I am always surprised and delighted when I see a little garden in an unlikely spot in the neighbourhood — behind a dilapidated steel shed, in a little alcove at an apartment building, or wrested from the woods at a seniors’ residence.
Kate Doyle, now in her fourth year of gardening, has a plot in the small yard of her downtown core home. These are tender beginnings, to grow a little food and to have an activity to share with her three- year-old daughter, Annette. Kate designed the efficient space-saving garden boxes and her husband, Eric, constructed them.
Young Gardener
Annette, aged three, loves tomatoes, tiny tomatoes that she helped plant. She knows that you eat them when they’re red.
She was excited about my suggestion to grow a sunflower house with her daughter or start a fairy garden complete with twig furniture. These are the kinds of things young mothers new at sharing gardening activities with their kids need to know. She and Annette went seed shopping together so they were sure to grow things that Annette would like to eat. Tomatoes — she especially likes tiny tomatoes!
During our visit in July the beans and peas were doing well and in August the zucchini and tomatoes were producing like crazy.
Kate is wowed by the produce of Aaron Shantz of Our Food SENB who shares an office with her at the United Way of GMSENB, and she takes some inspiration from him. His mega broccoli heads and tasty farm fresh eggs are enough to make her swoon.
Kate says she’s also connecting and learning on social media. “When I asked just yesterday or the day before, ‘How are your gardens, friends? What’s happening?’ I thought I could name like four people that had gardens, but there were about 30 comments from friends that I would never have expected to have their own gardens.”
Sharing Your Garden
Sharing how your garden is growing is a large part of the fun. You always have stories to tell.
The gardening bug
There is a contagious aspect of gardening. Kate’s neighbours have taken to growing vegetables, too, and now it’s connecting the neighbourhood in unusual ways. They got together and bought a truckload of soil; they help each other weed and pick stuff; and they even take in each others laundry if it threatens rain.
“We live on a street where there are so many awesome people. The other day when we were going to get that thunderstorm I realized that my blankets were on the line and I just messaged the group, hey, can one of you go take my blankets down, I’m not going to be home until five, five-thirty? They went and did it. They even folded them for me!” I think gardening fosters this kind of trust and consideration.
Gardening fosters trust in yourself, too. Kate says, “…the more I do it, the more confident I am in my techniques and my abilities.”
Garden Running Riot
In Scott Carsons garden, vegetables run riot, climbing wherever they can.
Scott and Angelina’s riot of a garden
A few blocks away, Scott Carson and Angelina Iapaolo are growing a garden in a battered asphalt driveway and minuscule backyard. There is an archway back entrance to this Driveway Called Eden with a trellis covered with a bounty of tiny tomatoes — free for anyone to sample. It’s also an invitation to come in.
Plants are growing everywhere. Beans are sending out scout tendrils onto the fire escape of the adjoining building. Squash vines are climbing up the back steps to the second floor. They’re pushing the boundaries over to the neighbour’s lot. But the neighbour doesn’t mind and was inspired in his own way to start growing flowers. The bright pots and blooms on his balcony are the perfect complement to this vegetable profusion.
Scott Carson
Scott, his coffee and his garden on a Sunday July morning.
Scott is the main gardener and quietly goes about his work. His close-set eyes focus his attention intently on the plants. Scott is a musician (pianist) and I swear he sometimes seems to be listening to the small squeaks, hums and groans of the growing green things telling him what they need and when. Sun, water and fertility — lots of fertility. Scott fertilizes with horse manure throughout the season with great results. Scott and his partner, Angelina, are rewarded for their efforts with LOTS of food. In mid-July they already had giant heads of purple cabbage — enough to start making sauerkraut. In August, it was salsa making season with a profusion of tomatoes. September yielded zucchini as big as Scott’s forearm.
Angelina is the networker and the one who gives voice to what they are doing here with their amazing garden. She is grateful that the landlord, the owner of a fast food joint next door, lets them create this jungle of food. But I clearly see that it is the landlord that should be grateful. The garden adds to the beauty and the safety of the property and the neighbourhood that otherwise would just be decaying old houses with peeling paint and sagging porches.
Scott says gardening, ”…also elevates the energy of the area it is in.”
I can imagine this garden as a set for a sci-fi movie. The plants seem innocent enough but they grow like crazy at night when no one can see them — their conspiratorial aim: overgrow everything. Make it green. Make it beautiful.
Angelina Iapaolo
Angelina is a great front person and loves to explain their gardening process.
Angelina is the singer of the duo. I envision her and Scott making music in the garden — from the garden — intuiting the voices of plants.
The will to garden
Gardening is hard work and takes commitment. So why do people do it? Beginning gardeners are usually inspired by someone else. The desire to eat better, be more self-sufficient, and also save money are motivations for sure. Angelina says of their garden, “I think its setting, its inception, its bounty have shown people that we are like them, without much, but we made this amazing thing happen on pavement, in a rental, in a shady neighbourhood. People are growing stuff all over now and feeling so great about taking care of themselves. We are no longer an oddity. Gardening to feed ourselves is a purposeful lifestyle choice.”
She also sees their vegetable growing project as a kind of template for action. Angelina plans to share her knowhow. “When I get it all down pat I want to help replicate it for others.”
Gardening with Children
Gardening with children at the Boys and Girls Club of Moncton.
Me, Elaine, the Gardener
My grandparents introduced me to gardening. I remember being five years old and planting onion sets with them in the spring. Now, I am an avid and fairly successful gardener both at home and at the Boys and Girls Club of Moncton, where I am coordinating a gardening project, completing the circle and working with children. My grandmother grew a lot of tomatoes and I remember the fruits heavy on the vines and the green tomato chow and dill pickles she would make in fall. Something that I thought was so simple and ordinary at the time now comes across as a beautiful memory and profound lesson.
Art in the Garden
We did art with the kids because gardening is aesthetic experience.
This gardening thread was picked up again years later when I was in my twenties. I started a garden when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin in the backyard of a house we were renting. We had just read Plowman’s Folly, a book about how the practice of plowing destroys the structure and micro-organisms in the soil. They encouraged disc harrowing to prepare the soil instead. We did the next best thing, or so we thought.
We tied some cinder blocks to a garden rake and scratched away at the sod. When we dug in to plant, we discovered that someone must have worked on cars back there because we unearthed old spark plugs, distributor caps, hunks of rubber, tempered glass and shards of metal. (They made cars out of steel back in those days.) Probably the soil was soaked with oil and gasoline too because nothing much grew except some beans, but that small success was enough to keep going next year and the next. With gardening, even a small reward keeps you hooked. That’s part of its magic.
The thing about gardening is that right away you have to pay attention, you have to observe and ask questions and find solutions. Why did this plant do well and not the others? You have to look for the subtleties.
The way of the garden
In my backyard garden now, the beets are doing well, probably because I added Borax to the soil. (Beets like boron and our soil here lacks it.) It was hard to germinate peas, beans and carrots this spring, probably because it was cold and wet in May and early June and I tend to plant early.
Tomatoes are doing OK but not as well as last year. I should have rotated their position to a new bed. Peppers, I have aplenty. Lots of sun!
I have zucchini but no cucumbers yet because they are too shaded, but I did rotate their position. Were there no bees to pollinate them? You see how this works?
An avid gardener likes to grow more and more every year. And they like to take on challenges, like growing melons or exotic, finicky vegetables. This year my watermelon only grew big enough for a Barbie doll picnic!
Raindrops on turnip leaves
I’m going outside now to listen to the rain hit the leaves in the turnip patch and to see if the ears of corn have plumped up. You see, it’s like this. You think about it more and more and find yourself in the garden at odd hours, taking care of it. In the fall it might be a cool starry night and you’re wondering if it’s going to frost and you don’t want the garden to be done for another year, yet. And the things that you lavish attention on and take care of, you grow to love.
The ultimate reward of course is eating. Never before has food tasted so good. My husband, Archie, and I roast up pans of fresh vegetables from the garden in olive oil and lemon juice and eat them with torn off hunks of baguette. Gardening makes life good. It makes you realize that it’s the simple things that are so very, very good. And you want to keep it all coming — next year and the next and the next.
Success not Always Wild
One Barbie-sized watermelon this year, but it tasted so good. Next year I’ll get it right.
Our first comic. These will be published as part of our work on whatever we’re doing at the moment. This is about our video profile of Jill Van Horne, Network Development Coordinator for Our Food SENB. You know, the person who took Aaron Shantz’s place.
We are adding a new feature to our work that should see us publishing more. Our original goal of long form text and now video take us a long time to publish and so we disappear for long periods of time.We will now work simultaneously on comics of what we’re doing.
I’ve long been a fan of comic journalists like Joe Sacco (Palestine) and Harvey Pekar (American Splendor). Their work is engaging because it takes you into the story from a different angle.
Although my drawing is not ready for primetime yet, I can produce fun stuff like you see here. It’s a mix of Photoshopped photos and screen grabs and hand drawn textures and inked lettering. They will be chronicles of our reporting, behind the scenes shots, sneak peaks, as well as invitations to engage readers.
Elaine Mandrona and Jill Van Horne at a Community Food Mentor gathering in 2017
At the dunk tank station for a charity fundraiser one Saturday morning in August, Kate Doyle was squatting on the sidelines with her partner, Eric Babineau, and their three-year-old daughter, Annette. They were watching spectators toss practice balls while Kate waited to be the first celebrity dunkee. Then a big guy stepped up, drilled a wild pitch high, hit a steel support causing the ball to ricochet past Kate’s little family and close to Annette. And a look somewhere between a poised rattle snake and an angry Rottweiler came over Kate’s face. The guy didn’t apologize, didn’t even look her way because, I think, he was embarrassed; but he must have felt it, that look of someone who was not offended, but guard-dog pissed that someone almost hit her little girl.
If you don’t know this reflex-to-protect side to Kate, or if you think it’s limited to staring daggers, then I don’t think you know Kate Doyle at all. But let’s rewind.
Lots of opinions
Kate says, “I’ve always had a lot of opions.” Perhaps her boss at the United Way volunteered Kate while she was on holiday to be a celebrity dunkee, she hoped all those opinions would translate into a lineup of people prepared to pay money to dunk her.
Gardens, and Shine Theory
My wife, Elaine Mandrona, and I were interviewing key players in the Moncton area food movement and Kate came to us via Aaron Shantz of Our Food SENB. Kate’s employer, the United Way of GMASENB, sponsors his organization, and he and Kate work closely out of the agency’s office in the Community Peace Centre on Church St. Kate is the Community Impact Manager and, among other duties, works with people applying for funding.
She’s keen to ensure conversations are two way, even if it is her is being interviewed, so it’s no surprise to hear she swears by Anne Friedman’s Shine Theory, which embraces collaboration over competition. “When you shine, I shine,” she said. “It’s related to feminism. It really resonates with how I work with people.”
Except for us, Oak Lane was deserted and quiet that morning and we chatted about food, the food movement, children and gardens — her garden, in particular.
We only learned about her Roller Derby career later, but we’ll get to that.
Moncton's Oak Lane
We interviewed Kate in Oak Lane, downtown Moncton. On a summer morning, there could not be quieter spot.
It always starts with a small box
“We’re going to start with a small box,” Kate told Eric, announcing her foray into gardening four years ago.Eric said, “Oh, OK. A small garden box.” A four-by-four box was made. The most recent expansion plans (four times that box)were hastily sketched and fired off in an email to Eric from work with the question, “Can we amp this up?”meaning the garden. Eric, ever supportive,said, “OK” and took a couple of vacation days and made it for her.
The garden also began expanding into potted tomato plants and herbs along the deck, and now that Annette is more helpful, Kate said, “I would love to see it take up the whole yard.” After all, she pointed out, there is aplayground nearby if Annette needs to play. We think she was joking, and she may think she was joking, but you never know about gardeners.
Eric Babineau
Kate's partner
Kate and Eric met through music. Kate often had bands crash at her place in Fredericton and Eric had left behind the triple-extra-large t-shirt he had bought at a concert. He connected to Kate via MonctonLocals.com (pre-Facebook message board) but for the life of her she couldn’t remember anyone at her place who was anywhere near big enough to wear a 3xl t-shirt. Eric is a small, or medium at most. He went over to retrieve his shirt, they got talking and the rest is history. He’s never worn the shirt.
Snap peas, tiny tomatoes and feeling full
We arrived at 9:00 am on a Sunday in July to photograph this garden and to meet Annette and Eric. The mid-summer sun was shining harshly making it all the more evident that the garden was sparse and struggling. (We were warned.) But seasoned and committed gardeners know this is how gardening goes, and that in July the game is far from over. When we returned in August it was lush.
However, a snap pea and cherry tomato harvest was never going to happen with a three-year-old loose and feeling entitled because, after all, she helped plant them from seed. For small children, snap peas and cherry tomatoes are too perfectly sized and positioned to imagine they aren’t growing just for them.
This year Annette reached the age when children become aware of a garden’s magic, that it can turn playing in the dirt into real food. Kate hopes this magic will parlay itself into a life-long, healthy relationship with food. Kate said, “We’re taught to be thin and beautiful instead of being healthy and full.” What she wants is for Annette to believe: “‘I can make my own food. I can be proud of what I eat. I can eat things that are good for me and make me feel good.’”
Snap Peas
Magic for 3-year-olds
Snap peas are so magical they’re just sitting there waiting to be eaten by three-year-olds. Annette helped buy seeds as well as planted this year and really knows her way around the garden. Kate hopes gardening at this age helps Annette develop a natural and healthy relationship to food.
Where do gardening bugs come from?
The gardening bug, on Kate’s side, skipped at least one generation. She remembers picking strawberries with her family, but there was no agricultural tradition despite living on PEI, where farming is everything. On Eric’s side, though, there is an uninterrupted gardening tradition, including a sister who homesteads. Kate’s garden evokes Eric’s memories of raiding his mother’s garden, “pulling carrots out, wiping them on the grass, and eating them right out in the yard.” And last fall the three of them joined the Babineaus in picking a million apples — with Kate, everything is measured in millions, tons or hot minutes — processing some of them into apple butter that she slathers on pork chops.
Counting Tomatoes
Kate and Annette’s potted tomato plants. Annette loves tiny tomatoes and loves to count them. Of course, if you keep eating them, counting is less of chore.
Food for the Millennials
Food was simple for Baby Boomers because the food system was largely hidden: buy food at the grocery store; eat it; throw the scraps away.Millennials like Kate, though, felt the repercussions of the “invisible food system” and grew up feeling compelled to examine their habits and choices more closely.
Kate always thinks things through, usually by talking them out with friends both on- and offline and has been doing this since adolescence on PEI. “I always had a lot of opinions,” she said. “I tend to take a very hard stand on a lot of things.”
One of those stands was on eating meat. In her teens, Kate committed to being vegan as a protest, not against meat, per se, but against how industrial farms mistreated livestock and their keepers. She only gave veganism up in her late twenties when she became pregnant because she felt she couldn’t balance her and her baby’s nutritional needs with the time constraints of being a working mom. Still, eating meat brought up the same concerns about mistreatment. It was local farmers like Murray Bunnett, who raise their animals humanely, that helped her find balance, ethically and nutritionally.
And she’s comfortable with that decision — to begin eating meat again — because she has examined other assumptions about food. Concerning a brand of tofu she loves: “You think in your head tofu is healthy and is a good thing to eat and you’re being ethical because you’re not killing an animal. But I was thinking, Ok, hold on, this tofu came from China: How was it produced? Who is producing it and what conditions are they living in? Is it any more ethical to be buying this because it’s not killing an animal versus me supporting a local farmer who is treating his animals fairly with love and kindness and compassion? Where’s the balance there?” For Kate, the key to navigating the myriad issues around food is to strike that balance, a good stand for anyone who must work with people in the local food movement.
Kate at Home
Kate lives with her partner Eric and their daughter Annette in older house in Moncton core that’s been redone. It’s one of places where there is more building than lot. Still, Kate would like to make the most of it with as much garden as possible.
Four Year Gardening Veteran
Kate has been gardening for four years, now. She said the first year was terrible because she was too timid about
Kate and the food movement
“It’s a lot like roots,” Kate said of the movement.“It’s happening underground. It’s really incredible how people are collectively working through all these things.” But she, too, has become a player because she is the CommunityImpact Manager for the local United Way. Kate estimated during this past summer that, with a food box program she worked on, she spent two days a week on food and garden-based projects. What’s more, she said, “A lot of the work I do may not be directly food related, but food is part of it.” She regularly meets with farmers like Murray Bunnett, community food workers like Janet Hamilton of the Mapleton Teaching Kitchen and homesteaders/activists like Aaron Shantz of Our Food SENB, so she can’t help but be steeped in all that is going on. And she is in awe.
“I think that Moncton has this really cool vibe happening right now. Things are literally growing,” she said.There are the little things. “We walk downtown and we see planters with food in them. You may not notice, but you walk by Calactus (Café) and there’s little strawberries and grapes.I know it’s small scale. I know it doesn’t address broader issues, but it’s really cool to live in a community that that is a thought people have: ‘I amgoing to make sure there is food ripe for the picking.’” And there are big things, like how area food banks have shifted to a progressive food centre model like the Peter McKee Community Food Centre.Kate feels that in Moncton “we’ve really embraced arts, culture and now we’re looking at food for social change which is important to me.” In fact, she claims, “I love Moncton, and I will fight anyone who says that’s it’s not the best place.” Which is tall praise from a woman who, just a few years ago, hated Moncton; hated it so much it took Roller Derby to change her mind.
Eve McQueen
In the yellow helmet
Back in her Roller Derby days, Kate was a blocker, eventually a pivot, a special position that kind of directs strategy. She’s the one with yellow helmet. (Marc Henwood Photography)
Eve McQueen, because Katefrontation was taken
Understanding Kate is easier if you factor in Roller Derby. I put itin upper case because when Kate talks about Roller Derby, it sounds upper case, like the Roman Catholic Church or the House of Commons. She played for the Lumbersmacks.
“I was really strong and I was unafraid. And I hit really hard,” Kate said of her Roller Derby era, the era pregnancy and then a shattered knee ended.
Finding Roller Derby was about finding her squad, her crew. “I loved this being something started by women for women with no ulterior motives around it. It was a place all women could go, all women shapes, ages, sizes,” she said. “It’s not often that women are allowed to have a space and be proud of who we are and our bodies and what we’re able to do. So it was really cool.” It was a tight community. (Roller Derby was first played in 1935 and has waxed and waned in popularity. The Twenty-First Century iteration is largely dominated by women’s teams.)
Eve McQueen was her show name. “I wanted Katefrontation but it was taken.” The name was inspired by Eric because, “If you look at Eric, I feel there is a striking resemblance to Steve McQueen.”
Roller Derby dominated her life, but that is to be expected with Kate. “I’m an all or nothing kind of person. My whole social life revolved around it. I want to go back, but I can’t.”
She can’t because she returned too soon after having Annette. “I was desperate to get back. I needed to get out of the house. I missed my friends and I missed roller skating. I really loved it.
“The second night back we’re doing a scrimmage and I should not have been playing. I was still all loosey goosey from having a kid because your muscles are all messed up and I went to go in to hit somebody.” Eve McQueen was a blocker. There are blockers and jammers. Jammers do the scoring through holes blown through the opposition by blockers. “I hadn’t been on roller skates in a year and a half and I twisted the wrong way and twisted my knee and shattered the whole thing.” And it was over. Forever. Reconstructive surgery is an option for professional athletes, but, apparently, Roller Derby at the Lumbersmack level doesn’t qualify.
Annette
The shattered knee might have officially ended The Roller Derby era, but it had really ended the year before, more specifically, within five minutes of Kate finding out she was pregnant. In that five minutes, she informed her teammates that she couldn’t play. She lied to them, mind you, making some excuse because she was torn by her loyalty to them, but her baby immediately shot to the top of her list of priorities. Eric’s, too. Both had jobs involving a lot of travel or long hours, but both found jobs closer to home. Kate said, “Our entire life has revolved around our child this year.”
All the signs of great parenting are there: their obvious belief that their kid is the smartest kid, ever; “tons” of pictures on Facebook; the way they talk to her like she’s a fully functioning person, not a baby; the pride in her helping in the garden despite the episode of washing it out with the hose on the wrong setting.
A Fine Gardener
Annette demonstrating her garden watering skills. Now that she’s three, she is helping with some of the chores. Watering is a favourite chore and she is quite good at it, but one of her first efforts nearly washed the garden out because the hose was set to jet rather than shower.
Annette is happy, confident, bright and independent. And she’s uni-lingually French. “We decided it was really important for her first language to be French. It’s not my first language, it’s my husband’s,” Kate said. Kate did French immersion in school, but said that despite understanding really well, she had no confidence in speaking the language. While the decision isn’t exactly unusual in Moncton, for me, as someone who has struggled for years to learn French with marginal success, it strikes me as courageous to put a language between you and your child and then expect to bridge that gap by the time the child can speak. Kate said, “It’s been a learning process for me to describe all these things in French,” but she made it. But that’s what I learned about Kate in our four meetings, that she commits to these things, unreservedly, wholeheartedly, no looking back — veganism, Air Cadets(see sidebar), Roller Derby, gardening, French for her girl.
But that Saturday morning by the dunk tank, what I knew about Kate Doyle was all gardens and Shine Theory. Watching her squatting with Annette and Eric, and Kate with that angry-Rottweiler look on her face, I was caught off guard, my camera dangling by my side, wondering what was going to happen. It was only later that day that she told us, “When I am loyal to something, I will do anything for those people.” And she hadn’t yet told us that she had been a bruising blocker for the Lumbersmacks, and that she “hit really hard”(present tense), and that despite not looking it, she was really physically aggressive.I didn’t know the depth of her commitment to the things she loved and believed in and the lengths she’d go for them. If I had known that, I would have had the camera at the ready because with Kate Doyle anything could have happened.
Diana Gregory of the local Canadian Mental Health Association gives a sopping Kate Doyle a hug. Kate, in her typical thorough way, Googled all about the dunk tank; in particular, how do you get out. Turns out, there are steps in the tank.
We spent time at a conference for New Farmers in April at the Dieppe Farmers Market. While we would love to report on what all happened there because we were impressed with everyone there, we have a couple of reservations, mostly because we were not officially invited as journalists and second, because we are not new farmers.
As community journalists we want to establish a foundation of trust with anyone we work with. Showing up uninvited, taking pictures and notes and then publishing stuff doesn’t work for us.
So here are a couple of what we hope are flattering photos and the promise that we want to do more work with this group. They definitely fit into the parameters of our food beat. We most likely will track down the people we talked to and photograph and interview the hell out of them because so many seemed like great resources of knowledge and experience that many others would benefit from.
There are a lot of people doing a lot of good work in the food movement in the Greater Moncton Area. Why do we have a big picture of Janet Hamilton for the first issue or our Food Movement Beat? It’s because she is all about teaching that most basic and powerful skill of cooking, a skill that if learned, it could go a long way to fixing a dozen or more of the world’s problems. Anyone familiar with the shortcomings of our food system knows this is not exaggeration.
We became students of the food movement after our Community Food Mentor programs with Alya Nouasri and Janet, Elaine in June and Archie in January. Once we started to talk about the issues and the food system and all its effects on health, culture, behaviour, the economy and on and on, we started to realize how food really is something people can organize around in myriad ways and make a difference.
The paralyzing question is: Where to start? Food is an astonishingly big topic. But after nearly a year of meeting many of the people who make up the movement — because Moncton Beats is about people who make up the heart of the community — we keep coming back to that one powerful activity that makes everyone — including children — experts on the food system and that’s cooking.
Once you start cooking, then you start appreciating food and then you start looking for good food, maybe buying from farmers markets, talking to farmers, maybe growing your own vegetables or keeping a couple of chickens, and then wondering how in the world all that food got into the grocery stores from who knows where and what’s the true cost of it being so cheap, and on and on.
Whether it’s a one-pot meal for single people living on low income, or a baked potato for children who don’t know where potatoes come from, many start the journey with Janet in her teaching kitchen.
There are other teaching kitchens, other people teaching cooking, but whenever there is a meeting about food in the Greater Moncton Area, be it about policy or pickles, you’ll probably find Janet there putting in her two cents, and taking home the peelings to make soup stock.
Despite her misgivings, I decided to include Elaine Mandrona in this first issue of our Food Movement Beat because so many of the themes of her coming to New Brunswick echo those of many of the people we talked to in the last year, especially the young farmers.
She first came to New Brunswick from Connecticut via Wisconsin in the early seventies when she and her partner at the time visited expat friends who said this was the place to start a new life away from everything that was wrong with the world: war, social inequality, urban sprawl, crime, degradation of the environment.
New Brunswick was beautiful and pastoral, the people friendly and welcoming and the land was cheap. Really cheap. They had found a haven.
“And we believed change was imminent. We didn’t know it was still 45 years away,” she says.
Back to the land — Corn Hill
They first settled in the Corn Hill area. Elaine and her partner had a tough year of it when winter came. “We moved into a wreck of a house that should have been knocked down,” she says. “I don’t know why we thought a cook stove could keep us warm over the winter in a cold and drafty farmhouse.” A neighbor rescued them by giving them an old wood heater.
The idea that many of these young people had was they would go back to the very basics of life, back to the land, and live without the conveniences they believed were at the heart of all the problems they left behind. Inspired by authors such as Helen and Scott Nearing and their book Living the Good Life, they engaged rural life in New Brunswick.
Of course, no book truly prepares anyone for reality and the hardships they endured are sometimes hard to listen to. Their neigbhours were friendly and helpful, but “I think they thought we were nuts to want to live without electricity when they had just got it in the fifties,” she says.
Back to the land — Cedar Camp
That relationship broke down and she started a new one and a new idea of an intentional community in Cedar Camp in the Waterford area not far from what is now Poley Mountain. Five hundred acres cost $40,000 then and the idea was that each person would build their own house and work the land together.
The first winter was a frigid nightmare again. “We lived in a cabin made from scrap lumber and tea box lids. We burned alders for heat.” The next summer Elaine built her house by a brook but her partner moved in, too.
“I built my own hexagonal tiny house, ten feet on a side. As a woman it was important for me to learn some simple carpentry skills and do that. My partner and I lived there off the grid for 10 years using micro hydro and solar panels. We ran lights, a radio and a small refrigerator. I figure that I earned a lot of green footprint credits living that way.”
Then the others in the community could not get enough money to make the community work so Elaine and her partner took over the farm.
They tried a market garden but there was no farmers market back then and organic produce was not valued in rural New Brunswick. The closest thing to a venue was selling off the back of trucks every Wednesday at the livestock auction in Sussex.
Eventually, the living off the land idea gave way to other ideas about how to earn a living and Elaine went into business for herself. “Being self-employed gave me a lot of satisfaction and independence. I ran my own stained glass studio and craft shop, Glass Alley (in Sussex), for 18 years and later became a massage therapist and nutritional consultant. I’ve been practising massage for 25 years now, soon to retire.”
Back to the land — Moncton
“Archie and I moved to Moncton in 2005 to start a different life, one in the city and close to our cottage in Cocagne,” she says. “We have a big yard and I felt bad that I was not growing any food.”
That desire to grow food again manifested in a couple of garden boxes that grew enough food to encourage her to build a few more. The more food she grew the more boxes she wanted. Starting on such a small scale without the desperation of having to make it pay or store it for winter made it more enjoyable. She also wanted to share the experience and invited people. A couple of young women took her up on it.
“Then I took a Community Food Mentor program and it opened my eyes to all that was going on in the area around food. The program also encouraged me to come up with my own program that could expand food capacity in my community. Now I have the City Farming Adventures group and am running an intergenerational and multicultural garden project with seniors in partnership with the Moncton Boys and Girls Club.”
There is no talk of a market garden, though. She’s in a different place now. “I don’t want to sell food. I just want to grow food with other people, especially children because they love it so much. People are coming back to the land. They’re realizing how important it is to connect with their food and how it is grown.”
She says they’re coming back to the land. “It’s just 45 years later.”
“If they plant it, they’ll be more eager to eat it,” says L’Ecole Abbey-Landry teacher François LeBlanc of his students. “At basis we need to eat better.” If there is one reason why teacher François LeBlanc got involved in establishing a greenhouse project for the school in Memramcook it’s that.
But it turns out to be more than that. “I’m more just trying to find different ways to teach. I like to tinker with things and I know kids do, too.” If this sounds like a teacher who likes to do things with his students, you’re probably right. And if you think he’s getting as much as the kids out of the program you’d be right about that, too. We talked to both François and Véronic Cormier, the coordinator of the program, and throughout it was obvious they were on the journey, too. The greenhouse, now that it’s up and running, has got their imaginations fired up with all the possibilities for education and for the community.
The possibilities
In the hour or so we talked they spoke of the possibility of feeding the school and feeding perhaps the nearby seniors complex, as well as having a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. They hope to find their place in the agricultural scene of the area. “One of the challenges is to find our niche,” says François, “maybe herbs or microgreens. No one here is doing microgreens.” They talked about having one crop they specialize in to pay the bills, as well as doing experiments with “weird” vegetables.
While not an expert, François is an avid gardener. “I’m self-taught. I do it on the weekend and at night, that’s when I do it. I try to stop that and get my school stuff done.” Véronic is also self-taught but is also studying nutrition at a school in Moncton.
The educational value of the greenhouse cannot be underestimated but there are challenges there, too. “It’s tough because you do have to follow a curriculum and we’re working closely with another school,” he says. “But I think the school vision with the principal we have now (Pierre Roy) is to have project-based learning and real-life things. He loves the whole entrepreneurship thing, getting kids involved.”
The business of greenhouses
The greenhouse is industrial sized at 33’ x 75’ and has room for whole classes to come in. It was donated by the local golf club who didn’t need it anymore. It was erected by a contractor.
The first day we were there seeds had just been planted but on the second visit the place seemed filled with bedding plants and apparently they had already had at least one sale.
On the day we visited there were seniors from nearby Le Manoir du Mascaret were stocking up on bedding plants.
The children we met that day were Grade 6 students Janelle Bourque and Danika LeBlanc and they had the manner of experienced sales staff. When asked what about the project had impressed them most it was, “M. François trusts us with the money.”
Both girls gardened at home, Janelle for a few years, but this was Danika’s first. She said it was easy now that she had already done it. And she says she loves it. She’s not the only one. “A couple of parents sent letters to the principal,” says François, “and said what we’re doing is helping their kids. Before they didn’t want to go to school. Now they’re loving the whole thing.”
One of the seniors there, Juliette Landry, was a retired Abbey-Landry teacher who said, “Every school should have a greenhouse.” Véronic thinks even bigger than that. “I would love to have another greenhouse and have one for full production and one for education.”
A community greenhouse
But the greenhouse is not just for the school. François and Véronic continually point out the benefits for the community as a place to gather and do gardening and for improving the health of people in the area.
Robert Bourgeois, owner of Belliveau Orchard, also sees the value of the project for the community. He is one of the business people and farmers consulted about how to make the greenhouse succeed. While he doesn’t think it could succeed as a full-blown, profit making business, he does believe in the project and its value to the school, its students and the community. “For the kids to have a hands-on experience to know where their food is coming from is worth something,” he says.
He also says they might think about forming a co-op “so people like me could could invest in it a bit, say, a thousand dollars a year” and with government incentives they could interest others. “It would help the community.”
François says there is still so much work to be done and so much that could be done. “We’re looking to do something for the community. It would be nice for people to jump on and give a hand.”
Shannon Gallant has been the culinary magician at Belliveau Orchard’s Café du Verger since October 2015. She is one of those savvy food people you find everywhere in Vancouver, Seattle or San Francisco. She loves to talk about food because she’s always thinking about food.
In April, we had been interviewing at Abbey Landry School in Memramcook and thought it would be fun to stop for a snack at the Belliveau’s and discovered this exuberant woman behind the counter. In the time it took her to get our order, we learned that she had learned a lot of what she knew in Vancouver and at nutrition school and then farmers markets across Canada and that everything she cooked was local. So we had to interview her.
“Everything I cook here is my own recipe from scratch,” she says. “My recipe or my mother-in-law’s who is Acadian.”
Winning people over lunch by lunch
“The clientele here is used to a lot of traditional comfort food so I’m trying to put a modern spin on it. Some things I will not touch like chicken fricot, those are tried and true recipes,” she says, but she will experiment with dishes like quiche and introduce things she thinks people haven’t tried. She believes she is winning people over lunch by lunch. “Someone will say ‘I never had a quesadilla’ and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.’” She says, “It’s fun seeing people try new flavours, new textures.”
The right person for the job
Robert Bourgeois, owner of Belliveau’s Orchard, said he had a gut feeling she was the one to take the restaurant to the next level. “When someone has a passion, it shows,” he says. They knew each other from Chamber of Commerce meetings and the farmers market and then she approached him with the idea that she could cook for them. “The timing was right,” he says, because they had just finished all the requirements for a license.
They will be renovating this summer with one wall being knocked out and and the restaurant expanded into the yard. “This fall it’s going to be crazy here. Finally, we have something to eat,” Robert says. “Some days on the weekend there are three or four thousand people for the U-Pick.”
Developed menu over winter
Now that the busy season is close at hand the lunch menu is pretty well set, but it took some time to develop. “We used the winter to play with recipes, see what people in our neighbourhood liked. The menu would change every couple of days. Once my lasagna ran out I would try a quiche, once the quiche ran out I would work on a different kind of soup, or a chili or a shepherd’s pie, any kind of comfort food that I could make a little bit healthier.”
Shannon is also having a great time with the community events they’re putting on. “We’re running a program now called The Mini-chef Series so we’re getting kids into the kitchen.” They had one where they had 18 kids in the kitchen and taught them how to make pizza.
More to come
Shannon has “a million ideas” for the restaurant. “Lunch is it right now but I would love to see more tapis, more finger foods, more munchies that you can come and have a coffee or glass of wine and sit with your friends and have a snack to share.”
Is this her dream job? “Absolutely,” she says. “This is my dream job. I’m cooking what I want. I’m using the ingredients I want.” And of course everything is local if possible, some of it from the property itself since Belliveau’s grows a lot of produce. They also source from the butcher shops and bakery in Memramcook. And with all her farmers market experience — including starting one — that makes her really happy.
Shannon seems to have nearly limitless enthusiasm for what she is doing at the restaurant and Robert Bourgeois is giving her all the creative input she wants. It sure sounds like a dream job.
When I first met him at the on Elmwood Drive in Moncton, Aaron Shantz couldn’t shake hands because he had this massive gash from some accident with metal at his house. It looked painful and he made it sound like he had been incredibly stupid and clumsy.
The other thing I remember about that first interview is that he said his wife was probably better connected to food security skills than he was because he was just a forestry guy, his original career being in GIS for big corporations – the ‘devil’, as he calls them – helping them to cut corners around environmental policy. “It made me sick.”
Homesteaders
But this is who Aaron is now. He and Shelley bought an abandoned farm and they’ve turned it into a homestead. In the photos you can see why Our Food SENB might think him suited to the job of coordinating food actions.
Aaron and Shelley have committed to the idea of a way of life they believe more people must turn to if we’re to survive on this planet. “I’m an idealist,” he says and the ideal is, “can someone start from scratch with no financial help from anyone else and actually provide for themselves and live with a low environmental footprint?”
The original plan was for Aaron to work some minimum wage job while Shelley grew their food. Aaron got jobs like welding plastic tanks for fire trucks, picking corn, and milking goats. “We were going to live agricultural bliss,” Aaron said, but “surviving in Kent County has been a real journey.” And then kids started happening. “We never factored having a kid.” Or two.
“I know a lot of people have the ideal (of food security and a light environmental footprint) but it seems like a really hard thing and that all the things that are needed don’t exist yet and that our generation has to learn those things. Maybe in a couple of generations we’ll have it figured out.” Aaron Shantz, Coordinator of Our Food Southeast New Brunswick.
Natalie, her husband, and two young children live in a tucked away corner of the city that seems like country. Surrounded by grassy fields and wetlands, the redwings, warblers, geese and pheasants are calling all around, yet you can hear the bells of the cathedral close at hand.
Her front yard is dominated by that huge, and intriguing concrete structure that look like a Druidic circle but, she tells us, it is the Coliseum, the remnant of what once was the biggest indoor skating rink in eastern Canada. Anyone who knows Natalie agrees that this is exactly the kind of place Natalie would find.
The other circle in Natalie’s world is a close-knit but loosely organized group of friends involved in issues and projects. “I’m not into that many organizations. It’s just a group of people and we just kind of gather and talk. Like a few of us are working on a permaculture garden in the downtown Moncton. We’re all trying to learn as much as we can and we’re all trying to spread the word as much as we can.”
While Natalie is a gardener with a local landscaping company and has studied art at NSCAD, she describes herself first as an activist, something she’s been doing most of her adult life. She has supported causes like striking bus drivers, participated in “occupy Moncton,” and opposed water fluoridation and fracking. “I always have social issues in my brain.” In April we ran into her at a New Farmers event put on by the National Farmers’ Union and were not surprised to find her there.
Garden Cities Project
A formal organization she is involved in is the Garden Cities Project. Natalie is the coordinator. She organizes box rentals at their initial Garden Hill location as well as the new Community Food Centre on St. George Street.
She also organizes workshops. Elizabeth Gorman, one of the founding members of the group, says Natalie is adept at it because of her creativity and the circle of friends with unique talents she can draw on.
Sour dough saga
In their personal lives Natalie’s friends focus on healthy living and making things from scratch. They keep each other going. Natalie tells us a story about sourdough starter. Sourdough starter is wild yeast fermented in bread dough that can be divided and shared — kind of a metaphor for how they share things and ferment ideas.
Natalie’s starter died after her daughter Ariane was born. She was just too busy to make bread. But bread making has started again thanks to the gift of starter from a friend that has been kept going for 18 years. “For the last six months we’ve been making bread every week at least once a week … and I’ve been giving away more sourdough and now we post pictures of our bread on Facebook.”
Women’s issues
A lot of these activist friends are women and attend a yearly gathering of feminists at Caissie Cape where they celebrate, create, discuss and brainstorm. “I’m excited to be leading a discussion at a women’s summit this year. We’re going to talk about the whole Jian Ghomeshi thing face to face.”
Dedicated mom
For the past four years, Natalie has wholeheartedly dedicated herself to motherhood and it shows. Her children are trusting, curious, cuddly and talkative even if we don’t understand everything they are telling us in French.
Their outdoor environment, where they spend time every day, rain or shine, is magical with a meandering Zen path, a fire pit and an aromatic pine tree where her son Jaco hides underneath from ghosts. Are there skater-wraiths from days past that haunt the Coliseum?
The youngest, Ariane, was sporting a goatee of orange washable marker the day we were there, the result of exploratory artistry. There are toys strewn everywhere both inside the house and out.
Back in the dirt
But this is the year for getting her hands in the dirt. Natalie goes back to work full-time as a gardener and will also start to expand her own gardens at home in earnest. Last year she worked a community plot at the U de M, but this year she wants to garden where she lives. She has several new vegetable beds and plans to grow food well into December in the hot houses that she built with her dad. “I gardened with my Dad for a long time when I was a kid.”
She got back to gardening when she returned from NSCAD. “When I came back to Moncton, I started really small. I was living in an apartment with some people and there was this little garden two feet by six feet and just started there. The soil was awful but it got me started.” When we met in April she was saying, “If it were up to me this would be planted already but none of the soil companies are open yet. I want soil, I’m excited. I want to garden now.”
Respect for the natural way of things
Inventive and respectful of nature, she points to a patch of Colt’s Foot next to the house where she has struggled to establish a garden. She has concluded that these wild flowers shouldn’t be eradicated (they do have some medicinal benefit) and that she will, instead, work with the persistent plants by sinking coffee bean bags full of soil into the patch and grow her vegetables that way.
She also has a healthy garlic patch and an area of earth reserved for a bee garden.
Growing her own food is half of the equation — the other half, food security for everyone, is always on her mind. “People don’t realize that we’re going in a scary direction. They’re blaming themselves because they’re struggling to eat.” She sees this at close hand with her peers — her own generation. “This is wrong that people can’t afford to both eat and pay rent.”
Natalie is a doer — comfortable and confident speaking her mind. Her motto: “Learn as much as we can and spread the word.”
Sep 28 2017
Evolution of a Gardener
I am always surprised and delighted when I see a little garden in an unlikely spot in the neighbourhood — behind a dilapidated steel shed, in a little alcove at an apartment building, or wrested from the woods at a seniors’ residence.
Kate Doyle, now in her fourth year of gardening, has a plot in the small yard of her downtown core home. These are tender beginnings, to grow a little food and to have an activity to share with her three- year-old daughter, Annette. Kate designed the efficient space-saving garden boxes and her husband, Eric, constructed them.
Young Gardener
Annette, aged three, loves tomatoes, tiny tomatoes that she helped plant. She knows that you eat them when they’re red.
She was excited about my suggestion to grow a sunflower house with her daughter or start a fairy garden complete with twig furniture. These are the kinds of things young mothers new at sharing gardening activities with their kids need to know. She and Annette went seed shopping together so they were sure to grow things that Annette would like to eat. Tomatoes — she especially likes tiny tomatoes!
During our visit in July the beans and peas were doing well and in August the zucchini and tomatoes were producing like crazy.
Kate is wowed by the produce of Aaron Shantz of Our Food SENB who shares an office with her at the United Way of GMSENB, and she takes some inspiration from him. His mega broccoli heads and tasty farm fresh eggs are enough to make her swoon.
Kate says she’s also connecting and learning on social media. “When I asked just yesterday or the day before, ‘How are your gardens, friends? What’s happening?’ I thought I could name like four people that had gardens, but there were about 30 comments from friends that I would never have expected to have their own gardens.”
Sharing Your Garden
Sharing how your garden is growing is a large part of the fun. You always have stories to tell.
The gardening bug
There is a contagious aspect of gardening. Kate’s neighbours have taken to growing vegetables, too, and now it’s connecting the neighbourhood in unusual ways. They got together and bought a truckload of soil; they help each other weed and pick stuff; and they even take in each others laundry if it threatens rain.
“We live on a street where there are so many awesome people. The other day when we were going to get that thunderstorm I realized that my blankets were on the line and I just messaged the group, hey, can one of you go take my blankets down, I’m not going to be home until five, five-thirty? They went and did it. They even folded them for me!” I think gardening fosters this kind of trust and consideration.
Gardening fosters trust in yourself, too. Kate says, “…the more I do it, the more confident I am in my techniques and my abilities.”
Garden Running Riot
In Scott Carsons garden, vegetables run riot, climbing wherever they can.
Scott and Angelina’s riot of a garden
A few blocks away, Scott Carson and Angelina Iapaolo are growing a garden in a battered asphalt driveway and minuscule backyard. There is an archway back entrance to this Driveway Called Eden with a trellis covered with a bounty of tiny tomatoes — free for anyone to sample. It’s also an invitation to come in.
Plants are growing everywhere. Beans are sending out scout tendrils onto the fire escape of the adjoining building. Squash vines are climbing up the back steps to the second floor. They’re pushing the boundaries over to the neighbour’s lot. But the neighbour doesn’t mind and was inspired in his own way to start growing flowers. The bright pots and blooms on his balcony are the perfect complement to this vegetable profusion.
Scott Carson
Scott, his coffee and his garden on a Sunday July morning.
Scott is the main gardener and quietly goes about his work. His close-set eyes focus his attention intently on the plants. Scott is a musician (pianist) and I swear he sometimes seems to be listening to the small squeaks, hums and groans of the growing green things telling him what they need and when. Sun, water and fertility — lots of fertility. Scott fertilizes with horse manure throughout the season with great results. Scott and his partner, Angelina, are rewarded for their efforts with LOTS of food. In mid-July they already had giant heads of purple cabbage — enough to start making sauerkraut. In August, it was salsa making season with a profusion of tomatoes. September yielded zucchini as big as Scott’s forearm.
Angelina is the networker and the one who gives voice to what they are doing here with their amazing garden. She is grateful that the landlord, the owner of a fast food joint next door, lets them create this jungle of food. But I clearly see that it is the landlord that should be grateful. The garden adds to the beauty and the safety of the property and the neighbourhood that otherwise would just be decaying old houses with peeling paint and sagging porches.
Scott says gardening, ”…also elevates the energy of the area it is in.”
I can imagine this garden as a set for a sci-fi movie. The plants seem innocent enough but they grow like crazy at night when no one can see them — their conspiratorial aim: overgrow everything. Make it green. Make it beautiful.
Angelina Iapaolo
Angelina is a great front person and loves to explain their gardening process.
Angelina is the singer of the duo. I envision her and Scott making music in the garden — from the garden — intuiting the voices of plants.
The will to garden
Gardening is hard work and takes commitment. So why do people do it? Beginning gardeners are usually inspired by someone else. The desire to eat better, be more self-sufficient, and also save money are motivations for sure. Angelina says of their garden, “I think its setting, its inception, its bounty have shown people that we are like them, without much, but we made this amazing thing happen on pavement, in a rental, in a shady neighbourhood. People are growing stuff all over now and feeling so great about taking care of themselves. We are no longer an oddity. Gardening to feed ourselves is a purposeful lifestyle choice.”
She also sees their vegetable growing project as a kind of template for action. Angelina plans to share her knowhow. “When I get it all down pat I want to help replicate it for others.”
Gardening with Children
Gardening with children at the Boys and Girls Club of Moncton.
Me, Elaine, the Gardener
My grandparents introduced me to gardening. I remember being five years old and planting onion sets with them in the spring. Now, I am an avid and fairly successful gardener both at home and at the Boys and Girls Club of Moncton, where I am coordinating a gardening project, completing the circle and working with children. My grandmother grew a lot of tomatoes and I remember the fruits heavy on the vines and the green tomato chow and dill pickles she would make in fall. Something that I thought was so simple and ordinary at the time now comes across as a beautiful memory and profound lesson.
Art in the Garden
We did art with the kids because gardening is aesthetic experience.
This gardening thread was picked up again years later when I was in my twenties. I started a garden when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin in the backyard of a house we were renting. We had just read Plowman’s Folly, a book about how the practice of plowing destroys the structure and micro-organisms in the soil. They encouraged disc harrowing to prepare the soil instead. We did the next best thing, or so we thought.
We tied some cinder blocks to a garden rake and scratched away at the sod. When we dug in to plant, we discovered that someone must have worked on cars back there because we unearthed old spark plugs, distributor caps, hunks of rubber, tempered glass and shards of metal. (They made cars out of steel back in those days.) Probably the soil was soaked with oil and gasoline too because nothing much grew except some beans, but that small success was enough to keep going next year and the next. With gardening, even a small reward keeps you hooked. That’s part of its magic.
The thing about gardening is that right away you have to pay attention, you have to observe and ask questions and find solutions. Why did this plant do well and not the others? You have to look for the subtleties.
The way of the garden
In my backyard garden now, the beets are doing well, probably because I added Borax to the soil. (Beets like boron and our soil here lacks it.) It was hard to germinate peas, beans and carrots this spring, probably because it was cold and wet in May and early June and I tend to plant early.
Tomatoes are doing OK but not as well as last year. I should have rotated their position to a new bed. Peppers, I have aplenty. Lots of sun!
I have zucchini but no cucumbers yet because they are too shaded, but I did rotate their position. Were there no bees to pollinate them? You see how this works?
An avid gardener likes to grow more and more every year. And they like to take on challenges, like growing melons or exotic, finicky vegetables. This year my watermelon only grew big enough for a Barbie doll picnic!
Raindrops on turnip leaves
I’m going outside now to listen to the rain hit the leaves in the turnip patch and to see if the ears of corn have plumped up. You see, it’s like this. You think about it more and more and find yourself in the garden at odd hours, taking care of it. In the fall it might be a cool starry night and you’re wondering if it’s going to frost and you don’t want the garden to be done for another year, yet. And the things that you lavish attention on and take care of, you grow to love.
The ultimate reward of course is eating. Never before has food tasted so good. My husband, Archie, and I roast up pans of fresh vegetables from the garden in olive oil and lemon juice and eat them with torn off hunks of baguette. Gardening makes life good. It makes you realize that it’s the simple things that are so very, very good. And you want to keep it all coming — next year and the next and the next.
Success not Always Wild
One Barbie-sized watermelon this year, but it tasted so good. Next year I’ll get it right.
By Elaine Mandrona • food movement, food security, gardening