The Fox

I saw a dead fox on the side of the highway this morning.

It is rare to see a fox in the wild in this part of Ontario. It’s even more rare to see them within the city, although a friend told me today she’s seen them in High Park in Toronto.

This fox was stunning. His bright orange coat constrasted with the white fur of his chest, which was glowing in the early morning light. He stood out against the bland background of asphault and concrete on the QEW. I caught just the briefest of glimpses as I sailed past at highway speed – just long enough to know I’d identified his spieces correctly, but thankfully not long enough to see the extent of his injuries.

He has been with me all day.

I have been struggling with a decision I made. The decision to take down the trees at the back of my new yard. This decision has put two parts of me at odds with each other: first, my desire to grow vegetables in order to feed my family and second, my belief that we shouldn’t remove habitat useful to wild animals if it’s not absolutely necessary. The birds love those trees – it’s rare that I see the branches empty!

What does this have to do with the fox? You see, I hate that I drive to work. I was going to say, “That I have to drive to work”, but that would be a lie. I don’t have to drive to work. I choose to drive to work. I took transit for my first week (TTC bus-subway-subway, GO Transit train, Missisauga Transit bus) and it was nearly 2 hours each way – in perfect weather and without any of the usual GO Transit delays. So I bought a car. I made an effort to buy a car that would have a smaller impact on the environment than others, but still, it’s a car. And I drive alone 35km each way from my house to work and back again. I carpooled for a while, but there’s no one in my neighbourhood that works at my company.

And I feel. so. guilty.

Seeing that fox this morning, I had a sudden vivid visual reminder of the impact of the decision I made when I gave up my transit passes and bought my car. My car that I love so much I’ve given him a name (“Oswald”, if you must know). Although I didn’t hit him myself, I have been consumed by self-loathing all day for that choice that I made – that many other people make every day – that led to the death of that rare and beautiful creature. That choice that flies in the face of some of my strongest values. I have no guilt for buying my car – but I feel guilt for driving it every day. For putting 55 litres of diesel fuel into the air every two weeks. Even when it’s biodiesel, it’s still so wasteful.

That fox – and the guilty concience he’s become for me today – have made me think again about other decisions I’ve made. Like those trees. Those beautiful, healthy cedar trees that make up wonderful habitat for the neighbourhood birds. Those trees that I am cutting down on Saturday, to make room for my garden – my hobby.

Yes, gardening is more than a hobby. I believe strongly in gardening as a political act, an act of care for my family, possibly even a revolutionary act. But without touching those trees, I could still plant tomatoes. I could still grow my peppers. I could cover my giant deck with containers and grow food there. I do not have to take those trees down. But I want a bigger garden, so the trees are being cleared out.

This decision has been made and I’m not going to go back on it. I’ve even made myself feel better by planning a large patch of berries, which should drive those birds even more wild than the cedars do. I can take down those trees and I can live with the decision.

But I will think of that fox and the awareness that he brought that my choices have consequences. And that sometimes my choices have more to do with my convenience than my values.

I do my best to make my choices after long and careful thought.

But still, I am haunted.

 

Moving

Not the blog… just me!

My husband and I have bought a house in the Beaches in Toronto.  We’ll be moving in 12 days.  Which means I’ll be establishing a new garden.  Again.

This is my new backyard. Those cedar trees at the back will come out and my garden will be along the back fence, with containers at the back of the deck.

I’m very excited about the idea of establishing a garden that is finally fully MINE and that I will be able to keep for more than a season or two. This will be the first time in my gardening-without-mom experience that’s happened!

I’ve also started posting at the You Grow Girl forums again.
Just this morning I shared a list of the things I’m planning so far for the new garden. This is an excerpt of what I said:

As for what I’m planting, right now my garden plan reads as, “tomatoes go here. peppers go here. Get raspberries from Sorellina”… and that’s about it! I haven’t had a moment to go through my seeds and figure out what specific varieties to grow.
I do know a few things I can share right now though:

1. I’ll be putting in about 12-16 tomatoes, and about half of them will be pastes, with half of those being yellow paste (I’ve discovered a love of yellow pasta sauce!). My brother will also be planting about a dozen tomatoes and we’ll be sharing the harvest, so I’ll probably be starting those for him too. For sure one of the featured plants will be Sorellina’s Uncle Charlie’s tomato. It’s one of my all-time favourites.

2. For peppers, I’ll be putting in about 5 hot and 5 sweet. The 5 hot will be determined by my husband – he picks them, I grow them, he eats them (match made in heaven!). For sweet, I’m trying out the mini-sweet varieties from Seed Savers.

3. ONLY TWO ZUCCHINI. This will likely morph into 4 plants by the time I’m actually planting them, but two plants will give me more than enough for two people.

4. I’m trying cabbage and broccoli for the first time this year. Red cabbage and Romanesco broccoli.

5. I’m avoiding onions and potatoes. I just find they’re so cheap at the grocery store that I’m better off buying them there and saving the garden space for things like tomatoes that are more expensive to buy from the store.

6. Now that I’m going to be in my own house, I’ll be trying out some new things that take time to get established: strawberries (I’ve grown them before, but now I can actually establish a proper crop), blueberries, raspberries, rhubarb, horseradish.

7. Soup beans. I grew some neat varieties last year, but I didn’t have enough room to get a sizable crop. I’ll be trying again this year with Calypso, Red Cranberry, and Hutterite Soup Bean.

So that’s what I’ve got so far.
I will post garden plans, photos, planting lists, etc as I get a better idea of what the garden will look like.

 

Little Hater

There are some very definite reasons why I’m having difficulty with writing on this blog.  Call it fear of success AND failure (strange combo, I know), call it procrastination, call it laziness… I think it’s best summed up by this fantastic video post from illdoctrine:

http://www.illdoctrine.com/2007/12/beating_the_little_hater.html
(can’t get the thing to embed, so you’ve gotta deal with it like this for now.)

I have an idea for what to do with this space that may help me with this.  Because I. Have. So. Much. In. My. Head.  Gotta get it out.

Stay tuned.

 

Keepin’ it going

I have a new post up at the Garrison Creek Park Community Garden Association webpage.

It was a lot of fun to write, so I think I’m going to try to keep this up.  I just might not be posting very frequently.

 

Drifting

I’m not sure why I started this blog and I’m not sure if I should keep it.  I tell myself daily that I “should” write… but then I can’t figure out what to say.

This blog might be deleted in the next couple of weeks, or it might change names and/or focus.  We’ll see.

 

Garrison Creek Park Community Garden: A new beginning

I haven’t written about it (although I’ve hinted), but last year’s garden season didn’t quite go as planned.  Sure, I got a great crop of tomatoes, but it just wasn’t what I’d hoped.

So when a new opportunity arose a few months ago, I jumped at it.

Garrison Creek Park is located approximately 2-3 minutes (walking) from my house. 
And now it is the home to the Garrison Creek Park Community Garden Association.  Somehow I’ve found myself as the “Plant/Garden Co-ordinator”.  My job involves developing things like this:

(Click to see larger)

If you’re interested in finding out more about us, please visit us at:
http://garrisoncreekpark.wordpress.com/

 

Toastmasters Speech: Community Gardening

I joined the new Toastmasters group that has started at my office and the topic of my first speech was “Community Gardening”.  Since I’m making strides to overcome my fear of failure in terms of public speaking, I thought it would be a good idea to bridge over to the blog, which has also suffered from my fear of failure in the public eye.  Here is my speech from April 3rd, 2008.

Community Gardening

Gardening is something that I’ve been doing my entire life.  You could say it’s a family tradition, with my grandfather teaching my mom, who in turn taught me.  But when I moved from my small hometown to the city of Toronto almost three years ago, I was sure my gardening would be relegated to a few withering plants on a balcony until I could afford a house with enough of a yard to have my own large vegetable garden, which I knew was still many years off.  Little did I know that there is an increasingly popular phenomenon growing in small corners of parks in cities around the world, including Toronto, called “community gardens”.

Madam Toastmaster, fellow members and guests, the summer of 2007 was my first year with a community garden plot, and there are lots of things that I’m still learning, so instead of telling you about my garden specifically, I’d like to tell you about all the benefits of community gardening I’ve seen and heard about through the gardeners I’ve met in and around Toronto.

Before I go into the benefits, I’d like to take a moment to tell you about what a community garden is.  Usually, these gardens are founded in underused city parks, although they also occasionally pop up in abandoned lots or hydro fields.  In Toronto, there are allotment gardens run by the city, where the parks department gives out permits – for a fee – that allow a gardener to use a small piece of land from May until October to grow vegetables and flowers.  My garden last year was of this type – I had a 20 foot by 30 foot plot in a hydro field beside a rowdy flea market.  But increasingly, community and neighbourhood groups are establishing gardens where everyone works together on the same plot of land, and the harvest is either split amongst the members or donated to a community soup kitchen or food bank.  There are also gardens that combine these two ideas, with areas tended to by the group, and private plots that belong to only one member, all within the same garden.

The term “community garden” is made up, of course, of the words “community” and “garden” and these clearly lay out the two ways I think this movement is making a difference in neighbourhoods throughout the city.

From the description I just gave you of what a community garden looks like, you can probably put together for yourselves what a lot of the benefits to the community are.  First and foremost, a community garden brings neighbours together in a common area.  It is becoming increasingly common in our society to put up fences and stay within our homes and not talk to anyone on the street or in the park.  In these garden spaces, people come together to teach each other and get to know each other in a way that otherwise they would not have done.  Also, neighbourhoods that have put a garden in one of their parks have found that the increased community presence there reduces the amount of vandalism and crime, simply because there are more people in the area more often.  So these gardens really do benefit and bring together the community.

Then you may ask yourselves, “why a garden?  Aren’t there other ways to bring a community together that don’t involve getting our hands dirty?”  I’m sure there are many other ways to build community, including sports teams and block parties and many other great ideas.  But I believe that these gardens can teach us things that a sports team never could.  I was amazed when I moved to the city to learn that there are kids who live here who have never been to a farm, or even a farmer’s market.  If you ask them where their food comes from, they’ll tell you, simply, “it comes from the store”.  The primary thing that we can all learn from gardening is exactly what it takes to feed our communities.  I’ve been vegetable gardening for my whole life and it has grown in me an appreciation for how challenging it must be to farm on a large scale – a small 600 square foot lot was too much for me to care for on my own; I can’t imagine what 600 acres would be like!  Many of the community gardens in Toronto also advocate organic principles and do not allow chemical fertilizers or pesticides.  In these times of increasing paranoia about pollution and climate change, these gardens often show alternative ways of growing our food that do not cause the same environmental degradation as conventional farming.  Although a few little plots of dirt in a city park may not look like they’re making a difference, I believe they can plant enough seeds of knowledge about some of the issues we face today and some of the solutions to these issues that they really can bring about positive change.

So next time you’re walking your dog through your neighbourhood park, take a close look around, and you may see, in a small, unobtrusive corner, a plot of land growing a few tomatoes and flowers.  Take a closer look, because what you are looking at is more than just a few little plants – it is community and it may be a step towards a better future.

            Madam Toastmaster

 

By the way… the speech went great. 

 

Sneaking back to the blogosphere: BlogHers Act Canada

I’ve been absent for quite a while, I know.
But I thought it’s about time to sneak back in.
First post back: my submission for the April Challenge for BlogHers Act Canada:
The challenge is to teach our kids to go green, and the first week is about “Discovering great books for teaching kids about the environment”. 

One book that I always loved as a kid was “The Man Who Cooked for Himself” by Phyllis Krasilovsky. Unfortunately, it seems to no longer be in print, but is available from some used book sellers.  Here is the Amazon listing.

 I re-read this book a few months ago, and was struck by how appropriate it is to today’s issues of food production and the current “locavore” food movement. It is a picture book about a man who lives on the edge of the woods, who finds himself isolated from the store where he used to get his food. After he and his cat nearly starve, they find wild food growing in the forest, which he enjoys so much that he is inspired to plant a garden the following summer. The story is clear and well written, and teaches lessons without beating kids over the head with the political jargon.   This is not a story about climate change or endangered species or organic gardening, it is simply the story of a man who discovers the great joy in participating in feeding himself.  It is a good story even for those people who are not looking for an educational book, so would be a great gift for a family whose mind you’d like to change through their children (ooo… so sneaky!).

I think this book was an excellent supplement to the lessons I learned helping my mom in her vegetable garden, and I hope I can find a copy of this book once I have my own kids so I can teach them the same lessons.
 

 

Tomato Count: 44

On May 27, I got help from my wonderful Mom and sister Angela. They worked in Plot 22 with me for several hours.  We dug up weeds, turned over soil, planted tomatoes and eggplant, mulched with straw, and watered like crazy. The result was this:

Isn’t it beautiful? (picture is two days later… no sign of transplant shock!)

We planted:
6 eggplant (Imperial Black Beauty)
44 tomatoes of the following varieties:
- Black from Tula
- Whippersnapper
- Uncle Charlie’s Giant Italian
- Purple Cherokee
- Sophie’s Choice
- Opalka
- Eva Purple Ball
- German Red Strawberry
- Riesentraube

As of June 17th, they’ve more than doubled in size (in all directions!) and will need staking soon. I’ll post update photos as I have them, and will make every effort to track the progress (and taste!) of each variety.

Coming Soon: A big update… (easier than multiple posts)

 

Building a Garden

My first big task in Plot 22 was to flatten out the lumpy, dry soil and ammend it with manure. I was very lucky that the plot’s previous owner left it in very good shape. Many of the other plots had grown over with grass and weeds through the winter, requiring many back-breaking hours of labour to get them cleared. Unfortunately, the previous owner was planning to come back this season and had done some work during April, but he didn’t send in the paperwork to get his permit; I stopped feeling bad about that when I found out Plot 22 would have been his second plot, and his first plot is one of the largest in the garden!

In early May I attacked the garden with a rake and flattened it out. With help from my fantabulous boyfriend James, I laid out paths and planting areas. I would have loved to put in raised beds, but that would require a much larger budget! We ammended the soil with well-composted manure and tried to ignore the unwelcome criticisms of one of my garden neighbours (more on that some day when I’m up for some complaining!).

About a week later, we constructed a pea trellis:

It is made out of seven 6′ bamboo poles, fine nylon netting, and zip-ties. I hope it will be strong enough once the peas start climbing up the netting to survive the winds of summer storms. So far, it seems to be doing fine, even after the 100km/h gusts of last Friday night! The first pea seeds were planted along one side of the trellis May 19th, and the first sprout spotted a week later:

I planted a second crop along the other (North) side on June 9th. I’m hoping that will give me a second harvest a few weeks later than the first.

I’m growing Homesteader Peas (a shelling variety) and an edible podded sugar snap pea.

The first batch of gladiolus was also planted in mid-May, and will be followed by a second set next weekend.

Coming soon: Tomatoes!