Vert-à-Go

Do you have a pesky gardening question? The University of Saskatchewan’s Gardenline is now open for the season and is taking calls from domestic gardeners and small-scale commercial growers.

Gardenline offers information and advice on everything green. You can ask about starting seeds, growing vegetables, fruit, houseplants, trees and shrubs, yard and garden plants, and find out how to deal with diseases and pests.

The free phone line (966-5865) will be open until 31 August on Mondays to Thursdays, from 9am-noon and 1-4pm. You can also email questions to gardenline@usask.ca.

Gardenline’s web site also has a ton of very informative articles grouped by category (they are rather awkward to search, but fun to browse). You can find advice on planting early vegetables here.

Happy new year! Holiday festivities are now over for most people and there’s not much to do apart from dig yourself out from the snow and finish clearing out the fridge of festive leftovers. A friend of mine, Tom, suggests the following New Year’s Day recipe:

Humpty’s Last Stand

Take all remaining 2008 food, chop, add egg and bake. Ready for 2009!

I have already made turkey pot pie, stock, creamed turkey, a couple of coleslaws, and chilli and am now down to half a leek, a grapefruit, and a cup of gravy. Oh, and a pound of chestnuts. I fear it may require more than eggs to transform those ingredients into an edible concoction!

While you’re enjoying the revitalised dregs of 2008, here is a list of some of the top food stories from the past year. 2008 was a tumultuous year, which brought a huge amount of hardship to people worldwide–as well as some exciting developments that promise some hope of change in 2009.

1. Although the first shocks were felt in 2007, it was in 2008 that the food crisis began to bite hard. Skyrocketing food prices, riots, privation, and starvation–it was a perfect storm formed from a combination of factors, including food commodities speculation, the rush to biofuels, crop failure, spiking oil prices, natural disasters, and governmental incompetence (or malice). Towards the end of the year, some organic growers and vendors (like Whole Foods) were beginning to feel the pinch as consumers looked for ways to reduce their food bills.
2. The previous few years brought the term ‘locavore’ and the 100-mile diet to the fore, but in 2008 a backlash arose against the strict application of ‘food miles’ without consideration for other environmental impacts such as method of production. Turns out transport doesn’t count for everything when it comes to carbon emissions.
3. In March, Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party government withdrew funding for Station 20 West, a non-profit public centre that was to include dental, medical, and mental health services for Saskatoon’s core neighbourhood residents. CHEP and the Elizabeth Fry Society were also expected to join the centre, as well as a cooperative grocery store (area residents have been without a full-service local grocery store for a decade). In April, thousands of supporters gathered to protest the cuts in a community march. Having spent the year fundraising, Station 20 West now plans to break ground on its revised centre (which will include the grocery store) this May.
4. Uncertainty about the food crisis led to a sharp increase in the number of people planting gardens, many for the first time, this past spring. Seed sales skyrocketed in Canada, the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Many city people (including me!) dug up their front lawns to plant vegetables instead.
5. It was another rotten year for rotten food–in Canada, with the Maple Leaf foods listeriosis outbreak, which killed 20 people across the country, and the E. coli outbreak from contaminated lettuce at a North Bay Harvey’s fast food restaurant. Fingers were pointed at the Canadian food inspection system. The US scrambled to find the source of a salmonella outbreak (first incorrectly linked to California tomatoes, then later to Mexican peppers), while in China, tens of thousands of babies were harmed by melamine-tainted milk (which had then also entered the global food chain).
6. Honeybees, which are succumbing in droves to an as-yet-unsolved combination of ailments called Colony Collapse Disorder, continued to decline. Parasites and pesticides appear to be chief culprits, but many of the hive deaths and disappearances are unexplained.
7. There were catastrophic floods in Iowa, as well as another year of catastrophic drought in Australia, as well as ever-increasing evidence of the effect of climate change on the ocean–salmon in Alaska attacked by a warmer-water parasite, while west-coast oysters were hit by a bacteria deadly to shellfish larvae that appeared to be connected to a new anaerobic dead zone in the ocean. These natural and unnatural disasters demonstrate yet again how dependent we are on the earth and weather behaving as we expect they should so we can grow sufficient food.
8. Several more fisheries were forced to close or are driving themselves close to collapse because of insufficient fish, due to manmade contamination or overfishing–US west coast salmon from California to Oregon, and bluefin tuna in both the Mediterranean and off the coast of Japan. Taras Grescoe’s book Bottomfeeder warned of the imminent need for humans to stop eating so far up the ocean’s food chain and to reject unsustainably-caught fish if we are to prevent mass oceanic extinction.
9. Seventeen Canadian municipalities, including the city of Toronto, decided to ban the sale of bottled water on their premises and forty-five more are set to debate the issue. It’s time to go Back to the Tap!
10. ABC News’s Senior White House Correspondence Jake Tapper called Barack Obama “an arrogant, arugula-eating, fancy-berry-tea-drinking celebrity”, while sustainable food fans cheered when Obama revealed that he had read Michael Polan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan wrote an open letter to the ‘Farmer in Chief’ and a campaign began to create an organic food garden on the White House Lawn. And he hasn’t even taken office yet!
11. Burger King released a men’s cologne that smells like a Whopper hamburger. Well, I suppose it’s better to smell like one than eat one…
12. The launch of Vert-à-Go! I’ve learned a huge amount since starting up this web site last March, and I’m looking forward to covering more food issues and providing more information on where to find sustainable, organic, local and ethically-produced food over the next year. Thanks for reading!

photo by Shop Boy

If you look at the right-hand side of the Vert-à-Go web site, you’ll see a column named Food News. Here you’ll find a collection of external links relating to sustainable, organic, local, and ethical food issues–all kinds of interesting news articles, web sites, and resources from Canada and around the world. All pages will open in a new window, but some of them will require you to register before viewing them (i.e. the New York Times–but it really is worthwhile registering to see their content).

This sidebar displays the most recent dozen or so links that I’ve tagged–to have a look at the full list of archived Vert-a-Go links, you can visit my del.icio.us page. You can also subscribe to my Food News stream using this RSS Feed.

Happy reading, food news hounds!

photo: Library of Congress archives

Earlier this year, Kitchen Gardeners International launched a campaign to plant edible landscapes in high-visibility locations. At the forefront of the campaign is a petition to ask the next US president to convert part of the White House lawn into a large organic food garden that would supply the White House kitchen and local food banks with fresh produce.

Roger Doiron, founder of KGI, explains that there is a well-established precedent for ‘eating the view‘:

“The White House lawn has been a sustainable and edible landscape in the past, notably at times of national emergency. In 1918, for example, Woodrow and Edith Wilson did away with gas-powered mowers, replacing them with a hungry herd of sheep. Later, in 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden on the White House lawn inspiring millions of citizens to follow suit. For the really obstinate opponents who say “that was then, this is now,” you can point them to the governors of Maine, New York, and North Carolina who are already happily eating their view and saving tax-payers money along the way.”

In his victory speech last night, President-elect Obama declared the importance of embracing a spirit of service and sacrifice “where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other.” I think taking responsibility for feeding himself and his neighbours would be a terrific way to start. Vote for the Eat the View proposal at the On Day One web site or “buy” a parcel of the lawn to fund kitchen garden projects!

This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.

Now that the farmers’ market is in full swing, and the garden is growing nicely, the majority of our meals are locally grown. Here’s a sampling from the weekend:

Fusilli pasta salad with sugar-snap peas, yellow peppers, green onion, cilantro, mint, and Canadian goat cheese feta (source: Vegetables: farmers’ market, herbs: my garden, feta: Bulk Cheese Warehouse)

Barbecued Mennonite farmer sausage & steak, new potatoes with chopped herbs & butter, sautéed beet stems & greens (source: Smokehaus sausage: Bulk Cheese Warehouse, Benlock Farms steak, vegetables: farmers’ market, herbs: my garden)

Sliced Mennonite farmer sausage, new potatoes with chopped herbs, mixed salad (lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, green onion, mixed seeds), Saskatoon berries and chokecherry syrup on vanilla ice cream (source: Smokehaus sausage: Bulk Cheese Warehouse, lettuce & herbs: my garden, vegetables: farmers’ market, Sunview Farms eggs: Herbs & Health, Saskatoon berries: my neighbour, chokecherry syrup: my grandma, ice cream: Homestead Ice Cream)

Early last week I cut up a whole Pine View Farms chicken (6.5lbs), which lasted our family of four for meat the whole week. One night we had half the breast with a pepper/sugar snap pea/mushroom stirfry (I cut up the other half and fried it, then put it in the freezer to add to a curry next week).

At lunch time one day I popped the chicken back into some water with (organically grown) celery leaves/tops and let it simmer away for about half an hour, then added the resulting broth and chicken stock that I already had in the freezer to sautéed celery, onion, garlic, and mushroom. Once the vegetables were tender, I whizzed the soup with a hand blender and stirred in the chopped cooked chicken with salt, pepper, and juice from a (organic) lemon. This made enough soup for us for 2 meals.

Another evening I put the de-skinned legs, wings, and thighs into the slow cooker and made a coconut chicken curry with onion, carrot, chickpeas, and swiss chard (I would have added peas to this too but we’d already scarfed the fresh ones earlier in the week with the other half of the swiss chard, and I was out of frozen ones). This fed us very well, gave me lunch the next day, and I froze 3 additional large single portions of leftovers.

Any remaining bits of that chicken went into the freezer for future chicken stock!

This week I plan to make (among other things) a beet/goat cheese/arugula/walnut salad, a balti curry with baby tomatoes and chicken, a green pepper/sugar snap pea/mushroom/cashew stirfry with quinoa, whole wheat/buttermilk pancakes with garden strawberries & Saskatoons, pasta with fresh peas/basil/pumpkin seeds, rhubarb crisp, monastery lentils or lentil salad (depending on the weather).

The Wednesday market will start next week, 25 June. Hours will be 10am-2pm. Vendors will be limited (similar to the Sunday market), but more vendors will come as the summer progresses.

You should also be able to expect cherries at the market on 5 July. Now it’s officially summer!

I will be away for about 10 days, but you can expect more posts at the beginning of July. Have a good month!