I have a huge fig tree and it has a large number of figs - what do I do with all the figs? I tried drying some in the oven, but they are too wet and were making a mess. I am eating some fresh, but they are not that nice as a fresh fruit.
Ideas?
By ANNA KEMP
Aug 01 2007
Fernwood’s city farming
leads to food security
Just a block away from a fast food outlet, a stone’s throw from a grocery store and tucked between houses and apartment buildings sits Up from the Ashes City Farm, a productive quarter-acre urban farm. Through the bicycle wheel gate on Balmoral, between Cook and Vancouver streets, lies a lush paradise with tall corn, gigantic zucchini plants, greenhouses full of seedlings, artichokes, greens, carrots, beets . . . the list goes on. Children play on a rope swing that hangs from an apple tree, while their mother, Jennifer Freeman, and her business partner, Angela Moran, tend to the massive gardens.
Moran and Freeman are the most recent caretakers of this four-lot piece of land which first became referred to as an urban farm back in the late 1980s, when it was being cultivated by Brett Black.
“Someone has always been growing on this land, whether for personal use or for selling,” says Moran. Even before Black, there were people growing on the land—the fruit trees were planted by a Portuguese family who owned the land in the ’40s
Moran became involved with the project at the end of 2005. “I had just finished a horticulture gardening course and felt I had the skill to take on a sizeable piece of land,” says Moran. Asking around, she discovered the previous caretaker was planning to leave. She got involved and took over the lease in September, 2006.
Freeman heard through the grapevine that Moran was looking for a partner. “I was always attracted to this piece of land,” says Freeman. “I needed space to grow and when the opportunity came, I went for it.”
Both women work in Fernwood-based food security jobs outside of their work at the urban farm. Moran is site manager at the Greater Victoria Compost Education Centre and Freeman runs the Good Food Box Program—bulk-buying fresh fruit and vegetables from local farms and distributors—and grows garlic to sell commercially. Both women went through Lifecycles’ Youth Community Entrepreneur Program. “We see the value of generating our own income and the value of being an entrepreneur,” says Moran.
The produce they grow at the farm goes to a few local restaurants and serves 12 families in Fernwood. Any excess gets sold at the Tuesday night market in Fernwood Square.
“Twelve families get to truly experience food grown locally, and the community at large gets to see an example of food growing in the city,” says Freeman.
The pair has also done farm tours with local schools, teaching kids about growing food in the city. If they had more time and funds, they would like to organize a workshop series. “It would be unreal what we could do,” says Moran.
The organic gardening techniques Moran and Freeman use are a blend of both of their approaches. Freeman emphasizes a minimum input approach, with less time devoted to seeding and watering, her two least favourite aspects of gardening. “It’s about honouring what the mother gives us,” says Freeman. “If you can survive off the food that is just given, you have more time for personal pursuits.”
Moran adds that instead of seeing bugs and weeds as problematic, you can just let them be and recognize the stories they can tell about soil condition or deficiency.
The different plants that volunteer (that is, grow unseeded) tell stories not only about the soil condition, but also about the history of the land. “The history pops up through the soil every year,” says Moran. “Different seeds lie dormant, waiting for the right conditions to grow. You could plant no seeds at all and still be laughing.”
From crap to crops
Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when the farm was run by Brett Black, it produced hundreds of pounds of potatoes, onions, apples and other crops, along with chickens, turkeys, and, says Black, “the occasional pig slipped in when no one was looking.”
When he first moved in, the place was a disaster. But Black, obsessed with producing his own food, looked at the old dilapidated house and the yard full of junk and saw a perfect spot for urban regeneration.
He hauled away tons of garbage and used sheet composting and mulching, along with chickens, to build up the soil.
“The chickens did most of the work,” says Black. He brought in 120 of them to clean up the area and create compost. Plus he paid the rent by selling the eggs.
It was the chickens that started the “mini-political thing,” says Black. One day, a police officer was passing by, saw all the chickens and decided to check out the legality of having so many in the city. But according to the bylaw, as long as you didn’t have a rooster, you could have as many chickens as you like, providing you had the space. Next the SPCA came around, but they also found nothing wrong with the huge fenced area the chickens lived in.
As Black was not breaking any codes or regulations, city council decided to rain on his parade by changing the bylaw, limiting the number of chickens a person could keep in their yard to six.
“The decision started a tempest in a teapot,” recalls Black. The community turned out in full-force to support him, signing petitions and lobbying council, until, in the face of strong public pressure, council rescinded the bylaw change.
There were also a couple of moments when the city tried to rezone the lots to be apartments, but public pressure won out. Black remembers one redevelopment meeting where 500 people showed up. “Everyone was all riled up. Old ladies were shouting at the mayor. People were really passionate about it,” says Black. “It was a great spot, and the whole political storm was fun, but you always knew it was a losing battle. You knew eventually it was gonna be developed.”
The land is leased from someone who owns 10 adjoining lots, and, presumably, is waiting for when it is worth enough to sell. “It would be great if the city could make a decision to protect areas that could be used for food production,” says Black. “There are not huge areas, but soon there will be nothing. There’s all this yapping about food security and not doing anything about it. . . we’re supposed to be a garden city.”
Black farmed the land alone for a couple of year then was joined by Steve Reynolds. Later, more people got involved and they took it over once Reynolds and Black moved to a farm in Saanich. Soon Black will be moving to Swan Lake where he’s going to start working on the 100-yard diet, a more intense version of the 100-mile diet. And since they don’t allow chickens in Saanich, he plans to farm fish.
Next generations
Jonathan Pulker has lived in a house on one of the urban farm’s four lots since 2000. When he arrived, Black had been gone about four years. “The place was a shambles when I moved in. The Youth Empowerment Society were living there and the lot was a huge dog yard rather than gardens . . . There were a few last desperate tenants [in Black’s old house] and then the house was condemned,” says Pulker.
“I had always admired what Brett had done here, so I resurrected it to a certain degree.” Pulker began cleaning up the garden and once Black’s old house was condemned, he turned it into a chicken coop for four or five years. Too busy with work and family commitments to give the farm the time it needed, Pulker has encouraged and facilitated others to keep it going for the last three or four years.
Pulker is both a chef and a huge advocate of growing your own food. “It would only take a very small blip in the oil supply to realize that we only grow about 10 percent of our food. The average thing we eat travels at least 2,000 miles. I am not an extremist or anything, but I definitely think we are completely out of touch.”
Pulker says that our reliance on cheap oil makes it hard for local produce to compete in the marketplace. “We only spend nine percent of our income on food, and in other parts of the world it’s more like 22 percent. We live in a state of extremely devalued food.”
The recurrent theme among all the people who have lived and worked with this land is a hope that it would inspire people in the community to see how easy it is to grow their own food and what a tremendous range of options there are.
“There are so many blank canvases that food can be grown on. If we want to cut down our food miles, we can use spaces in the city to grow greens and stuff that doesn’t travel for long distances,” says Freeman. “A surprisingly large amount of food can be grown on a plot, food that is high in nutrients and vitamins like dark greens, kale, swiss chard. Almost all year round you can have high quality nutritious food growing right here in the city. M