As the World Turns

     I grew up in a Delta town. The mighty Niagara was placid after its furious descent over the famous falls. Downstream from the gorge and whirlpool, the river was wide and green and drained peacefully into Ontario, the smallest great lake. Hugging the shoreline were countless acres of small fruit farms--strawberries, sweet and sour cherries, peaches, plums, apricots, pears, apples and grapes (in order of ripening)--which grew happily in the fertile soil of the Lake Iroquois Plain, an ancient lakebed. Of course the farms were a recent addition, replacing the Carolian forest of southeastern North America, which included ash, birch, chestnut, hickory, oak and walnut. Remnants of this diverse deciduous forest remain, particularly on the Niagara Escarpment, the remnant shoreline of an Ordovician-Silurian-age tropical sea.

1960, my sister in the family tomato patch

     Summers I spent picking, processing, and pigging out on fruit.

Farming is fun!

     Surrounded by orchards, and friends with so many of our neighbours, our family of eight had plenty of fresh, locally grown, picked-in-season (off the ground sometimes, as windfalls) fruit. We ate it, froze it, jammed it, pickled it, and devoured it in my mom's pies, which she made in rectangular cookie sheets, not in wussy little pie plates!
     My dad had a green thumb and grew tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, melons, corn, and flowers.
     Watermelons had seeds, peaches were horribly fuzzy, tomatoes smelled like tomatoes, and fruit came in every shape and size. We ate it if it was mis-shapen, bruised, or had little marks on it from rubbing against the tree. We discovered worms in our apples and ate around them!
    Of course, all that has changed in the last forty years. Most of those mixed farms are now vineyards, producing fruit for wine. The grocery store sells fruits and vegetables of a different sort--uniform in size and shape, selected and modfied to be certain colours and textures, and watermelons don't have seeds any more.

My crop of grass

     This is how the world turns. Every generation experiences loss as the next one changes the world.
     I don't have a particularly green thumb (although there was a time when I grew lettuce, spinach, peas and potatoes in Harvie Heights). And this year I grew a patch of grass, which dances in the wind and makes me happy.

Christian Wright of Sweet Earth grows this garden on top of the Canmore high school.

     So I respect those with the gift and focus to grow food. And it's nice to run into pockets of people who perpetuate local produce, and grow varieties not seen in stores. I support them. Sometimes the fruits of their labour are so expensive that it feels like a donation to a worthy cause. Organic farming requires manual labour, a hands on approach, and alternatives to agro-chemicals. It's smaller scale and less is produced and of course, the costs are greater.
     So are the rewards!

New apples of the season.

     When I took a bite of this apple yesterday, I had a hit of another world. Not the one I grew up in, but a future world in which we move forward with all the advances and technology, and we maintain connection to the earth that supports and sustains us, the planet that gives us life. A world in which we continue to respect ecology, and create a green economy where we nurture the love of nature right into the constitution.