Digging away

There is something truly magical about planning and planting a garden. Riffling through seed catalogues, talking to other gardeners about plants, hashing it out on paper, even preparing the soil. In those moments, the garden is all beautiful potential.

I think it’s a bit like writing fiction—something I’m also doing right now. Most writers begin with an image or an idea, a character, a voice, a setting, or maybe a plot twist. In your head it is glorious and perfect and you can only imagine that it will be easy to write and astonish others as it has astonished you.

But then, you sit down to write and come up against your own imperfect mind and gifts, exhaustion or inexperience. It never sounds exactly as you imagined before there were words on a page. No matter how good, no matter how surprising, it never exactly captures that initial inspiration. There are lots of people who pack it in, but also many who keep going, digging away, hoping that they might come close to expressing that moment of clarity and insight.

It is the same in the garden. In imagining the vegetables and herbs and flowers I will grow, there are no cats pooping, slugs eating or tomatoes rotting. At the school garden, there are no seedlings torn by little hands, no vandals painting over the signs the children have made, no seeds that fail to emerge from the soil. Spring is a beautiful kind of reverie and I want to linger here in this moment, to revel in pure potential.

Growing good neighbours

This week, Crave, a web site focusing on food and health-related books, asked us to blog about our book, The Stop: How Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement coming out next week. Nick Saul and I decided to write about our experience planting a veggie patch on our city lawn—and some personal discoveries about the power of food.

Here’s a taste of the blog post. To read the whole thing, check out Crave.

When we decided to build a raised bed vegetable garden on our small downtown Toronto front yard a few years ago, we thought mostly about the delicious tomatoes, peppers and fresh herbs we’d enjoy come harvest time. We ordered fresh soil, built a simple structure using 2x6s and some brackets and shopped for seeds at farmers’ markets. But the day the soil arrived, it was clear the harvest was the least of the pleasures involved in growing food in the city.

Vegetative states

November is the longest month here in Toronto. (Or maybe February.) The short, grey, cold days and distance from spring make me despair that it will ever be warm and bright again. Luckily, there are photos. I’m going to try and imagine that this sunflower is my own personal Seasonal Affective Disorder lamp and it’s pouring its sunshiney goodness all over me.

And if that doesn’t work, maybe these radishes can inspire a bit of spring-like optimism.

But I’d even settle for the kind of tough, in-it-for-the-long-haul fortitude of a squash.

Who knew light deprivation could make a person want to anthropomorphize vegetables? For a hilarious take on this very subject, check out Don Gillmor’s wonderful children’s book, When Vegetables Go Bad.

Garden variety politics

The school garden has been put to bed for the winter, and I find myself reflecting on the season past and beginning to think ahead to what we might do differently next year.

Sadly, here in Ontario, where the government has decided to unilaterally end bargaining with the teachers’ unions, and the teachers have responded by withdrawing their involvement in extracurricular activities (one of the only tools they have left to make their displeasure clear), there could very well not be a garden next year.

We’ve worked hard to embed it into the school’s life—supporting teachers to use the garden as a teaching tool, buying curriculum resources, etc. And it’s worked remarkably well. We have a committed and enthusiastic staff team devoted to using it for teaching purposes. In just the past few weeks, the teachers have been using the harvest in their classes, baking kale chips and making a veggie soup that had children literally pushing to the front of the line to get seconds.

But maintaining the patch is the collaborative work of parents, students and teachers, and such collaboration isn’t possible right now. We’re doing what we can while respecting the teacher’s right to withdraw their voluntary labour, but it might very well not be enough. A lot of work has to go into planning and fundraising—not to mention planting and tending—to make the garden thrive, and without parents, kids and teachers working together the whole thing could easily not happen.

It’s devastating to think that all the work we’ve put into this garden, all the momentum we’ve built over the past two years could actually grind to a halt.

I think making food literacy a part of our schools and education system is a key part of how we’re going to reverse the damage of our current food system—the diet-related health issues, the environmental degradation, the fear about food safety and unfair labour practises. Teachers are our most important resource when it comes to making food literacy a part of our children’s school life. We need to urge our provincial government to treat them with the respect they deserve and get back to negotiating in good faith.

Interview with Sweet Potato Chronicles

A couple of weeks back, I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Ceri Marsh, one of the smart women behind Sweet Potato Chronicles, a funny, useful and great-looking website devoted to the family meal. SPC offers recipes, product reviews, ideas for how to get your kids eating healthily and one of my favourite regular features: “What’s so great about…?” (sage, bay leaves, coffee, pumpkin, etc.). Ceri asked such good questions, I wanted to include a few of them here. For the complete interview, follow the link.

Q: What do you want kids to learn about the world from What’s For Lunch?

A: I hope that children who read (or flip through!) the book will see both their differences and similarities to other kids around the world. I hope they’ll recognize the way that food connects us all. I also hope they’ll read about the kids who are taking charge of what they eat at their schools and in their homes—demanding healthy sustainably grown food, asking questions about how it’s produced and by whom—and see that they can also make a difference.

Q: How important is it for kids to have some control/input in their own meals?

A: I’ve been working with our school garden for a few years now and have seen first-hand how kids who weren’t willing to try a new vegetable (or any veg at all!) ended up eating kale pesto simply because they grew the kale themselves. And I love my own son’s enthusiasm about the knobbly little carrots and bitsy peppers we grow in our tiny urban patch. There’s no question when children have an opportunity to grow, cook, prepare or even just get involved in choosing their food, they take more chances and will eat more healthily. But it’s also more than that: when paired with talk about what all this means (to the planet and their own bodies, for instance) they start to see that even in this small way, their personal choices can have a big impact on their world.

Q: Why do you think there is such a strong interest now in what kids eat at school? Is it the Jamie Oliver effect or is there more to it?

A: There’s no question Jamie Oliver has had a huge impact on the school lunch world. But I think that the interest in school lunch is part of a more widespread engagement in food issues. You can’t turn on your computer or open a newspaper without reading about food safety scares, environmental degradation caused by factory farming, escalating food prices, small-scale farmers leaving the land because they can’t make a living, the obesity crisis. People are starting to understand that the industrial system we’ve established over the course of the last few generations is not sustainable. Interest in school lunch and talking about food with children is part of this. If we can teach our children about food and how it’s connected to all these things they care about (their environment, their health, their community and culture) they might actually have a fighting chance of truly changing this system for the better.

Q: How hard or easy is it for parents to get more involved with the issues of food in schools? I just learned my 5 year old is being given chocolate milk for a snack at her Toronto public school. What the heck?

A: It took me a long time to figure out where I fit into my kids’ school as a parent—whether it’s about academic issues, food or volunteering my time. Nobody wants to be that guy when it comes to the teachers, other parents or administrators, marching in and wagging your finger about bake sales or insisting on whole-grain pizza dough on pizza day. But parents are key participants in the school system and we need to be both clear and respectful talking to schools about our expectations, hopes and concerns. Chocolate milk might be okay as a special treat, but serving it to 5 year olds every day doesn’t sound right at all. There was a huge debate about serving chocolate milk in schools in the US last year. Chef Ann Cooper, a key school meal activist otherwise known as the Renegade Lunch Lady, calls it “sugary soda in drag.” I think schools need to think carefully about the mixed messages they send children when they talk about healthy eating in class (the food groups, nutrients, etc.) and then urge them to sell cookie dough or chocolate bars to raise money or offer them processed food or sugary drinks as incentives or snacks.

For more from the Sweet Potato Chronicles interview, click here.

Kale in kiddie pools and jalapeños in buckets

I’ve spent a lot of time reading kids’ nonfiction over the last few years. Partly because I enjoy it (and so do my boys) and partly for research purposes as I began thinking about writing my first book aimed at children.

Over and over, writer/editor Hadley Dyer’s name came up. Her book, Watch This Space: Designing, Defending and Sharing Public Spaces, with illustrator Marc Ngui, is a brilliant look at the importance of public space and how kids can be advocates for it. She’s also written some 13 other books and is executive editor of children’s books at HarperCollins, with authors like Dennis Lee, Kenneth Oppel and Michael Redhill in her stable.

Now, in between her full-time work as an editor, Hadley’s managed to write a new book for young readers, this one about urban agriculture. Potatoes on Rooftops: Farming in the City is a fun and informative trip through the world of growing food in urban areas. From spaceship-shaped greenhouses to aquarium aquaponics, from growing strawberries in old shoes to raising chickens in backyards, the book is full of interesting facts, helpful how-tos (composting, creating a teaching garden) and lots of food for thought.

With a combination of illustrations and photos, bite-size information blocks and longer narrative, it’s a book to dive into again and again.  Hadley manages to strike a easy-going, playful tone but Potatoes on Rooftops is also a call to action for kids to “Join the good food revolution.” In a foreword written by food activists Brian Cook and Barbara Emanuel, they explain: “The decisions we make today will affect the food system in the future and will have long-term consequences for humanity.”

Tomatoes are for sharing

This year while we were away on summer holidays, I left our garden in the care of a neighbourhood 13-year-old as well as our Garden Guru across the road. I returned to find it much as I left it, growing steadily, but I figured there’d be a few more tomatoes to show for the two weeks. I was a bit disappointed by the barely ripened full size specimens I found, plus a handful of cherry tomatoes, but put the lack of production down to the hot, dry summer we’ve had and my patch’s stubborn streak this particular year. But over the last few days, I’ve been delighted to discover that my neighbours took me up on my offer to eat what they found while we were gone. Seems our various friends and neighbours enjoyed our tomatoes quite a bit. There was even some guerilla watering by an older gentleman down the street.

The idea that our garden is a community project is a total delight to me. It’s been like that from the beginning when the soil was first delivered and everyone pitched in to shovel it into the raised bed. And since it’s right on the sidewalk people can watch its progress closely—and obviously take an interest in its success.

A garden of selective amnesia

My veggie garden has been a challenge this year. The daily cat turd removal cast a poopy pall over the proceedings, and, frankly, I didn’t spend nearly enough time planning and thinking through what I’d like to grow. As a result, there are few of my favourite leafy greens and lots of tomatoes that are covered in powdery mildew. My arugula has some sort of spotty bug and the only green pepper that grew was stolen by a squirrel. I guess I’ve been lucky in years past having so few pests in my patch, and I’m now facing the reality that nature is a tough taskmistress.

Still, there are moments like eating the lunch below—with beans, cucumbers and lettuce from our garden—that conveniently make me forget all that. Mother Nature’s got her cat o’ nine tails, but I’ve got my fork.

{Photos by Andrea Curtis}

Garden intruders or garden guardians?

Each morning when I wake up, I make a pilgrimmage out to my vegetable garden to search for cat turds. I’m led to the spot by the flies and the soil that’s been disturbed, and I dig around furiously looking for the toxic deposits—generally buried under a few inches of soil. It’s an unpleasant way to start the day, but the marigolds I’ve planted, the cayenne pepper/mustard/flour concoctions I’ve sprinkled, the chicken wire I’ve erected and the obstacle course of sticks I’ve planted in the soil have done little to deter the neighbourhood felines and their nightly constitutional.

I keep thinking of the classic Bill Murray vehicle, Caddyshack, and the poor demented golf groundskeeper he played, tormented by groundhogs digging up his perfect grass. I am a neurotic Carl Spackler, planning and scheming about how to keep the infernal kitties out of my garden. (All suggestions welcome.)

It’s curious, because when it comes to messing with the school garden, I feel quite the opposite. Not that I’d welcome cat turds. (I wouldn’t wish such a curse on anyone.) But there are two-legged intruders there, and my attitude toward them is far more laissez-faire.

Are school gardens the new environmental battleground?

I spent a couple of hours the other morning planting vegetable seedlings with kids at the school garden. It was one of those days, with the sun shining, parents, teachers and kids working together, when you feel good about the world. The kids were excited to plant the seedlings they’ve grown from seed in little newspaper pots that they made, closing their eyes and blowing good wishes to their cucumbers and peppers and tomatoes to grow big and strong. Thanks to the attention of their teachers, most of the kids knew quite a bit about what they were planting and what will go into ensuring we see healthy and delicious organic veggies emerge from our plot.

But even with this unmitigated good vibe—actually because of it— I couldn’t help thinking about the cynical move of a new organization purporting to create a new Canadian School Garden Network, while actually working in the interest of fertilizer companies. Nutrients for Life (N4L) is a charitable organization connected to the Canadian Fertilizer Institute that has created a website “network” with resources and curriculum links for teachers and schools interested in school gardening.