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Oysters, Abattoir, perennial food crops and Eco-Fair

All blissfully quiet at my end of the Gorge these days, now that Craigflower Bridge has been closed for rebuilding and traffic re-routed. I was gratified to learn that not only were there viable oyster beds in the Gorge, but the planners had taken steps to relocate and preserve them so that the construction does not do away with this rare species (for the next eight months or so). These are our native Olympia oysters, not the Pacific upstarts introduced from Japan that now dominate the West Coast’s shoreline and oyster farming operations. I happened to pass what I assume to be the relocation action as it was unfolding and snapped them at it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been spreading myself thin in recent weeks, trying to keep up with different social media (Twitter, Facebook and most recently Pinterest), working on some of my own writing, and going nose to grindstone with my holistic nutrition studies. We’re deep into preventive nutrition this month, studying up on nutritional approaches to digestive, blood sugar, cardiovascular and arthritic conditions. Quite a ride.

On Friday I returned from Nanaimo via Salt Spring Island where the community abattoir was officially launched with an open house in the drizzly rain. I’d visited earlier this year but was interested to have a look at the finished structure. There is more work to be done if larger animals (cattle) are to be slaughtered here, but it’s up and running for poultry, rabbit, goat and lamb. It’s going very well so far: an arrangement with a local farmer has meant all the offal and skins are being composted, which has taken one of the main economic headaches for an abattoir out of the picture, and has solid community support – no small achievement for this kind of business.

Saturday I took in a workshop on perennial fruit crops at ALM Farm in Sooke, in which farmer Jordan took us for a tour of the farm’s apple, pear, fig and plum trees, kiwi vines, strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb, Jerusalem artichokes, hazelnuts, gooseberries, herbs and asparagus before I had to whistle off to take my place behind my books, alongside the Haliburton farmers at the Reynolds School Eco-Fair. It was a lively and well-attended event with speakers including Green Party leader Elizabeth May and Brandy Gallagher from O.U.R. Ecovillage, and lots of well-chosen information tables, including Pedal to Petal, LifeCycles, Growing Young Farmers, Organic Gardeners Pantry, BC Sustainable Energy Association and more. The Hali stand was peddling organic food boxes (CSA subscriptions), seeds, plants and good advice.

Flavour of September, with a pinch of October

 

 

 

How busy can one month be? Very very in September’s case. Here it is October and I’m still rushing. A quick review will show why I’ve been too crazed to post, though it’s been delightful and stimulating.

Friday Sept. 21 was the long-anticipated (by me, certainly) panel discussion featuring visiting baker Andrew Whitley, community-supported fisherman Guy Johnston and urban farmer Angela Moran, with her chicken wrangler Trevor van Hemert. Whitley kicked off with a description of the organic baking career that led him to his current life as a baking instructor and organic activist. He is helping to launch a local community supported baking enterprise, and through the Real Bread Campaign which he co-founded, to raise awareness about different ways to promote bread in communities. Johnston described his two-year old community supported fishery, which helps him keep his boat in the water and his family in the sustainable fishing business. He urged us to join in the October 22 protest against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, which will endanger the livelihood of all those who fish in west coast waters. Moran and van Hemert have arranged with eight neighbours to share both chicken-shaped responsibilities and egg-shaped outcomes so that Moran’s urban farm is able to keep its flock of laying hens. They’ve come up with a model agreement they want to share with others to spread the joy of shared chicken ownership.

Saturday we put Andrew back in the kitchen to lead a breadmaking workshop for a lucky baker’s dozen who were spared the cost of airfare to Scotland to take the class at Bread Matters. In the beautifully equipped domestic science lab at Royal Oak Middle School, Andrew and the participants faced some challenges with the limitations of domestic ovens and unfamiliar flours while he shared some of his knowledge about bread, flour and the state of grain in the world today.

 

 

 

 

Sunday Sept. 23 marked the first offering of the Flavour Gourmet Picnic, held at Coastal Winery in Black Creek, just north of the Comox Valley. I’d been to Feast of Fields and the Island Chefs Collaborative festivals, and thought it would be interesting to experience a north Island event. Andrew & Veronica joined us to sample the many, many wares on offer at a gentle, sun-warmed and well-organized afternoon of sipping and tasting. One of those who’d attended Andrew’s talk to the VIU Professional Baking program in Nanaimo the week before was there with her Church Street Bakery breads, and he make an appearance in the rather lovely video made to commemorate the day (accepting one of the most delicious items on offer: a piece of chocolate pave from Kingfisher Lodge).

 

 

 

 

 

On Monday, after a relaxing morning gathering oysters for supper, we headed back to Victoria where I attended a meeting of the Victoria Horticultural Society‘s Veggie group – one of the members was explaining her planting calendar and use of cover crops, which is something I’d like to do better even in my tiny garden.

By Wednesday 26th Andrew & Veronica were packed and ready to leave, but not until we’d stopped in to see Cliff Leir’s operation at Fol Epi. He’d described his grain soaking and flour milling operations at the Kneading Conference, but seeing the tiny space in which the magic happens made it the more special. Good things, small packages etc. (and the pumpkin pie and sausage roll we sampled, among other treats, were formidably good).

Wednesday evening arrived promptly and after a small misspelling on the poster had been swiftly corrected (yes, I pine still for England where there is never a D in my name) the maiden voyage of Digging the City took place in a room in my local library filled with interesting and interested people, many from GTUF.

Thursday saw me back on the farmstand at Haliburton and then back on the road to Nanaimo where we were discussing vitamins and minerals in the CSNN introductory holistic nutrition course. Fascinating but mind-blowing.

Friday 28th I went to a permaculture potluck to hear Brandon Bauer, one of the instructors in the permaculture design course I took earlier this year, talk about his work replenishing the soil on his property on Salt Spring Island. He’s currently teaching a permaculture and site planning workshop and as ever had some pithy things to say about his own experiences in those areas. Saturday was a workshop on tenancy management (better late than never) that was fascinating and offered by one of the very knowledgeable souls at ROMS. That evening we went for supper at the Moon Under Water brewpub which I hadn’t had a chance to try out, and enjoyed my Fanny Bay Oyster Burger for auld lang syne.

Sunday was my weekly family dinner, plus some lying-in, sitting-down and catching-up, which meant I missed the Saanich Sustainable Food Festival and the 5th Annual Chef Survival Challenge and Feast at Madrona Farm… I’ll get to one of those one of these days… AND the Slow Food Terra Madre fundraiser Last Hurrah At Orange Hall.

Monday it was suddenly October, and I joined some other GTUFers to talk about food security at Gorge-ous Coffee, our newly opened local hangout. While we did not quite set the world to rights, we had an interesting chat about foraging in the neighbourhood, rooftop gardens, preserving skills, grafting tours and nut trees, among others.

 

 

 

 

After a quasi-restful Tuesday in which I attempted to catch up on a few more things, like a bit of light tomato canning, and a chat with my neighbour who’d attracted a frog to his garden, and a bit of acorn gathering, it was suddenly Wednesday and time for the debut screening of Symphony of the Soil, Deborah Koons Garcia’s (The Future of Food) second feature film  and an excellent one it is. It explains very beautifully what soil is, how it produces food (not just for humans) and how it can be preserved and nourished. Recommended viewing for all living things. We too were nourished with birthday cake as the occasion marked Open Cinema’s tenth anniversary and afterwards there was a panel discussion with Robin Tunnicliffe, Heide Hermary and the filmmaker.

 

Clay, cordyceps, clams and cucumbers

Last weekend’s permaculture course covered soil (with Christina Nikolic of Gaia College, SOUL and The Organic Gardener’s Pantry), fungi and animal husbandry. We started things off with a bit of digging in the garden to collect our soil samples, which we scooped into flat-bottomed jars, topped up with water and commenced agitating to thoroughly break the soil finely enough to settles and show its layers. We were advised to scrape aside the organic matter and just go for the soil. It was going to take some time for everything to settle – but we began to see the surprising truth of Christina’s observation that even where we thought we had hard clay soil, chances were it was simply compacted and the actual clay content would not be that great. The colour of the soil reflects the amount of organic matter, with darker samples being higher in humus, and lighter ones tending towards higher clay content… no bad thing since clay holds water and nutrients better than silt or sand.

Water made up most of the jars, and the layers then settle in this order:

  • (small amount of organic matter floating on top)
  • water
  • clay
  • silt
  • sand

Christina takes a more benign view of soil than most instructors. Knowing your soil type does not mean you have a problem to manage, she says, and nor is there any point to spending money on soil tests. Instead, focus your energies on building up the organic matter in your soil (even a great soil probably only comprises about 10% organic matter) which makes it more able to absorb and retain water and nutrients.

There followed one of our increasingly excellent potluck suppers, which we were delighted to be able to eat on the sunny patio, and which included such local delicacies as steamed nettles with shiitake mushrooms, kale & squash filo pie, mango spring rolls and spot prawns… but the vegan fudge shamelessly stole the show.


After our giant feed, we talked about different ways of growing mushrooms – from inoculated logs (actually bagged bricks of substrate made from grain or wood chips – these are widely

Mushroom stem butt

available here nowadays at farmers’ markets), from spore prints or even stem butts. We were told that mushroom logs can be broken up and used to inoculate mushroom beds made in various ways in the garden, or rehydrated to fruit multiple times, as the mycelium web runs throughout the substrate. By far the most entertaining moment came when Brandon told us about the cordyceps mushroom that infects carpenter ants – compelling them to take to the highest branches of trees, and killing them at the moment their mandibles bite into a leaf, at which point the fungus grows from their bodies. It is a method of pest control (carpenter ants and termites) described by the mushroom guru Paul Stamets whose TED talk also discusses how to use mushrooms to clean industrial waste and for so many other purposes – medicinal, fuel and more – that he proposes preserving old growth forests as a matter of national defense. David Attenborough has documented cordyceps too:

I finished my weekend on Monday evening when I moseyed over to Vancouver Island University to attend a discussion about local food which featured John Ehrlich (of Alderlea Farm) who has a 300-subscriber biodynamic CSA (veg box scheme), and Guy Johnston, who is starting his second year of a Community Supported Fishery offering salmon, prawns and octopus. We broke for a mid-session snack offering local foods including Natural Pastures cheese – but one of the points earlier made was proved to us: in order to offer us local food, the organizers had to buy it and bring it into the meeting. This college with its cafeteria downstairs and a well-established culinary arts program is tied like many institutions to trade agreements and supplier contracts that do not address the provenance of ingredients. In order to assure a local food supply, local food producers need local consumers, and as has been often said most of our food is made up of cheap imports purchased from off-Island wholesalers.

Farmer John Ehrlich
Fisherman Guy Johnston

Re-entry: Denise Dunn; IdeaWave

I bade farewell to Saskatchewan on Friday afternoon: a blizzard was in the forecast for the following day, but as we lifted off, it was clear enough for an atmospheric sunset, and at the other end of the journey, the rain paused so I was able to enjoy the freshly rinsed walk from the plane and the aromas of salt and cedar that greet arrivals to Victoria’s airport.

 

Saturday was too fraught for me to make it to the first day of IdeaWave, so I missed hearing some great speakers, as was reported to me later. I did manage to go to the memorial service for Denise Dunn, whose sudden death leaves a mighty vacuum in the many spheres of her involvement, not least her generous and welcoming presence in Transition Victoria, where she was active in the Reskilling group, and led the Meet, Mend & Make evenings and the Linen Project. There were around 200 people gathered to remember her, so she got a good send-off.

After that I returned home to continue fretting over my talk on CSAs at IdeaWave this morning. It went reasonably well, although there was a total failure of technology when the lovely pages of my Powerpoint presentation galloped off on their own, so I cut the cord and went imageless and belowtech with my index cards. However. The technology worked well enough to animate quite a number of 10-minute presentations and I learned diverse and interesting stuff from some interesting speakers.

Some of us lunched at Ingredients, where my spicy quinoa chili was good and most welcome, particularly as we’d walked through a Victoria snowstorm – the kind that doesn’t stick – to get there. We stopped at a Chinese bakery on the way back to pick up a bit of sweet fortification (a warm sesame ball with a sweet red bean centre) for the last series of speakers. The afternoon was further fortified by the generous offerings of Lighthouse Brewery, and the final presenters met warmer and warmer applause, so it seemed.

Among the things I heard about over the course of the day were Makerspace (and the Maker Faires – of which there will be one in Victoria in July); the possibilities opened up by iPads to help people with developmental disabilities communicate; the food possibilities of marine plants; the possibilities of diamagnetics in space travel (and the amazing levitating ability of pyrolytic carbon); and a moving presentation by photographer Rob Jirucha about his project to try to photograph 34 elders who are seeking to transfer the language and culture of BC’s 34 distinct first nations languages while they still exist. Here’s a video he made of the project so far:

SENĆOŦEN Language Champion from Language Champions on Vimeo.