Friday night’s PEP reading featured Vancouverian Christopher Levenson

and Victorian Grace Cockburn.

Saturday was the first work party of 2010 at Haliburton Community Organic Farm. There was work to be done

and workers to do it

Apple trees to be planted

A hoop house to move and then reassemble

Coffee break

Work started on the nursery greenhouse

Indoor work to be done

Lovely lunch

Workers large and small

Make hay while the rain holds off

My first Seedy Saturday last weekend! The convention centre in Victoria was mobbed by earlybirds who arrived to browse the stands for seeds and information about all aspects of growing food and flowers.

Food was big, of course, and some interesting things on offer. A couple of places (Carolyn Herriot’s Garden Path, and Sooke Harbour House) offered a small and special tuber, Oca (Oxalis Tuberosa) which hails from the Andes is gaining some popularity in these parts for its ease of growth and its sharp flavour.

The mushroom growers were there, offering inoculated logs for sale; there was a talk about mushroom growing by local expert Justin Napier of Oystercatcher Mushrooms, which offered some revelations about the nutritional value of mushrooms (one point was that they offer vitamin D, and the content of that is related to how much sunlight they absorb).

Mason (blue orchard) bees were topical – a couple of places to buy the houses, and a talk by Steve Mitchell of Bee Haven Farm.

Yum! Jerusalem Artichokes (sunchokes) were on sale for eating and growing.

The dynamic duo of Brock McLeod and Heather Walker (Makaria Farm) were selling beans and grain and gave a talk called Growing your own pancakes (organic grains on a small scale). They’re running a grain CSA this year which sounds like a wonderful thing.

And the tireless farmers of Haliburton Farm were selling seeds, seedlings and the benefits of getting involved in a community farm.

I attended a crowded workshop on fruit tree pruning, by Philip Young who keeps the trees of Glendale Gardens in shape. Time was as always too short to cover everything we wanted to know but we got some good advice about winter and summer prunings, tools, tree renovation, and the difference between pruning for growth and pruning to encourage fruit. Recommended manual: The American Horticultural Society Pruning & Training by Brickell & Joyce.

Carolyn Herriot did a brisk trade in seeds and tubers, while promoting her latest book and eponymous talk (The Zero-Mile Diet)

Out at Haliburton Farm, the seedlings are growing, some of them destined for the Seedy Saturdays that have begun on Vancouver Island.

The farm ducks are hard at work keeping the edible pests down…

and the last of Farmer Ray’s giant beets are going to feed happy animals somewhere in the area.

And once again Margaret Atwood‘s prescient novel Oryx & Crake comes to life. We won’t be eating pigoons just yet, but Enviropigs are on the Canadian horizon. It seems that genetic engineers are attempting to address the complaints of people living near factory farms by reducing the pesky smells of too many pigs being reared inhumanely. The obvious solution (reduce pig numbers) is no fun, so the industrialists prefer to splice mice genes into the pigs. Kind of misses the point… it won’t give the pigs better diets or living conditions, and it certainly won’t make those sewage lagoons disappear. All we end up with is the thin end of a wedge that will give us food animals created by lab rats: same issues as GE foods… do we have the faintest idea what other changes might have been triggered by this genetic manipulation, and what might that do to the bodies who consume them, today, tomorrow or next generation?