The single-digit nighttime temperatures combined with an active hurricane season have sent East Coast gardeners into a predictable panic. Their Instagram accounts are overflowing with pictures of turkey roasters filled with underripe tomatoes, plucked ahead of Hurricane Teddy. In a year when COVID has turned gardening into therapy, it’s not surprising that Mason jars have become as scarce a commodity as toilet paper was in April. Preserving what we’ve grown is just as therapeutic as growing our food from scratch.

If you’re new to gardening, and are wondering what comes next, I offer you a checklist of tasks for the fall season that should keep you occupied well into October.

• What to keep/what to pull out: Not all veggies like the same weather conditions. Carrots, parsnips, kale, Brussels sprouts, and peas sowed in mid-summer are all enjoying our cooler fall weather and should be given more time in the garden. Carrots and parsnips even get sweeter after a frost; we don’t usually harvest them until Thanksgiving.  As for the sun lovers—tomatoes, peppers, squash and eggplants—they are likely already shivering and ready to get out of the pool!

• Green manure: You likely have some garden space left vacant from the departure of your tomatoes and their friends. Why not cover crop it with plants that will add nourishment to the soil? Buckwheat, clover, winter rye and oats are good choices; they’ll grow for a few weeks in fall, then, after the frosts fell them, will add nutrients back into your soil.

• Fall means GARLIC! One of the easiest and most satisfying crops to grow is garlic. You can find it at garden centres at this time of year right next to fall bulbs like tulips and daffodils, or pick some up at the farmers’ market. Break the head into cloves, and plant each clove in well-prepared soil around Thanksgiving time. I usually add liberal helpings of kelp meal, bone meal, blood meal and well-composted manure to my garlic beds, as they’ll be spending three-quarters of a year in there and will need enough provisions to grow big and healthy. Make sure to stick them in bum-side down, with their pointy tops just below the surface of the soil. I cover my garlics in eelgrass, dead leaves, or straw weighted down with earth to keep it from blowing away. 

• Collect seed: Harvest time is perfect for collecting seed. There are always a few beans and peas with brown rattly pods still left on the vines, or a kale or mustard plant that’s making teeny pods of its own, each filled with dozens of tiny black seeds. Get busy and collect that bounty for next year and save money at the garden centre while you’re at it! This year, I plan to tuck seeds into small envelopes to include with Christmas greetings—if current trends continue, we may be seeing more shortages of seeds next spring. 

• Update your journal: If you don’t have a garden journal, now’s a good time to fix that! You likely have a few successes and failures to jot down while they’re still fresh in your mind. Perhaps a certain variety of tomato did exceptionally well for you, and you want to remember its name for next year. A journal can be extremely simple and point form-ish; I’ve kept one on and off for 25 years. It makes fantastic reading during the long winter months when we can’t get into the garden.

Wishing you and your garden much happiness and productivity as we pass into a new season.

In the meantime, here is another small sample from the book, short enough, I hope, that it will not bring on any symptoms!

What we see when we slow down

Since I was too dizzy to drive or ride my bicycle in the weeks after my concussion, I began walking. Just around my own neighbourhood at first—even small trips to the drugstore or post office seemed like epic outings when my brain was crowded with symptoms.

You see a whole lot more when you’re walking than via any other mode of transportation. It invites you to experience your five senses in ways not usually available in our regular lives.

On my walks, I noticed how the lavender plant in my neighbour’s front garden bloomed beautifully all summer long. With her permission, I would stop and pluck a couple of strands from its large bushy cushion and rub them between my fingers every time I passed by. The scent on my fingers was like medicine for my nerves (I learned later that lavender oil is used as a sleep aid and general calming agent).

Returning from walks, and not wanting to go back inside just yet, I would visit the garden, a sanctuary of calm which provided me with many delightful flavours to collect by hand all summer long, especially berries. From early July sweet strawberries, to the deeper red, scratchier raspberries that seeded themselves among the currant bushes, to a few highbush blueberries the birds didn’t eat, to the black currants, deepest purple and most adult berry of them all. I spent the most time picking these tiny dark globes from their large, treelike bushes, and turning them into jelly, one of the tart, musky and concentrated delights of midsummer.

The slow, unhurried action of berry picking gave my brain a simple and undemanding task that became a pleasure in its productive repetition: the same hand motion, finger grasping berry, container slowly filling with fruit. Just enough stimulation of the visual centre not to overwhelm, but satisfy.

It was astonishing to me how pleasurable such small manual tasks became in my shrunk-down, post-concussion world.

What are some of your own small but healing pleasures?

I’ve learned that our brains hold on to significant dates—some benign, like birthdays, and some painful, like the date we lost a loved one or were seriously injured. As we approach the anniversary of our injury or loss, we may feel a strong sense of dread and vulnerability or experience painful flashbacks to the event. It is a date most of us would like to forget.

Some years ago, I decided that, instead of suffering through each successive return of what I called my “accidentaversary” on May 2^nd, I would use that day to celebrate some joyful aspect of being alive. One year, I had professional photos taken of me in natural surroundings to affirm my continued presence in, and love for, the world. Another year, I treated myself to a massage; on last year’s accidentaversary, I committed to writing a book about what it’s like to heal from a concussion. That book is now complete and about to be published.

As much as possible, I try to honour this date as one of spiritual reflection and renewal and not schedule too much work then. For me, it has been a healing ritual to mark each return of the date with gratitude rather than dread.

On this May 2^nd, I completed a four-day course on neurorehabilitation after brain injury offered through Brock University and the Brain Injury Association of Nova Scotia, who generously funded my attendance. I met many others, like me, who had to rebuild their lives and identities following their injury. I loved being a student again – after twenty years of being a teacher, it’s nice to let others do the PowerPointing! – and learned a great deal about the brain and its incredible capacity to heal. What better way to celebrate my brain’s return to health in a wonderful community of others who know that journey well?

If you have a date that brings you dread, consider changing it into a day of reflection, one that holds meaning and comfort for your hurting self.

How will you transform your own accidentaversary?

Especially renowned in New Brunswick, along the banks of the Saint John river, but actually found throughout the Maritimes and New England, these bright green gems like to hide themselves in wet and wild places, making them a forager’s delightful surprise discovery. Once discovered, like their springtime companion, the mayflower, foragers keep tight-lipped about their whereabouts. “Where’s your patch?” is a question you should never ask if you are a dinner guest at a forager’s house and happen to find fiddleheads nestled on your plate.

Fiddleheads are pretty primal-looking critters: like embryonic dragons emerging from small, brown volcanoes, with a papery brown placental husk covering them. Plucking this husk from them takes time, and must be done by hand, making fiddleheads a true labour-intensive delicacy. They should be cooked or steamed for at least 10 minutes—though I’ve occasionally popped a raw one into my mouth (oops! They’re so tempting!) it’s better to err on the side of caution rather than wind up with a case of food poisoning that has been linked to raw or undercooked fiddlehead eating.

Fiddleheads have been a part of my family for years. My grandfather, a passionate lover of the natural world, must have encountered many patches of them on his hikes through the Nova Scotia woods. On one expedition, he was distressed to discover that the woods he had visited in the recent past had been clear-cut: he found a forlorn patch of fiddleheads exposed to the sun, and decided to relocate them to his own woodsy backyard, where they thrived and multiplied—the uneaten ones transformed to a Paleozoic-era fern forest that I enjoyed getting lost in as a child—the soft fronds of the full-fledged ostrich ferns brushing my bare arms and tickling my ears as I passed through, imagining I was a small, intrepid dinosaur living millions of years ago.

You don’t need to be a forager to enjoy the seasonal delight of fiddleheads: they appear pretty consistently at farmers’ markets in the region at this time of year.

Besides eating them steamed with butter, pepper and salt—or spritzed with cider vinegar—I have canned fiddleheads, (admittedly, they lose almost all of their appealing bright green colour this way), frozen them, and made a pretty delicious soup out of them. Because the taste of fiddleheads is kind of a cross between broccoli and asparagus, they lend themselves well to a cream-based soup, which can be made with or without dairy. Even suspicious children will take to this fiddlehead format!

However you eat them, I wish you the happiest of fiddlehead seasons!

Cream of fiddlehead soup

1 large onion, chopped and sautéed in butter or olive oil

5 cups stock, veggie or chicken-based

2-3 large potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks

2 teaspoons salt

½ teaspoon ground black pepper

2 cups fiddleheads

1 can coconut milk, or about 1 ½ cups homogenized milk or blend, or cream

Saute onion in a small amount of butter or olive oil, adding salt and pepper as it cooks. In a large saucepan or soup pot, heat stock to a simmer over medium heat and add potatoes and fiddleheads to cook (this saves using another pot!), along with cooked onion. After about 15-20 minutes, or whenever the veggies are tender, remove saucepan from the heat, and add coconut or plain milk. Puree the soup with an immersion blender until smooth and creamy. Serve with a generous dollop of butter.

I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks singing the praises of each member of this marvellous trio in turn, mainly in the form of favourite recipes. I’ll start with the ‘barb since it’s the only one that’s visible in my garden right now.

Rhubarb is a funny bird: it’s rare to eat just the stalk of something and discard the leaves (we do this with sugar cane, too). It’s tart enough to make you pucker: I cringed when my two-year-old pulled a stalk out of the ground one spring, broke it in half, and started munching on it. He was amazingly unfazed—this kid sucks on lemon wedges for fun. “Woo-bahb,” he pronounced with satisfaction between bites.

Like citrus, rhubarb is high in vitamin C; it’s also moderately high in potassium. It’s been consumed for medicinal (mostly laxative) purposes in China and parts of Asia for thousands of years.

The rhubarb plant’s a heavy feeder—it loves hanging out near manure piles and around compost heaps. The leaves from these plants are the size of elephant ears.

On a bike ride along the old railbed near our cottage a few years ago, we discovered a lush patch of enormous rhubarb growing on the grounds of an old farmstead; I stuffed the giant stalks into my backpack and into the back of the bike trailer for the freezer, wondering somewhat suspiciously what caused the massive growth: an old septic field? Compost pile? Hopefully not a cemetery….

If you’re on a rhubarb watch on your own property right now, I send you these favourite recipes to try when the time comes:

Rhubarb Meringue Pie

This recipe shared space on a page in my grandmother’s recipe book with another rhubarb pie that called for a crumb topping. Both are excellent and custardy, but I like this one a little bit more… if you have a few frozen strawberries lingering in your freezer, you could add them to the rhubarb to make up the three cups of fruit the recipe calls for.

3 cups chopped rhubarb

1 cup white sugar

3 tablespoons white flour

2 tablespoons butter

2 egg yolks

1 unbaked pie crust

Meringue topping:

2 egg whites

¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

¼ cup sugar

2 tablespoons water

½ teaspoon vanilla

¼ teaspoon salt

In a large bowl, combine rhubarb. Sugar, flour, and butter. In a separate bowl, beat egg yolks and stir into rhubarb mixture. Add to pie shell and bake in 425 degree F oven for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 deg F and bake 30 minutes more. Remove from oven and cool to lukewarm.

In another large bowl, beat egg whites with cream of tartar until stiff (3-5 minutes). Gradually beat in sugar. Add water, vanilla and salt. Beat until very stiff, shiny peaks form. Spread meringue over pie, making sure it touches pastry edges. Bake 10-12 minutes in a 375 degree oven. (You’ll be adjusting your oven dial a fair bit for this recipe!)

Orange-Rhubarb Butter: from Marisa McClellan’s canning Bible, Food In Jars.

Marisa McClellan is the queen of all things jammed, jellied, relished, and otherwise canned. She’s written a few canning cookbooks now, and her recipes never disappoint. I love the tart and refreshing notes in this marriage of flavours; superb on toast, you can also use this butter as a marinade for poultry.

8 cups chopped rhubarb

2 cups granulated sugar

2 cups orange juice

Combine all ingredients in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a simmer. Turn down the heat to low and let it keep cooking, stirring every 5 minutes or so. Keep this up for an hour, until the butter has thickened.

While it’s cooking, prepare a boiling water bath with 2 1-pint (500 mL) jars. Put a rack in the saucepan and put jars on top. Cover them with water and bring to a boil. Put your canning lids in a smaller saucepan, cover with water, and bring them to a low boil. (If you have a magnetic wand handy, that’s the easiest way to get them out of the hot water).

When your butter has finished cooking, remove jars from canning pot (pour the water back into the pot as you remove them) and ladle hot butter into them, allowing at least ½ inch headroom. Wipe the rims, apply lids and screwbands, and process in the boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

Grease-stained and dog-eared, to me they are the perfect escapist literature: a blend of the practical, the comforting, the beautifully illustrated, and the sometimes bizarre. Sure, the dishes they describe can be fussy and time-consuming. I know there are many recipes in there that I will never, ever make. I still love reading them, and when I lack a good novel to lose myself in, I will often pull out a favourite cookbook so I can be transported back to my favourite decade of them all.

Here are a few of my favourites:

1. Eat It (Dana Crumb and Shery Cohen) and The Food Stamp Gourmet (William Brown):

   These two slim cardboard-covered volumes, given to me thirty years ago by my father, were written in 1971 and 1972, respectively, and wear their unabashed hippyness gloriously on their sleeves. Rubenesque female figures with enormous rumps stir a pot full of stew on the cover of Eat It; inside, you can find recipes with titles like “Roast and a Bottle of Beer, or Uncle Lushwell’s Meat Can’t Be Beat” and “Five Joint Soup” (instructions: “Now during the first hour of cooking, get away from the stove, sit down, roll one, have some tea, look out the window–relax.”)

   The tone is obviously cheeky, and the cartoons accompanying the recipes tend towards the grotesque: kids with snotty noses posing next to the chicken soup recipe or the caption next to the frittata: “What’s that slop you’re eating?” Be prepared to be somewhat revolted as you read—it’s cookbook reverse psychology thing, I guess.

   One of my favourite parts of Food Stamp Gourmet is the price per serving in 1971 dollars. (i.e. Poached Sole= 70 cents, Chicken Risotto= 31 cents). It’s a sobering reflection on the effects of inflation. I get really nostalgic when I read this cookbook and desperately wish I could have lived more of my conscious life in that decade–I was actually born smack in the middle of it–before HIV, when Jimmy Carter was president and Pierre Trudeau was giving money to national parks and historic sites, and decriminalizing homosexuality, and climate change hadn’t made us feel like the damned.

   It’s been a while since I’ve made any of the recipes in either cookbook (the moussaka, and Coq au Vin are really good), but I’ll never part with these crusty time capsules of the sweet seventies.

2. The Moosewood Cookbook (any of the series, but especially the original): Remember the handprinted loveliness of Mollie Katzen’s 1977 classic vegetarian cookbook, inspired by the Ithaca, NY, restaurant of the same name? Sure, the index was pretty much useless, organized solely by vegetable rather than an actually usable alphabetical list of ingredients (they fixed that in subsequent editions of the book), but I’ve never stopped loving and using Moosewood, even when Mollie grew up, started wearing makeup, and got her own PBS special.

   Having a crappy day? Whip yourself up a round of Montana Mom’s Dynamite Cheesecake. It’s not “loved by millions from coast to coast” for nothing!

3. Laurel’s Kitchen (Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders and Bronwen Godfrey): Published in 1976, the year before Moosewood, Laurel’s Kitchen perhaps never attained the full glory of Katzen’s book, though it’s still a great resource for vegetarian cooks. If you really want to geek out on veggie nutritional data, this is the cookbook for you! Robertson et al’s defense of vegetarianism as a nutritionally complete diet is impeccable, and has the feel of pioneer voices crying out in a carnivorous wilderness. The recipes aren’t bad, though they tend to rely on margarine quite a lot.

Do you have a favourite cookbook from an earlier time? Let me know about it!

Easy access to fresh food is also a matter of geography (think of the “food desert” phenomenon endemic to low-income neighbourhoods, which often lack a grocery store), and is in many ways an acquired taste.

Those of us who advocate for a whole foods diet are in fact asking others to reject the comfortable, undemanding processed meals that many folks grew up eating, and their associations with home and simple childhood pleasures.

We’re also asking folks with little to no experience of from-scratch food preparation and no ancestral memory of the taste of beets, kale, turnips or chard to prepare these foods in a way that will appeal to them and their (likely suspicious) children.

No wonder foodies are often accused of arrogance and elitism.

Well-intentioned efforts to make institutional food healthier are often met with hostility and subversion—look at what happened when Jamie Oliver took on the enormous challenge of reforming the menu in British school cafeterias. He received his share of resistance from those who saw the change as an attack on their culture—in Rotherham, in the north of England, where Oliver began his cafeteria reform project, angry mums slipped burgers and fries to their kids through the school gates at noon in protest.

An acquaintance of mine who lives in a rural community in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley faced much the same backlash when she began volunteering in the cafeteria of the elementary school her kids attended. Shocked by the daily fare of hot dogs, processed cheese, and canned everything, she suggested making the occasional pot of homemade soup or casserole with local ingredients and offered some of her own tasty recipes (she cooks professionally). Her ideas were met with impassive silence, and she soon gave up, sensing a major clash of food cultures brewing and not wanting to alienate her children from their friends’ home and school food rituals. She now sends them with packed lunches.  

As a food writer and speaker about organic gardening and home canning, I always wonder how I can introduce the concept of whole foods to those unfamiliar with the concept without coming across as preachy and smug.

One way to do this is to be open about my fondness for the occasional canned or boxed indulgence: the comfort of Thermos-warm Chunky soup at lunch, the pure joy of Oreo cookies.

When I feel self-righteous hearing about the ignorance of someone who threw away the broccoli tops and cooked the stems, I remind myself of my student days at the University of Toronto when I lived close to the bustling streets of Chinatown, and my walks through the marketplace there. There were fruits and vegetables I had never seen, labelled in a language I could not read. I really wanted to ask someone, “Do you eat the top or the bottom of that thing? Raw or cooked?” but I felt shy and out of the loop, as well as completely non-functional in Cantonese and Mandarin, so I sadly never got to try any of the tasty-looking produce there.

I am grateful that I had a taste of being a minority during my years in Toronto: as a white person, feeling invisible and out of it in one’s home community is an invaluable learning tool.

If that sense of being out of the loop also affects those from a different food background seeking to learn healthy food skills, we need to do everything possible to remove barriers.

To that end, Jamie Oliver has advocated the concept of recipe sharing (aka “pass it on”) in his 2008 Jamie’s Food Revolution, where readers are encouraged to sign a pledge to master one (very easily-assembled) recipe from Oliver’s book and then teach it to a few non-cooking friends. Oliver himself got his start cooking in his family’s pub, and though he has since achieved superstar chef status, he never seems to have forgotten this background.

In an age of instant gratification, the satisfaction of doing a cooking project from scratch can be a novel enough concept to get curious kids into the kitchen.

Six years ago, a friend teaching Home Economics (or whatever it’s called now) to fifteen and sixteen year olds invited me to come to her class to help make pickles. Seven months pregnant, I waddled from cutting station to station, offering encouragement to kids who had never chopped an onion (and who were slightly freaked out by the eye-watering effects of doing so: “Help! Why am I crying?”). One student looked at me with wonder when I complimented her on her chopping skills, and suggested that next fall, we should try making ketchup: “You can do that? That is so cool!”

Beyond our individual efforts to make eating whole foods the norm rather than the exception are institutionally-based initiatives like Halifax’s own Mobile Food Market. Extending a bridge into the local food desert, and spearheaded by the NS Health Authority, the Ecology Action Centre, the United Way, and other local community groups, the “food bus” brings affordably-priced fruit and vegetables to underserved areas like Fairview, Spryfield, Harrietsfield, and North and East Preston. The bus parks in a central spot at a regular time each week, and customers can climb aboard and shop for their produce.

I’m happy to see that the project website mentions “culturally appropriate foods” as part of its mandate (I’d like to know what kinds of produce fit that bill). Here’s a link to that website, with an up-to-date delivery schedule for the next two months: http://www.mobilefoodmarket.ca

With the link between good food and good health so firmly established—like the link between smoking and cancer– any efforts to get people eating a lot more fresh, unprocessed food are worth tackling, resistance notwithstanding. I would include a tax on junk food in that effort, much the way we currently tax tobacco and alcohol. We’re never going to get a handle on this problem when we can buy a frozen processed entrée for $1.50 while a head of broccoli alone costs $4.99.

We do need to be aware that any suggested change in food culture may inevitably be perceived as an attack; our humility and willingness to acknowledge the appeal of processed food are both necessary components of the change we wish to see in how we and our communities feed ourselves.

To wit: parents bending themselves into knots trying to get junior to eat something other than Cheerios.

Diets so restrictive they could barely keep a goldfinch alive.

Worried hosts emailing guests well ahead of time to make sure their dinner choices won’t offend or poison them.

To be clear: this post is not about the care that must be taken by the poor souls suffering from debilitating, or even life-threatening food allergies. I could write a book about the terribly toxic agri-industrial practices that may be bringing on these severe reactions, but that is a subject well beyond the scope of this post.

Nor is it about the rejection of highly processed, chemically laced food-like products that are so lacking in nourishment they shouldn’t even be called food.

No, my beef is with the glorified fussiness that has become a cultural norm in the West.

Eating has become a minefield, subject to snobbery, political correctness, and an ever-changing host of health fads supported by “science.” Anyone paying any attention to these has likely considered giving up butter, only to find margarine’s properties far more death-dealing, or realized, after years of thinking eggs were too high in cholesterol to be eaten regularly, that the latest research pronounced them benign.

Having worked in the food service industry, as a grower and lover of good food, and an interested observer of human behavior, I offer this light-hearted guide to some of the characters occupying the modern food stage, all of whom I believe deserve to wear the fusspot crown:

The tinkerer: We’ve all known a few folks who are constantly and quite dramatically adjusting and re-adjusting their diets, through a belief that something they’re eating is making them sluggish, moody, bloated, or otherwise unwell. Their bodies are like Ming vases to be handled and nourished only with the utmost delicacy by a battery of vestals in the alternative health industry.

I have a few dear friends like this, God love them. Their shopping and cooking routines are frankly exhausting. I try to make a meal free from dairy on their behalf, only to discover they’re now happily eating cheese, but have eliminated wheat and sugar.

I like to think of the tinkerer as the dreamy idealist of the food world, convinced that in that spirulina shake or shiitake mushroom extract they will find perfect health and vitality, if not Nirvana. Their restless questing for this Holy Grail of diets makes them the natural heirs of King Arthur and his Camelot crew.

The militant vegan: Ten years ago I worked as a cook in a vegetarian restaurant that employed and fed (or tried to feed) a number of vegans.

On days when we made lasagna, my bearded co-worker offered to do extra dishes if I would grate the cheese, so averse was he to the handling of dairy.

When mice took up temporary residence in the walk-in fridge, we were responsible for setting snap-traps in the kitchen against the little buggers that could bring the wrath of the health department down on the restaurant’s poor owner.

I wasn’t surprised that the vegan members of the staff were having trouble getting this distasteful job done, thus prolonging the problem. I became the designated mouse-catcher on my shifts since I was already tainted by being a meat-eater.

Vegan customers often walked into the kitchen to make sure their tofu wasn’t being cross-contaminated with butter, and we were regularly grilled on the provenance of all ingredients in a cake, pie, or main course dish, as though we might be guilty of sneaking beef broth into the lentil bisque.

Observing one more pallid customer eyeing her wheatless, dairyless, flavourless cookie with characteristically vegan suspicion, I thought to myself, “How would you survive in the wild?”

Vegans remind me of an endangered tropical species of bird or mammal that subsists only on the fruit of one special hidden tree that is threatened by clearcutting, or about to be ravaged by an incurable tree disease.

Omnivory— eating from many food sources, animal and vegetable–has historically been a predictor of species survival and population health. Why else are the world’s cities bursting their seams with crows, pigeons, raccoons, rats, and yes, humans? One could argue that the earth could do with far fewer members of each of these species—and I would not disagree. Just like the kid who eats only pizza and chicken nuggets is vulnerable to nutrient deficiencies, though, those who practice restrictive diets must take expend extra time, energy, and money in sourcing and preparing acceptably nutritious food.

To me, it’s a great irony that both highly-processed food and extreme veganism have the potential for malnutrition. It’s true that opposite extremes are still in themselves extremes.

The political activist:

Here’s where I get to discuss my preferred brand of food neurosis, the area in which my partner would gleefully accuse me of classic foodie snobbery, the kind that comes with “certified organic”, “locally-grown”, “fair trade” stickers securely attached to its compostable, brown-bag packaging.

Yes, food is intensely political.

I was reminded of this fact recently when I asked a friend over for coffee; he approved of my fair trade dark roast, but chided me and my flagging political awareness for the “conventional” chocolate chips he had spotted in the cupboard.

I’m the kind of person who can get behind a good cause, a rousing protest, a punishing boycott of almost any variety. I love the self-righteous high I get when I bring my own mug to a café, or circulate a petition opposing a bottled water company, or buy coffee beans with names like Breaking the Silence or Happy Turtle (10% of proceeds going to some good cause).

I remember watching a PBS documentary about the birth of the suffragette movement in the US and falling in activist love with votes-for-women matriarch Lucretia Mott for refusing to serve white sugar at her house because of the working conditions of sugar plantation workers in the West Indies.

I have a picture of renowned anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva posted above my desk, face beaming, imploring me to save both my own heritage seed and the world.

That I get to make choices about what I eat—one might say, the luxury of political awareness—marks me as privileged. Good food (i.e. unprocessed, non-GMO/organic, locally-grown, fairly-traded) should not be more expensive than its conventional counterpart, but it is.

I know a local farmer who, though not certified organic, still grows vegetables with minimal chemical inputs (he estimates being 75-80% organic) and natural fertilizers. He prices his produce at a level affordable to low-income patrons, believing that healthy food should not be the province of only the rich. I’m hoping this is a model that will grow and spread, especially as more and more folks realize the truth of the maxim, “Let food be your medicine.”

There’s more I would like to write about in connection with food and class culture. Because this post is becoming ungainly, I will continue the discussion next week.

If you’re not headed out of town, and are taking a few vacation days yourself, I offer you the following food-related March Break activities sure to keep everyone’s blood sugar levels stable and moods pleasant.

1. Homemade slushies: This is the Maritimes, folks. We specialize in slush–that is, snow that semi-liquefies within a few hours to a few days of falling. I wanted to post a picture of happy kids in snowshoes vacationing in the sugar bush of Quebec or Vermont, pouring boiling maple syrup onto the deep, clean snow, and wrapping a popsicle stick around the resulting taffy, but who knows if we’ll get enough fresh snow over the break to do it?

   (In case we do, here’s a link to Canadian Living’s website which explains the finer points of maple taffy making: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/baking-and-desserts/article/how-to-make-maple-syrup-taffy-pops)

In the meantime, it’s highly probable we’ll be getting slushed on for a portion of the next six weeks—check your forecast for lousy weather and leave a few clean pans on the back step where it can accumulate. Then bring inside, add slush to your blender with any combination of fresh or frozen fruit, or just fruit juice, and enjoy a healthy slushie that didn’t come from a gas station, and isn’t the colour of Windex.

1. Vinegar-baking soda volcano: Clean your drains while keeping the youngsters entertained! Place a quart-sized Mason (or other tall) jar in the kitchen sink and pour several tablespoons of baking soda in. Pour some white vinegar into a measuring cup and let your kid dump it on top of the soda. Watch for foam! Pouring a little bit of vinegar at a time will allow for multiple eruptions. For extra fun, give the kids a few vials of food colouring to add to the foam and get them to predict what eventual colours will be created by mixing different colours.
2. Backyard campfire: After the big storms in February, we pulled out our second-hand fire pit, cut up a few logs into kindling-sized pieces (to ensure a quick starting fire that wouldn’t make a bunch of neighbour-disturbing smoke), and turned the wintry backyard into a Scout camp-style cookout. We roasted wieners, made Smores, and warmed our toes until the last embers disappeared. Summer camping’s great and all, but fires feel even better in the cold! If you don’t have a fire pit, try a habachi, or even a propane BBQ.
3. March 17th and the eatin’ o’ the green: Saint Patrick’s Day falls during March Break so why not celebrate with a green food-themed Friday? See how many naturally-occurring green things you can include in the day’s meals and snacks. Some ideas: try adding a few spinach leaves to a smoothie made from bananas, milk/rice milk, and vanilla for your very own tribute to the Shamrock Shake, or whip up a pot of cream of broccoli soup with sautéed onion, cut up potato, broccoli, and veggie or chicken stock, all run through the blender. If your kids are partial to pasta (who isn’t?), rinse out that busy blender and make a green pesto using steamed spinach, sautéed onion, a couple of teaspoons of fresh lemon juice, fresh parsley, a pinch of salt, and one container of ricotta cheese. It will come out creamy, delicious, and light green—serve over hot pasta with a scrape of Parmesan on top. YUM!
4. Get ready to grow! If you garden, or would like to start growing your own veggies, get your kid to help you make a list of favourite varieties you’d like to include in this year’s patch. Consider buying from a local seed supplier like Annapolis Seeds (http://www.annapolisseeds.com) or Hope Seeds (http://www.hopeseed.com/home) both based in the Annapolis Valley. Most seeds can be ordered online; several weeks after placing your order, you will have the fun of getting your seeds in the mail.

   If you’d like to get started right away, plan an outing to a garden centre like Halifax Seed, Bloom (of Hammonds Plains) or Lakeland Plant World (Dartmouth), where knowledgeable staff will help you find what you need. I take a therapeutic trip to a greenhouse every March to remind myself that spring is not far away.

5. Noodling around: Take a trip to the Bulk Barn or other food store with an expansive bulk section, and find the place where noodles live. Let your kid pick out 2 or 3 fun shapes (hopefully not obscene ones!) to go with that green pasta sauce you made! Shapes we’ve tried and loved: lobsters (coloured with beet juice), the leaning tower of Pisa, a Maine-based moose-grizzly bear- pine tree assortment, caterpillars, beetles, and worms.
6. Foodie dance party: Create a playlist of catchy tunes featuring food and get boogiein’. A few suggestions: “Cake by the Ocean,” “Brown Sugar” (classic Stones), and Bob Marley’s “Jammin’.”

A final couple of pieces of advice: If you’re going someplace warm this March Break, try not to infuriate the pale grubs you’re leaving behind by coming home tanned. And if you’re staying home and manage to make it through this list before the end of the week, there’s always Netflix!

Water is threatened on all sides by pollution, privatization, and industrial and domestic overuse, yet we often treat it as though it were a limitless commodity, a kind of earth-abuse that will come back to haunt us and our descendants for years to come.

Wanting to shrink our ungainly eco-footprint with respect to water, my family has been able to reduce its water intake to about one-quarter of the Canadian national average. Between October of 2015 and October 2016, our most recent annual water billing period, we have averaged around 250 litres per day in our household of three people, or just over 80 litres per person per day (by comparison, a March 18, 2009 National Post story states the average single Canadian and American uses about 340 litres per day).

Divided into areas where we use the most water—and in addition to what we view as standard water-saving retrofits like low-flow showerheads and dual flush toilets—here’s how we do it:

Tackling “The Big Three” of domestic water consumption: toilets, laundry, and bathing

The Big Flush: Toilet flushing accounts for 31% of the average household’s water usage—the biggest single consumer of water (Home Waterworks, Alliance for Water Efficiency). Most ultra low flush models use 30 litres/person/day or 6 litres per flush while older model toilets consume a whopping 70 litres/person/day.

It has never made sense to me that we use potable water to flush our toilets. Some schools and other multi-user businesses are installing engineered rainwater collection systems for the purpose, a wise development that recognizes the wastefulness of pre-treating water destined to flush toilets.

For those of us seeking a less engineered solution, a bucket kept under the sink will serve the purpose. Put a plug in the tub for the morning shower, and then bail out a few gallons into your designated “flush-bucket” (we use an old 4 litre detergent bottle cut out) and pour directly into the toilet bowl when needed. You’ll get a couple of flushes out of one bucket, so if you have several housemates using the toilet, keep extra water in the tub and get a second bucket.

Bath to washer: I have a kid who likes to take long baths several times a week; while we try to restrict the amount of hot water he adds to the tub, he likes the deep swimming pool effect and sneaks more in while we’re not looking.

To mitigate this habit, I started bailing the contents of the tub into the washer by the bucketful, climbing up and down two flights of stairs to the basement 10-12 times per bath, slow and strenuous work that I considered a kind of back-to-the-earth fitness regime.

My engineer husband, finding this an inefficient way of getting water from one place to another (true enough), devised a system for bypassing the tub drain and pouring bathwater directly into the washer, plumbing in a three-way diverter valve that allows water to travel either to the washer or to the municipal sewer in cold weather when the garden hose freezes up!

Our theory is that the relative cleanliness of the bathwater and the soap added to the laundry cycle, plus the fresh, municipal water used in the rinse cycle makes for acceptably clean laundry. We try to do laundry as soon as the water is transferred from bath to washer to keep the water from getting ‘skunky’.

We should be aware of the existence of building code rules and regulations around grey water reuse in our own districts. To watch a video on how one California homeowner safely and legally recycled water into his landscape, see http://www.treehugger.com/clean-water/gray-water-safe-legal-and-permitted-water-recycling-video.html.

(It’s interesting to note that in Japan, it is standard practice to use household bathwater for washing clothing, though admittedly, the Japanese preface their bath with a ‘pre-clean’ so they’re cleaner when they enter the bath). See this blog post about laundry habits in Japan: https://alicegordenker.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/recycling-bath-water-for-laundry-%E9%A2%A8%E5%91%82%E6%B0%B4%E3%83%9D%E3%83%B3%E3%83%97%E3%80%80/)

Looking for other ways to conserve or recycle the water you use?

“Warm-Up Water”: the chilly beginning to washing your hands, or waiting for the shower to warm up, this water can and should definitely be saved for doing laundry. I keep a scoop near the bathroom sink for catching it as soon as the tap gets turned on, then store it in a bucket for the laundry. The diverter on your shower drain will send warm-up water more efficiently into your washing machine.

Rainwater for laundry: Our household does a lot of laundry—we are outdoorsy types and all the gardening, hiking, and mucking about is pretty hard on our clothes. We have looked for ways to reduce the amount of water we use in this area, and in the warmer months, have found rainwater the perfect solution. (In the winter, the piping system we use freezes up, so in our northern climate, this is definitely an April through November project). Two large barrels sit on elevated stands outside the basement window nearest the washing machine: Ian has removed one pane of glass from the basement window, and replaced it with two layers of plastic board that he cut a hole in for the garden hose that attaches the rain barrels to the machine. Diverter valves mounted at the back of the machine allow us to switch easily from rain barrel water to municipal water during dry spells or when the hose freezes up in winter.

Rainwater for irrigation: As a professional gardener, I make note of weather patterns every summer that will lead to the success or failure of my crops. Last August, Nova Scotia experienced a record dry spell that saw wells drying up, especially on the south shore of the province. This was a real eye-opener in our usually damp province. With climate change making weather predictions ever more difficult, it makes sense to conserve rainwater when we do get it for the times it’s really needed. Unchlorinated, unfluoridated, and free, the rain can be stored in barrels around your property, from shed roof to porch roof, or in interconnected barrels from one location.

With a portion of your water bill now going to sewerage fees, meaning users are charged both for the water that comes into their houses as well as for the water that is discharged into the wastewater system, using rainwater for lawn and garden maintenance makes both environmental and economic sense, saving you a portion of that fee during the summer months.

Bathwater for irrigation: In very dry summers at the cottage, with well supplies running low and visitors adding to the water burden, I have resorted to using bathwater for irrigation. If you choose to do this, you should aim to use as few soap products as possible in the bath—most of these contain salts (like the ubiquitous sodium lauryl sulfate found in many shampoos) that with repeated applications can build up in the soil where you grow your food. Try using ‘all-in-one’ soap/shampoo/general cleaning products like Dr. Bronner’s Pure Castile Soap, which contains no sodium, and is certified organic.

Give plants a good soaking at ground level, trying not to splash their leaves. Aim to have the water penetrate deeply into the soil near the plant’s roots, rather than a superficial watering; this may cause more harm than good as the plant’s roots will turn upward toward the surface wetness instead of burrowing deeply into the ground.

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There are many areas of modern life which we feel are beyond our control, but water use doesn’t need to be one of them!

This March 22, just in time for World Water Day, I encourage you to find ways to reduce your own consumption of this most precious resource.