To celebrate the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival the VCBF is putting on a Cherry Blossom Umbrella Flash Mob Dance complete with pink umbrellas!  Part Bollywood and part Singing’ in the Rain, this upbeat flash mob is sure to be a blast for those who participate!   Sign up at: www.vcbf.ca .

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.

It felt great to get out and dig in the soil, and harvesting is always fun.  While I was disappointed to only have a few pounds of potatoes, I did get a bunch more Gladiator parsnips and a ton of various beets that I didn’t expect.  I roasted up this bunch of roots for a family dinner tonight.

Now that the community plot is officially put to bed for the winter I wonder weather I want to keep up the space again next year.  I have enough room to grow a small variety of veggies at home and while I love gardening with the community members, it has lately been feeling more like a chore.  Much of the food at the gardens gets stolen, many say because of the part of town we are in (notorious for homelessness and drugs) but sadly, the folks that I’ve seen steal are (gasp) other gardeners or visitors in suits who drive Hondas and show off their knowledge of growing food by cutting off all my garlic scapes or plucking a pumpkin.  Mostly the thieves are foodies with a sense of entitlement and little concern for community.  So that sucks.

Then there’s the growing conditions.  The soil is poor and disease is rampant.  Without daily weeding the plots are soon overrun with buttercup, horsetail, bindweed and in some cases the dangerous giant hogweed.  This year I just wanted to grow squash.  I ended up planting 10 types of squash and got about 12-15 orange spaghetti squash and downy mildrew killed the rest.  I did also plant strawberries, potatoes, artichokes, tomatoes, beans, celeriac, beets, parsnips, peas, fennel, carrots, garlic, leeks, and kale, so I strayed from my focus and got a little of everything (except the celeriac which was a big failure).  It’s fun to bring home fresh veggies and I haven’t really shopped for any in the grocery for the last 5-6 months.  The number and variety of what is left after theft and disease is just a taste.  Despite a valiant effort–I added manure to the soil, a bacterial / fungal mix that we bought at the farmers market and compost compost compost–the soil still lacked nutrition.  This combined with the fact that disease is so quickly spread in a community garden space that I fought rust, mildew and blight daily.  I certainly appreciate the fresh food I brought home, yet this alone is not worth the effort when I can buy the like at the farmers market each week.

Even if I never brought home a veggie I would still be a member because I joined the garden in the first place for the community.  I wanted to learn from others, connect and share.  In my mind perhaps I had the idea of a communal gardening group of people laughing and sharing huge baskets of fresh produce, while tending their lush green plots and beautifying the neighbourhood.  The reality is that you see most of the members only at the monthly work parties.  For most of the year I went to the work parties religiously.  A few of the other members have the same commitment, a few.  It’s great to see some of them, sometimes, but I wouldn’t call it a community.  There is rallying around the condom/needle clean up and stopping the crazy dude from pouring rat poison on our plants, but it’s not quite what I had imagined.  I’ve made a few friends at the garden though, so that’s something.

Now, as another year comes to a close I’ll reflect on whether or not it’s worth the effort or if perhaps there is another group or space that would be a better fit for me.  For all the reasons above I almost gave up my membership last year, but something kept me there.  The promise of something new, perhaps.  Maybe this year some new people with join and keep me company at the work parties.  Or perhaps I’ll get to run a seed starting project with the new greenhouse or learn something new.  Who knows?  But if I’ve learned just one thing about being a member of a community garden, it’s that it is about a whole lot more than just growing food.

I got out a few days before the dump and covered my rosemary, sage and gai lan with greenhouse umbrellas which may help a bit.  As you can see by the photos, it’s a bit like trying to drink a swimming pool. 

My weekly home-grown vegetable adventures weren’t a total bust though.  Just before the dump, I managed to get a few parsnips from the ground and make a lovely parsnip and white bean soup with crispy parsnips.  It was delish.

Now that the ground has thawed a bit I’ll try to dig up the potatoes I left at the community plot (whoops) and I pulled some beets.  Greens are wilty but the roots are plump and sweet.  I hope to continue pulling the roots for as long as I can, but I think that the winter vegetable starts are a write off for the year so I’ve set up the automatic sprouter indoors and I’ll grow my greens there for now.  

It’s been an interesting week or two we have been having here, so it’s great to have a look over at Daphne’s Dandelions to see what others are harvesting elsewhere.

These are the ones I’ll be testing and saving over the next few days to see which will join my most favourite of all heirlooms (some of those favs snuck into the photo even though they came from my garden: Green Zebra, Sweetheart Grape and Siletz).  All this for $8.50.  Hell yeah!

It seems crazy to BUY more tomatoes when this is the giant bowl I am trying to cope with today from my home garden (this is a really, really big bowl):

Ah, well, I’m sure I’ll find SOMETHING to do with them all….om nom nom nom nom..

Until this year, the one area I had never been into was the Kidz Discovery Centre which, according to the website, “allows kids to become a farmer for an hour and learn about where their food comes from”.  Here is a brief summary of our experience:

First, they gave the kids aprons and buckets to collect plastic farm produce from the displays on their discovery tour.  The next stop was at a trough of soil where they gave the kids bean seeds to plant and told them they were tomato seeds.  The staff broke the beans seeds in half and told them they were carrot seeds, and let them plant those as well.  Next, they collected white plastic eggs from brown plastic chickens and vise versa before moving to more troughs of soil to harvested their fully grown plastic tomatoes and carrots.  Here is a quick snap I took on the display that taught the kids how vegetables grow:

The kids continued around the displays collecting empty boxes of milk, perfect red plastic apples, little bags of wool and a few other things.  At the end the staff took their kids’ harvest back and gave them a coupon to use at the mock store at the exit.  The only thing available in to buy at the ‘store’ was chocolate milk   Not vegetables, fruit or plain milk, just chocolate milk. 

Apparently Safeway believes that hyper and miseducated children are our future.  

I don’t.  I feel that kids are smart and should be taught what a real tomato seed or carrot seed or bean seed looks like.  That carrots are fun to pull out of the soil by their greens because they are totally hidden in the soil, that tomatoes grow on bushes and that they can be many colours, sizes, shapes, and flavours.  That you get white eggs from white chickens and brown eggs from brown chickens.  And that farmers don’t sell their harvest to buy chocolate milk at Safeway. 

I had a few days to shake off the frustration but in the end I was so disappointed with the Safeway’s Kidz Discovery Centre that I invited my nephews (and their parents) to a few farms in Abbotsford.  We spent the day feeding lettuce, apples, carrots and corn to all sorts of farm animals, picked real apples and learned to sort through the fallen, diseased and wormy ones, watched cows machine-milked on a conveyor belt, got lost in a corn field and climbed all over antique tractors.  It was a great day and a much more honest representation of where food comes from. 

We went to the Birchwood Dairy and the Apple Barn Pumkin Farm on the Abbotsford Circle Farm Tour.  I’ve done all of the Circle Farm Tours available and have enjoyed them so much that I plan to do them all again.  If you decide to do a tour yourself, bring a cooler to pack all your farm fresh goodies in, start early in the day, and pick up a tour brochure at your first destination.  The kids will still end up with a sugar rush from fresh ice cream and a bushel of apples eaten while picking, but at least you can feel good about what’s going into their heads.

This past Saturday I attended the Wild Seafood Festival in Steveston Villiage.  Salmon has been recently making headlines as the 2010 Sockeye run is the best it has been in 100 years, and that’s after many years on the decline.  The fishing boats down at the docks were almost completely hidden behind the hoards of clamouring people trying to catch some fresh fish off the boats. 

My first instict was to run back to my car and get the hell out of the craziness but the energy in the air was so intoxicating that I took the bait.  I cued into the school of people who were all lured down to the docks, lined up, and hooked with some pretty fantastic bargains.  I walked away an hour later with some of BC’s finest wild seafood: sablefish, sardines and sockeye.

Feel like a outcast since you didn’t get to go on this wild adventure?  Well the “festival” part of this event was a couple of booths set up near the cannery, which were lovely but you didn’t miss much.  The Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site is open every day February to December and the fishing boats are still reeling in fresh fish and selling it off the docks daily.  I think the only thing you will have missed, was tackling the crowds and long lines.