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I'm 51 years old and I can't grow a carrot. That is a shameful thing. Growing food is the most vital skill anyone can have, and here I am, well past mid life, and I don't have it. In many cultures, survival in the face of such appalling ignorance would be a miracle.
But not this one. Thanks to the miracle of western civilization, I have been afforded the constant luxury of having food delivered to me on a platter. Whether in a grocery store or a restaurant, it's always been there. And as long I've had the wherewithal to pay for it, I have seldom given it a thought.
Until now. We live in a time when the western miracle is starting to fray. Suddenly the limitless notions I was imbued with as a child growing up in an age of longer, lower and wider Chevrolets seem ridiculous. Even dangerous. Sustainability is our new watchword. And good thing, I say. It's about time.
Nicholas Read admires his crop.
Bill Keay/Vancouver Sun
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Font:****Thus it's also about time, I've decided, that I put my back and shoulders - such as they are - where my environmentalist's mouth is and learn how to grow that carrot. And maybe some lettuce, spinach, basil, beans and tomatoes too.
So last week I began a journey through the vagaries of the growing season. My guide and tutor was Ward Teulon, owner/operator of City Farm Boy, a network of small organic farms dug on private city lots. Except instead of growing grass, Tuelon has put those lots to work growing fruit and vegetables he then sells at farmers' markets. It's his hope that by setting this example, others will follow it, and we won't be as dependent on foreign agriculture as we are now. It's my hope that I'll learn something from him.
My first lesson was on a small lot in east Vancouver where Teulon has Swiss chard, potatoes and already metre-high garlic growing in neat, three-metre-long rows. There is also a row for tomatoes, but it's too early to plant them - our cold spring has delayed everything, I learned - so they'll come later. Last week we needed to weed around the finger-high, neon-green leaves of chard to make them the biggest, toughest plants in their immediate neighbourhood. In other words, by removing the weeds around them, when new weeds do grow - and they will - they'll be in the shadow of the - by then - bigger, stronger vegetables.
It made sense. Of course, accomplishing that involved being able to tell a weed from a chard - "look at the leaf shape," Teulon explained with saintly patience - and refraining from stepping on the poor things. "Not to worry," he reassured, "they're tougher than they look."
Good thing.
After that we tackled similar weeds around the potato plants, which were already a foot high and around, light green and quite showy in a fleur-de-lys kind of way. Miraculously, to me, each one may produce as many as a dozen tubers - the actual meat of the potato - when it matures.
On another lot we dug a new bed - "Don't hurt your back, Nick, and try not to break the pitchfork" - for what turned out to be three long rows of bean seeds and about a dozen raised mounds (they looked awfully like little graves) for squash. Raise the beds, Tuelon explained, and the soil will be warmer. Oh ... yeah.
It was hours of hard work especially for someone used to pushing a computer key, not a pitchfork. They say a fighter's legs go first; what about a farmer's? But it was satisfying too. Like a kid, I couldn't wait to find out when the bean seeds we planted would come up. Maybe in 10 days, I was told, depending on the weather, something on which a farmer's eye is always fixed.
"It's part magic and part science," Teulon explained along the way. Not to mention a great deal of patience.
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