Community Garden

About six months back, Paula finally got a spot in the University of Victoria's Community Garden. By the end of August, they were ready to move the garden to its new location. And since then, gardeners have been busy preparing things for the next growing season.

  

The garden is located in what was nothing more than a grassy field for years. Pipes have been laid for water, and after the plots themselves were laid out, the sod was lifted in each of them. The best thing about the garden is the two metre high deer fence around it--there are a lot of deer on campus.

Paula and Ben, our son, originally laid out the beds in the new plot. Formal raised beds are new to me--on the farm, we used a rotary tiller to break up the earth and then used a hilling blade to hump it into a rounded long mound. As you can see, here we have a much more formal series of boxes--each lined on the bottom with landscape cloth to discourage anything from working its way up from underneath.
The boxes are spaced so that they are slightly further apart than my feet are long--enabling me to stand between the beds.Each had a layer of leaves laid in, and then covered with a mixture of compost and topsoil.The recent rains seem to have compressed the soil a bit.
The old strawberry garden was moved a week or so back, so Paula planted some of the extras in the one bed. This still needs to be mulched.

I salvaged what was left of a soaker hose that had been run over by a lawnmower (not by me!), and cut it into shorter pieces to fit in the beds. I found some L and T fittings at Rona and laid the hose out until I ran out. So far, this bed and the strawberries have hose in them, and the third bed and the empty space are still waiting. But I got a clockwork timer today (spring driven) that will enable us to turn the water on and leave.
The polytunnel hoops are 25mm electrical conduit held in the D holders for the next size up. The conduit came in three metre lengths--longer than I wanted-- but once I bent them into their holders, it didn't seem necessary to shorten them. Poly clearly still has to be installed....
The fourth space in the plot isn't being ignored; it is slated to have a cold frame built for it. Among other things, we're hoping this gives us a place to overwinter herbs.
Its strange to imagine overwintering anything. Out on the prairies, most everything is planted in May and out of the ground by mid-October at the latest. Here, things are different. Up the peninsula, someone is successfully growing citrus trees. Kiwi fruit are farmed nearby. Here at the bottom of Vancouver Island, the temperate rainforest is modified by a local micro-climate that gives us even milder weather. A lot of rain in the winter, sure, but seldom snow, and even less seldom, -20C. I've never gardened out here, so this year looks to be very experimental.

The Real Deal

This is a CBS report on school lunches in France. What impresses me is not that the kids get lunch, but that they get lunch that matters. Fresh where possible. Local where possible. The focus is on real French cuisine; to teach kids to care about food as a cultural thing.

Can you imagine what this would look like in Canada? The maple syrup lake being stored for export would be served to our kids. Alberta bison, prairie grains, Quebec cheeses.
This also denotes a culture where food matters. Where you teach kids about what is good and why. Its also a culture that actually cares about its kids--there's no sodas or junk food in the schools. You want that, you have to decide to go and get it.
Its no wonder Jose Bove and the anti-McDonald's movement grew up here. Real food still matters. Kids matter. National pride is on the line. It really is sad that I can't even imagine what Canada would look like if we cared that much.

Different Definitions

     My nephew clearly has his own definition of "food security".

Yes, that is a policeman in the middle of his onion rings. And there's also a firetruck on standby. So his food is definitely secure.

Something Good

     I read a lot, and a lot about food security. I try and synthesize the information I read into a whole and to communicate from a position of intellectual coherence. But occasionally I run across a bit of writing that is just excellent and needs no real gloss from me. Today is one of those moments.
     I'm currently burning through Colin Tudge's book Feeding People is Easy. I'm really appreciating how solutions oriented the book is. (An article of his in the journal Public Health Nutrition is available as a pdf here.) But in the meantime, he pretty well summed up my feelings with this passage:

    But never in all history have the powers-that-be had the wherewithal to operate on the global scale as they do now. Never have they been able, as now, to take the whole of world farming by the scruff of its neck and ram it so procrusteanly into a structure and philosophy that are so alien to its purpose, and so at odds with the needs of humanity and the biological and physical constraints of the world. The powers-that-be behave as if they were playing a game--which indeed they are: a game of money and power. They are forever lecturing protestors like me about the need to be "realistic"; but the only reality they recognize is the political-economic, commercial-military power game that they happen to be engaged in, and which makes them rich. They have no feel at all for the physical realities of the world itself, and the creatures within it, and for the ways in which farming has, in reality, been practiced this past ten thousand years, and by whom.  They have a great deal of "data", which they collect and publish selectively and manipulate with the aid of lawyers and other rhetoricians this way and that, largely for our bamboozlement, but that is not the same thing at all. The world is suffering, possibly terminally, from a huge irony: that the powers-that-be live in a fantasy world of their own devising, blind to every observation that is in any way inconvenient, yet they believe that they really do know what they are doing, and that they alone are the realists. We are dying of their illusions.
(pages 46-47)

"...take the whole of world farming by the scruff of its neck and ram it so procrusteanly into a structure and philosophy that are so alien to its purpose...." That just sums up our approach to the natural world. The difficulty is, Gaia will fight back. Contrary to popular belief, it is we who must adapt or die.