Busy

Harvest is in full swing - today, basil, carrots and tomatoes for me, plus courgettes, aubergines, lettuce, cabbage (to go in saurkraut), turnips; bush beans we're getting three times a week; cucumbers, kale, chard, parsley and all manner of other things are there when we need them.

I need a break! Well, that might happen. The winds of change are blowing, the farm feels different and there is a lot going on. I'm thinking about life here, settling down, what I want from life. How I want to grow (in all senses - Polyculture rather than market gardening? What do *I* want to become?). Today I got a SIM card for my mobile phone - after a blissful 4 months without. Thankfully the farm doesn't get service from this operator, Rogers (who use the same network technology as Europe so my phone works with their network; Bell, the other major provider, uses something different that won't...).

I'm tired, really tired. Work is tiring of itself, but there is so much more in trying to get settled into life here when it's not settled at all.

But it's good. It'll work out, the sun is shining and the raspberries are very very tasty!

I have been reading a book called The End of Food by Paul Roberts. It discusses many things, one of which being that the Organic Food Movement has been co-opted by the food industry, and isn't that much better in sustainability terms; another being that a large goods lorry driving food is much more efficient than a number of farmers driving pickup trucks the same distance - the example it gives is 312 miles from California's Salinas Valley to Reno being better than farmers driving their pickups 20 miles.

Small, organic, local... ideally embedded in the heart of the community. Walking distance, and with all the seasonal help.

The other thing it mentions is the word Polyculture, similar to Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution, and the example given in Roberts' book is also in Japan - putting ducklings in a rice paddy, then duckweed and underneath loach (a fish), then following the removal of ducks then rice, vegetables are planted in place. Not one thing followed by another, but a number of mutually supportive systems. Beauty in the cycles.

Will I buy a minivan (in Canadian speak; in the UK I suppose it would be a people carrier, but a large one, on a pickup truck chassis) this weekend, or just the fork, hoe and rake I truly need to grow food?

We'll see.

Slack

No blogging for a LONG while now. It's been a busy few weeks - my fiancee is now back in Canada which is fantastic, I've got two markets under my belt, we've had another heatwave...

Life is good. We're a good team of workers, getting through the jobs quite quickly and efficiently. My body feels great - sure there are aches and pains, but nothing serious. And yesterday we had a great market - we sold out of most things, people were interested and enthusiastic about what we had (though many had some of the things in their own gardens that we'd had for a while - less interest in lettuce, for example, but more in cucumbers. It's about having things that people here don't have in their gardens yet).

Today, my day off, I'm trying to organise visa, work permit, residency application stuff. I got ripped off getting passport photos at Black's Photography. $20 for the first PAIR then $10 for each pair after, amazing!

It's interesting what is cheap here and what is expensive compared to the UK. Lots of stuff is "service-expensive" - such as buying or selling a house, getting photographs, etc. Coffee is cheap... :)