June 12, 2015
Better late than never
I don’t know that much about irises, except that we’ve had them blooming in our front garden in previous years. The year Iris was born, they were out on her due date, though by her birth date (two weeks later) they’d already been and gone. But this year, while there have been irises throughout the neighbourhood for weeks now (just around the time the lilacs peaked), our garden hasn’t yielded a single one. Where had the irises gone, I wondered? But then this morning on our walk to school we realized that the strange spiky stalks in the middle of the garden had been irises all along—just in hiding. It turns out that we really don’t know much about irises at all, until they spring into bloom. Which is happening a few weeks late this year because our garden is north-facing and mostly always in the shade, I think. But happening nonetheless, because by school pick-up, the flowers had opened up. Better late than never.
March 27, 2013
The Stop by Nick Saul and Andrea Curtis
Oh, there is nothing quite like the The Stop’s Farmers’ Market. To get there, we have to trudge up the hill above Davenport Road, which is no small feat pushing a stroller, but the journey is worth it. In the winter, to arrive inside the big hall at Wychwood Barns, full to bursting with people touring around the tables heaped with fresh produce, delicious breads and cheeses, and other wonderful things. In the summer, the market spills outside into the grounds surrounding the Barns, and you’ve got to set a budget or else you’ll go mad–cherries, pickles on sticks, cinnamon buns, sushi, honey, cookies. We don’t want to snack too much because we’re planning on having our lunch at the Market Cafe, and then after lunch, the kids play on the splash pad while we wait, hoping the artisanal cheese doesn’t melt in the bottom of the stroller. Such concerns such a luxury and these Saturday mornings a highlight of family life in the city.
That’s not the half of it though, as demonstrated by the stories told in the new book The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement by Nick Saul and Andrea Curtis. We thought we knew what The Stop was all about–I bought their cookbook a few years ago, and used it so thoroughly that it no longer has bindings (and I continue to use it still- oh, the fish tacos, the beef stew, that strawberry bread!!). We visit the market a few times a year when we’re hungry and in need of a trek. And this Christmas, we divided our annual food-bank donation in two and gave half the money to The Stop instead. But for all our enthusiasm, it turns out we didn’t know The Stop at all.
It turns out that the hub of The Stop is not the Green Barn, where the farmers’ market takes place each week, where Jamie Oliver paid a visit not too long ago. The real heart of The Stop, instead, lies a few kilometres west down Davenport Road at their main office, which was a small food bank when Nick Saul became executive director in 1998. It didn’t take long for Saul in this role to become disillusioned with the food bank system, which, he tells us, is a relatively recent invention. Food banks came about in the 1980s as a temporary solution to community hunger, but they stayed around as government programs for dealing with these problems were being reduced at the very same time. And now it seems as though we’ve always had them, food banks, systems we support by dumping store-brand Kraft Dinner in grocery store bins every once in a while before heading home to feast on artisanal cheese and organic kale.
The Stop is written by Saul and his wife, award-winning writer Andrea Curtis, but told in Saul’s voice as he outlines his decade and a half with the organization. The problems with the food bank, he realized quickly, were manifold: it was a stop-gap measure; users picked up their hampers and left feeling diminished; the contents of the hampers weren’t anything that anyone would choose to eat, and did nothing to contribute to a healthy diet. There were other things going on at The Stop though that were having a more positive impact, such as their Healthy Beginnings Program, which taught food and nutrition skills to pregnant low-income women. Other initiatives came about–a community garden, cooking classes, drop-in meals. Around all these, a real sense of community began to form. Users came to The Stop and began to find it empowering, to find places where they could contribute to their communities and get involved.
Change is hard though, and Saul outlines how difficult it was to shift the centre’s focus away from the traditional food bank’s. First, because The Stop’s volunteers felt good about what they were doing and didn’t appreciate their efforts being criticized. The general consensus was that anyone using a foodbank hamper didn’t have the right to turn their nose up at anything, wilted lettuce, fetid peppers, and all. But Saul was convinced there had be a better way, and slowly, step-by-step, his organization began to blaze that trail. The community garden, he admits, is never going to feed the world, and there are many people who use The Stop whose problems are so complex that those problems are never going to be fully resolved, but many lives have been changed by the place (including those of the babies in their Healthy Beginnings program, all of whom were born at a healthy birth weight last year) and a community has found its spirit.
With The Stop’s Green Barn, Saul writes, “we can have a role tapping into the largely middle-class enthusiasm about food we’re seeing and connecting the dots between the poor and everyone else.” Because the poor, he explains, are largely excluded from the foodie revolution of the last few years. While I’m snacking on my organic kale chips, rising food costs are putting healthy food further and further out of reach of people who could benefit from it as much as I do. Saul checks Michael Pollan’s “vote with your fork” philosophy, and points out that for all the good of the movement, it leaves lower-income people as disenfranchised as they’ve ever been.
Nick Saul left The Stop in July 2012 to become president and CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, which aims to bring The Stop’s movement and innovations to communities across Canada, and after reading the book, I am confident in this new organization’s success and so excited by the work they’re doing. These aren’t political issues, Saul tells us, but instead these are issues of morality. The Stop is a fantastic story well told, compelling to read, and it will inspire readers to reconsider their relationships with both the food they eat and the people they live amidst.
July 11, 2012
Blooming
Five summers ago, we had the most extraordinary garden, and grew tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis, watermelon, and lettuce, and more, although, regrettably, the carrots didn’t take. When we moved to our new apartment the following year, however, we learned that we actually had not a green thumb among us, and that our garden’s greatness was mostly due to soil worked for years by Portuguese residents who’d lived there before us. We tried growing some veggies in pots on our deck, but we were thwarted by nasty squirrels and lack of sunlight, and so we just stuck to impatiens.
That this year has been different, like all our gardening adventures, has been mostly an accident. While on our annual impatiens-shop, I picked up a cherry tomato plant for the hell of it, definitely not optimistic. I decided I’d tried to grow some basil again, so I threw in one of those plants too. And then Harriet planted beans in a cup in April, in wet paper towel, and they sprouted, so we planted them.
The impatiens have done as well as ever. (They are indestructible.) The tomato plant is enormous and yielding a fantastic crop, though Harriet totally lied when she said she would eat them. The basil never stops, and I can make a batch of pesto once a week. Harriet’s paper towel beans even have beans of their own, though I’m not sure what one does with mung beans other than plant them back in paper towel. And now I wished that we’d gardened a bit harder back in May, though if we had, no doubt, we would have been disappointed. There is nothing our garden hates more than deliberateness, so we’ll play the game. We’ve got our tomatoes.
The whole summer is in bloom– we even had peaches at the market today. It’s the most delicious time of the year.
May 29, 2012
The Occasion is Lavender
I only bake when it’s a special occasion, but the problem is that I seem to unearth occasions daily. Today it’s that the lavender in the front garden is in glorious bloom. We snipped twelve sprigs, and then I set to bake lavender cupcakes, which I’ve always wanted to bake, so that’s another life goal accomplished. I used the recipe from Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess, which has proven a very poor instruction manual in my experience. All the measurements are in imperial and I don’t own a kitchen scale, so I have to guess the measurements and so I’ve never had a recipe from that book come out right. Though these lavender cupcakes turned out to be pretty damn acceptable. The flower is absolutely delicious. And though Harriet claims that she doesn’t like them, we’ll try her again tomorrow.
June 29, 2011
Jiggety Jig
Some of you who’ve been reading awhile know about the summer of 2007 when I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, and grew a gorgeous backyard garden (peppers! tomatoes! cucumber! when a raccoon ate our cantaloupe, and I cried, and watermelon!). We were off to a wonderful start as urban farmers, except the next spring we lost our garden plot when we moved to a new house, our attempts at a pot garden were thwarted by squirrels and shade, we learned we’d had less green thumbs than great soil thanks to the Portuguese gardeners who’d been working away at it for years in our neighbourhood. Anyway, ever since, I’ve pretty much only grown impatiens.
What that summer did, however, is turn me onto fresh food like serious. I realized the difference in taste between local food and food trucked in is worth every penny extra. And especially since I’m now feeding a little person, and trying to teach her to appreciate the marvelous flavours the world offers, I make a point of buying the freshest, best-tasting fruit and vegetables available. And this time of year, there is plenty of stuff available. Becuase the season of abundant abundance has begun (and oh my, to imagine August– bursting peaches, corn on the cob, tomatoes, necterines, and blueberries…), and our local market offered up plenty of delicious this week.
We got garlic scapes (so good roasted on the bbq, with a bit of olive oil), hamburger patties, zucchini, strawberries, raspberries, rainbow chard, basil, cheese, and heirloom cherry tomatoes. Also a strawberry rhubarb pie in the freezer made with fruit that I bought last week.
So many wonderful ways to eat the sunshine…
June 21, 2010
Harriet gardening
You probably shouldn’t let your baby dig in soil with a spoon. Because while spoons are good digging implements, they’re also good for delivering items to the mouth, and though Harriet’s spoon/mouth coordination is not always right on track, it certainly was the time she ate a giant spoonful of soil… So it was kind of a milestone, times two if eating dirt is also a milestone. Is it?
May 15, 2009
Bad Gardener
Bad mother, bad schmother– what I am is a bad gardener. I didn’t used to think this. I used to even imagine that I had a green thumb, but turns out I just lived in a house whose backyard had very fertile soil (as a result of probably 40+ years of being a Portuguese man’s backyard before it became ours). When we moved last year, we set up a pot garden on our deck, and it was a disaster. I think we got three cherry tomatoes and a bean from the whole lot, in addition to a crop of thyme we never managed to harvest. I will try again with a pot vegetable garden another time, but not this year, when I’ll be too consumed with another little seedling. But seeing as our deck might be as far out into the world as I venture some (most?) days, I wanted something to be growing there. We went to the garden centre last weekend and bought a bunch of annuals that should take off without a great deal of work on our part. Though not if the squirrels have anything to do with it, bruddy squirrels, those vandals. It would be one thing if they ate the plants, or if their nuts were actually buried there– but there are no nuts, they have no interest in the flowers but to unearth them. The squirrels just dig until the pot is sufficiently ransacked, then go about their merry way. Or as merry as a way can be for vermin. If I were a different type of person, I’d be gedding out my shotgun…
July 24, 2008
Abundant abundance
We’re entering that wonderful time of abundant abundance, and our aubergine/eggplants are blossoming purple. I didn’t even know that eggplants blossomed in purple, which is only one of the thousands of things I don’t about the food that I eat. As well, lots was blooming at the market today– we got blackberries, tomatoes, and cantaloupe in particular. And also purple dragon carrots, which are fabulous.
In other news concerning marvelous creation, may I please introduce you to our cousin site, Create Me This. It is the homegrown initiative of my talented husband, with a little help from me.
June 26, 2008
Poem in the Post
Kawaii. Today in the post was a “Hello Kitty Everywhere! Haiku Postcard” from my sister. Haiku as follows:
Peeking through the soil,
The flowers shyly emerge.
I am their first friend.
June 17, 2008
Pea-pods
Spotted today was pea-pods in the garden, which this year is pots up a fire escape more than a garden, but it certainly makes for easy weeding. The pea-pods are a miracle! The lettuce and chard are also ripe for harvest, the herb garden getting bigger every day, and we’re avidly following the progress of the heirloom tomatoes we’ve grown from seed. Inside the house is lots of plants too, which is strange because in our old apartment we didn’t have a single living thing (except the mice). Something about this space just wants green things to be growing.
Also exciting is strawberry season. There was a whole bunch of perfect berries at the market last week. I am sorry that I won’t be able to make it this Wednesday, but hopefully Saturday will make up for it, when I am going strawberry picking. Which means strawberry jam in my near future (though probably just freezer jam, as I’m not sure I’m ready to take on real preserves), as well as a few strawberry pies (frozen, to last throughout the year, once fresh fruit is behind us).
