfoot, you’ll feel it before you do any damage.

Walking barefoot in dirt is just plain fun, and even though is sound totally flaky, it connects you to the earth.  You’ll be able to feel how dry or damp it is, how squishy the soil feels, and you might even pull up the odd weed by crimping your toes around those rascals.

(Now, when I mentioned this to EB, she immediately put her Elmer the Safety Elephant hat on a said this could be dangerous.  “Why?” I asked.  “Well, there might be sharp things in there”.   Ok, fair enough.  We once had a lot of broken glass in one of our garden plots, so use your best judgment on this one)

Hand Job

Get a watering can and hand water your garden.

Hand watering accomplishes so many things that once you start, you’ll sell your sprinkler on Craiglist.

For one, there’s very little wasted water when you do it by hand.  You’re in complete control of where it goes and how much goes  there.

You’ll feel like a proper gardener, literally providing nourishment to your plants.

But mostly, hand watering ensures that you spend some quality time with the food you’re growing.

By walking up and down your rows with watering can in hand, what you’re really doing is observing.  Observing what ?  Well, everything that’s going on in your garden. What’s getting eaten by bugs, what’s taking off and what’s ready to be picked. And you’ll learn from all that observation, trust me.  Plus, you’ll see those weeds before they become a problem.

And to be honest, hand watering doesn’t even take that long.

I’m a bit of a type A personality, so I speed water: I have 2 cans, and while I’m sprinkling with one, the other one is filling up.

(It was a real extravagance that I couldn’t afford today but my Haws long reach watering can is like an old friend. I’ve had it for over 20 years and it still looks like new.)

A Few Words about Weeds

A garden should be a place of relaxation as well as a supply of food.  “But what about all that weeding?” says you.

Once your garden takes off, weeding is a thing of the past.  You’ll have so much lovely stuff growing, the weeds won’t have anywhere to grow.

Until you get there, sure, you’ll need to do some weeding, but it’s not as big a deal as those old codgers make it out to be.  Pull them by hand a few at a time (see Hand Job above), particularly after a rain when they’ll come up easily.

It’s incredibly therapeutic, the results are tangible and obvious, unlike almost everything else in our lives.  I once survived a particularly difficult co-worker by calling out their name every time I pulled a weed.

What to do with those weeds ?  After hand-picking weeds from their gardens, my grandmothers would toss the uprooted weeds on the path.  I drop mine in clumps on the driveway or sidewalk, and let them dry up. Then I shake off the dirt, push it back into the garden, and throw the weeds into the compost.

Who You Calling a Hoe ?

My grandmothers had 2 garden implements.  A small hoe and garden fork.

They used that hoe to plant, weed, hill potatoes, scare away crows, kill bugs & rodents and do just about whatever else is needed in the garden.  The plainest, simplest un-sexiest hoe you can imagine really is the gardeners’ miracle tool.  A small blade is better.

The fork  was used to dig up potatoes, and in their large gardens, even wholesale uprooting of carrots and beets, but you’ll be pulling those by hand.   The fork was also used to deep till the garden in the spring.

Read the Directions, Make a Mark, and Rotate

Pretty much all you need to know about tending your garden you can find on the seed packet.  If it says 45 days to maturity, that’s what’s going to happen.  If it says to sow 50 cm apart, that’s the thing to do.  If it says full sun, you can bet whatever you’re planting won’t do well in the shade.

When you first plant your garden, make sure you put some markers to show where the rows are.  One of EB’s friends recently Facebooked her to say she’d gone a little crazy weeding her new garden and had pulled up much of what she planted.  It helps if there’s a little stick that marks your row, at least until the plant start to show themselves better.

I make a map on a piece of paper, writing down what I planted, the variety and when.  I usually grow a few varieties of things like carrots and parsley, and I totally forget what they are immediately after planting.  So now, when people come over and ask me important garden questions, like “What type of carrot is this ?”, instead of answering “good”, I can look it up on my map and answer them, proper like.

The map also helps your ‘next year’ garden. You want to rotate your plantings from year to year, so the map will ensure you don’t put that row of carrots where they were last year.

Famous From Door To Door

The best thing about having a garden is that you get to eat vegetables minutes after harvesting.  One of my sons actually eats spinach right off the plant, it’s like butter and delicious, and tastes nothing like spinach we buy in the store.

But, unless you’ve got some incredible project management skills, chances are you’ll have too much of X or too much of Y at some point.  If you’re so inclined freeze what you can, but what you’ll probably end up doing is learning to spread the wealth.

I pick when it’s ready, wash it, and what we aren’t going to be able to eat in the next few days, I walk around to our neighbours.  Not only will they have a nice unexpected treat for dinner, they’ll think you’re a star “Do you know, his spinach is so good his kid eats it right out of the garden”.

Here are some pics from my garden taken today. Truth be told, my garden looks like crap, but it tastes good.  And that’s the point.  Click any picture to see bigger versions.

Our little organic plot should provide lots of food for us this summer, weather willing. I’m encouraged to see more people getting into vegetable gardens (again). Last year I dug up a big corner of backyard lawn, and it spent a fallow summer. I moved six yards of garden mix and manure by wheel-barrow from the front yard where the delivery truck left it, onto that backyard patch this spring. Now we’re planting, and the whole experience brings back wonderful memories.

Growing up in rural Manitoba, gardens played a key part in spring and summer activity. My relatives on the farm had huge gardens, as did my grandmother who’s garden I would eventually inherit the use of.

As kids, we’d be sent out to pick corn or peas or beans, working our way through rows that were 40 or 50 feet long, hauling in huge baskets of fresh veg. I can vividly remember sitting in my aunt’s living room, watching daytime soaps and game shows on TV, while shelling peas for hours.

What we didn’t eat fresh for dinner went into the freezer. And that was the ritual all summer long.

No one talked about ‘organic’ gardening – organic was the only thing they knew. A visit to the manure pile netted as many wheel barrows of organic fertilizer required.

Getting rid of weeds was simple – you pulled them out. It was a daily ritual – usually done first thing in the morning before it got to hot and the soil was still moist from the overnight dew.

But through the sixties, more and more ‘helpful’ chemicals made their way to the gardens. Like everyone else, my relatives eagerly adopted these as labour saving solutions; they were cheap, easy to use and boy where they effective. The same thing was going on with the crop fields – the wonders of modern science killing weeds, bugs and blight. I have a vivid picture of one of my favourite aunts in her garden in the early 60′s – a can of deadly pesticide in one hand, and a cigarette in the other.

Twenty years later, when I inherited the use of my grandmother’s garden plot, I wanted to grow my vegetables organically. It was the early 80′s, and because I didn’t know any better, the idea of growing everything organically seemed perfectly simple. My grandmother’s garden was huge – and I had no idea how much work I had taken on.

Gardening in rural Manitoba is a full contact sport.

The weeds and the bugs are epic, not to mention the weather which usually includes, at any given time, and in any given combination: hail, drought, flood, wind and frost.

I got lucky that first year. The weather cooperated and it was just a battle against weeds and bugs. I’ve never pulled so many weeds in my life – but was thrilled when the vegetables took over and kept the weeds out.

The bugs weren’t quite so easy, and they seemed to devour plants young and old. My fancy organic gardening books had recommended sympathetic planting to control bugs, and my veg garden was full of flowers planted with the food crop. This proved to be of great amusement to my relatives – and seemed to do nothing to deter the ravenous bugs. When I asked my grandmother for advice, she smiled and said it was simple. “Start early in the morning, go barefoot, pick the bugs off the plants, squeeze them between your fingers, and rub the guts back onto the leaves “.

Great.

I got pretty good at that by the end of the summer, and learned a few key lessons about organic gardening:

• There’s no easy way to grow vegetables organically – it’s work pulling weeds and controlling insects.
• A little bit of time spent weeding on a regular basis is key – leave things too long and the weeds take over.
• Manure is your friend. My relatives spent their lives hauling the stuff away and I’m paying good many to have it dropped into my yard, but it does wonders – way better than any box of fertilizer.
• Nothing tastes like organic vegetables you’ve grown yourself. Nothing.

The crop that first year was mammoth. I left boxes of fresh vegetables on the doorsteps of many of my friends on many weekends. I learned to appreciate the food on the table in a way I never had before, and I learned to appreciate what goes into growing it.

An organic garden is really a labour of love. It can be frustrating and disappointing when the weather and bugs conspire against you, but the rewards are always worth it. And it can be on a small scale – even a downtown balcony.

One year we just had 3 small boxes next to the fence (the ones in the photo) planted with various kinds of lettuce. We had fresh cut salad every night all summer long.

That patch of lawn in the backyard I dug up ? We won’t miss it for a minute.

1. give with intention.
We challenge you to not just give for the sake of giving stuff, or because you are enticed by the merchandising or the brilliant price point in store windows. As Dora the Explorer says “stop and think”. Give to fewer people with more intention. Put more thought and energy into buying items and focus on giving quality.

2. spread the green around you.
Local, handmade, and artisan make timeless, unique gifts that keep the green in your community and strengthen the local economy. Or even better redistribute your wealth. Instead of traditional gift giving support a local non-profit that is making a difference in your local community. Tell your friends and family what you’ve done.

3. creative wrapping. don’t look for the silver lining.
Don’t kill the messenger. Use your vivid imagination and have fun with creating green wrapping – from the classic newspaper comics & magazine pages to silk scarves, cloth bags, storage containers, cereal boxes, kid’s painting, or even star shaped potato stamps pressed on post paper – really the sky is the limit. Start thinking about it now and set aside supplies (this will prevent you from resorting to the cheap, and not so cheerful solution). Use it as a good excuse to break out some cheer and have some quality bonding time.
At all costs avoid the silver lined gift paper – it can’t be recycled! If you must buy wrapping paper look for 100% post-consumer waste content that is processed chlorine-free.

4. give your time. being present is the best present.
Celebrate with the ones you love. Limit your party hoping, and plan to invest quantity of time with quality people. It seems simple, but as you get caught up in the craziness of the season it easy to over look, over book, feel frazzled, and not enjoy yourself.

5. celebrate what’s on the table.
Creative menu planning with food that shows taste and respect for your guest creates a memorable meal that is cause enough for good conversation. Focus on quality ingredients that are local, artisan, organic, fairly traded, homemade, and minimally processed. As for centerpieces, glass bowls full of cranberries, and citrus are festive and will live another day. Invest in beeswax (or soy) candles with all-cotton wicks, they burn cleaner and smell divine. And for the star of the show, we highly recommend Organa Farm birds raised with care in the Cascade Mountains by the Deschamp family. If you want to skip the dishes, use biodegradable cutlery, plates, and re-useable cloth napkins.

Green Gift resources worth checking out:

My favourite:
Dreaming of a Green Christmas

Others:
we’re dreaming of a green christmas
when visions of quince and hazelnuts dance in your head – Bill Jones
8 green ways to wrap gifts
20+ Ways to Give Without Giving “Stuff”

Giving

Treehugger 2008 Green gift guide

Sustainable Food Organization Membership:
Vancouver’s FarmFolk/CityFolk Society sells $30 memberships ($15 student/senior) that include a quarterly newsletter, voting rights so you can influence how the organization runs, discounts at events like the harvest celebration Feast of Fields, and access to a community of like-minded people who want to make the world better through food.

The Soil Association said its position was at the core of the organic movement’s values of protecting human health.

Gundula Azeez, Soil Association policy manager, said: “We are deeply concerned at the government’s failure to follow scientific advice and regulate products. There should be an immediate freeze on the commercial release of nanomaterials until there is a sound body of scientific research into all the health impacts.”

He compared the developments with genetically modified foods, another area that has been controversial, with many consumers suspicious of the technology involved.

Read the FULL ARTICLE

The UK’s largest egg packer is investing nearly £250,000 to help its organic producers cover the extra cost of the recent change in feed rules.
Noble Foods believes the increase will fully cover the extra cost incurred by its organic producers as a result of the non-oragnic feed allowance falling from 15% to 10% on 1 January for all organic poultry.

Full story in the Farmers Weekly Interactive