Trial By Worms Or A Volunteer’s First Day Experience

I approached the Green Barn from Christie St south from St. Clair. It stood out quite imposingly from the open area around it, almost a little intimidating. What with the small residential neighbourhood surrounding it, this large monolithic structure dominated the landscape. I had heard much about the Green Barn project and its conversion, or renewal from the old Wychwood Streetcar Barns. I used to volunteer several years ago in the STOP’s Earlscourt garden when the Barns were in its planning stage.

This was my first time to see it in full operation. If the exterior was a little austere broken by small garden plots along the side, a sandy volleyball court, and doggy run the interior was another world. I entered through the steel girdered gate into a small garden courtyard with an open brick oven fired up and waiting for something delicious to bake. Behind it was the sheltered garden green and full ready to give up its seasonal harvest. It was welcoming.

I entered the Wychwood Café; the tables and benches were solid and square-timbered in a brick and glassed area. The small stainless steel kitchen was separated by a small serving counter in the brick wall. A number of people were busy in small meetings, waiting for instructions, preparing in the kitchen, all sharing a common sense of purpose. I could see the office and knocked on the open door and met Kristin. I was expected and she welcomed me and was happy that I could help them.

I was introduced to Carolyn who would offer me a choice of garden tasks. There were several other volunteers waiting to be assigned and that she would be glad to teach us if we didn’t know how to do something or had any questions. They needed some in the garden to plant and harvest and they needed some in the greenhouse to help with the composting and that would be a heavy job. I felt that I could offer my services for whatever was required for composting, and as this was completely new to me, I could learn about it.

I was with two others and one had done it before but the procedure was explained again. There was a big bucket of earth on the floor and another empty with a screened frame, raised to make it easier to work on, and several other smaller pots. From the big bucket on the floor we would scoop out with trowels, several small piles of dark, moist earth and remove the non-soil matter and sift it through the frame for the final compost material.

Did I mention the worms? It was crawling with worms, Red Squigglers they were. They lived up to their names and more so! We had to grab them before they squiggled through the screen. It was like being in a David Attenborough documentary. I had visions of them being in the burritos that we were told were baking in the oven for us! I’m not surprised if they are delicacies in some cultures. They told us that this was the initiation for volunteers. It turned out to be a lot of fun and learning more about others as well as the fundamental importance of worms in the process of fertilizing the soil.

In the end we had cumulatively produced almost 140 lbs or 63 kilos of sweet, pure compost! Can’t wait to come back.

First Day of Spring 07

Just had to say this before midnight comes ‘round. In celebration, the Demonsmonkey & I planted tomato seeds in the greenhouse at the Scadding Court Community Centre where we started our 1st day on our 2nd volunteer job. When you are in demand you follow your calling! As far as I can recall it was the first time I have planted a ‘legal’ seed and the long-lost memories trickled in. More on that later…

Best to you all

- darthcricket

Seedy Saturday - Toronto

Saturday March 17, 2007
Scadding Court Community Centre
Dundas St./Bathurst St.


The morning dawned bright like an alpine spring. Clear blue skies, fresh white powder snow and a crisp bite to every breath you take. Heading downtown to Chinatown today with a couple of bags of tomatillo ‘paradise’ seeds to do some dealing and getting tips on grow ops.

Drugs? Not unless tomatillos causes hallucinations or other extreme sensory reactions. There are only two sensory reactions that need descriptions here, sight and taste. Before I tell you about the dealers let me go back a bit to last summer in the Earlscourt Garden that we were volunteering in.



This is an organic garden. One normally thinks of gardens as a systematic or orderly array of various vegetables or flowers, pleasing to mind and eye. But first glancing at this garden one is struck by the relative chaos and profusion of plants, vegetables, fruits, berries, herbs and flowers. But be assured that there is method to the madness, a symbiotic diversity, a botanical multicultural consensus. This garden reflects the diversity of the cultures in that neighbourhood and the one plant in particular that eventually caught my attention is the tomatillo.

At first it looked to me like they were growing chinese lanterns and like most everyone they were curiously tempting to touch. They were very papery and empty. This invited a yell from the boss man as they are very fragile! As time went by they grew bigger or rather fuller. They are about the size of, ummm… chinese lanterns; actually about two inches round and always green.

One day the boss man pointed to one of these and not having touched one since being yelled at it was surprisingly heavy and solid, full to almost bursting. And I thought they were purely ornamental like the flowers. But nothing is just ornamental in this garden everything has a reason. He peeled away the paper shell and behold the tomatillo, like a little green tomato, in it’s ripe glory.

And the taste?! Not knowing what to expect I took a bite and was rewarded with mouth-watering experience with visions of the Paradise of Eden! It was the perfect marriage of tomato and an apple, kind of like Adam and Eve. And if you believe having visions is synonymous with mind altering drugs you could be right. Keeping in mind that everything is an illusion and relative as a fingerprint and thus life is what you make it!

Where was I? ….

Back in the Beginning...

Fri afternoon Marie aka tyhe Demonsmonkey, and I got a call from the project manager, Amanda, for the community garden at STOP Community Food Centre and confirmed our volunteering for the community garden. Woohoo! We started the next day from 10 - noon. Arrived before Amanda, and met Herman who is given an honorarium to look after the garden and spends most of his days there working it and keeping an eye open for problems - people stealing or messing it up. He lives in a house across the lane and can watch it from there.

We got the tour from him and were told not to touch anything and told us why as some vegetables were young and some special Caribbean type stuff. Naturally he is very protective!

He is a real charmer after you work with him for a while. We took a break after an hour crawling around on our hands and knees under the tomato plants picking weeds. He had mixed up a beverage from the various mints in the garden and some gingerroot and asked us to try it. It was delicious! It was sweet but not too much and the ginger was predominant over the mint but not too much and there was a natural fizz but not too much nice body but not too much - it was just right. Had a full glass the next and chased it down with cold coffee. Amazingly perfect.

Had a great morning. We are going back Wed from 5:30 - 8pm. Marie is quite excited about the Green Barn Project, STOP is part of it with Foodshare, at the old Wychwood TTC Barns. We are keeping our ears to the rail on that one but in the meantime we are looking forward to working with the people at STOP.

So for the last 2 days, we have been putting up a small garden on the balcony, with green onions, peas and M wants to try some beets while there is still some growing season. We are making some room up by the windows to try to grow some things over the winter. Next year we plan to go crazy. M is inspired to do this having a small book called The Apartment Gardener.

Daylight Savings as WMD

By any other name messing with the clock is DST and when you mess with something there are always consequences!

Benjamin Franklin in 1784 was the first person manifest this phenomenal thought purely as a joke on the French. He was the American Ambassador to the court Louis X??? at the time and poked fun at the aristocratic laziness and propensity for partying up all night. They thought he was cute and cuddly. No one at the time could appreciate his intellect of extra-terrestrial proportions and wrote it off merely to his Masonic musings.

The idea disappeared off the radar until some Brit aristocratic duffer in 1905, Wm. Willet, invented the term Daylight Savings Time and thought he had a ‘in’ at the House of Commons to legislate in favour of all poof golfers to give them time to finish their games before the clubhouse bar closed. It was narrowly defeated.

Not until Spring 1916 during WW I did the German’s hatch a fiendish plan to catch everyone with their pants down, if they had any pants to speak of, and turned their clocks ahead to get the jump on the rest of the world. Who would have thought that a Weapon of Mass Destruction could be so simple as that. The Brits never recovered for another 21 days and were forced to turn their clocks ahead to match. The golfers were delighted! The US as usual held back on the war efforts and changed theirs at the end of WW I but was aborted soon after in 1919 by angry farmers despite another powerful golfer in favour of the American wealthy class trying to veto return to Nature’s intention.

My but times have changed! Or have they? There’s always some screwball that the powerful can hang up in front of them, either to fly or die, and Bush is their guy. What he wouldn’t do for that extra hour of vacation on the ranch at Crawford Texas. A firm believer in Gen. 1:26-31, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ .......

But!

This must be an abomination, as we have not succeeded in convincing the plants to spring forward or back, the cat still wants his breakfast and the dog needs to pee; farm life still proceeds against his God-given wishes. Try to tell this to a farmer let alone sell it to him. Keep in mind Bush is not a farmer he is a rancher.

Neither is he a geek. My computer operating system, Windows, ignores the new shift, and coincidentally, so does Harper’s Ministry of Finance in Ottawa which has been shut down for 2 weeks plus trying to figure out why it can’t access all those income tax refund cheques that the poorest of us have been waiting for. It’s been ignoring everything! Who should we blame? PM Harper? Flaherty, Min of Fin? Yes, partly. Which points the finger right back to Bush. Or better yet, sighting down their ass-cracks.

That brings us back full circle to the first use of DST. Just as Germany used the DST in WW I as a surprise WMD naturally, Bush is using it in his *WOT. WHAT? Yes WOT. Not only that, it is a payback to the Frankenfood Industry, Monsanto, Cargill, Pepsi, etc for destabilising what remains of the global competition.

* War on Terror

And lastly who do you imagine could mastermind this intricate threading of micro-events? God? Harper? Bush?

Remember Benjamin Franklin?

Was that a meteor I just saw?

darthcricket Goes UrbAg!

It is a new spring, dubious thanks to the Harper/Bush mafia. Of course I exaggerate a bit but it feels like spring after the coldest February on record. It is actually a new Daylight Savings Schedule. More on this later...

UrbAg? WTF? It's the new anti-Harper/Bush method of putting good food on the table. UrbAg is an anacronym for Urban Agriculture as opposed to agriculture where you might normally find farms and big farms at that! They are called BigAg...BigBadAg mostly. And then there's the SmallAg who probably do it for love and and swap/sell what they have left over from feeding their families to smart families in the cities and towns. (SmallAg's are friends of UrbAgs usually).

My interest, as a subversive insect, was slowly cooking as, kind of like 'boiling frogs', as I was being exposed to the Demonsmonkey's garden in a very gradual way. She, my partner, thought last year, "Why should we buy food?" (I'm sure she didn't mean to steal it as she's not that kind of monkey). So she started her balcony garden late in the season last year but unfortunately the beets didn't make it though got the peas to pod. As we have been volunteering in the garden at the STOP Community Food Centre since last summer there must have been some subliminal messaging happening as well.

So anyway I was scanning my favourite anti-WalMart flyer from Canadian Tire and an ad for a 72 cell herb garden kit jumped out at me! And for $6.99 + PST&GST! Wow! I was hooked (cooked?). Not only that but they had "duck shoes" for the Demonsmoney! Wow x 2 = WowWow! Something celestial must have been aligned for it sure felt like Spring.

So now as I sit here typing I have, sitting to my left, a mini greenhouse full of potential delights for culinary, medicinal and other esoteric purposes... basil, oregano, parsley, cilantro and thyme.

We got magick!