Nov 14 2018
gardening
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.
Jun 6 2016
Elaine Mandrona — Back to the Land Redux
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.”
Jun 6 2016
Planting seeds — The Simplest, Most Powerful Thing a Child Can Learn
“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.”
Jun 6 2016
This is Natalie Goguen
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.”
A Gallery of Natalie Gogoen
Jun 6 2016
Laura Degrace — The Mad Scientist of Workshops
This is Laura DeGrace. Don’t mention a community project idea around Laura unless you’re better than half serious about following through because the next day your inbox will have urgent messages about funding possibilities and probably a list of potential recruits and clients.
Her logic is simple: If the idea resonated enough to tell someone then why wouldn’t you get out there and try to make it happen? Hers is a mindset of making possibilities into realities.
Green Eye Coop
Many of her projects — and there are a lot of them — are about food: cooking it, growing it, supplying it, teaching about it, protecting it. Her flagship is Green Eye Coop, which she says gives some coherence to all the stuff she’s organizing. Creating the co-operative also moved her from mostly volunteer work towards a living income for doing the things she was doing anyway.
Love for Organizing
We take for granted that someone who spends most of their time organizing courses and workshops about food and food security is someone who is obsessed about food and food security. Laura told us that she’s really about organizing. An idea pops into her head, she wants to make it happen. An idea pops into someone else’s head, she’ll get in on organize that too.
And as if she didn’t have enough ideas for workshops, she recently traveled to California with a couple of friends, Janet Hamilton and Jen Hudson, to take a week-long master food and preserving course. So, you can be expecting a swarm of preserving workshops in the near future.
Nov 14 2018
Garden Art Lesson Plan 6 where we make a watercolour oil pastel green resist
By Elaine and Archie • art, children, food movement, food security, garden art lessons, gardening