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Transition Town

A lesson in not waiting for permission

The Transition Network (and Transition Towns)  exist because governments are too slow to respond to the need for urgent change. Community action can fill the void, and the town of Todmorden in West Yorkshire proves the case in point. All you need is a group of people with passion and vision and the will to plant in every scrap of land and teach one another the how and why of growing food. Check out the Incredible Edible Todmorden website, but first watch this inspiring TED talk.

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.

 

 

Breaking bread with Capital Nuts

I attended a workshop yesterday organized by the Victoria Transition Capital Nut Project in Playfair Park, a restored Garry Oak Meadow in Victoria. It attracted a couple of dozen brave souls willing to stand in the November chill and learn how to make Garry Oak acorns edible. Being the proud custodian of a very large tree myself, and being overshadowed by a number of others, I thought it would be a worthwhile skill. We were led through the process by ethnoecologist and wild food forager Abe Lloyd.

We learned about defects to watch for. Sprouted acorns (Garry Oaks are white oaks, a class of tree whose seed germinates in the autumn) are not necessarily a problem, although they are often cracked, which may allow insects or mould into the nut. Acorns with caps still in place when they fall are no good because the cap usually covers some mould. A small hold indicates that a worm has eaten the contents and left the premises. Spotting – especially dark discolouration – can indicate damage. The best way to find out is to open the nut (they are soft enough to crack with your teeth) and check. This time of year – October or November – is the best for hunting acorns. Early falls (August, September) are usually unripe or damaged nuts so should be avoided.

 

 

 

 

 

He showed us some samples – with a couple of English Oak acorns for comparison (there are a few of these trees in Victoria, though Garry Oaks are the native species). The ones that were still in their shells had been dried; his guideline for readiness was when the shell could be cracked easily by hand or nutcracker (or hammer). The shelled samples included some black ones which he said were still fine, but he’d hastened the drying process and discoloured them (they can be dried on racks, with fans or with a dehydrator). After drying, he ground them to flour in a blender. Because they have an oil content of about 10% they’re not well-suited to grain mills that use stone grinders, as they might gum them up (there is less oil in flour grains like wheat).

 

 

 

 

 

As it circulated, Abe invited us to have a sniff and a taste of the flour. We could smell the sugars in the flour, but it tasted bitter, because of the high tannin content in these acorns. The next step was to leech out these tannins, by soaking the flour in water for four or five days, pouring the liquids off morning and night, and then tasting the final product to check for bitterness. The colour of the liquid changes, growing lighter as the tannins are removed. The final sludge can be used straight away as a batter for flatbread, or dried and used with flour for flavour (bearing in mind it is low in glutens so wouldn’t make great yeast bread on its own).

 

 

 

 

 

Abe demonstrated his flatbread technique. He usually adds maple syrup to sweeten the bread a little, but it worked well without.

 

 

 

 

 

A morsel of hot acorn flatbread: just the ticket. Someone had brought some Spanish chestnuts – the edible variety which unfortunately don’t have quite enough time to ripen in our temperate climate. And local agrologist Kendell Neilsen was on hand with a sample of hazelnuts she’d gathered in the area.

 

Linen, flax, apples and more apples

On the last day of August I wandered along to a potluck information session on the Linen Project that Denise – who’s been driving the project forward under Victoria Transition‘s Reskilling umbrella – hosted. Although the sun was setting and the day’s participants had scattered, there was a full scale exhibition set up in the garden, and a spinner demonstrating how to spin linen from flax fibre that had been retted, broken, scutched and hackled by willing volunteers. A perfect plant, flax, offering flowers, food and fibre.

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, the fruit continues its burst of plenty in these summery September days. I joined three other Fruit Tree Project volunteers this morning to pick a tree that yielded a spectacular 260kg of apples before we had to leave with promises to return.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After weeks of picking, juicing, freezing, baking and sharing my own apples, I finished stripping my yellow transparent tree on the weekend, which also had a record yield, and squeezed around 30kg into the Fruit Tree Project’s cooler, which is busting at the seams while its coordinators work to distribute the bounty between charities and local processors.

Things continue to flourish at Haliburton Farm too where our veg boxes this week included a first crop of apples from the farm’s replanted orchard, some herb bundles pretty enough to grace a table, and some rather beautiful sweet peppers.