City versus Country: Trading Places

I was raised in a city, Calgary to be exact and I loved it. For 24 years from ages of 5 to 29, I went to school, grew up, loved, lived, ate and breathed Calgary. There was so much to do in the city and around the city.  I had lots of friends, a fairly decent job, I lived in a great neighborhood with an excellent landlord. Yup! Calgary was my city. I loved the Flames hockey team and the Stampeders football team.

But.....some of my fondest memories were summers spent in the country.  Summers at my aunt's farm in Manitoba where we slept in the hay loft, raided the garden, swam in the river, and ate fresh caught pickerel at 10 o'clock at night. Or summers spent at Sorrento on the Shuswap lake in beautiful British Columbia where we climbed apple trees and ran barefoot as free as could be.  In my heart of hearts, I am a country girl!

After leaving Calgary, I went to live on Vancouver Island in the little town of Chemainus and I must admit I felt culture shock for the first time in my life.  You see, Calgary is a very friendly city and when you say "hello" to someone, they say "hello" back.  It is easy to make friends in Calgary.  So, I expected the same of a small town and it wasn't the same at all.  In Chemainus we walked down the street with our dog "Fred" and we would say "hello" to folks and they looked at us like we were axe murderers and run in the opposite direction.  It was hard to make friends in Chemainus as well because unless you  had grown up or lived in the area for some time, nobody wanted anything to do with you. I missed Calgary terribly and I wondered, what had I done?  What made me pack up and move to such a miserable place?  I ended up living on Vancouver Island for 13 years.  You learn to fit in and eventually you make friends.  I love Vancouver Island now and not just because all my family lives there.  I still have some very good friends in Chemainus and Nanaimo.  It is truly a beautiful place. I also, met the love of my life there and we've been on an adventure ever since.

Part of our adventure was spending a year up in Nunavut.  That was interesting and scary all at the same time. The cold was easy to deal with but the social problems that plague the area are not. And that's a whole other blog.

Next we took our adventure to Quebec and we decided very early that Montreal was too big a city for us.  So, we settled in Quebec City where we had a lovely condo in the beautiful Saint-Sacrement area, which is close to downtown. We had neighborhood bistros, coffee shops, and boulangeries. There is so much history and culture there.  Quebec is a very dynamic and graceful city.  We both had good jobs but what we found was that we weren't doing big city things. We weren't taking advantage of the restaurants or the theaters and everything else that cities have to offer.  What we really yearned for was to be in the country again.

Now we are on Prince Edward Island and we are very much in the country and couldn't be happier.  Pretty much all of PEI is rural,  even the capital city of Charlottetown, the biggest center on the island, has a population of only 40 thousand people.

Which brings me to the reason for this blog!  I was contemplating all of this when I realized that we are trading places.

There are those people who grew up on the farm, then moved away to go to school and swore they would never go back. They were sick of the smell of manure, the early morning chores, relying on the weather for the production of the crops and constantly keeping the pests controlled. They yearn for something more. They want to be able to walk to a neighborhood grocer to buy their food and eat in restaurants at 10 o'clock at night. Go to concerts to see their favorite bands and go to museums and the ballet.

Their parents eventually get too old to maintain the farm and move to the city to live in an old folks home. The farm is inherited by the children who left and swore they'd never go back and sometimes they do go back and other times the old farm is left to decay.  And then, there are those farms that get sold.  Who do they get sold to?  They get sold to the people from the city who are tired of the rat race, people who are sick of the two hour commute so that they can sit in a cubicle all day long, staring at a computer screen under fluorescent lights. These same people that work 9 to 5, Monday through to Friday.  On the weekends they stand in line ups at the big box stores to buy their groceries and supplies for the week and maybe on Sunday they do something fun but then it's back to work on Monday, back to the old grind.  Over and over again, week after week.  They yearn for something more.  They want to grow things, they want to smell the rich earth.  They want to experience the quiet, stillness of the country and how dark it gets at night where you can see a million stars.  The rural life is laid back in comparison to the rush of the city.

Cities will always be there.  People come and people go, but typically cities just get bigger. It is the face of the country where we see the most changes and there seems to be a transformation going on here.  There seems to be a strange phenomenon of people moving from city to rural areas and setting up hobby farms and planting different crops than the mass producers,  such as small vineyards, greenhouses, or organic crops and that is just to name a few. There are dozens of micro-farms out there growing specific crops for a specific market.

Will we eventually see a change in how farming is done?  Will it go back to the way it used to be before big corporations got involved in farming? Does the new farmer want to practice the old ways of farming, keeping the farm small and selling their wares at local markets?  I think there is a movement in the works already and people are looking at reducing their food's carbon foot print.  Unfortunately, mass production and the cheap prices of goods from China have ruined fair prices to local farmers for their crops, they can't compete.

What we are personally striving to do is to go down the road of self-sufficiency and grow and raise our own food, on our own land.  We would love to just live off the grid and reduce our carbon footprint to almost nil.  This is our goal!

Growing Garlic

I like to buy local food: local meats, local produce, local milk ... you get the picture.

When we moved to PEI, we bought as much as we possibly could from local producers. One exception was garlic. Local garlic was selling for $2.50 per bulb. I never buy Chinese garlic, but settle on Californian garlic that is readily available in local grocery stores which typically sells for about $1 per bulb.  I would pay up to $1.50 for local garlic but I find it hard to stomach the $2.50 for 1 bulb given the 4 bulb weekly average we consume as a household.

When I complained to a colleague, she informed me that the reason local garlic was so expensive here was that garlic is really hard to grow on PEI. Oh, I thought, that explains it. I walked away from that conversation scratching my head. Something just didn't sit right with me. Hmmmm, I wondered, is it really difficult to grow garlic on PEI?

Garlic -- May 2013

People turn to gardening for a variety of reasons: freshness, quality, passion, doing-it-yourself, savings. In my case, I decided to try my hand at growing garlic in the hopes of having a fresh, local, quality product that could eventually save my family $520 per year and demystify garlic growing.

Surely, it couldn't be all that hard. I knew that garlic had to be planted in the fall and harvested the following summer so, in October of 2010, I went to the store and picked up two bulbs of California garlic. I opened the garlic bulbs into cloves and walked over to the garden area. I planted them two inches down with the root tip at the bottom, covered them with the soil, watered them a bit, and walked away.

The next spring, garlic started poking its way from the soil. This was very exciting and so far, I hadn't done anything special in terms of work. I just dropped them in the soil.

By around mid July, the garlic scapes were twisting like pig tails. A friend had said when that happens, I should cut the scape off just below the twisting pig tail and this would allow the energy of the plant to focus on bulb production. So, I did. From those scapes, I produced a wonderful garlic scape paste, which I put on pizza. But you could use it the same way you would normally use garlic cloves.

I can't remember exactly when it happened, probably mid August, the garlic appeared to be dried up. So, I pulled them from the ground. From those two bulbs the previous fall, I harvested 10 bulbs!!! We ate a few bulbs, and I planted the rest back to the soil. In the fall of 2012, if I recall correctly, I harvested about 24 bulbs. We ate a couple and I put the rest back into the soil. This August, I am set to harvest about 80 bulbs!!! I'll plant most back into the soil and by the summer of 2014, I should be able to harvest approximately 200 bulbs. At that point, I'll have enough garlic to feed our garlic addiction throughout the year and plant enough for the following year.

Last fall, I thought I would try something different. I noticed that bugs left the garlic plants alone.  After having read about companion planting, I decided to plant the garlic around our fruit trees (apples and cherries) in the hopes of keeping the pests off of the trees. I also decided to add some quality compost to the process as the trees need the rich soil.

Garlic Growing Around Cherry Tree -- May 2013

The garlic is doing great and the trees seem to be doing better than last year with fewer pests on them. So, you see, growing garlic is very difficult and growing garlic on PEI is especially difficult! LOL. One of the best things about growing garlic is that it's not sensitive to frost. We have had a few good frosts this May after the spring thaw but the garlic doesn't care. It just keeps on growing.

Garlic Growing Around Apple Tree -- June 2013