Amarosia Organic Garden

This is a really neat downloadable free guide from the Hesperian Foundation which covers topics such as pesticides, mining, GM (GE) foods, food security and toilets! All presented in a very readable fashion suitable for high school kids. It also includes some great ideas for activities which could be adapted for any age group.

Step 1:  Take tomatoes out of freezer. Use the same quantity that you would cook with normally.

Step 2: Warm some olive oil in a pan. Add a pinch of salt and drop the tomatoes in.

Step 3: Cover and warm on high until defrosted. At this point the pulp will still be in the tomatoes and they will be surrounded by their juice.

Step 4: Remove cover, stir gently and continue cooking with cover off until sauce thickens.

Step 5: Eat poured over pasta. A delicious taste of summer!

It takes about 20 mins from frozen to sauce.

Yes the skins will still be in the pan and the seeds too, but if you are using good quality heritage tomatoes the skins are so thin you won’t even notice them. And, did you ever hear of someone being killed by a tomato skin, now really?!

This is one of the many reasons we use raised beds.

Imagine if this was during the spring and we planted on flat ground. If we planted our peas, carrots and spinach etc the seeds would either rot in the ground or they would wash away.

With the raised beds the seeds and plants are out of harms way and all of the water gathers in the walkways.

This is why it is important to protect the soil over the winter

1. Raised bed with nothing protecting it. The end and sides are eroding away.
2. Raised bed with cover crop planted during the summer. Extensive roots help to hold the soil together.
3. Raised bed with black plastic mulch physically holding the shape of the bed together.
4. Fall seeded cover crop. Although the above ground portion is not very significant, the roots are still doing a good job of binding the soil.
5. Crop Residues also hold the soil together. In the case of beans or other closely spaced crop, the plants are quite effective, but in the case of tomatoes, cabbages etc it is necessary to use some additional form of covercrop because the plants are too widely spaced to hold onto all of the soil.
6. Permanent walkways are seeded to dutch white clover. This prevents excessive soil compaction from foot traffic and binds the soil together even when submerged for (not too excessive!) periods of time.

Nestlé has been accused by environmental groups of misleading advertising for its claims that bottled water is “the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world”.

It argues that “A litre of bottled water requires about 1.5 litres to produce. A litre of soft drink needs about three litres of water; a slice of bread 28 litres; and a can of vegetables about 35 litres. ”

What it doesn’t mention is that a slice of bread is food! Of course it takes more resources to produce something that is nutrient dense. Water is an essential part of our diet,  but we need calories too. As for the soft drinks, is anyone claiming they are healthy or environmentally sound and what are the veggies doing in a can anyway?! Canning anything takes huge amount of energy just to produce the can even before you put anything into it.

Their mistake is to point this out  “A litre of bottled water requires about 1.5 litres to produce.”.

A litre of well water takes 1 litre to produce.

When you compare like with like, bottled water does not seem so eco-friendly. And that’s before we even get onto the issue of bisphenol-A and the waste generated by the plastic ‘disposable’ bottles.

I know that not everyone is lucky enough to be on their own well and many have to drink city water, but

• many people who DO have well water still drink bottled water because they think its better for them (or more chic)
• given that we flush out toilets with water that is safe enough to drink and that the majority world does not have access to water safe enough to drink  I would take the city water any day. If you have concerns about chemicals in your water, have a filter fitted.
• Much bottled water is just city water in a bottle, so the water in the bottles is no safer, and possibly less safe because it isn’t subject to the same health standards as municipal water.
• Mineral water could be better for you than city water, but it travels huge distances to get to you and there isn’t enough of it available for everyone to have some. We forget that water is a limited resource.
• Maybe if we stopped putting so much garbage in our water (agricultural chemicals, sewage, industrial chemicals etc) we would not have to use as many chemicals to make it clean again.

Our winner of the week is McCain for their efforts to try to convince us that fries are every bit as healthy as potatoes.

“Healthy Potato Facts”  attempts to demonstrate that there is no loss of nutritional benefits when a potato is converted into a fry. However, what they don’t point out in their ’side-by-side’ comparison is that the portion of fries is only 1/2 the size of the potato it is being compared to.

In fact the ‘portion size’ of 19 fries is less than half of what I would consume if offered a plate of them. Were I to eat a normal ‘Rowena sized’ portion of McCains superfries I would have consumed  30% of my daily allowance of sodium. And please don’t tell me that most people wouldn’t add extra salt on top of that. In fact, if I had a large North American portion of fries, we’re looking at 60% of the daily sodium allowance.

In the mean time, looking at the side-by-side comparison, the fat content of the fries is 6% (read 12 or 24%) while the vitamin C content in a portion of equal weight is slashed by half. What they also don’t point out is that in a calorie comparison, the McCain superfries have twice as many per weight… which of course is why they halved the portion size on the fries.

Thank you McCain for making a mockery of healthy eating. What is scary is that some people will believe you.

Today we checked in on the compost piles to see if anything was happening.

The first big pile is finished and will be making its way to the greenhouses in the spring (it should have a lower salt content being only vegetable based) and, despite the chill, the youngest compost pile is still warm enough inside to keep the microbes happy.

We are still going to have to buy in compost for a while yet. Our sum total of a years worth of vegetable scraps is about 1/6 of what we bought this week… so we need to find 6 times more stuff to compost…

Mmmm, chocolate pudding!

Every spring a beaver moves into our pond, but by early summer they have moved on. This year the beaver arrived in October and has been hard at work building his lodge.

He has also been doing the other thing that beavers do, which is damming the exit to the pond and making it flood all over the farm track and the perimeter of the pond.

Twice Dave has broken the dam down and twice Mr Beaver has repaired it. This time he added a thick layer of mud to the top, and you can even see his paw marks in the top. I can imagine him muttering away as he slathers mud on his dam of sticks and branches “Now this time, this time you are going to stay put!”

So Dave decided to remove only the top couple of inches of mud to drop the water down to a level that doesn’t damage the farm track, but hopefully keeps it high enough not to upset Mr Beaver. We’ll seen if he accepts our proposition.

OK, so I can understand people in many developing countries taking part in activities that we would never consider because they are fighting to survive.

BUT I am completely unable to understand how a Wal-Mart employee could be crushed to death by crazed shoppers. I know that crushing deaths occur at concerts and in football stadiums where you have crowds surging forwards at intense moments in the show or game, but shopping?! Really?

The idea of queuing from 4am to buy something that is likely 25% packaging, 70% promotion and  only 5% actual thing, and getting SO hyped up about it that you don’t notice when you are walking over the top of a person is just grotesque.

I wonder whether these shoppers will even consider that their passage to a great Christmas gift for their child was paid for with a human life.

During the winter I get the opportunity to catch up on some research, but even in the midst of the chaos of summer I still find time to check out these blogs because I want to see what other farmers are managing to grow in more favorable climates!

Tiny Farm Blog is writen by a (more) experienced farmer in Southern Ontario. I love the fact that really often when I log on I’ve been doing the same thing as him that week. It’s also great that he shares the things that worked and those that didn’t and the vegetable varieties he grows. It saves a lot of wasted time when someone else says “don’t grow this variety it tastes funny”:-) He also has quite the fan base, who write comments on his blog which I’m sure make him feel loved… come on guys, please write some comments!

Salad Bowl Gardens is owned by Roxanne Beavers (of organic record keeping fame) who is a fellow organic inspector and Jamie Coughlin who works for the Dept of Ag in Nova Scotia. They are also new(ish) farmers working a small(ish) patch of land andthey never fail to make me laugh, or at least smile, at their antics:-)

Jen and Derek of ‘Jen and Derek’s Farm Fresh Veggies’ came and visited us this summer which was lovely. Meeting fellow farmers is always fun. They have a small organic farm on PEI and my first encounter with Jen was when she showed up at the Dieppe Market and cooed over our lovely signs. Like us they are doing their best to make their farm financially sustainable without subsidizing it out of Derek’s off farm income.

Stone Spoon blog is written by a Université de Moncton Student who has decided to try to eat an entirely local diet and does the majority of his shopping at the Dieppe and Moncton Markets. He also comes out to help out from time to time to try to gain some experience of what it is like to grow your own food. He is constantly cooking new things (his girlfriend is a lucky lady!) though is uncomfortable with my cooking methods which involve reading the recipe and then deciding to do it differently.

SteveBeing is the online diary of Steve the Wwoofer who was here in late September/ Early October. It’s a great account of his travels and experiences of Wwoofing on farms in Eastern Canada. Please note that he can spell, but he only has access to the internet for fleeting moments at the occasional farm so does not have time to check for spelling and grammar!

p.s. regarding writing comments on the blog, we have a spam guard feature. For any first time posters, I have to confirm that you are not a Russian spammer, so please be patient when you write anything because I have to plow through about 30 spam postings a day to pull out the real ones. Once you’ve been accepted for the first time, you are considered safe, so then you can advertise your great fake Rolex deals;-)