Slow Coast.ca

By David Parkinson

Somehow, amongst all of the chores and preparation for the 50-Mile Eat-Local Challenge and Edible Garden Tour, not to mention being part of the startup team of a cooperative, this summer is keeping me jumping. I’ve been writing a huge amount: articles for local publications, minutes, and emails; and somehow I seem to keep coming around to the weekly deadline without anything to say that seems worth saying. (Or that I haven’t already said.)

So I’m going to follow my co-blogger’s lead and knock off for a while. I’ll be out there helping to put together the aforementioned 50-Mile Eat-Local Challenge and Edible Garden Tour, picking and processing fruit, and staying busy enough. With luck, I’ll have something to say from time to time. But until Labour Day I think that my posting will be sporadic.

Have a good summer!

By Tom Read

See you in September!

Everybody needs a break now and then, so I’ve decided to give journal-writing a rest for the summer. Instead, I’ll concentrate on the many projects piling up around our homestead, plus enjoying a visit from my nephew, plus helping out as a volunteer at Texada Island’s Sandcastle Weekend, plus going to get our new puppy in mid-July. And keeping on looking after our ever-growing numbers of chickens, pigs, bees, trees and gardens.

Maybe we’ll see an increase in real estate activity over the summer, too.

I also hope to find time for some simple pleasures, like reading a few novels, going for a swim at Raven Bay, cooking and eating fresh food from the garden, and engaging in good conversation with friends.

So I want to wish everyone a fine summer. I’ll be back in this space at a weekly pace starting on Friday, September 10.  Until later….

By David Parkinson

Someone out there may have noticed that my usual Monday deadline came and went without a post. In my defense, I can only say that I’m pretty busy getting ready for the first Annual General Meeting of Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative, to be held tomorrow (Wednesday June 23). I expect to have plenty to say about that, and maybe about other things, when I return next week.

By Tom Read

Overlooking the kitchen garden at mid-day, just before the Summer Solstice, 2010

Time passes quickly for busy bees like me. Today I startled myself when I belatedly realized that the longest day of the year is but a few days hence. Many years ago I enjoyed a tradition of all-night bonfires on various northern California beaches with friends to celebrate the summer solstice. But in my present life on Texada Island that won’t be an option this year. From mid-May to mid-October, most outdoor fires are banned by order of the Province of British Columbia, regardless of weather or forest conditions. Thus, no summer solstice bonfire for us.

Instead, here are a few snapshots of what we’re doing at this mid-summer moment:

– Today we took a dozen fertilized chicken eggs to our friend An so she could place them underneath one of her broody hens. We are grateful for An’s help again this year — our sleek, young Dark Cornish hens seem amenable to Lord John Marbury’s amorous attentions (our rooster), but once again they have shown no interest in becoming mother hens. If the hatch-out with An’s surrogate mother hen is successful, we’ll raise the resulting brood as meat birds in one of our chicken tractors on pasture, and they’ll be in the freezer by late fall.

– Our pastures are awash in flowers just now, which reminds me of bees. I’m stewarding a couple of hives as a new beekeeper (coming up on two years).  This summer, I’m trying to encourage the bees to migrate from my existing, rather dilapidated hives into a proprietary type of beehive called a “DE hive” (named after David Eyre, who invented it). It’s working, slowly. Why didn’t I just follow the easy path and replace my old hives with additional standard replacements? Answer: the DE hive seems not only better designed all around, in my opinion, but it’s also smaller and lighter, thus easier to manipulate for a fellow like me with a trick lower back.

–  Our country homestead needs deer fencing on a new field, rock-picking of a new gardening area, expanded irrigation system, new dog run, and I’ve got to do something this summer about the moss that’s beginning to get established on our roof. Plus, we’re behind on planting our summer crops due to a cold and wet spring. We need every hour of these long days to make a dent in our “to do” list!

And that’s the way it is at Slow Farm on this mid-summer Solstice.

By David Parkinson

Oats!

Canada Border Services willing, this week will bring something I’m very excited about: the region’s first commonly-owned cider press. For just about as long as I’ve been living here and hearing about the Powell River Fruit Tree Project (now known as Skookum Gleaners), I’ve been hearing people say, “Someone should get a cider press that we can all use” — or words to that effect.

But one thing we can all admit — even though sometimes we go around acting otherwise — is that words alone won’t make this sort of thing happen. For reasons which are not very clear to me, we struggle to get from the desired outcome back to the simple steps needed to get started. I get frustrated fairly often when I hear people saying that we should do such-and-such, or someone should do this or that, and then leave it at that, as though coming up with the first idea off the top of one’s head is a real start towards making something happen. In fact, implementing the solution to a clearly stated problem is, like most things, the product of discipline and hard work. There are few shortcuts that aren’t dead ends.

So, in the case of the desire to have a commonly-owned cider press, we have to work backwards to understand what we can do to make that happen. And here we can easily bog down, hampered by a lack of imagination or a lack of exposure to innovative solutions to a pretty common and simple problem. After all, people throughout history have figured out how to avoid having to force everyone to own the same tools when those tools aren’t in use every day. We have lost our flair for the commons, dazed by cheap commodities and a perverse economy that rewards the illogic of gluttony and waste.

One solution is: buy a cider press among a group of family, friends, and neighbours. And from what I hear, this solution is in practice out there in the hinterlands, where there are enough people with enough apple trees so that there is both a real need for a common solution and a network of mutual trust in place to make it work with minimal effort. This is a fine solution when those conditions are present.

But what about the more common situation, where we see a widely-dispersed network of people with few trees, many of whom do not know one another? In and around Powell River there are many homeowners and tenants who have a few fruit trees on their property; but these trees produce nowhere near enough fruit for these people to start seriously considering getting in on a cider press, let along buying one for their personal use. Only at the level of the whole network of trees could we produce enough cider to justify the purchase of a press.

Also, this network is so disconnected and spread out that there is little hope of creating the sense of common need or mutual trust needed in order for people to work together for the common goal of sharing a cider press. Somehow someone or something needs to pull the network together, and we need to create an entity which people can trust to do the right thing by individuals and by the community at large. It’s unlikely that any individual tree-owner is going to take this task on. It’s one thing to say that someone should get a cider press to deal with this problem/opportunity; but who will buy the thing? Who will operate, maintain, and store it?

If any person or organization were to own and operate equipment which could be held in common for the use of the entire community, we would want that person or organization to be open and transparent to participation by anyone with an interest in using that equipment. In the case of our cider press example these people would comprise owners of trees, people who want to make cider, and others in the community who would benefit from having access to local cider.

The question of a shared cider press is only one among many examples which we could easily come up with, from shared hand tools all the way up to a community farm or vineyard or brewery. It’s simple to imagine cases where a great number of people can benefit from the collective ownership and control of assets which few individuals are likely to buy on their own. In a sense, it is a simple problem to solve, and yet we struggle to find a solution. Our economy has evolved to make it almost necessary for everyone to have to own the same commodities as everyone else, even when shared ownership would do so much to reduce the burden of individual ownership on people, on the economy, and on the environment. We place convenience high above environmental stewardship, and the result is a lawnmower in every garage, even though one per block would be more than enough to keep the lawns mown.

There is a growing movement out there, epitomized by websites like Shareable and the P2P Foundation, seeking sensible collective solutions to problems like this one. I’m amazed by the number and variety of creative solutions that people are developing in order to enable us to work better together, reducing the load on individuals while strengthening community networks of sharing and collaboration. Not to mention reducing the stress on our stocks of non-renewable natural resources and on the the systems which support life on the planet.

The solution we chose is to purchase the cider press through Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative. This organization is completely open and democratic, so anyone wishing to have some say in the use of the cider press is free to join and participate. There are other models we could have chosen for collective ownership, but the cooperative model is ideal for situations like this one, where people benefit collectively through access to resources that are hard to access individually. If we had 100 people buying together, this cider press would have cost about $13 per person: less than the cost of a night at the movies with a bag of popcorn. Well, eventually we will have more members than that, so that the cost (and benefit) of the press will be spread wider and wider.

As long as there is an organization which people can trust to manage the purchase, maintenance, storage, and use of shared resources, then we can have valuable community assets at a low cost to individuals and with a high degree of accessibility for the many owners. It is a simple and brilliant solution to a set of problems which are becoming more pressing all the time.

By Tom Read

A vocal jazz rendition of "Theme From Spiderman" resonates around the village of Van Anda from Texada School's playground last Friday, part of community appreciation day at the school

“We may be small but we’re mighty.” That’s Texada School Principal Carol Brown’s apt description of our community’s little (28 students this year) but vigorous school.

The Texada Island community has responded warmly to Ms. Brown’s leadership, enthusiastically supporting the school in many ways. Just to name a few, community volunteers provide hot meals one day a week, give kids extra academic help, conduct ongoing workshops on social and historical topics,  and contribute funds for extra-curricular activities, including field trips. Yesterday (Friday), the school formally thanked the community of which it is a part, and Linda and I were privileged to attend the festivities.

And what an abundance of festivities! Not one, but two very talented youth jazz groups from Powell River gave a concert to be remembered. Community volunteers (mainly husbands of local teachers) put on a delicious picnic lunch barbeque. A much-anticipated mural unveiling took place — an art piece designed and created by students with the help of a local artist that interprets our island’s industrial heritage of mining and logging.

While I enjoyed the entire event, the most meaningful part for me was the one-on-one reading session that started the afternoon. I got to sit with a student named Austin while he read to me from some of his favourite books. In the end he departed from the program a little by asking me to read a few stories to him. I know that parents do this routinely, but as a non-parent I found the experience an unexpected pleasure.

Austin and I enjoy a one-on-one reading session earlier in the day

Maybe that’s what healthy communities do best — help connect people who otherwise might not learn to appreciate each other.

And the weather on this special day? Perfect!

By David Parkinson

Sub-irrigated planter or self-watering container: overflow hole visible near the bottom

Small-scale and urban food production is certainly catching on all over the place. Every day I see more articles about backyard gardening, permaculture, community gardens, CSA programs, and all other kinds of schemes that people are trying out to shorten the distance between producer and consumer. Anything that turns consumers into producers is especially exciting, since that is one guaranteed way to put some amount of direct control and personal responsibility into people’s hands.

But, as anyone who grows food will tell you, it’s a lot of work; and not only physical labour but also a constant or near-constant project of thinking up new plans and new approaches and testing them out. This year, the two things I’m most excited about in our garden are our ten new blueberry bushes (two each of Bluecrop, Brigitta, Duke, Northland, and Reka varieties) and our jazzy set of self-watering containers, also known as sub-irrigated planters.

The blueberries are pretty obvious: ever since I was a child, blueberries have been one of my favourite fruits. For me, there is no pie like a good blueberry pie; and they’re an essential ingredient in a good bowl of oatmeal. When I got these ten bushes a couple of months ago, I learned that in their first season they will do better at rooting and getting established if they don’t put too much energy into their flowers. Which means that I was supposed to be removing flowers when they appear. Well, I did that for some time, but then my heart just went out of it. I want those berries too much!

And so now I am gratified to see a fair number of almost-berries on a few of the bushes. I can’t wait — to me, there is almost no luxury greater than picking ripe blueberries off the bush in the backyard. (I think I’ll still need to mount an expedition or two to a U-Pick this summer, though, in order to pick enough to dry the quantities I need for winter storage.)

As for the tomatoes, no decent garden is complete without a few tomato plants. But tomatoes present some interesting challenges, especially for gardeners working with a limited space: they don’t like to be drenched with water, so it’s best to keep them somewhat sheltered and away from other plants. They like real heat. They can be especially thirsty, and they need heavier feeding than many other plants. Last year, we had a few tomato plants that we tried to keep sheltered under the south-facing eave, tucked in under the branches of our peach tree. But when it rains the wind tends to blow out of the southeast, so they were not always keeping dry there. This is not the hottest side of the house either, thanks to shade from a neighbour’s ornamental cedars; but it was hard to know how we could plant them on the west side without having them out in the middle of the lawn.

The solution: self-watering containers (SWCs)/sub-irrigated planters (SIPs). I found this clever idea on the internet (where else?). The idea is simple: instead of watering plants from above, letting much of the water evaporate off the soil surface and training the roots to stay shallow, why not water plants from beneath? That way you lose less water to evaporation and dissipation into the surrounding soil, and send it right where it belongs: straight to the roots of the plant. In an Italian garden you will often see tin cans open at both ends and dug into the soil around the base of tomato plants, providing a water-tunnel to do the same thing.

The idea is simple: two buckets stack into one another. A pipe cut through the bottom of the upper bucket carries water down into the lower bucket, from which the water is drawn up into the soil by capillary action (“wicking”).

For a simple set of instructions, see this website. We managed to get our hands on about twenty used food-grade five-gallon plastic containers from a kind friend, some PVC piping from another kind friend, and that plus a drill and a utility knife were about all it took to whip up a number of SIPs to hold the tomato starts we got from some other kind friends. Even for notoriously non-handy people like us, it was dead easy. And now we have twelve robust tomato plants out on our front steps, under the eave on the west side of the house where the sun is at its most intense in the afternoons and evenings.

It’s definitely an experiment, although there seem to be enough people out there using SIPs — often in small spaces or on rooftops where it is impractical to have large planters full of heavy moist soil — that the technology is proven to work well. Still, we will go through this season to see just how well they work and whether there is room for improvements. It’s my hope that we can divert a large number of used food-grade containers from the waste stream and construct SIPs for more people next season. It’s pretty close to an ideal technology for growing some food in a small space, and would also be good for people who may not want to spend a lot of time watering and weeding. But what a way to get people hooked on ultra-local food: there is nothing on earth like a tomato fresh off the vine; so completely different from the tomatoes in the store it might as well have another name.

By Tom Read

All piggies on deck! Almost all, anyway. That's the pallet feeder in the foreground, with bits of plywood attached for better piggy footing. The mobile pig house is back left, while you can see the modular fencing panels beyond. Eventually we'll put a door and a watering system on the pig house. The grass is gradually being transformed into fertilzed bare soil, after which we'll move the pigs, then plant a crop.

Last year’s initial pig-raising effort went so well here at Slow Farm on Texada Island that we’ve decided to try it again this year — but with a few differences.

First, we’ve taken on four piggies this time, compared to last year’s Spot and Pinky duo. The larger herd will help pay for purchased food inputs without generating much additional labour. Building on what we learned in 2009, non-purchased food inputs will continue this year. The pigs will spend their lives on pasture with ample feed grass and weeds, plus we’ll gather orchard gleanings, carefully screened food scraps from our own kitchen and leftovers from the Texada Island Inn’s restaurant (“the slops”).

Second, we’ve built an experimental rotational grazing system that we designed over the winter.

The pig house is the same recycled shipping crate we used last year, except that it’s been further modified for mobility by adding wheels, steel reinforced undercarriage and removable trailer hitch. The whole thing tows easily into tight spaces using our quad. We think it’s big enough for four 200-lb pigs, but if not, we’ll add another mobile unit as needed. Thanks to the creative scrounging and construction efforts of our friend Jim, we were fortunate to obtain the wheels, steel and trailer hitch for free from Texada’s “heavy metal dump” transfer station rather than have to buy new parts.

The fencing we started with last year was bare-wire electric, which alone did not quite work, so we backed up the wires with a stout pallet fence. This was effective but not mobile. This year we’re trying out a homemade lightweight fence consisting of eight-foot-long wood panels (made from scrap wood, naturally) with built-in electric fencing. Each panel fits with its adjacent panel by means of a slide-together wood connector, while carriage bolts and washers connect the electric wires between panels. So far, it’s working — but the herd just got here 10 days ago and they’re still a wee bit small.

We’ve also redesigned our watering and feeding approach as part of the rotational grazing system. Feeding and watering last year took place within a steel tray and rubber tub that the pigs easily upended at will. This year’s feeder is a modified pallet — it’s got shallow troughs on either side hinged for better clean-out, plus firmly attached scraps of plywood on the “deck” for better porcine footing when the inevitable mud comes along. It’s too big to be upended by a less-than-full-grown pig, yet can easily be lifted by two humans when the time comes to change pastures. Watering is currently done with just a simple tray, but our plan is to use a nipple waterer attached to the mobile pig house, fed by two water containers on top of the house.

I’m sure this current crop of piggies, so far unnamed, will find whatever weaknesses we’ve overlooked and thereby help us refine the system. Why bother with all this mobility stuff? Partly because I’m still determined to avoid using a gasoline-powered rototiller on our farm. Plus, we like the idea – and taste — of pastured pork.

By David Parkinson

Blueberry flowers enduring the drizzle

All you want to do is something good,
So get ready to be ridiculed and misunderstood;
Cos don’t you know that you’re a fucking freak in this world,
In which everybody’s willing to choose swine over pearls.
(Aimee Mann, It’s Not Safe)

The path from spring to summer seems to be meandering through winter this year. This past weekend we were treated to weather pretty much straight out of November’s repertoire, although with uncannily long days instead of the usual five o’clock shadow and shutdown. The plants shiver and wait for better weather, but the slugs are in their element. Eventually, though, the record will stop skipping and we’ll go on with the expected progression into the long hot days of unbroken sunshine: tomato weather.

In the meantime, preparations for summer are in full swing. The 50-Mile Eat-Local Challenge will be celebrating its fifth year this year, and of course we will be presenting another Edible Garden Tour on Sunday August 8, 2010, as the kickoff event of the 50 days of the eat-local challenge. (Feel free to contact me if you would like more information on either of these projects, or if you’d like to get involved as a volunteer.)

Closer in, the board of the Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative is getting ready for our first Annual General Meeting, to be held on Wednesday June 23, 2010, at 7:00 PM at Vancouver Island University in Powell River. The preparations means creating a flurry of documents, getting ready to amend our rules, creating reports on our progress and finances, and generally being ready to stand accountable before our membership as their representatives. The best part of the meeting is that we will elect a new set of directors, who will have a democratic mandate to continue working towards our vision, using our values and principles as a compass.

But what is the cooperative actually doing? What is it for? I can tell that people are confused. I know for a fact that some people who hear that there is a cooperative in the region automatically think that we are planning to start a bulk-food or natural-food store. I’ve had it reported to me on good authority that someone out there believes that we are starting up another feed store, like the old Farmers’ Institute cooperative store which eventually became the Rainbow Valley Pet & Feed  Store after the rancorous breakup of the cooperative.

Obviously there might be some confusion about any new organization, especially one with a slightly cryptic name. People see the words “food” and “cooperative” in close proximity, and naturally they think of a food store. And the word “cooperative” carries other connotations for those who remember the demise of the old feed store. What the heck is a “provisioner”, anyway? It doesn’t help that, as I have learned lately, many people really do not understand what a cooperative is and how it differs from other corporate structures, such as the limited-liability corporation or the not-for-profit society. So one of the challenges for Skookum is to spread the word about the structure and philosophy behind the cooperative movement. We’ll get there, but it’s going to be a long process of teaching and learning together.

The main idea behind the formation of Skookum, which is simple but somewhat abstract, is that we need to kickstart many more experiments in strengthening the local food economy. There are many things going on in the region, but many of them are fundamentally working in isolation when they could be working together better. It is our belief that people want to be able to work better together, to share tangible and intangible goods, and to create things which are more than the sum of their parts. But it’s hard to make that happen; it takes a huge investment of time and energy to meet up with the others who have what you need and need what you have.

Without a structure to make this sort of collective effort possible, though, it simply won’t. I don’t know how many times I’ve been involved in conversations sparkling with great ideas and positive energy; but if those ideas don’t get some kind of nurturing support, they just get filed away, along with all the other wonderful things we could do if we had enough time, or money, or something we never seem to have.

So the essence of Skookum is that it’s designed to be a marketplace of ideas about how we can all work together to produce and preserve more food. We have members so that we can crowdsource solutions and so that we can easily gauge the amount and intensity of interest in any project that we might propose. The more members, the more projects we can sustain and distribute among the membership — also, the more easily we can pay for our projects and other expenses.

At its core, it’s a way to organize and connect together the people in the region most likely to have crazy ideas about getting more local food happening. Like a dating service for local-food freaks and compulsive backyard growers.

Let’s take a simple example. Imagine that I would like to grow chickpeas to support my out-of-control hummus habit, but that I don’t have enough space in my backyard garden for any significant amount. So I put the word out through the membership to see who else would be interested in working together to grow a large amount of chickpeas. Two or three people respond, letting me know that they would be very interested and would help with all the soil preparation, tilling, hoeing, weeding, watering, and harvesting. A few others respond to say that they would be happy to participate as subscribers to the harvest, and would be willing to pay extra to support the labour of the three or four people who will be the main workers.

The organizing team goes forth, finds some land it can beg, borrow, or steal for the purpose of growing a little field of chickpeas. Everyone tosses in some money to buy a good amount of chickpea seed, amendments, and whatever else it needs to get from seed to harvest. The project works on a share basis, meaning that whatever the harvest comes to, it will be divvied into equal shares. Some amount of the final harvest is set aside as a community share which we will donate to an organization that deals with people in need; or else we will sell it as a share and donate the money to that organization. (In case they’d rather have money than chickpeas.)

Built into the cashflow of the project will be some kind of payment or recognition for the labour, expertise, tools, etc. contributed by the members who organize the project and ensure its success. Every successful project, no matter what it does, has at its centre a person or a group of people who take primary responsibility: they make the phone calls, organize the meetings, and deal with the crises. Too often these people’s contributions are passed over. One of Skookum’s strong commitments is to provide fair wages for this critical work, because if we are going to have a functioning local food economy we need to find and nurture the special people who go out and get things done (as opposed to talking about getting things done). They deserve a reward for their valuable gifts of initiative and determination.

So the outcomes of this little chickpea project are:

• more people know something about how to grow chickpeas;
• more people have some locally-grown chickpeas;
• some people got paid or otherwise remunerated for spearheading this project;
• probably some new connections were formed among members of the cooperative and members of the wider community;
• some members of the community benefited by receiving chickpeas or some equivalent donation.

Nothing terrifically earth-shattering, but if we get enough of these little projects up and running, achieving some kind of self-perpetuation, returning value to their participants and to the community, then we will be sending a message about the power of cooperative effort. And the best part is that all of this activity will be 100% democratic and accountable. There will be no need to rely on the goodness of those who own the business. The business will be owned and managed by anyone in the community who wants to pitch in. And that is the real magic ingredient here: I do not believe that we will organize our way out of the impasse we’re in by retooling private ownership to give it a greenish veneer. There needs to be a much greater degree of public involvement in the food system, or else we’re going to continue enriching the few who make the decisions which generally do not reflect the interests or the will of the people.

It will take some time before this all becomes clear. In a way, we’re fighting our way out of the murk of bad and increasingly outdated ideology. All we can see are problems, and all solutions seem equally plausible or implausible. So we need to keep trying anything but what the rules of game dictate: cooperation instead of competition; collective ownership and management instead of private capitalization and profit-taking; openness and transparency instead of boardroom decision-making and political railroading; togetherness instead of isolation. If we persist, sooner or later something will work. Trust me.

By Tom Read

BC's Local Government Act, the Regional District Tool Kit (available at the Texada Library) and "A Guide to Regional District Board Delegation to Committees and Commissions" are some of the information sources about Local Community Commissions in BC.

Last night at the Texada Island Chamber of Commerce dinner meeting we heard a presentation on the possibility of a Local Community Commission (LCC) for Texada. The speakers were Dave Murphy, now in his fourth term representing our island on the Powell River Regional District (PRRD) Board of Directors, and Frances Ladret, the District Administrator.  More in a moment on what they had to say, how some people reacted to it, and what might happen next. Warning: this is a longer-than-usual post; please bear with me.

First, it’s important to note that the Chamber is a private, non-profit organization that serves mainly as an informal forum for Texadans to discuss “what’s happening” on the island. Indeed, at last night’s meeting we also heard local farmer Dave Opko give a very informative talk about recent changes to Provincial livestock farm-gate sales regulations. Those changes favour places like our island, but that’s another story.

The Chamber sometimes sponsors public meetings open to all, such as a candidates forum at election time. But its regular meetings are held at the Texada Legion and are limited to members and guests only, by advance reservation. Seating space is limited to about 50 people for such dinner meetings. In the interest of full disclosure, I must add that I’ve been a director of the Chamber since 2002, and the just-elected president of the Chamber happens to be Linda Bruhn, my wife. Last night’s meeting was her first in that role.

Back to the LCC presentation. The idea of a Local Community Commission for Texada piqued quite a lot of interest, especially from those already involved in local government activities of one sort or another. We had a full house, including several trustees from Texada’s two Improvement Districts, along with past and present members of various committees, commissions and community organizations. Many people in the room wear multiple hats, serving on various community groups and as businesspeople.

Dave Murphy introduced the topic by saying that he wasn’t necessarily for or against an LCC, but he wanted us to be aware of the possibility of such an entity, and he wanted to get an informal idea from our group whether we would be interested in learning more about it through a public consultation process. Then Frances took to the podium and gave a succinct explanation of the LCC concept, how others have used it, and why Texada might want to consider adopting it. I don’t have the space to go through the whole presentation here, but I do want to cover a few highlights, below.

So what is an LCC, and why would Texada be a possible candidate for one? Under section 838 of the BC Local Government Act, Regional District Boards can delegate some of their authority for operating services to an LCC whose members are elected from within a remote electoral area, such as Texada Island. Although it can administer day-to-day operation of local services and can advise the Board on budgets and policies for those services, an LCC can’t pass bylaws or enter into contracts. But, as Frances mentioned, the Board would normally approve the LCC’s budget and policy recommendations, provided there was no additional cost or liability incurred by residents of other electoral areas or by the Board itself.

Local Community Commissions were designed for geographically well-defined remote areas with several local services. Texada happens to support several island-only services administered by Regional District staff who live in Powell River. There’s an economic cost to having our local government administered by people who don’t live on the island. Because of travel time, an administrator may spend five or six hours on a Texada task that would have taken less than half that time on the mainland. And Texadans who want to provide input on policy or meet with administrators have to travel to Powell River to have a meaningful voice in local government.

Frances mentioned that Texada has more services than any other electoral area in the PRRD, but there’s no coordinating body on the island to see that our services are delivered efficiently. Instead, each one acts independently of the others. Take building management, for example: our Recreation Commission maintains certain buildings, our Airport Committee looks after other buildings at the airport, and the Health Services Society advises the PRRD on the building that houses our Health Centre. There’s no island-wide venue for setting priorities or taking advantage of joint operating efficiencies.

About 80% of Texada’s residents also receive services from our island’s two Improvement Districts, one in Van Anda and the other in Gillies Bay. These existing layers of bureaucracy — PRRD and Improvement Districts — don’t coordinate much, either. According to Frances, there might be greater operating efficiency and ability to obtain grant funds by changing the Improvement Districts into Service Areas administered on Texada through an elected LCC. That might eliminate a layer of bureaucracy while still keeping local control of those services in each of the two villages.

There’s a lot more to the story, but the above highlights are enough to indicate that an LCC would represent a significant change for Texada. Not surprisingly, this prospect alarmed a number of audience members.  Objections included the following:

– Since it couldn’t pass bylaws or enter into contracts, an LCC would be powerless, so why do it?

– An LCC would be just another layer of bureaucracy with additional costs, which we don’t need.

– The only reason to even look at this would be to get funding for fixing our water systems, and there’s no guarantee of that.

– Everything is fine with our Regional District services today, so why bother?

There are also compelling arguments supporting the LCC option. Now that the topic has surfaced, I hope Texadans will do some research and learning on their own, not just relying on information brought to them by PRRD. Frances provided a background handout, and a little more delving on the Internet readily yields much more detail about possibilities and options for local influence on a regional district.

The next step, I believe, is for Director Murphy to call a public meeting to present the LCC concept to a wider audience. That meeting could address the objections that surfaced at the Chamber last night, and could also help us decide, as a community, whether to further pursue the LCC concept. We owe ourselves a more thorough and well-informed discussion about this possibility — or even other options.

By David Parkinson

Oats in the furrow, ready to be covered

One of the main purposes for the Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative is to get us thinking more about sharing solutions, as opposed to the current model, which often has us all off on our own trying to solve the same problems by learning the same skills and using the same resources. If we expect that we’re all going to need to become much handier at producing, preserving, and sharing food, then it makes sense for us to work better together: to share tools, ideas, space, time, and labour.

Our fast-paced and hyper-individualized culture has steered us away from collaborative projects; it’s become possible for almost everyone to do for themselves one way or another, thanks to abundant cheap goods. And we seem to have lost some of the appetite for group projects that characterized earlier generations, with their many service clubs, church groups, and all the other pieces of a thriving community. To be fair, not everyone has punched their cards and checked out of the common effort, but we’re all going to have to get a lot smarter about how we work together to get the things we need.

Skookum was founded on the assumption that we all will need to become better equipped to understand how our food gets to our tables — and that the work of getting the food to the table is going to become more widespread and more local. Although sometimes it seems that our efforts in this direction are puny and never enough, the only thing worse than not doing enough is doing nothing at all. (Or maybe doing something poorly.)

While we run around trying to get the gleaning project ready for prime time, while we prepare for our first general meeting of our members, we are trying to get a few little projects up off the ground. Something that particularly interested a couple of us was the idea of producing some of the grains we eat as part of our diet. A number of people hereabouts have been experimenting with Red Fife wheat and kamut, as well as other more exotic grains such as quinoa and amaranth. (And as my fellow Slow-Coaster Tom reports, buckwheat is another grain that people are growing here, if only as a cover crop.)

One grain I eat a lot of is oats, since I have a big bowl of oatmeal for breakfast most days. And, conveniently, Dan Jason at Salt Spring Seeds sells a variety of hull-less oats suitable for our coastal growing conditions. Sharon Deane, another director of the cooperative and an avid food gardener, was interested in working together to grow a pilot patch of oats, if only to see how well they grow, how much they yield, and what the process is for getting from field to cereal bowl.

And so, scrambling right up to the last minute, we managed to find a little patch of shared soil up in Wildwood where we can plant and tend our experimental crop for 2010, in the hopes that we will learn enough to expand the project for next year. This past Saturday we took our five packets of Salt Spring Oats, suitable for sowing approximately five hundred square feet of ground, and spent some time turning the soil, scraping furrow, planting and covering the oats. We’ll continue to visit our little grain patch — and I’ll continue to blog about the progress up there — until the end of season, at which time we hope to have enough oats to share around, roll into flakes, and make into a delicious bowl of local breakfast. (With local fruit, milk, and honey…)

Eventually it would be wonderful to see more people getting together for the purpose of sharing land and labour to grow ever-larger patches of grains, beans, and other storage crops. There is a project running our of Vancouver, Urban Grains, which shortens the distance between grain consumers and farmers by getting city folks to sign up for a share of the grain produced from a farm in Agassiz. This is a classic Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme, and these are starting to catch on all over the place, as regular people decide that they want to become more involved in the production of the food they eat. Passive consumption of foods coming from an opaque and mysterious system of production is looking more and more like a strange aberration, only possible during a time of extremely cheap fossil fuels and a style of imaginary economics that assigns no negative value to environmental destruction and social inequities so long as they are kept well out of sight.

For the three-and-a-half years that I have been living in Powell River, I have seen more people getting more involved with growing their own food and resuscitating the traditional skills of canning, preserving, and storing food. There is a real appetite here for self-reliance at the level of the individual and of the community. It’s one of the very positive and heartening aspects of living here. We need to start taking that energy and focusing it on shared projects which will spread skills, knowledge, and (especially) food amongst as many members of the community as possible. I’d love to see our cooperative work its way up to the point where our members can sign up at the beginning of the growing season for shared grains, beans, oil, vinegar, fruit, winter storage vegetables, and all the other aspects of a food-secure household.

So, even though this humble little patch of oats may not produce any great amount of food, what it will do is get us started on one project among many to bring people together to share land and crops. We will start to learn about the economics and the practical details of small-scale grain production. And we hope that people will be attracted to the idea of experimenting with self-reliance in staple crops.

Stay tuned for updates as the season progresses!

By Tom Read

Here’s The Long Field as it appeared yesterday around 7:30 pm. A few new cedar fence posts are already in position, but we still have a long way to go before this field is restored to productive agriculture.

The acreage surrounding where we live, which Texadans have called “Slow Farm” for decades, has seen farmers come and go for about a century. We are slowly, pun intended, joining that farming history by resurrecting the old fields here one by one. Our latest endeavor parallels the High Road; we call it “The Long Field.”

By mainland standards this field would be considered so small and irregular as to hardly qualify for serious agriculture. Allowing for proper clearances from the road and a nearby creek, it’s only about 500 feet long by 30 to 60 feet wide. But it’s all good bottom land — quite rare on Texada Island — and it has a history of growing food. Decayed but still standing cedar fence posts and half-buried strands of wire fencing remind us of our farming predecessors.

During the past several decades, a wall of roadside trees grew up next to the field, casting deep shadows upon it. Reluctantly, we had to remove those trees to bring back the sun. This work was quickly accomplished a few weeks ago by our friends Stump, Warren and Brian at RAW Select Logging. Now comes the hard part: hand labour to pick out odd bits of left-over branches and the occasional rock, plus fencing the whole field to keep out the deer.

We do not plan to rototill this field. In keeping with our desire to minimize fossil fuel use, we will instead hand-sow a cover crop of buckwheat, to be followed next summer by rotational grazing of pigs and chickens. Our choice of buckwheat was inspired by several attributes: Our neighbours to the south on High Road, Brian and Leslie, are using this crop to improve the tilth on their bottom land this year, so we expect it to thrive on our place, too. We also realized that buckwheat makes great honey and can be planted even in mid-summer for a fall flowering, so it will help feed our bees as they’re getting stocked up for winter. And fresh buckwheat pancakes come well recommended, too.

So much for Part 1 of our Long Field story. Sometime in the future I’ll report back on how we’re doing with this project, as our Slow Farm adventure continues.

By David Parkinson

More gorgeous wispy tendrils of fennel

I’m away in Vancouver this week for a Community Developers’ Conference sponsored by the Social Planning and Research Council of BC, so in lieu of a post I will pass along this important announcement from the organizing team of the Chamber of Commoners, who are putting on another event. I am really looking forward this follow-up evening, since it will be a great opportunity to catch up with all of the amazing and progressive action going on in the region.

Here is the announcement:

Greetings Commoners,

After a long grey winter, it’s time for all of us in non-profit, community, and people-based activities to refuel by coming together at the upcoming ‘Chamber of Commoners’. It’s going to take place on June 9, so save the date. Once again, the evening will be filled with snacks and drinks, information tables, ‘organizational’ speed-dating, door prizes, and even more open time to mingle with new and old friends. In addition, we’ll have a bit of fun trying our hands at some collective song writing. That’s right! We’re going to work together to add a few verses to John Prine’s ‘In a Town This Size’ and give it some local Powell River flavour. Some of Powell River’s very own music talent will be on hand to help perform the final product.

Mark your calendars, and spread the word! Here are all the details you’ll need:

Chamber of Commoners
Club Bon Accueil (French Club)
5110 Manson Avenue
7-9 pm, Wednesday, June 9, 2010

This is a ‘by donation’ event (suggested donation: $5.00). No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

RSVP to chamberofcommoners@gmail.com to confirm your attendance.

Please let us know ASAP if you’d like to reserve space for an information table (space is limited).

We are looking for donations of door prizes. Contact us if you have something to offer.

See you there!

By Tom Read

Rocky knew to smile for the camera instinctively it seemed. One of Rocky’s favourite spots was on this end of the deck where he could look out over much of the property to make sure no pesky deer or ravens invaded his space. This territorial guarding just came naturally!

As I mentioned in my previous post, we lost our beloved dog, Rocky, to cancer back in February. We still miss Rocky, but the mourning is less, and it’s time for another dog to join our rural Texada Island household. When searching for a new canine partner, it helps to create a list of desirable traits. We may not find the perfect dog, but if we could, here’s a short list of what she or he would be like:

–  Beta dogs are much friendlier than alpha dogs (who just want to boss everybody around), so we’d really like a dog who thinks that all the world is his or her friend, including cats. Among other reasons, this is important to Penny, our cat, who grew up with Rocky and is accustomed to having a canine friend and protector.

–  Either a young male or female, but definitely a mutt. We like the steadiness, durability and intelligence that haphazard reproduction can bring. My experience with pure-bred dogs when I was young was mostly positive, but they generally seem a little too precious to me now.

–  We like a big dog — Rocky weighed about 140 lbs — because we’re just more comfortable with large dogs, and we think our property offers lots of room for a big dog to roam. Also, there may be some truth to the stereotype that big dogs tend to be gentler and quieter than small dogs.

–  We’d like a dog whose instincts tend toward herding and protecting rather than roaming, digging or fighting.

–  An outdoor dog is a must. This place is heaven for dogs, with a climate that’s seldom too warm or too cold for a dog with a decent coat. Rocky preferred living outdoors on all but the very warmest of days, when he snoozed in a cool spot indoors during the afternoon heat. As for cold weather, that was his joy. His insulated doghouse that’s on the covered deck right outside our front door kept him safe from cold winds and moisture yet gave him freedom to go roaming in his designated 2-acre guard area when he wanted to. And he frequently wanted to, as we would sometimes know from his “get off my property, you darn deer!” bark in the wee hours of the morning.

So where might such a dog be found? At the “pound?” Our region lacks an animal shelter, with volunteers taking the role of “fostering” unwanted dogs. That’s how we found Rocky 10 years ago. Lately there haven’t been many dogs, let alone large ones, available hereabouts. So we’ve been searching online, and we’ll probably find our future dog soul-mate in the Lower Mainland or Victoria. The search is on.

By David Parkinson

Tattered pear blossoms in glorious full sunshine; soon these will be fruit?

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
(Howard Zinn, 1922-2010)

In the past week, I have emailed with two people who are considering moving up this way and met face-to-face with one. This has made me reflect more than usual on the weird meandering path that led us here in 2006. I have often thought that an interesting radio program or podcast would be “Who Let You In Here?”: a series of interviews with recent and not-so-recent arrivals to the Powell River region, digging into the reasons why people end up here, in this slightly out-of-the-way corner of the world. Everyone’s story seems a little cockeyed, as though there is some greater force drawing us all here.

To make a long and not-so-exciting story short: among the features of Powell River that looked interesting back in 2006, when we were doing some research on the internet about possible places to move to, the two that stick in my mind were the 50-mile eat-local challenge and the Powell River Regional District’s declaration to be a GE-free crop zone. Events and campaigns like these two act as beacons, sending a message out into the world: there are people here working against the grain, trying to preserve the special character of this region, trying to build something forward-thinking and new. That’s how it worked out for us. An intriguing signal sent out across the worldwide web; a promise of progressive action, enough to merit a second look.

Now, coming up to four years later, the internet footprint of Powell River is much larger, and it’s good to see the number of people blogging and sharing information about all the action happening in the region. If you look on the right sidebar of this blog, you will see my attempt to list some of the blogs which are in some way about the cultural life of this place. Some are more active than others, but they are all attempts to convey some small slice of the life of this place that might otherwise get lost in the noise. They are all beacons, flashing their message out into the world, seen by who knows how many people? who knows where? to what end?

I met today with one of the two people who were in town this past weekend looking for properties. This person is moving with his wife and two children from southern Ontario, and has decided that Powell River is the right place for his family to settle and begin making serious preparations for the effects of peak oil and economic meltdown. Our conversation wandered off into some very difficult territory at times — by which I mean: territory which is barely even on the map for most people. The possibility of rapid social collapse brought about by any number of threats which even now are visible and getting more worrisome. Things that no one wants to have to imagine, let alone try to plan for. Things that we pray we’ll be proven wrong about.

How many other people are quietly making preparations for a gradual, or a not-so-gradual, decline in our living standards? And looking at Powell River as a good place to move to, considering its relatively gentle climate, year-round growing conditions, somewhat affordable real estate, and its small but burgeoning subculture of activists, foodies, and do-it-yourselfers? And what is the picture they see of our community as they sit in Vancouver, or Edmonton, or Peterborough, scanning the internet for signs of intelligent life?

Climate, food security, affordability, and activist culture are the main reasons that drew us here three-and-a-half years ago. We picked up on the signals and homed in on their source. Now we are here contributing (we like to think) to the constellation of projects and activities which continue to pump the message out there: here is a place with many positive possibilities… we are making things happen… come and join us.

Against a backdrop of extreme uncertainty about the future, many people are starting to tune into new messages traveling on new frequencies. (Or maybe old frequencies now being brought back into commission after years — decades — of disuse.) We are developing new metaphors with which we can shape and make sense of the events taking place around us. There is an atmosphere of portent which like most things has a light and a dark side; although the dark side is carrying the day lately, every positive step forward makes the light more real.

Luckily, the beacons radiating outward from here are mostly very positive ones. I can see why Powell River is building a reputation for itself as a place where citizens are reclaiming the commons, naming the problems besetting the world and developing sensible solutions, and looking beyond the challenges we face to find the opportunities. This all makes a wonderful positive feedback loop: more people catching the signals → more people checking out this region as a place to get involved in a forward-thinking community → more new community initiatives and energy → more signals radiating outwards. And so on, round and round, gathering momentum all the time.

It’s exciting to think about the people we don’t even know about yet, picking up on the signals and deciding to take a closer look at this region as a place to find a community. We need all of the positive, imaginative, hard-working energy we can find. Maybe an incentive program to bring in the coolest, most skilled and knowledgeable doers we can find.  These are your tools: word of mouth, radio, blogs, newspapers, magazines, email. Bring us our apple-graders, beekeepers, and cheesemakers; our reducers, reusers, and recyclers; our brewmasters and -mistresses; our cobbers and thatchers; our spinners, dyers, and weavers; our electrical improv artists and plumbing whiz-kids; our tubthumpers, tailors, and troublemakers; our town criers, navigators, and provisioners; our sowers, tillers, and reapers. Now go forth and radiate!

By Tom Read

Ten years ago a neighbour gave us a six-inch high walnut seedling as a house-warming present. It grew into a 20-ft tall tree (and is still growing), but never did it bear a single walnut. Then this spring, look what appeared! Catkins! It appears we may at last see our first harvest; some things just require patience.

This week marks a first decade anniversary for us: On May 4, 2000, Linda and I arrived home on Texada Island. Three years earlier we had bought our property on the island, and from 1996 to 1999 we’d visited each summer for a few weeks while planning our move. But I remember well that day ten years ago in early May when we finally became island residents. We were determined to put down roots — emotionally, physically, and socially — thus making Texada our only home from that moment onwards. Within a year Texada would become our economic home as well.

A few observations about our lives since that day:

1)  A house that’s valued as one’s permanent home is never finished. We keep making changes to suit our evolving way of life, right to this day. The result is an ever-better fit between our lives and our shelter, which is immensely satisfying.

2)  The company of animals makes our place more of a home. Weeks after we arrived, so did Rocky the dog and Penny the cat. After 10 wonderful years together, we lost Rocky to cancer in February of this year. We feel his loss not only emotionally, but physically, too. Deer, raccoons, a feral cat and especially mice have become more intrusive in the immediate vicinity of our house and garden since his passing. Our chickens no longer enjoy his protection, so they don’t get to wander freely quite as much. But soon we hope to find another canine companion, because a country homestead needs a dog.

3)  Generating our own electricity forces us to pay more attention to our dependence on nature. Just one example: our household water must be pumped uphill from a shallow well, which assumes that there’s adequate rainfall to raise the water table and fill our well. Our electrical system, which operates the well pump (among many other devices) depends primarily on falling water and sun exposure for power generation — which again brings us back to rain. So we watch the weather carefully. Also, too much wind can cause trees to fall on our micro-hydro penstock, thus rearranging our priorities while we repair the damage.

4)  Getting involved in the community as a volunteer is a great way to build a satisfying social life in a small, rural place. Neighbours more easily get to know each other by working together on projects that benefit the community as a whole. Both Linda and I have participated in several community organizations since 2001, which is when our house finally reached the move-in point and our focus could shift outward.

5)  Being involved in our community has also helped us find suitable economic niches locally. Rural livelihoods must be carefully grown and nurtured, because there’s obviously a lot fewer job opportunities in a place like Texada than in a city. Given the ups and downs of global economic life in the last decade, we’ve reinvented ourselves economically multiple times since we moved to Texada. Economic flexibility, and a certain amount of related anxiety that keeps us awake to new possibilities, is a way of life for us.

6)  We’ve been asked countless times what it was like to move here from Los Angeles, and whether we miss anything from city life. Looking back on these last 10 years I can honestly say that for me and Linda it was first a relief and then a joy to become full-time Texadans. The time has passed quickly because we’ve always got so much happening here that it simply does not occur to us that we are missing anything, especially from some over-grown megalopolis like LA.

7)  If we have learned anything about island life in the last 10 years, it is the need for patience. Not only does off-island travel need to be planned around someone else’s schedule (BC Ferries, for instance), but it takes patience to live with others in a small community. Not everyone is like-minded; disagreements and perceived slights — often unintended — happen. Eventually we learn that life in a small community is better if we’re patient with each other and learn the arts of forgiveness, compromise and consensus. This is an ongoing challenge, but quite worthwhile and satisfying when we’re successful.

All in all, by and by, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

By David Parkinson

A springtime harvest of delicious and beautiful purple broccoli

There seems to be three ways for a nation to acquire wealth:  the first is by war…this is robbery; the second by commerce, which is generally cheating; the third by agriculture, the only honest way.
(Benjamin Franklin)

Last Tuesday evening the newly-formed Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative held its first public information meeting at Vancouver Island University in Powell River. The purpose of the evening was to share information about how we got to where we are, what we intend to do, and how our members can fit into all that.

One thing I realized as I assembled notes for my presentation was how much progress six novices managed to make in five months. Our first meeting to talk about forming a cooperative was back on November 27, 2009; so the public meeting last week was our five-month anniversary. In that short time, armed with little more than determination and persistence, this initiating team accomplished the following:

• learned how to incorporate as a cooperative;
• specifically, learned how to incorporate as a not-for-profit — or community service — cooperative;
• learned how to amend the standard rules in order to create the governance structure we wanted to see;
• wrote a vision statement (“A thriving community with a strong and reliable local food network”);
• started drafting a statement of values and principles for directing our operations;
• bought a domain, created a basic website, and set up email accounts;
• created a logo;
• started recruiting members;
• began work on one major project, the Fruit Tree Project, and have started to line up other potential projects for this year or next.

I’m sure there is more, but these are some of the highlights.

But why, you ask? Why create yet another organization? What sets this one apart?

I’m still trying to figure out my best answer to questions like these. But the one thing about cooperatives that most interests me and the other members of the initiating team, who are now the board of first directors, is that they are highly member-driven organizations. A cooperative without members is not a cooperative, and cooperatives come into existence in order to supply its members with goods or services which they might otherwise struggle to supply for themselves.

In this case, the main gaps we aim to fill are shared skills, knowledge, and resources. Increasingly, people seem to be getting the message about the importance of food production to the local economy and to a broader picture of sustainability and resilience. Although it’s hard to gauge, there is uncertainty out there about the future and about our ability to keep the food supply running as it has been doing for the past few decades. Interest in local food continues to increase.

But once people start to question the global industrialized food system, how are they supposed to change the way they shop, prepare food, and eat? Some of us have what it takes to start tearing up the lawn to make room for purple broccoli and so on; but many people will feel that they don’t know enough about growing food, or they haven’t spent any time doing it and so it would fail. Or they haven’t got the time, or the tools, or a friendly neighbour they can work with or bounce ideas off. And so the good intentions, as they so often do, fall away and never manifest themselves as positive action.

What people need is a proper community of fellow food-producers (and -processors, and -preservers, and -preparers, and…) with whom they can share plans, garden space, seeds, tools, time, labour, laughter, and everything else that helps us all participate in a “strong and reliable local food network”.

This is where the Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative comes in. We chose the word “Provisioners” deliberately: a provisioner is traditionally someone who supplies provisions, meaning food and drink, usually to an army or other large group of people. And of course provision also means forethought or foresight: to make provision for something means to take it into account in one’s plans. Provisions are preparations in advance of some foreseeable event or situation. We wanted to play on this cluster of related meanings — to suggest that each one of us has what it takes to make provisions — to indicate that we can all become provisioners and escape the narrow confines of being either a passive consumer or an all-powerful producer. Just regular folks who know where their food comes from, how it got there, and where it’s going. United into a community of provisioners supporting and strengthening each other.

In this sense, many people up until about World War II were provisioners: they had some idea what it takes to produce, store, preserve, and prepare food for themselves and their families. Most of this work was considered women’s work, but it was respected as vital to the prosperity of the family and the community. We need to get these skills back into regular circulation, but we need to help people ease back into them. Many people are utterly daunted by the idea of tearing up lawn to create garden; or canning large amounts of food and storing it against lean times; or making sauerkraut; or foraging for wild foods; or building and using a root cellar; and on and on it goes.

So the only way out of this that we can see is to create a community of people working together to save money, time, and effort as they increase the amount of food being produced, preserved, stored, and prepared in the region. We intend to work with our members to design and implement projects which will attract people who want to secure their household food supply, but need the impetus of working with others, acquiring skills through doing, gaining knowledge through talking and listening, sharing tools and equipment that they cannot afford to buy for themselves. The Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative was set up to be the framework within which we can make that happen.

Some people out there are the fearless leaders and trailblazers who don’t let any obstacles slow them down. But more are cautious and need support and encouragement. If we’re going to create a grassroots revival of traditional food skills, we’ll need to create new institutions to bring back those skills. This is not something which can happen through the existing consumer model. We cannot shop our way out of our passivity. It’s time to start creating shared projects and community institutions that bring people together. Ones which are open, honest, and fair, and increase people’s sense of a hopeful convivial future.

If this appeals to you, please consider becoming a member and helping us figure out how we can get more people involved in the local food network. Our first general meeting will be on Wednesday June 23, 2010, at 7:00 PM at Vancouver Island University in Powell River. In order to participate in this general meeting, you will need to become a member before May 24, 2010. For more information, drop us a line. We need you!

By Tom Read

This was the scene yesterday as my beekeeper friend Ted (right), assisted by bee inspector Carolyn Stoddart, began spring check-up and housecleaning on one of Ted's hives.

In the spring we clean our houses, after a long winter, and so it is with bees. Beekeepers on Texada find that April can bring the right weather conditions for opening a hive to check on its health and clean things up a bit.

By this time there are plenty of flowers and pollen-bearing plants around to feed the bees, but spring weather is notoriously capricious. If a stretch of cold, windy, rainy days ensues, our bee friends may not be able to fly, and could even starve to death if they’ve used up their over-winter store of food. So we help out by feeding some sugar during such wet and cold spells.

I am a novice beekeeper, but I find this activity a fascinating mix of art and science, as is all animal husbandry. When a beekeeper opens a hive that’s been undisturbed since the previous fall (except for occasional feeding as mentioned above), one wants to get a feel for its state of health: how many bees, how much pollen and honey remains stored, is the queen healthy and laying lots of eggs to make new “daughter-worker” bees, are there signs of a potential swarm, are there other creatures living in the hive that shouldn’t be there, such as slugs, sow bugs, snails, mice, and wax moths. There’s also a visual check for the dreaded varroa mite, which so far has not come to Texada Island.

Spring cleaning consists mainly of scraping excess wax off of frames and boxes, and cleaning off the bottom board. Bees are quite clean by nature, and will remove debris and dead bees from their hive by themselves. But after a long winter of staying mostly inside the hive, there’s a build-up of stuff that needs removal, so we give them a little help.

One result of this check-up and housecleaning is that we get a better idea of how to manage the bees as we enter the new season. For instance, a beekeeper will usually ponder, at this point, whether the hive is strong enough to support a division (making a new hive, also known as a colony) or should the bees be given more time to build up their numbers and food stores?

Our goal at Slow Farm is to facilitate an optimum number of healthy bee colonies for our area, and eventually to take some honey when the bees can afford to part with it. This is an agrarian rather than industrial standard, and sets a sustainable example we intend to follow throughout our agricultural endeavours.

By David Parkinson

(Cross-posted to the blog of the Powell River Food Security Project.)

Workshop attendee and cheesemaker-in-training Julia Downs cuts curds into a workable size

After the full-on whirlwind of Earth Day, about 30 folks in Powell River had a stimulating opportunity to learn about cheesemaking from itinerant cheesemaker David Asher Rotsztain, who visited us from Mayne Island, where he farms and works to preserve the traditional craft of small-scale cheesemaking.

During the course of a three-and-a-half-hour workshop, we went through some of the basics of cheesemaking. David talked about the choice of milk, the politics of rennet, the odd history of orange Cheddar, the structure and types of milk proteins which are being manipulated to provide us with such a variety of textures and flavours, and plenty more.

What was most heartening to me was to see so many people come out on a Sunday interested in learning how they can engage with one of the most venerable means of food preservation. Some (like myself) were complete novices, never having deliberately made cheese; others were fairly old hands at certain types of cheesemaking willing to learn more about the complexities and details.

We started off adding some kefir to 4 litres of local whole milk warmed to somewhere close to body temperature, the perfect zone of warmth for bacteria to proliferate in. The bacteria, yeasts, and other critters in the kefir culture got to work souring the milk by converting the milk sugar lactose to lactic acid. Then David added a small amount of rennet, a digestive enzyme extracted from the fourth stomach of a suckling calf, in order to start the coagulation. Throughout the workshop, as we discussed other techniques and worked on other processes, we periodically checked the progress of the curdling as the curds separated from the whey.

Finally, as shown in the image above, we were able, gently, to cut the curds and, again gently, stir them to expel whey and firm them up. This is the step before pulling them from the whey and placing them in a mold where they would expel more whey, compress, and settle into the final shape and size.

David Asher Rotsztain setting out the samples of cheeses... first we learn, then we eat.

David told us all about the amazing and complex world of molds and their cooperative interaction with the process of ripening. I did not know that in order to create a camembert or blue cheese, all that is needed is to inoculate the souring milk with some spores from the desired mold (Penicillium candida or P. roqueforti respectively). The mold in question will create a mycelial network throughout the ripening cheese, much in the same way as mushrooms create vast networks throughout the soil of a forest. Spore-producing bodies analogous to mushrooms will pop up on the surface of the cheese, as in surface-ripened cheeses like camembert and brie — that’s what that furry rind is on those cheeses. In the case of blue cheeses, the spore-producing bodies are blue in colour and appear wherever the mold comes into contact with air. The veins in blue cheese are produced by thrusting skewers through the cheese to create air holes where the blue mold will appear.

We made paneer, a traditional Indian cheese produced by heating milk close to boiling and then adding something acidic as a curdling agent. We used a nice organic apple cider vinegar, which instantly created about three pounds of soft curds which David pulled from the whey with a slotted spoon, setting them aside to drain and solidify somewhat. Later he salted them lightly, split the batch in two, and added some ground chipotle peppers to half. (Delicious!)

After a dizzying ride through the amazing world of cheese, yogurt, and kefir, we concluded by sampling the paneer we made, along with a camembert from Salt Spring Island, another washed-rind soft cheese with a very pungent aroma, and a wonderfully yellow blue cheese from Moonstruck Organic Cheese also on Salt Spring Island. Some wine would have been nice…

Since I was coordinating these workshops on behalf of the Powell River Food Security Project, I sat through two in a row. Even then, I was fascinated both times to learn about the simple processes which convert milk into cheeses with such rich and complex flavours and textures. It’s an extraordinary art and one that would be nice to see revived here more visibly. There seems to be a cheese underground out there, and let’s hope that with some more practice and exposure we can work towards a flourishing local cheese industry.

By Tom Read

We came home to a plum-blossom surprise -- this young tree given to us by a neighbor a few years ago has never blossomed before now. Bees and other pollinators abound hereabouts, so we’re hoping for plums this summer.

Our 3,500-mile road trip from Texada Island to southern California and back is over at last. Our little Toyota Matrix burned about 110 gallons of gasoline during the 19-day sojourn, but this extravagance (for us) allowed us a rare and thoroughly enjoyable visit with family and friends ranging from Victoria, BC, all the way south to San Diego. Our previous road visit to California took place in 2007, involved travelling by pick-up truck and burned a lot more gas. Depending on the global price of oil a few years hence, maybe next time we’ll go by bus and train.

It was a refreshing, though tiring, trip. Being away from our island gave us a chance to see our lives here from a different perspective. For example, I’ve long been interested in the agricultural potential of Texada, which stands in sharp contrast to the huge agribusiness centres along Interstate 5 in California’s San Joaquin Valley and Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Any casual traveler along that route sees the vast monocultures of fruits, nuts, vegetables and grasses. My eye also caught the occasional grouping of bee hives, some looking normal but in several cases carelessly piled in a heap — dead.

What happened to the bees? Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that I saw, in nearly every field, at least one grouping of translucent liquid-filled plastic tanks boasting chemical company logos. Bees and toxic chemicals didn’t evolve together, so is it any wonder the bees are disappearing?

And then there was the soil. At 65 miles-per-hour you can’t do a soil test on the passing scenery, but you can see the emerging salt flats — white crystals on the soil surface amid flourishing salt-bush — caused by excessive irrigation and lack of soil tilth in a field that still shows eroding furrows from former food growing. There’s just mile after mile of it.

Along with the ruined soil I also saw signs, literally, of renewed political conflict over water in a place prone to increasing drought. One empty field after another for hundreds of miles contained a political campaign-style sign reading “Congress-Created Dust Bowl.” California agribusiness exists on federal subsidies, particularly for water, but since the state’s rivers and reservoirs have run much lower in recent years, the water-war propaganda has become more intense.

Bear in mind that these valleys provide much of the fruit and vegetables we find on grocery store shelves on Texada Island and in BC. Our dependence on this dying system becomes much more real when one sees it in person.

Which brings me back home to our island, where water is usually not an issue and the soil ranges from Agricultural Land Reserve Class 5 rocky pasture to occasional pockets of Class 1 bottom-land richness. Small-scale mixed farms once flourished here. The time is coming when factory food will no longer be cheap, and small local farms will once again become economically viable. Let the transition begin.