Vert-à-Go

This is being posted very late; apologies. If you can possibly come out to the meeting, please do–the show of support tonight will be instrumental in whether the garden goes ahead or not! Even if you don’t want to take a garden plot yourself, if you support the plan, please come along anyway to show you are still in favour of the proposal in general.

Agenda: Park Programming change in Ashworth Holmes Park

7-7:10 pm Welcome and Introductions:
Presenters, topic, agenda

7:10- 7:30pm City of Saskatoon: Marieke Knight, Community Consultant
• Purpose of tonight’s meeting
• Review of the community garden Approval Process (use of City of Saskatoon park land)
• Purpose of a community garden? Recreational Programming change: What does this mean
• Why the Ashworth Holmes Park location?
• Garden Regulations and guidelines
• Sign in sheets to express the following: your support for the garden/your support and interest in having a plot/your objection to the garden as proposed

7:30-7:50pm Presentation: Garden Collective Representative
• Discuss site and possible design
• Potential costs involved for gardeners and why a cost
• Community use of the garden
• Why a garden?
• Next meeting for interested gardeners

7:50-8:05pm CHEP (Child Hunger and Education Project)
• brief description of CHEP’s work
• possible support CHEP could offer to the Community Garden Collective

8:05-8:20pm Power point: Operating Community Gardens

8:20pm Questions/Comments/Sign up

Caswell Community Garden/Ashworth Park site public consultation meeting

When: Monday 11 May, 7pm

Where: Caswell Hill School gym, 204 30th Street W, Saskatoon, SK (Google map)

For more information: Elizabeth Bekolay, garden committee/Marieke Knight, City of Saskatoon (975-3381)

Saskatoon Community Garden Network meeting

When: Monday 2 March, 7pm

Where: Core Neighbhourhood Youth Co-op, 905 20th Street W, Saskatoon, SK (Google map)

For more information: Saskatoon Community Garden Network Facebook group, dana@chep.org

The City of Saskatoon has been holding its yearly public ward meetings over the past few weeks. These meetings are usually held in the autumn, but were delayed because of the timing of the federal election (looks like they may have to permanently find another time for them, as we may well be having another election this October too).

The Ward 6 meeting on 22 January, which I attended, was a good opportunity for area residents to ask questions of Mayor Don Atchison, Councillor Charlie Clark, and representatives of various city departments. As I posted on Twitter the day of the meeting, so many people focus on national and provincial politics and forget that we can often make bigger and more positive changes to people’s lives at the civic level!

People at the meeting got up and spoke about the need for community gardens and more public green space in the ward, as well as their desire for better infrastructure and support for cyclists and pedestrians in the city. They also expressed their concern about lead levels in the tap water in older homes and the availability of recycling facilities. Justifiably high praise was also passed on to city council about the new Saskatoon Farmers’ Market location on River Landing.

So what is the city doing about the public’s concerns? It is currently investigating the possibility of converting some of the Victoria and Nutana school grounds to public park space, and is scoping out a number of potential community garden sites (sadly, the current Nutana Community Garden will be no more after the 2009 growing season, as the lease will soon be up and the land is slated for development–I’ll be writing more about this soon). I believe that the city is more than willing to try to accommodate and help set up community gardens, but the main obstacles are finding a suitable public space that has easily available water for irrigation. We need to push hard to identify more of these spaces and get gardeners behind the projects. If you’re interested in finding out more about community gardening in Saskatoon, get in touch with the Saskatoon Community Garden Network (you can join the Facebook group or email Dana Barrand for the next meeting details in March–I’ll also be posting them here soon).

The mayor freely admitted that the development for cycling paths is woefully behind schedule (it would apparently take 25 years to carry out the city’s planned scheme at the current rate) and pledged his support for the concept of human-powered transport. However, he didn’t give any details on how an accelerated timeline would be achieved. Saskatoon is so compact that a bike journey often need take no longer than one by car (and is very often faster, when you consider time to find parking). Riding a bike keeps you fit, reduces air pollution, and saves you money. It’s a no-brainer. Interested in improving cycling access, safety, and support in Saskatoon? Tell your city councillor and the mayor that this is something you strongly believe in. There’s also a Facebook group to support safe cycling downtown (a notoriously dangerous hotspot, as even the mayor admitted at the meeting that Saskatoon’s drivers “are not very good”).

Advice was given out to worried homeowners who cannot afford the estimated $4,000-7,000 it costs to replace old lead water pipe connections (and renters whose landlords are not willing to replace them. It was stressed that that the source water in Saskatoon is extremely pure, but that lead can accumulate while the water sits in the pipes nearby or inside the home. This has become a concern in cities across the country. To minimise horrible water wastage*, it was recommended that people take showers first thing, then let each individual tap run for 30 seconds before using it for drinking. Filters were also recommended. I’m not quite sure how the many people on limited incomes in the city who may be having problems finding the money for their existing water bill are supposed to find extra money for filters and for all this additional water (not to mention the expense of getting the water tested)!

It is a really unfortunate situation, as Councillor Clark pointed out at the meeting, because many people have bought (often older) homes closer to the centre of the city at least in part to try and reduce their environmental footprint. When we moved back to Saskatoon, we chose our neighbourhood largely because it was within easy walking distance of most places that we want to go. I collect rainwater to use in the garden and have put in more drought-tolerant plants. Through much more careful use of water and lights, we had managed to greatly reduce our utilities bill over the past year. But if it happened to have lead connection pipes, we would either have to use our fridge water filter for cooking and coffee/tea as well as fresh drinking water, or run a huge amount of water down the drain every day. Fortunately for us, I discovered that the main line had been replaced about 15 years ago, before we moved in. But there are thousands of homes that still have the old connection. To find out whether you have lead water connection pipes, phone the city at 975-2491 and they will look up the details for your address.

The issue of recycling was also raised. Mayor Atchison expressed his support for recycling facilities, but thought better results could be achieved through the use of several “super-depots” located throughout the city. Councillor Clark disagreed, stating that he thought that a curbside blue box collection program could work well in Saskatoon. I have to say that it doesn’t personally seem to make much sense to me to have thousands of cars burning gasoline hauling newspapers and plastic back and forth all over the city when one vehicle could do pickups. The success of Saskatoon Curbside Recycling seems to show that when people have the convenience of door-to-door pickup, they will recycle anything that isn’t nailed down and will often pass the recycling bug onto their friends and neighbours. It would also provide the necessary infrastructure to begin collecting organic/kitchen waste, which would be so much better properly composted rather than dumped into the landfill to create methane gas. I don’t think people will really be willing (or should be willing) to drive their used coffee grounds or potato peelings halfway across the city twice a week to a central collection point.

There were many other issues raised at the meeting that night, but these are the ones of most relevance to my blog. For a good overview of the issues raised at the ward meetings, check out Sean Shaw’s blog–he has attended many (if not all?) of the city ward meetings this month and posted notes on those for both Ward 4 (where he plans to run for councillor in the autumn) and Ward 6. Thanks, Sean!

If you feel strongly about any or all of the above issues or anything else (I’m sure you do!), you can get in touch with City Council via this online form or get contact details for your local councillor here.

* It has been recommended that a tap be left running for 10 minutes before water is used for drinking if it has not been flushed out in for 6 hours. The expense and sheer waste is staggering, frankly. But then, so is the idea that you might be drinking water with an unsafe level of lead in it.

(right: Roma, Tigerella, Thai Pink Egg, Sweet Gold, Sweet Millions, and Green Zebra tomatoes)

We are now well into autumn, and the last of the food has been harvested from our various garden patches. Everything has been eaten fresh, canned, frozen, or put into cold storage. But how did the growing season measure up? It’s important to keep a yearly record of what you grew, where, and how it fared–otherwise, you may find yourself staring at a bunch of seed packets and plants next spring, thinking, ‘What on earth was that thing I grew last year? Where did I put it? Did it actually grow, or was that the other one?’ I call it gardeners’ amnesia–it’s astonishing how easily all your years of gardening can run together in your memory, making you waste time replanting something that wasn’t very successful in the past (or force you to rack your brains for days trying to remember what on earth that fabulously productive and drought-resistant plant was and where on earth you found it).

Your records don’t need to be fancy (if they’re too fancy, you won’t have time to actually garden!). Draw up a quick map showing where you put everything, and then make a list of all the individual plants with a note or two about how they grew. Once that’s done, jot down a few general notes. Did you make particular soil amendments? Use a specific fertiliser? What were the weather conditions like? Were you hit by any plagues of pests, and if so, what did you do to combat them? If you had any ideas for how to improve something in the garden next year, write it down now! You’re pretty much guaranteed to forget some detail or other. I also went round with a camera and took a photo of everything in an attempt to keep myself from impatiently digging up all my perennials in June and shifting them around (only to discover in July that there was a very GOOD reason I hadn’t put it there–there was already another plant still waiting to come up!) For more advice on specifics, Mother Earth has a good article on garden record keeping here.

Here’s a rundown of 2008’s successes and disappointments:

Back garden

Tomatillos

See, I’m already running into trouble here–I bought two from different nurseries and one ended up maturing much earlier and had much larger fruit than the other variety. But the varieties weren’t listed on the sticks and I can’t actually remember which was which.

Tomatoes

Tigerella (along garage wall) — disappointing producer, probably due to poor sun/heat conditions (Shaughnessy Gardens)

Thai Pink Egg (along garage wall) — nice fruit, but not huge numbers of them, see above (Shaughnessy Gardens)

Sweet Gold (along chain link fence) — amazing taste!! fabulous producer. definitely get again (Floral Acres)

Sweet Millions (along garage wall) — great as usual (Floral Acres)

Green Zebra (along chain link fence) — took forever to mature and didn’t produce much, but would probably give it another chance

Prairie Pride (in 5-gallon pails by fence) — bought them quite advanced, they burned out a bit quickly but would try again

Chillies

I put in jalapenos and a bell-shaped green-purple variety in the large container as usual. They did pretty well, considering the lack of sun.

Raspberries

Did amazingly well–if next year isn’t as rainy, try to give them as much water as I can as it obviously helped

Strawberries

The plants really took off in their new raised bed and I’m expecting a lot more fruit next year, once their established. Keep on top of the quack grass!!

Cucumbers

I bought a few bush-style cucumbers and put them in 5-gallon pails by the fence. They did not do well…but I was also perhaps (definitely) rather neglectful of them.

Green beans

Bush-style, from Early’s–I planted these in front of the tomatoes and they did quite well (better on the chain link fence side); I’d do that again–there weren’t really enough for freezing but we ate quite a few fresh and I put quite a lot into soup. Probably got the equivalent of $25 worth.

Dill

This never comes back, but it always does fine when I plant it every year.

Lettuce

I seeded the containers quite early (early May) and they did great. I didn’t get the Strela Green seeds in time (Salt Spring Seeds) for the first planting–try them next year!

Front garden

Lettuce

I chose several different varieties (buttercrunch, salad bowl red, rocket (arugula), perpetual spinach, mesclun) to add different colour and texture to the front beds. I staggered two plantings and they did really well (grew faster before tree canopy came in, but then stayed nice and didn’t bolt in the heat later). I loved going out front to pick.

Carrots

I put in two rows of carrots at the front. Next time I wouldn’t stagger the plantings because I ended up just leaving them till the very end of the season anyway. As they don’t get much sun there, they didn’t grow very big,  but the foliage was pretty, they did produce a modest quantity of carrots, and carrot seed is cheap. I’d probably look for the shortest maturity time when picking carrot seed next year.

Chives

The chives I put in the front did well and looked quite nice even as an ornamental feature.

Chillies

I put a couple of extra jalapeno plants out front mainly to add some colour. Considering their puny growth rate, they ended up with a decent amount of fruit.

Scarlet runner beans

These looked ok, but took FOREVER to come up and just never got enough sun to really bush out. I think I’ll try some other kind of flowering vine next time.

Strawberries

I put a couple of strawberry plants in the front and they didn’t do anything; that’s to be expected in the first year so I guess I’ll leave them be for another one and see what happens.

Herb spiral

Rosemary, curly parsley, Italian parsley (they grew very slowly, but were healthy enough)

Oregano, sage, thyme (grew very large and prolific)

Cilantro (this is the first time I’ve *ever* managed to get it to grow without bolting within 5 minutes. I scattered the dried seeds below the obelisk and am hoping some plants will come up there; if not, I’ll get 2 plants for the spiral? they were a little tall in comparison to the other plants, though)

Basil–regular, lemon, lime, Thai (they got pretty spindly…probably not enough sun out front. Might be worth trying it again, especially if I started my own basil and could put more in at the back for volume rather than odd leaves for cooking here and there.)

Ripping out the front lawn and putting in the herb spiral, the new walkways and beds was the best thing I could have possibly done. I wish I’d done it years ago. I LOVED having the herb spiral and chives, etc, out front. It was both handy and attractive, gave the space focus, and brought us out to the front garden much more often. It feels so much more neighbourly now, and many passers-by commented on how they liked it. I also think it is a great idea to challenge people’s notion of what you can and can’t plant in a front yard. Why not plant vegetables or fruit? Why remain a slave to a lawn that you don’t even use?

Community garden

Potatoes

The foliage in the middle of the patch mysteriously turned brown at the beginning of August and looked very sickly. We couldn’t really identify the problem, and those plants didn’t produce much of anything. The other ones around the edges did quite well, though.

Carrots

Did great, but really needed more thinning as they didn’t have enough room to grow large and straight

Beets

could also have been thinned more to give them more space to grow.

Parsnips

These were tasty, but small. We left them in the ground until mid-October, but they just didn’t seem to get much of a chance to grow. I think they came from seed–it might be worthwhile starting the seeds inside earlier so that they would have a better chance to mature.

Swiss chard (Bright Lights)

This was so successful–prolific, long-lasting, drought resistant, and tasty!

Corn

Something seriously weird happened here. The cobs just didn’t appear (those that did, were small or mutated). I wonder if there was a problem with the seed, as the same thing happened to my mom’s crop and we used her leftover seed.

Basil, roma tomatoes, jalapeno peppers

These were too overshadowed by the potatoes. Plant the basil and peppers on the north/east edges in future rather than further in.

Butternut squash

This just didn’t do anything. I think it was a bad year for squash (probably needed more sun and room)

Bell peppers

These did pretty well, but would probably have done even better along the edges of the plot. Overall, I think that the community garden space is best left for stuff that can be planted and then just merely tended until a fell-swoop harvest. Green beans would have been nice, but it can be hard to catch stuff at its peak ripeness when it isn’t right outside your door.

Weather: A very cool and wet summer (there were several weeks when it rained nearly every day to some degree, and it was really quite grey), although it smartened up a bit in August. Lots of things were late (tomatoes especially) because of the lack of heat, but September was gorgeous and there wasn’t a killing frost until the middle of October. I only had to use the hose to water a couple of times the entire summer–the rain barrels kept everything happy. Get that other rain barrel organised for next year!

Fertiliser: I used organic tomato spikes and earthworm casing fertiliser. What I really need to do is go take some soil samples before it snows to measure nutrient levels.

Soil amendments: I worked in a dozen bags of well-composted manure from the Cyclones before planting

Pests/other problems: This was a particularly pest-free year. Very few canker worms or aphids. Slug problem has disappeared since moving lettuce into pots in back yard and into ground at front (please don’t let them find it there!).  There were ZILLIONS of wasps, however–lots in the front; I wonder if they were driven there by the fake wasps nests hanging at the back. Some blossom end rot on the community garden tomatoes and that unexplained potato blight, as well as the corn debacle.

And how did everyone else’s gardens fare?

This past weekend, the six members of the Number One Ladies Jam Collective got together to exchange the (preserved) fruit of their labours: strawberry, raspberry, pear ginger, apricot, and peach/raspberry jam. Delicious! We will definitely be doing this again next year.

We enjoyed a few wines during the evening, including an organic Chilean cabernet sauvignon (Cono Sur) and a French merlot packaged in the more environmentally-friendly tetrapack (French Rabbit). We sampled homemade/Saskatchewan-grown salsa, pickles, and hummus, and to top it off, I served chocolate beet cake, made from some of my beets from the community garden plot. My recipe came from the City Gardeners Cookbook, but this recipe is virtually identical (except that they sprinkled chocolate chips on the top and used canned beets and beet juice instead of 1.5 cups of fresh beet puree).

I made two 8-inch round cakes instead of one 9×13 sheet and spread peach-raspberry jam between the layers. Then I mixed up 1/2 cup of sour cream, 6oz melted semi-sweet chocolate, and 1/8tsp of salt for a quick icing. Topped with the very last surviving sprig of white and purple pansies from the garden and a few small bunches of Concord grapes from a vine at my mom and dad’s farm, it made an elegant-looking dessert that quite belied its humble roots. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of it before we devoured it!

(photo: Bright lights, big city–Danny’s magnificent chard!)

I went by the Nutana Community Garden the other day for the first time in several weeks. My husband took charge of the plot this spring and did some nifty space-saving planting (thanks to Square Foot Gardening)–it’s all looking really good. In particular, the Swiss chard is going completely rampant!

Swiss chard is one of those things that tastes best fresh out of the ground and is done no favours by hanging out in a supermarket cooler (buy it in season at a farmers’ market or other local vendor–try Steep Hill Co-op). It will also continue to grow back throughout the season–in fact, the more you cut it, the better it grows. So if you have a few square feet of sunny ground to spare, you can keep yourself in these highly nutritious greens from mid-July to freeze-up (and beyond, if you freeze what you can’t eat fresh at the time!). There are a number of varieties, but I personally like Bright Lights for its gorgeously-tinted stems. Planted in containers, these were a huge hit at London’s famed Chelsea Flower Show a few years back.

So, what should you do with it while it’s at its best and more profuse? Well, right now you can add it to your morning omelette, chop it up and add to a tossed green salad, make soup (it goes great with beans or lentils), make pesto, sauté it as a side dish, make Swiss chard ‘cabbage’ rolls, add it to pasta, chickpeas, casseroles, fish…the possibilities are pretty much endless. You could even try a tourte aux blettes– a sweet Swiss chard tart (often including apple, raisins, and pine nuts) popular in the south of France, which is often served for dessert.

If you’re picking Swiss chard from the garden, you will probably still have more popping out of the ground than you can possibly use right now. If you get it into the freezer, you can save yourself money and food miles this winter!

How to freeze Swiss chard

If you’re going to use frozen Swiss chard within a couple of weeks, you can just stick it into a bag and freeze it as-is. But if you want it to keep for longer, you need to give it a good wash in a cold water bath, blanch it (plunge it into hard-boiling water for two minutes to kill any nasty bacteria), then dunk it in ice water and squish out all the excess water, then pack it into freezer bags. It should last for a year in an air-tight bag or container.

You may want to remove the stems and use them fresh for something else rather than freezing them–they can go rather mushy and/or stringy after freezing.

Get more great Swiss chard recipes:

Leslie Beck, RD: Canada’s leading nutritionist

Veggie Meal Plans

Simply Recipes

Martha Stewart

The keepers of London’s royal parks are considering replacing some of their flowerbeds with edible fruits and vegetables after being inspired by the success of similar urban park projects in the US, the Guardian reports.

The idea of planting cabbages and carrots may seem quite radical to those used to the beautifully manicured lawns and ornamental flowerbeds of Regent’s Park and Kensington Gardens, but officials say that they don’t intend to start ripping up the famous rose gardens:

“The royal parks’ role is not to have huge areas of land changed, but to act as a demonstration area to show what can be achieved,” said Colin Buttery, the parks’ chief executive. “We very much want to support the idea of people growing their food by doing small-scale demonstrations.”

A similar food garden demonstration is already in its second year in St James’s Park. Spearheaded by the Churchill Museum, the Cabinet War Rooms, and the Royal Parks, the Dig for Victory allotment project in St James’s Park features two model allotments–one modern, and one recreated in the style of a 1940s Victory Garden. The Dig for Victory campaign was launched to help deal with wartime food shortages in Britain by encouraging people to grow their own food in their gardens and on public land (parcelled out as ‘allotments’). At its height, there were 1.4 million allotments in Britain, which managed to cut its dependence on imported food in half–an impressive and essential achievement during those food-scarce years.

Because the WWII campaign dealt with many of the same issues that we face today–the problem of obtaining fresh, healthy, affordable food and conserving water, soil and other resources–this demonstration project has particular resonance and it’s become a popular attraction for locals, curious tourists and school groups. This spring, vegetable seed sales outstripped flower seed sales in the UK for the first time since the Second World War. There are are 330,000 allotments in the UK today, but still so much demand that in many cities, you can’t even get on a waiting list for a plot.

In Canada, a similar surge in vegetable seed sales is taking place, and growers say they have never experienced such demand. Over 100 people turned up this spring to apply for a plot at the Nutana Community Garden in Saskatoon, and despite the addition of quite a few new plots, most of these people had to go on a waiting list. There are a number of enterprising people who are trying to get additional community garden projects started throughout the city, and municipal departments have generally been quite helpful, but Saskatoon really needs an official initiative like Vancouver’s 2010 by 2010 challenge (to establish 2010 new community garden plots by 2010 as an Olympic legacy) to help turn the dream of universal local garden access into reality.

If you happen to be in London this summer, the Dig for Victory allotment is open to visitors seven days a week from 10am-5pm until September. It is located on the north-eastern side of St James’s Park (if you hit the Inn The Park cafe, you’ve gone too far west). A companion exhibition entitled Make Do and Mend: The War on Waste is on at the Cabinet War Rooms Museum across the way.

Check out more pictures that I took during my visit to the Dig for Victory gardens here!

(photo by Travis Gray)

I went to hear Richard Heinberg speak at the Broadway Theatre last night in support of his book Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines. It was not a talk for the faint-hearted.

Heinberg is one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. I first read about the issue of peak oil about a year ago in James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, and it completely threw me for a loop. Peak oil is part and parcel of the undeniable argument that oil, like every other resource on our finite planet, is someday going to run out. Up until fairly recently, it was assumed that we had many years of oil left, and that in our infinite human ingenuity, we would come up with some kind of alternative energy source long before that distant day would come to pass.

Unfortunately, it looks like all the previous oil reserve estimates were wildly optimistic. And guess what? We haven’t come up with anything else that comes even remotely close to making up the energy shortfall.

So how much have we got left? The main problem with pinpointing the peak of anything is that you can only see it clearly in the rear-view mirror–once you’ve already passed the hump and have started heading down the downward slope. But Heinberg believes there are some fairly obvious hints that we are riding the top of the wave right here, right now:

• global oil production has plateaued in the past three years (the all-time record set in May 2005 has not been bettered since, despite the incentive of very high prices)
• oil companies are now drilling 3-4 times as many wells just to achieve the same level of production
• oil production has already peaked in 33 out of 48 oil-producing countries, including Kuwait, Russia, and Mexico (the US peaked in 1970)
• the number of big oil field discoveries is dropping off
• new fields are depleting more quickly
• prices are spiking to all-time highs (a decade ago, oil was selling for US$12 a barrel. Now it’s at over $100)

Even the CEO of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, has declared that “after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.” It took us 200 years to reach the peak, but skyrocketing demand means that it will run out way sooner than that. Once all the cheap, easy oil is gone, it will take an ever-increasing amount of effort to extract an ever-diminishing amount of oil, until we will eventually reach the point where it will take more energy to get it out of the ground than we can get by burning it. Heinberg thinks that we have already started feeling the oil pinch, and it is only going to get worse from here on out.

The potential implications of mismanaging the forced withdrawal from our oil addiction are pretty obvious, and very grim. Food inflation. Economic collapse. Ever-increasing environmental devastation (deforestation for biofuels, a return to coal, tar sands development). Oil wars. Wait, doesn’t that sounds familiar already? It’s pretty easy to see ahead to the collapse of industrial civilisation as we know it. After all, 26 civilisations have already collapsed. Why should ours be any different? As Heinberg says, the party’s over. Our way of life is going to change forever, and if you’re under 50, it’s definitely going to happen in your lifetime.

But what will we eat when the oil runs out? Unsurprisingly, Heinberg’s answer was ‘local, local, local’. We need to start growing our own food, emulating the famous WWII Victory Gardens, embracing permaculture, establishing more community gardens, and waking up to the fact that farming is going to become much more dependent on manual labour in the decades to come.

If you weren’t able to make it out to Heinberg’s talk, you can watch a very similar version here:

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5     Part 6