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Hello all:
There are a few things to announce, relevant to food-security efforts here on the Upper Sunshine Coast:
- We had a wonderful Kale Force meeting this past Wednesday (Feb. 11). There were about twenty people present, the food was awesome, and Wendy Devlin talked us through some of the information we need to know about seed-saving, including the details of the new seed-saving initiative starting up this year. Some of the participants in the seed-saving pilot project came to the seed-packing bee, and were able to pick up the seeds that they will be growing this year. Very exciting!
- Carol Engram is planning a series of monthly workshops this spring and summer to help people learn how to create and care for a productive food garden. She has asked me to see if I can help her find someone willing to let their garden be used once a month for a hands-on workshop and work party. During the course of the summer, Carol and the workshop attendees will build up a garden, learn about composting, weeding, planting, and other aspects of food gardening. If you’re interested in having some part of your property used as a demonstration garden in this way, please email me or contact Carol at (604) 485-2311.
- David Counsell has stepped forward to coordinate the community garden at the Seventh Day Adventist Church this coming growing season. If you are interested in helping out at that garden, which is on Manson Ave. near Alberni St. in Powell River, or are interested in having a garden bed for yourself or your family, please contact David at dcounsell@shaw.ca or (604) 413-1499. Or you can just drop by the church on Tuesdays or Thursdays between noon and 1:30 PM and talk to David in person.
- Hana-Louise Braun is continuing to coordinate activities in the demonstration garden of Powell River’s Community Resource Centre. If you would like to get more involved there and spend time learning how to grow food in your own garden, you can drop by the CRC any Monday between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM and talk with Hana-Louise. Bring work clothes, gloves, and hand tools if you have them.
- Come and ‘Dig-it’ on Sunday March 1st 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM in Wildwood. This free workshop demonstrates the division and the digging up of of berries and other food plants. Volunteers are invited to bring their boots and extra large pots to Farmers’ Institute member farms: 1:00 PM at Hatch-a-Bird Farm (6603 McMahon Ave.); 2:00 PM with Wendy Devlin at 6834 Smarge Ave. The newly potted plants will be donated to the Seedy Saturday plant exchange.
- Seedy Saturday is March 14 2009, at the Community Living Place on Artaban in Powell River). Bring your seeds in dry, sealed envelopes and swap them for other seeds. Or you can buy seed packets for fifty cents. You can exchange bedding plants, perennials, roots/tubers, berries, shrubs, and trees. Community groups will be there to give out information on gardening, permaculture, composting, beekeeping, and seed saving. There will also be five free garden-related workshops during the day.
So, as you can see, there is a lot going on in and around Powell River, even though we’re not even into the growing season yet!!
As always, if you have any ideas for a workshop that you would like to attend (or facilitate), please contact me at david@prfoodsecurity.org, or phone me at (604) 485-2004.
Here‘s an interesting little piece from the Independent about the move away from ornamental gardening and towards more food gardening in the UK. It’s all great news, but here’s the slightly alarming bit:
The UK’s leading seed sellers, Tuckers, Marshalls and packetseeds.com, are struggling to cope with the number of orders coming in. The Horticultural Trades Association put UK sales of the seeds of edible plants at £40.3m in 2007; new figures expected shortly are likely to show significant growth.
I expect we’ll be seeing more of this in the next few years, until supply can meet demand again. But will the supply be just more genetically-modified seed produced with chemical agriculture methods? It will unless we all start saving seeds in our own communities.
Here is the online hub for seed-saving action in the Powell River (BC) region. I hope your community has a Seedy Saturday; if not, start one! And this is the time to start rounding up your serious local growers and get them to save more seeds. And save seeds yourself in your own garden.
Had the last meeting of the year last night, and (I think) the first meeting of the second year of meetings… meaning, if I remember rightly, that the first meeting ever was in December 2007, back when we had no name for these monthly gatherings.
About 8 people showed up, which is not bad for a December evening. The food was great: a delicious curry and rice, some mashed (local) potatoes with parsley & smoked salmon, deviled backyard (illegal!) eggs, and yummy shortbread and other treats for dessert.
Conversation was, as always, fairly free-wheeling. But we did do a go-round and give everyone a chance to talk about what they’re up to, what’s going on in the garden, and all that good stuff. I handed out copies of the first draft of the seed-saving plan and we talked about that. I’m pretty certain that this is a project that will really spark people’s imaginations and lead to good conversations about the importance of local seed-saving, the fragility of the global food supply, backyard gardening in hard times, and all sorts of other topics near and dear to the heart of the Kale Force.
For anyone interested in getting more involved, the seed-saving project — which badly needs a jazzy name — has a blog. There’s not a huge amount of information there now, but this is the place on the web where we will be creating and following this local project, answering questions, sharing information and results, and all that.
See you in the new year!
One of Wendy's squash patches; pole beans in the background
We had the September Kale Force meeting last night, one week late since I was out of town at the Sorrento gathering of the BC Food Systems Network last Wednesday. This month’s meeting was the follow-up meeting to July’s meeting when Wendy Devlin talked to the group about some of the basics of saving seeds. That was the classroom portion; last night’s meeting was the hands-on part. We met up at Wendy’s place, up in the far northeast corner of Wildwood, admired her ducks and rabbits and sheep, and then spent almost two hours wandering around in her garden, learning about the ins and outs of seed-saving.
We looked at chard, beet, dill, cilantro, beans, various flowers, talked about gathering seeds from plants like cucumbers and tomatillos, and spent some time gathering seeds from Wendy’s cosmos (cosmoses?). It certainly adds a whole new dimension to gardening when you have to think ahead to saving seeds, since you have to consider distances between plants, accidental pollination, flowering times, and the tradeoffs between growing plants for eating and growing plants for seed.
After that, some of us went down the road a piece to Heinz’ house and admired his incredible garden, built among the rock formations beside his house. Talk about making the best of a difficult situation for a garden! Heinz has trucked in large amounts of soil and amendments and created a very orderly and well-maintained fruit and vegetable garden. He has lots of strawberries, even this late in the season, which might be something to do with the fact that everything is surrounded by rock, which probably helps keep the garden from cooling down as much as it otherwise might. We enjoyed a nice potluck meal and conversation, and then called it a night.
One thing that came out of the workshop was a renewed interest in creating a regional seed-saving effort, whereby people in different parts of town could tale responsibility for saving seed from particular plants and varieties. This might allow for isolating plants from cross-pollination and accidental hybridization, and would allow for some plants to be grown for seed in areas which are more conducive to those plants. For example, Wendy was having trouble getting some of her plants to set seed before the cool damp weather starts; but in drier warmer parts of Powell River it should be possible to extend the growing season by a couple weeks or more.
So, this winter, as we continue to meet (second Wednesday of every month at 5:00 PM at the Community Resource Centre!), we will hopefully be planning a little network of seed-savers around the area, divvying up responsibility for seeds from various plants, and using these seeds to feed into Seedy Saturday. Perhaps over time this will evolve into a seed company or cooperative.
