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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Fruit Trees & More attracts as many visitors as bees, it seems. Bob Duncan

is generous with his time and knowledge in showing countless numbers of fruit aficionados around his demonstration orchard. He’s a retired entomologist who spends his winters scouting for frost-resistant fruit trees that might grow here on Vancouver Island. The Fruit Tree Project had a fund-raising outing there last weekend. We started with some basics on pruning fig trees.

The principle, says Bob, is to cut back the 2 year old branches and leave the thin, year-old ones to hang fruit on. The older branches just keep growing outward, so the tree becomes large and unwieldy. He says the fig is an ideal tree for Victoria as it has no pests or diseases and needs little water or attention; they have two crops a year in hotter climates, so you need a variety that bears a heavy first crop, since the second won’t ripen here. It can be grown in containers as well, but whether in ground or pot needs to be pruned to grow from two or three stout stems.

One of the attention-getting features of Bob’s home is the lemon tree growing under a glass shelter against the south-facing front wall. Acidic citrus fruits like lemons and limes don’t need the heat that sweet ones (oranges, grapefruit) need to set fruit. Though the trees are hardy to -7, their fruit freezes at around -3 so he protects them with Christmas lights on thermostats, and wraps them in Reemay if the weather gets colder than that.

Against the west wall, he has an olive tree

which also grows well here, where we are (so far so good) without the olive fly that plagues Mediterranean growers; the fruit is hardy to -5 and the trees evidently survived even this winter’s -10 temperatures. His apricots

also need shelter as they’re not adapted to wet, humid climates. There was no mistaking the orangerie

where various varieties of oranges

as well as grapefruit

grow year round in an unheated greenhouse, protected like the lemons by Christmas lights on thermostat.

The fruit is left on the tree until it’s needed: unlike many other fruits, it doesn’t drop when ripe but just goes on getting juicier. He doesn’t sell the surplus oranges, unfortunately: you have to buy your own tree – or a jar of his wife Verna’s uniquely local marmalade. His kiwis do produce surplus fruit, however, and he promises the fruits are larger and sturdier than imported varieties. He grows them on this pergola

and says if you’re planning to do large scale growing you’ll need the right proportion of male to female plants for pollination. From a kiwi’s point of view, we have a marginal climate, as they need rich, moist soil and sufficient summer heat to ripen the fruit; about one year in six is unsuitable (I’m beginning to suspect this might be one of those..). He says we should watch for orange and red fleshed kiwis, which are about to hit the market.

Apples, those most popular fruits, present in about 200 varieties – many local rarities – and different methods of training and pruning. For most people, this oblique cordon (45 degree angle) which Bob favours

is too complicated to maintain, although it makes for a surprisingly long-producing tree on a dwarf stock, like all his apples. This one gives about 50 apples a year and has been going strong for around 20 years:

and he says they should live for up to 60 years, which is plenty for most people. He calls this the Christmas Tree style, which is easier to maintain:

He has to net the cherries to keep the birds off them when they fruit. Here’s a nifty Belgian cordon system he uses (but the “Christmas tree” shape works fine as well):

He warns against the temptation to buy multi-variety trees that garden centres are selling (three different kinds of apples etc.) as most amateur gardeners don’t have the ability to manage the differential vigour of such a tree – and you end up wasting money because eventually you otherwise end up with only one viable fruit variety.

Nectarines and peaches can, he said, be grown in the open despite popular ideas to the contrary. It is true they are vulnerable to leaf curl

but he counters that with one application of Bordeaux mix, which is a dormant spray approved for organic growing.

Pineapple guava is an edible evergreen

which needs to be grown under shelter, which unfortunately puts it out of the running for hedging.

We looked at his tea plants as well, and the Chinese “jujube” date, and the avocado (which still hasn’t fruited so he won’t sell it yet) and a pomegranate that he’s grafted with several varieties.. and I swear we didn’t see most of the orchard in the two hours we were there. To wrap up, he gave us a fleeting demonstration of his grafting techniques:

Grafted trees having a rest.

Busy bee houses (this orchard must be bee heaven), showing the hatching chambers on the left, where cocoons are placed after being cleaned over the winter:

Last Friday the Leaf Press chapbook launch at Planet Earth Poetry went well, aside from the fact I ran out of books before the reading started!

I went first, because I had the fewest books, having sold my remaining 3 copies of The Earth’s Kitchen before I read. Actually I had plenty, as I brought some of my other works along, including the recently deeply discounted and suddenly out of print Sunday Dinners, which we launched in Victoria only last June. I have snapped up the few remaining copies so it’s now officially a rare collectable, like Crosswords from Frog Hollow, and Old Habits, from Thistledown/Slow Dancer. Happily, Cartography, from Oolichan, still enjoys currency as an increasingly rare first edition.

Next up was Pam Porter,

who read some ghazals from her new chapbook, This Awakening to Light: a Year of Ghazals, a sequence she’d begun when they started rattling off her pen with surprising ease at a writing retreat. As she said in her introduction, the ghazal is not for everyone, but it obviously suited her well.

Yvonne Blomer brought the evening to an end with Landscapes and Home, another sequence of ghazals that periodically followed some of the formal rules (such as including the poet’s name in the concluding couplet) and drew on her Zimbabwean origins and Victoria location, which gave the poems. A Zimbabwean friend of mine who had come along said she found the imagery rang true for her.

Evolving news in the fast food world, including some linguistic bullet-dodging:

• The Fast food industry now calls itself the Quickservice or Fast Casual industry
• Low-fat, Low-carb and Low-calorie are being dropped from menus and packaging in favour of Wholesome, Healthy, Fresh, Natural, Local or Premium (I’d guess all these terms are essentially meaningless so can be used interchangeably)

Vegetarians aren’t economically valuable enough to get a place in line so the industry is not including meatless options across the board. But in Canada, maybe we have enough ethnic diners to make some dents..

This news from Washington DC suggests that consumer demand for low pizza prices is being met – at the expense of cooks’ wages. But they’ll need to drop further before unions will be able to find their way into the industry, which tends to draw its staff from a young and poorly educated labour pool.

Last week was National Drinking Water Week, and I celebrated by taking up a rare opportunity to go on a watershed tour – the Capital Regional District offers them only once each year – to see where my drinking water comes from.

The CRD has been pretty successful in getting people to reduce water waste, but Canada still has one of the highest water use rates in the world, second only to the USA. Nationally, we consume about 4,400 litres per capita per day. This figure includes industrial and agricultural use, of course, and we’re a big country with big irrigation systems in agribusiness, and a lot of manufacturing and processing, all of which uses water for such things as washing and cooling. In Canadian cities, the figure is 638 litres per day which includes personal consumption as well as water system leaks, firefighting and other municipal uses.

In 1994, Victoria’s consumption was 568 litres/day; in 2008 it was 400 (of which 280 was household use). Those figures come from two different sources so it depends on who you want to believe (and which way the wind is blowing?) when you start to compare. But the CRD has been doing a lot of work to inform its customers about water conservation, sponsoring irrigation workshops, native plant workshops (native plant gardens are best for conserving water because native plants are adapted to local soil and water conditions, and are more drought-tolerant than sissy imports); and offering this annual tour.

We were safely guided into the 20,549 ha (50,776 acre) watershed area by a CRD worker in an ambulance for just in case..

and after pausing to admire some local wildlife

stopped at Sooke Lake,

which is the reservoir for the CRD. Its capacity was increased a few years ago, and the drowned trees show the change of level. Even now we have the higher level, the CRD imposes routine watering restrictions from May through September, the times of peak use due to lawn and garden activity. This prevents us from draining the reservoir to a level where sediment and algae become a problem that would require additional water treatment; or the building of more expensive backup supplies.

After the flooding, the new shoreline was dug and replanted with trees, which would help with filtration and prevent erosion, but the digging disturbed the seeds from one of Vancouver Island’s top invasive plant species, broom, which out-competed the seedlings and took over. It’s a very hard plant to eradicate, and chemical solutions – even if they worked – are obviously not under consideration in this location.

Lots of wild strawberries around…

On we went, stopping at Rithets Creek

where there’s a weir, and a shed to measure water levels, which can get very high from spring runoff. Being up on a mountain, there’s no electricity for the equipment used, hence the solar panel.

We had a forest walk to look at some of the forestry issues that go into protecting a watershed. The whole area is surrounded by more and more development. Developers on Malahat Mountain (except for Elkington Forest) tend to clear-cut the trees and then sell lots that are promptly covered with impermeable surfaces like driveways and houses, not to mention lawns with their addiction to fertilizers and pesticides, all of which puts stress on drainage and the purity of the water supply.

Here’s a 4000 sph replanting which is 40 years old. SPH = stems per hectare; a forestry term that curiously prefers the word “stem” to what it really means (“tree”).

And our provincial tree, the Western red cedar

which our guide (a forester in his past life) said was probably not going to survive the drought caused by climate change. The douglas fir fares better in the wild swings of weather we have.

We lunched on top of the Sooke Dam, overlooking the lake

and then went for a look at Goldstream Dam

where watershed caretakers of yore used to live, and had to hike around the region to check on things.

All the water bodies had these debris booms to prevent floating matter from finding its way through the system.

Last stop was Japan Gulch (and they’re not sure where the name came from as there aren’t a lot of records kept there) where the water is treated, first with ultraviolet light, which kills parasites

and then with cholorine and ammonia, which create chloramine (mustard gas, in higher concentrations) that kills viruses and bacteria. All in all, we’re fortunate the water is very pure so doesn’t need much treatment.

And then it was time to leave. Sadly we did not get a turn trying on this natty emergency suit.

What can one say but congratulations to my new MP, Randall Garrison, who will shortly be joining lots of other new NDPs in Ottawa; and congratulations to Elizabeth May, who will be there too, waving a big green flag for that most undiscussed election issue.

Last Friday it were poetry, poetry, poetry as Cynthia Woodman Kerkham – who tonight reads the poem that won the Malahat Review’s Open Season competition – launched her first collection. Good Holding Ground, at Planet Earth Poetry. Place was packed to the rafters, and a jolly and generous crowd it was.

It never hurts a literary event to add a superb chocolate cake; like this one from Wildfire Bakery:

While I cannot promise such a cake this Friday, I am delighted to be launching a chapbook of food poems, The Earth’s Kitchen, also at Planet Earth Poetry, in the excellent company of Yvonne Blomer and Pamela Porter.