An Edmontonian's backyard tomato crop, 2010

The term elitist has been popping up more and more in the media when describing local organic food. I think that using the term displays a lack of imagination and out-of-the-box thinking (to use a tired term).

We just hauled in this year’s tomato crop (I described starting the tomatoes from seed earlier in the year). We transplanted them in late May in 30-40 square feet of garden space. I picked a few weeds along the way (like, 50), but we hardly paid them any mind until today.

With fewer hot days in late summer than usual, it was a bad year for tomatoes in Edmonton. Late blight took all of a neighbour’s tomatoes, and we lost most of our crop at the community garden to blight as well (seems that the cool wet weather is what causes it). Also, usually by this time at least half of our tomatoes are red, but we've only picked three red ones to date. No matter - covering them with newspaper will enable them to ripen on their own, and I for one can’t tell the difference between on ripened inside and one ripened outside.

So in a bad year we grew 10 gallons of local organic tomatoes with minimal effort, for $5-10 worth of seed. And, for those without a yard there are a plethora of community gardens in this city.

What exactly is elitist about local organic food again?

Growing your own food is right up there with riding your bike when it comes to green acts. It doesn’t get more earth-friendly than the hundred foot diet.

With our short growing season, the tomatoes that we put in the ground in late May can’t be in seed form. Traditionally, Edmontonians head to their local nurseries when the time comes to buy tomato seedlings. With a bit of foresight, though, you can save yourself a bunch of money and reduce the impact of your tomatoes even further.

Seeds

A couple of weeks ago I bought some open-pollinated tomato seeds from the good people of A’bunadh Seeds (from Cherhill Alberta – they had a booth at Seedy Sunday this year). I’m no seed expert, but I believe that open-pollinated means that I can harvest my own seeds from the resulting tomatoes (as opposed to hybrid seeds).  Earth’s General Store sells some great seeds too.

Any old tomato seeds will do in a pinch though. I chose a yellow, cherry, paste and beefsteak varieties.

Soil

The way to start your own tomatoes from seed is to get a bunch of small containers, they could be anything from actual seedling containers to Tim Horton’s cups, and fill them with soil. The soil should come from your backyard. Conventional sources will always tell you to buy potting soil from your local Home Depot or nursery, but I’ve never done so.

Potting soil ranks up there with bottled water on the list of useless items that companies have manufactured demand for. One website claims “garden soil is not a good choice, as it compacts too easily and can harbour organisms that cause diseases.” So how exactly will your tomatoes grow in this disease-infested soil once you plant them in said garden? For large greenhouses that have disease problems, sterilized potting soil makes sense. For the backyard gardener, it’s just another example of diminishing returns on investment.

(fill some containers with backyard soil)

Once you have soil in containers, plant the tomato seeds about 1/8” deep. I labelled the containers with strips from an old Venetian blind that I found in the alley.

(pieces cut from old blinds make great signs to label plants with)  read more... »

In October of last year we bought our first house in Edmonton--and we've been renovating ever since.  Sound familiar?

Our initial attraction to the property was it's three-fold potential:

•  Potential to make this old house (1942) into a energy-efficient family home (hopefully for many years to come);

•  Potential to make this huge double lot (8000+ square feet) into a more environmentally sensitive/edible landscape (we love growing our own food); and finally,

•  The potential (and challenge) of being good neighbors/citizens in an older and struggling North Edmonton community (Build better communities, stop urban-sprawl, "improve, don't move", etc.).

Idealistic? Yes, whatever...

One of the biggest challenges to renovations and landscaping we are constantly up against is cost. Not making a lot of money, the cost of creating a space we can enjoy without guilt has called for some genuine creative thinking... and I hope some of the ideas we've come up with will be of interest to readers who can relate.  read more... »

An article in the Edmonton Journal yesterday led me to a website by a local gardener. There is no greener activity than producing food in your own backyard, and there is much room for innovation in our northern corner of the world. I’m constantly delighted by what you can grow here, and how many different types of wonderful food can be produced in a few short months of summer.

Of note is the post “17 Hardy Fruits That You Can Grow On The Prairies”.  I’ve put a link to www.albertahomegardening.com under “100 foot diet” to the left of your screen.

Raspberries growing in Edmonton, Alberta

It’s been quite a dry year, much to the relief of TV weather people all over the city. They’ve barely had to complain at all about their waterskiing getting interrupted just so the pesky ecosystem can get some water.

The dryness is one reason that I’m impressed by the raspberry harvest. The iconic prairie canes are chock full of fruit at my community garden. With little maintenance or water, no fertilizer, and no pesticides, raspberries are as close to a zero-carbon food as there is.  read more... »

Readers at both my blog suite-mck.livejournal.com and here at greenedmonton.ca asked about the taste of the dandelion root coffee that I described here.

As you can see below, after grinding and brewing, it certainly looks like coffee, and the 50-50% blend with real coffee is barely distinguishable for having been economically adulterated.  read more... »

I’ll start this weedgeek post by saying that I know hardly anyone can pick dandelions the way I do. For most people with uniform yards of Kentucky blue-grass, extracting the yellow flower with an intact tap-root is a futile task. I’ve seen those screwdriver-like weed pickers that are sold in hardware stores described as ‘weed-breeders’ because they always break the root and any dandelion root fragment will just grow another dandelion.

Because I have no grass, I pick my dandelions with a pitch-fork.

There are plenty of reasons to celebrate the dandelion. People eat the greens and crowns. Make wine and fritters from the blossoms. But for me, dandelion-root coffee is the real prize. Because organic, fair trade coffee is pricey, it’s easy to quantify the value every scoop of dandelion coffee that I brew.  read more... »

Edmonton has a new movement: guerrilla gardening. A group of Edmontonians has started organizing and enacting gardening events that aim to promote "issues of community ownership, food security, native habitat, biodiversity, and the direct replenishing the environment in which we live our daily lives". Awesome.  read more... »

It's harvest time in Edmonton, and that means fresh, delicious food from our gardens at virtually no cost to the environment. Last night I made some soup, with 90% of the ingredients coming from my garden or the farmer's market. If I had a bigger/better garden, it could have been a 100-foot diet soup.

Ingredients:  read more... »

While weeds have been a part of my diet for over thirteen years now, and I've had many occasions to speak about eating them, it's been a long time since I've actually served them to anyone. In fact, apart from my wife, I can only recollect that reporter from the St. Albert Gazette, and my room-mates from just before I was married. And with my roomies, it was only dandelion root coffee.

Dandelion root coffee and chickweed omelets were part of a strategy to introduce weed-eating to people using the least foreign tasting species. Something like prickly lettuce isn't a friendly starting point. "Just that picture of prickly lettuce in your blog looked menacing," amandi_khera said. "I don't think I'd ever put something like that in my mouth."

Today though, I'd start with lamb's quarters. It's not just "least foreign tasting". It really tastes good.

This was my supper tonight:

 read more... »