Wreaths of Hope 2010

People living in poverty and addiction are awaiting the opportunity to use their unique talents once again to create your holiday wreaths.  By purchasing one you are giving one of the greatest gifts possible: dignity and hope to someone struggling to improve his or her life.  Just as the wreath was an early Roman and Greek symbol of victory, with every purchase you help someone experience a small victory in his or her life.

Each year the need is even greater than before, as many people face the winter without even their basic needs met. While we are not able to solve the big picture for the poorest people in our city, together we can make a difference in the lives of some.  In this, our tenth year of wreath making, we aim to create many more hours of meaningful employment.

Pricing remains unchanged this year at $45.00 (Small) $60.00 (Med) and $90.00 (Large).

Please call Emerging Hope Projects to order: Ph:604.716.4284

THANK YOU for giving someone a hand up not a hand out this holiday.

Back in April I pulled up my winter carrots and sadly, I lost the battle to that wily carrot rust fly.  This year I planted a summer crop, planted each seed individually spaced (painstakingly), mixed lots of sand in the soil and watered well.  Oh, and the most important thing: full sun.  My home garden is so crowded and lush that there just isn’t the sun there is at my new garden plot.  This, I’ve noticed, had made all the difference in the world to my vegetable gardening.  6-8 hours of direct sun just isn’t enough.

So here they are, some lovely purple carrot sticks, without a rusty track to be seen.  Take that, carrot rust fly. 

Me: 1 ; Carrot Rust Fly: 1

I’m currently harvesting the following veg from my home garden and the community garden plot:

Beans: Purple Peacock, French Filet

Peas: MammothMelting Snow Peas

Tomatoes: Black Russian, Siletz, Sweetheart Grape, Gold Nugget Cherry, Sungold Cherry, Isis Candy Cherry, Red Zebra, Tumbler

Sema Fino Florence Fennel

Beets: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden

Chard: Rainbow, Fordhook Giant, Rhubarb

Peppers: Filius Blue, Garden Salsa

Basil: Organic Sweet Basil, Thai Basil

Squash: one Gold Nugget was ready at the community garden

Potatoes: Red Chief, French Fingerlings

All this has made for some interesting recipes like carmelized figs, fig ginger jam, walnut pesto, and mixed veggies ragu.  I’ll be sure to share very soon.  If I can get out of the kitchen long enough.  help.

The ones at the community garden were basically in shade because my plot—unbeknownst to me when we took the plot in the late winter of 2009—was totally shaded by a huge tree until 2PM every day.  Not the best spot for growing veg.  Nonetheless, four of those plants seemed to be staying healthy albeit quite small so I potted them up and brought them home and forgot about them.  One day I had a bare spot in the front garden so I put four of them in the ground and a year later to my great surprise I have purple cauliflower!

Each plant is looking a little different today.  Two have golf-ball sized crowns, one has melon sized crown and one, in this photo, has started to set a bunch of florets instead of a crown. 

Cauliflower Gardeners out there: what should I now do with my purple cauliflower?  I couldn’t imagine after the treacherous life these plants have had that they would provide me with something edible, but they have, and now I wonder if I should harvest them or let them grow larger.  Could it be that each one could become it’s own crown? 

This certainly is no ordinary tale of planting a growing cauliflower, and I would not recommend it, but this sort of chaos is to be expected as I try new things and stray from the traditional ways of doing things (like gardening in rows – for shame!)  I’m sorry to those experienced gardeners with dedicated vegetable plots that are carefully organized and planned that I am making cringe with my tale but for me any experiment that ends with a tasty meal is a success.  And I’m hoping for a tasty meal soon.

Fallen Applesauce Recipe

• 1 crate fallen apples
• apple cider
• water
• 1-2 cups sugar (many of my apples were sweet, so I used less than a cup of sugar.  Plus I like it to taste true to the apples).
• cinnamon sticks, ground cloves, ground nutmeg

Directions:

1. Wash, core and peel the apples (cut out worms or any bruising) only use what you would eat fresh.  No need to peel the apples!
2. Cook the apples, sugar, cinnamon sticks and spices slowly in a cup of cider and a cup of water.  Add more liquid, sugar and/or spices as you cook to get the flavour and consistency you like.  Personal taste is the only rule here!
3. When apples are tender, remove cinnamon sticks and set aside.  Blend apples with an immersion blender until smooth. You can add the cinnamon back in now if you’d like.
4. Continue to add liquid and cook the apples, until you get the consistency and flavour you like. 
5. Ladle into sterile jars leaving 1/4 inch of headspace.
6. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes (adjust for altitude if necessary).  The applesauce can also be frozen if you prefer.

So, I went to my plot (which was about 100 meters from his) and dug my trench.  He came over to inspect my work and pleased with my trench, he took my seed potatoes from me and poured them out on the garden edge.  He took his 60-year-old gardening knife he started hacking at them (hey, wait a minute!): he cut some of the seed potatoes in half (Aaa!  My potatoes!), and then made deep gouges into the other ones (this isn’t what it said on the package!).  Yet despite my alarms I gave into his help and guidance and made an effort to trust this man, his 200-year old method, and his grandmother.  I planted these scarred and bleeding potatoes in my newly dug trench, tucked them in for the night with some soil, and put some sticks on them to prevent the birds from snacking.  Every few days or so, I was to come back and mound the soil up over the first few leaves of the plant.  My new friend said he would “bring me some sand from his beach” to improve my soil and he picked off any large sticks or bark in my soil and swore at them.  He then brought me a handful of worms and said, “My grandmother always told me that if you give someone worms for their potatoes, they will have a bountiful crop.”  I was so very touched as I accepted the worms and set them free into my new potato trench.

A week later, my potatoes had grown a little so I added a bit more soil and some sand I had collected from the beach.  Another week when I went to top up the soil again, I found leaf mould around the edges of the bed.  And another week there were chunks of burned wood scattered around the plants.  Now, a month or so later, my trench has turned into a hill with huge healthy potato plants above and I suppose about 500lbs of potatoes growing below.  I have not seen this man since he taught me to plant potatoes, but he has been at my garden plot watering my potatoes, mounding the soil, and adding his own special brand of magic.  It is this sense of community that I love about gardening: that a man I’ve only met once parents me and my plants while teaching me so much more than just how to grow potatoes.