Amarosia Organic Garden

There are no short cuts to producing, safe, healthy, nutritious food. If the food is cheap, someone, somewhere is doing something that you would rather they didn’t. It could be

• spraying the food with pesticides to reduce labour costs
• adding ‘filler’ to the product in the form of genetically modified waste products such as corn starch
• using poorly paid migrant labour
• adding toxic chemicals to baby milk and animal feed to make them appear to be more nutritious

As if we didn’t already have enough positive reasons to buy local, sustainably grown food, China keeps providing us with even more negative reasons.

“Chinese Melamine Scandal Widens” 

My last few days looked something like this

Friday: Pick for the market all day then plant garlic until late in the evening

Saturday: Get up at 4am to go to the Dieppe Market. Spend the day there then return to pack for two days away inspecting organic farms in Nova Scotia.

Sunday: Get up at 5am and leave for Nova Scotia with Noriko (who I dropped off  in SpringHill) and do two inspections, including one that lasts 7 hours.

Monday: Get up at 6am to do three more inspections. Get horribly lost in the woods in the pouring rain on the way to the first farm and nearly get the car stuck in a bog. See a bald eagle which (almost) makes up for the stress! Finish final inspection at 7pm and drive back to New Brunswick.

Tuesday: Get up at 6am and pick for the farm share program. Work in the pouring rain all day then take off for a board meeting of the Greater Moncton Immigration Committee which finishes at 8pm.

Wednesday: Get up at 6am feeling decidedly shaky. Prepare for the farm share program, then plant more garlic for the rest of the day) managing to squeeze in a little bit of blogging at lunch time.

Thursday:??? Crawl into a hole and refuse to come out?!

This week large baskets contain 8 items and small boxes contain 5

1. Baby leeks

2. herbs

3. dumpling squash

4. Rainbow carrots

5. Red Russian Kale

6. Heirloom tomatoes

7. Broccoli

8. Shredded cabbage

9. Napoli Carrots

Farm Share boxes (picked and packed in the pouring rain!) contain 5 or 8 of the following

1. Buttercup squash

2. Asian Greens

3. Bulls Blood beet purples

4. Shiso

5. Heirloom tomatoes

6. Rainbow carrots

7. Ground cherries

8. Spring onions

This mantra was taught to one of our fellow farmers from the Fredericton area. While customers expect everything to be perfect, flawless and often lacking personality (I LIKE the multi-legged carrots and funny shaped tomatoes) the farmers have to either throw out or process anything less than grade A. Whenever I pass through the ‘fresh veggie’ section of the supemarket I think about the tonnes (literally) of perfectly good veggies that are rejected on the grounds of not being acceptable to the customer.

This in turn teaches customers that veggies must fit a certain description. Our heirloom tomatoes in particular cause customers to comment that their son, daughter or husband would not eat anything so ‘weird looking’.  What they don’t realise is that kids often love the fun looking veggies and it might actually encourage them to be more interested in healthy food. Corporations certainly spend millions on trying to create foods that look as odd as possible (cheese strings, purple and green cereals etc) specifically to appeal to kids.

Throwing vegetables out deeply offends me for obvious reasons, but I lack the time that I would love to spend processing pounds of cracked tomatoes, slightly soft melons and ‘dinged’ cucumbers. Also, given that these veggies are grade B they don’t last as long, making it essential that they get processed promptly (within days rather than weeks).

Today I threw out lots of cucumbers that I had planned to pickle but never had time to actually do it. The sad thing is that, because they were grade B cucs, we couldn’t even give them away (on Sundays we offer boxes of grade B ‘extras’ to people collecting at the farm gate) but few people want the melon with a hole in it even though it is still delicious if consumed promptly. They may already have 2 melons and 3 may sound like a lot to get through in a week, but its a lot easier than the 25 or more that we are left with!

Even food banks are not good at taking fresh produce for the exact reason that it does not store for a long time, and grade B veggies store even less well.

Maybe the ‘reality’ that we live in is that, unlike our mothers, we don’t have the time to prepare and preserve food like we used to. Sadly this means the waste of massive amounts of food at a time when we have a global food shortage. Some time soon we really need to change the way we think about food.

Government Health Advisory: Please be warned that the consumption of these berries may lead to acts of selfishness and greed.

Mothers have been known to hide these from their children and otherwise loving sisters are documented as having  ‘failed to mention’ that they were in the box this week.

Handle with care!

I knew that the British were known for talking about the weather. As a new Canadian I am now learning that the Canadians are famed for it too. I Always assumed that it was because the weather in the UK is so variable that it makes a reasonably interesting topic of conversation that does not involve religion, politics or anything else controversial.

Now I have realized that there is far more to it than that. Until relatively recently most people either grew up on farms or in farming/fishing communities, and most people grew at least some of their own food. The weather is if crucial importance to farmers and gardeners. This year in SE New Brunswick we had a really hot July followed by a wet and cool August. There are things that you can do to reduce the impact of drought weather such as building up your soil organic matter, using mulch and drip irrigation, but ultimately a month of intense heat and no rain has its consequences. This year the beet harvest has been virtually non-existent for anyone without a source of irrigation or significant mulch, and the carrots are late and smaller than they should be.

There are things that we can do to moderate the effects of the weather, but we are ultimately at its mercy. Our one piece of luck this year was that our tomatoes, though planted late, still managed to ripen on the vine due to a remarkably late frost. Normally we get frost around September 5th, this year in mid October the tomatoes were still going strong.

This means that the weather is still a serious topic for farmers and given the ongoing and anticipated effects of climate change it is evolving into a political one.

Something else I noticed about conversations about the weather is that today, with most people working indoors in climate controlled workspaces, conversations about the weather are becoming more and more based on ‘weekend weather’. Last July/August was also very dry but it tended to be a bit rainy on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. Despite the overall rainfall for the month being negligable and the ground being bone dry, cracked and starved of moisture, each weekend at the market all I heard was complaints about ‘all the rain’ we had been having!

So next time your Sunday picnic or Saturday trip to the beach gets rained off, during a month of heat and drought, just remember that somewhere near you a farmer is looking up at the sky and saying ‘Thank you!’.

This week the large boxes contain 9 items and the small boxes contain 6

1. Acorn Squash

2. Green and yellow ethnic peppers

3. ‘Red Russian’ salad kale

4. ‘Bulls Blood’ beet greens

5. Heritage Tomatoes

6. Purslane

7. Fingerling Potatoes

8. Ground Cherries

9. Rainbow Carrots

As of this week we are no longer at the Moncton Market due to not really having enough veggies to supply two markets plus our 74 farm share members. The positive side of this is that Dave is now with me at the Dieppe Market meaning that I get the opportunity to do my shopping before 1:30 (meaning that I actually get to buy eggs before the farmers run out) and also can have a cup of tea in the morning without worrying about when I’m going to be able to take a bathroom break!

You will probably also have noticed another new face at the Dieppe Market. Noriko is from Japan. She is a student of Social Welfare and she worked as a waitress to save up enough money to come to Canada to Wwoof (volunteer) on organic farms in the Maritimes. Her reason for choosing this area was that she wanted to visit Anne of Green Gables on PEI, but her reason for Wwoofing is to learn about how to grow food sustainably.

Since joining us over a week ago she has been helping out with everything that we do, from harvesting, to weeding, to planting, to helping at the market, to cooking with us in the evenings.

She has taught us how to make traditional Japanese food and we have taught her how to make Rhubarb and Custard, Couscous and North African Lamb.

Having someone from another culture around helps us to learn both about them and about ourselves. Last week Noriko asked why we always ate our meals so fast. The answer is that we are always dashing off to do something else Farm or Food related, which is a bit ironic given that we are always promoting the importance of Slow Food! Having her here is helping us to slow down and smell the stir fry:-)

Large boxes contain 10 of the following, small boxes contain 6

1. Chard (Rainbow and Lucullus)

2. Arugula

3. Watermelon

4. Heritage tomatoes

5. Ethnic peppers

6. Rainbow Carrots

7. Fennel

8. Butternut Squash

9. Rainbow of potatoes (norland, caribe, all blue and carola)

10. Ground cherries