DIY Wheat

As grain farmers in Saskatchewan struggle through a late harvest, grain farmers on Vancouver Island are celebrating the success of their very first harvest.

Fifty families in and around the town of Duncan participated in a project to grow grains on a small scale. They celebrated their harvest by gathering at a local bakery called True Grain, where they had the opportunity to turn their grains of wheat into flower using the traditional stone mill.

The project is called Island Grains, and was started by Brock McLeod and Heather Walker.

Heather and Brock are new to farming (having just wrapped up their second season) and started growing grains after picking-up a book about small-scale wheat production at a second hand store. After one successful attempt, they decided to share their new knowledge, and build on it, by offering up a chunk of their land to anyone who was interested in trying to grow grains. They also set-up a series of workshops to help people through the process.

In the spirit of experimentation, Island Grains participants grew an array of heritage varieties with varying degrees of success, with different lessons learned. Plots of Red Fife—the first wheat to ever be grown with any success in Canada—grew well, but too tall and with heavy heads. The plants flopped over, and that made them difficult to harvest. Many participants enthusiastically planted an ancient grain called Emmer, which they got to taste at one of the Island Grain workshops. However, the seed variety turned out to be for winter, so plants grew into grasses, but never into full stalks.

One of the participants, Sandy McPherson, harvested a kilogram of Kamut from her plot.

“My husband and I were motivated by our desire to eat more locally,” McPherson says, “but we didn’t work too hard on growing our grains. Every now and then, we’d plan a bike ride to the plot so we could do some weeding.”

Next year, she says, they’ll grow Kamut on their own land, and also attempt Quinoa and Amaranth.

Sarah Simpson says her grain growing experience was anything but easy.

After not weeding for a month, she encountered weeds as tall as herself (5ft). She set to work destroying them, only to be told later by Brock that she’d, “weeded her plot to death.”

At the end of the season, Simpson harvested enough wheat for just one loaf of bread. Still, she says she had fun, and is going to try again next year.

Brock and Heather don’t know how much grain was produced on the collective plot, but if the yield resembled their plot of the same size, it would have produced some 500lbs of grain.

Note: One pound of grain produces, on average, two loaves of bread.

K-Dub

When you’re growing up, your town is just your town. Maybe as a teenager you hate it, but you probably can’t name the specific reasons except for maybe all the people you’re sick and tired of, your parents among them who’re driving you crazy and the fact that there’s nothing really to do at all. I don’t know if I ever directed my teenage angst directly at Kitchener-Waterloo, but I knew I wanted to get out. And out I got, when I was only 16.

I came back of course, and after only 6 months. The really strange thing is that living in a town of 300 people instead of 300 thousand people made Kitchener seem unbearably small. In Germany, I passed a river and sheep on the way to school. In Kitchener, I walked passed an Italian food store, over a railway track, through the parking lot of my Dad’s office and past a hospital. Just before actually entering school I had to walk through the “smoke hole,” where drug-deals were planned and girls came by with strollers to show-off their new babies.

I knew I wanted to get out, but mainly it was to get away from my parents, and to escape the possibility of going to a university whose populations was known to be made up predominately of "nerds". Many of those nerds did not speak English and were very into math. Many of those nerds went on to make a lot of money, and some even engineered technology considered partially responsible for our current economic crisis.

I left for university, came home, left again... There were some stints where I came back and the town surprised me: I realized how great the independent cinema was, and made a few new friends.

But I’ve been caught off guard by recent longings for the place. I actually found myself feeling a little jealous of the old friends who never left.

Getting back here though, I am shocked by the abhorrent urban landscape. In parts it seems the city’s greatest attempts at architecture come with the effort to make nice strip malls. There’s an organic food shop set up at a intersection of four-lane roads with tractor-trailers rumbling past in order to attract customers coming on and off the highway. There are tables with umbrellas set up so that when the weather gets better, customers can eat their deli sandwiches while soaking up the sun and watching the parking lot.

Residential neighbourhoods in this part of town actually have a certain charm: the brick houses are modest with peaked roofs with big trees out front for shade. Its not uncommon though, that this pleasant view will be marred by an overweight man cutting his grass while topless. In Paris, the man would be fined for this.

There are also a whole slew of new golf courses lined by monster homes. Each 700 thousand dollar home looks different, each is hideous in its own way. There are few trees except for those on the golf course, there’s nowhere to shop or socialize, but plenty of two-car driveways making ample room for Mercedes convertibles and Land Rovers.

It’s safe to say that after seeing all this, my nostalgia has waned. Then a friend tells me, “Get thee to Schneider’s Bush, you can find morel mushrooms under the white pines this time of year.” So I hop on my bike and ride through sprawl that feels like it will never end. I cycle past houses on pieces of land where only cows grazed when I was a kid. I make a left-hand turn past more of these houses until they disappear and give way to a Christmas tree farm and I’m almost there. There is a lone stop sign at the end of the road where I can lock-up my bike and, I step into the woods.

Almost immediately I find a mushroom, but I realize I don’t know what a morel actually looks like, and this one just looks like one of the regular white ones that may or may not be poisonous, so I keep walking. For five minutes I can hear the nearby road and I half hope I’ll always hear that road—for fear of getting lost. The sound fades quickly though, and I march on. I stop to watch a beetle who seems to be making-love to a twig, then am urged on by the mosquitoes attacking my knees.

Soon I come to a clearing covered in tall grass sloping upwards. Except for the trees along the bottom, this place would make a perfect toboggan run. A rabbit darts under some brush. Maybe he was planning to do that anyway. Maybe he was startled the large intruder that’s stumbled out of the woods—by me.

When I reach the top I look at where I’ve come from, over what should be the city—but all I see are treetops. Where am I? Have I just walked through a magical wardrobe?

I decide to walk through another section of forest and find another, much larger clearing. The hum of traffic I’ve been living in has been replaced by a cricket symphony. A crow calls out from the far end of the field, and sweeter little birds chirp around me. I stand there for a while just to listen and feel the sun. The grass brushes around my legs and then the mosquitoes resume their attack. I move on.

This next patch of forest is different from the last. The pathways are not covered with a layer of dried pine needles. Instead I walk on hardened deep-brown mud criss-crossed with roots. It gives the impression an older forest—a deeper, darker and more mystical sort of place. The air is wet in here, and I wonder if maybe I might bump into someone at some point. But it’s pretty clear I’m alone: the only movement in this forest comes from scurrying animals or the odd bird.

Down another hill and around another corner my eye gets stuck on something bright green. I look harder and see that it’s a pond covered in moss and the sun is shining on it.

The next clearing is a farmer’s field—acres of land that used to be corn. I’m getting a bit worried now, because this isn’t what I was expecting. So I resume my former path, and try to get back to the first big clearing. I’m relieved to find it and let my legs go loose down the hill and back into the forest.

I don't hear the road here as I hoped I would. In fact, I come out to another spot that looks unfamiliar. Have I completely misjudged my path?

“Hello!” I call out, even though I know no one will answer. I briefly imagine the search party formed to find me, which they probably will quite quickly but if not, my greatest risk of death will be the mosquitoes. I hear my father’s voice chastising me for coming out here alone.

Then I see a house and rush towards it. There are two little gardens and to me the place is perfect. I walk right on the road then change my mind and go left—I see my bike 200 meters away.

Kitchener-Waterloo has been redeemed.

As I unlock my bike and put my sweatshirt in my bag, I hear a car come to a screeching halt behind me.

“Hey you!” The driver yells, “You know where the Alpine Trailer Park is?”

Oh-La-La: Meet Natasha Cloutier

I discovered Radio Oh-La-La on Boingboing.net in the fall of 2006, and I'm not sure why I started listening, other than the fact that I love boing-boing. The podcast's creator is Natasha Cloutier, and since coming to Europe, I've been determined to meet her. I finally got the chance when I went to Amsterdam at the end of March. She's great, and she's definitely on to something. To me, she's proof that you shouldn't do what people tell you or try to make money--you should just find something you love and sink your teeth in. Have a listen, I've linked her blog in to the right...

There might be 50 thousand techno DJ’s in Holland, but there is only one Natasha Cloutier.

She spins regularly on Sunday night at a club called De Nieuwe Anita in central Amsterdam. Her audience is mostly Dutch, but the regulars, apparently, have come to learn some of the music she plays well enough to sing along.

You see, Natasha has converted Dutch-hipsters into lovers of French-rock. I’m convinced that if Natasha had stepped into one of my French immersion classrooms, she really could have turned things around for my poor, suffering teachers.

Those teachers made us listen to Roche Voisine. He grew up in Edmunston, New Brunswick, but made it big as a rock-star in the French-speaking world. Apparently he was a heart-throb in France, I was never convinced.

Some of today’s French teachers seem to agree with me about Natasha. When I met her she told me she’d been helping a teacher in California with the lyrics to LOVE by Nat King Cole:

L est pour la façon dont tu me regardes
O est le seul pour moi
V est très très extra-ordinaire
E est encore plus que quiconque que vous pouvez adorer

Nat King Cole, by the way, didn’t know French, but he learned it phonetically in order to sing.

Natasha does a lot of lyrical, and historical explaining of the songs featured in her podcast—Radio Oh La La, Franco a Go-Go. For example, it might not be common knowledge that “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra, was originally written in French. Paul Anka is credited as a co-composer of the song, because he essentially re-wrote Gilles Thibau’s original lyrics.

What makes Natasha’s podcasts so great is the fact that she really knows and connects to the music—and she’s a natural translator. Her enthusiasm helps her audience forge their own connections with the music.

On top of dj-ing gigs and podcasting, Natasha runs her own copy-writing and translating company. She speaks French, English, Dutch and Russian all fluently.

She told me that it took her ages to actually openly appreciate French-language music. She’s an only child—so on road-trips with her Francophone mum and Anglophone Dad—she was exposed to a mix of Stevie Wonder, The Beejees, Janice Joplin, Joe Dassin, and Jean-Pierre-Ferlin. For ages, she told me, she was actually embarrassed about loving French music, but she came out of the closest when she started attending a popular weekly gig of French music in Montreal called, “C’est Extra.”

Natasha grew up all over Quebec (her Dad was in the military) but having a parent on both sides of the bilingual divide never allowed her the luxury of fitting into either culture.

“During the first referendum (1980), both French and English kids threw stones at me.”

It’s the French side Natasha says she relates to, and she told me she’s not much into heading West from Quebec, because she always feels such a strong prejudiced from English-Canadians when they hear her last name.

This doesn’t make her any more accepting of French narrow-mindedness.

“For years,” she told me, “My step-mother refused to learn English, but still went to Florida every year and relied on my father to translate. It made me crazy.”

Natasha told me this politics, this linguistic and cultural prejudice definitely played a role in her move to Europe.

The Dutch, she told me, are terrified of anything French.

“They consider it exotic, and France is just a place to go on nice holidays,” she said.

Natasha’s got a strategy going to get over this hurdle, and it seems to be working: Get the novices on board, and just get people communicating.

A Way-Too-Long Entry: Transition Town Totnes

ABOVE: Paul & Ivana Barclay's cob house.


I went to Totnes in January... so I am a bit behind in posting this. You can also listen to a documentary version of this story on Dispatches, March 23.

When you dream of the future, do you see Mad Max, The Jetsons, or something else entirely?

People in Totnes, England, spend a lot of time on that dream, and they see all kinds of things. Here are a few of the dreams I encountered on my trip to the town: vegetarian totalitarianism, alternative power for rock bands, shark attacks in English rivers, food shortages, water wars, and petroleum driven cars being preserved as monuments.

Three years ago, a guy named Rob Hopkins returned to Totnes, his hometown, in order to put his latest idea to the test. He had been living in Ireland and teaching a course on permaculture when someone handed him a copy of a film called, “The End of Suburbia.”

It’s an apocalyptic look at what happens to suburban life when there’s no more gas for the SUV, never mind the trucks and planes that ship food from other continents.

In his rural existence, growing all his own food, Rob figured he was safe from the fate of suburbanites.

“Then it dawned on me—I was living in suburbia, it just didn’t look the same! I had to drive from where I was to go to socialize, go to shops, to take my kids anywhere… it came as a big shock to my system.”

He took the film into class and made a project out of how to solve the problem of oil dependency. The result was the “Transition Town”—a concept that harnessed the creative energy of a community to create an “energy descent” roadmap.

When Rob made his return to Totnes a short time later, he started knocking on doors and talking to people he thought might be interested in the idea. He started hosting talks and film nights about peak oil and climate change, holding brainstorming sessions and workshops…

“When it started out, we had a few ideas,” Rob told me, “We put those out to people and they then went off and played around, added things, took things away, the model keeps being changed all the time. It’s something that learns from its successes and its failures all the time.”

So three years-in, there are some 300 people on board in the Totnes Transition Town project. They’ve established a local currency, a garden share project, a local food directory, and are working on a multitude of others.

A word that gets tossed around a lot in transition circles is “resilience.” Rob says it’s a word he prefers over sustainability.

“Sustainability implies that you can keep everything going as it is at the moment in a kind of globalized economic model,” he says, “You just run the car on hydrogen and you stick a solar panel on the top and everything else is just exactly the same.”

When it comes to big, global systems, problems are easy to ignore. By the time they’re obvious, they’re enormous, and seemingly out of control. Localized systems bring problems closer to home and down to scale.

In his book, Rob acknowledges the struggles and hardships that existed in before highways and shopping malls, but I can’t help but agree with him in the belief that there might be a lot to learn from that era.

He quotes a passage from Great Expectations that describes the outskirts of London around 1870:

Wemmick's house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like battery mounted with guns…

“At the back, there's a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you'll judge at supper what sort of salad I can raise. So, sir," said Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “ If you can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions."

Then he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth. Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet.

"I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades…”

Wemmick’s got a pride in his home that can’t be bought at Ikea, or secured by a low-interest mortgage (which we don’t need to worry about any more).

I encountered a similar kind of pride when I met Paul and Ivana Barclay, who are in the midst of building their family home in the town of Dartington—just next to Totnes.

Paul used to work in IT for a telephone company, and until he and Ivana decided to build this house… he’d never worked with his hands before.

The house, by the way, is made of cob—earth from a hole in the yard has been mixed with straw from a nearby field to make the walls. The roof is thatched, and stuffed with recycled sheep’s wool for insulation. Ninety percent of the materials used to build this house have been imported from no more than 10 kilometers away.

Ivana says that while the house may fall in-line with many ecologically-sound principles—that’s not their motivation for building it. She says she wanted a house that tied her family to their forefathers—and this is very much like the houses that would have been built in this part of England before energy sucking steam engines.

Paul told me that before starting, he was intimidated by the idea of building his own house.

“But this is doable for anyone,” he told me, “And I can’t wait to build another.”

Paul says the family should be able to move into the house by summertime.

Paul and Ivana don't even consider themselves a part of Transition Town Totnes, but by opening up their home to curious passers-by, and using local resources, skills and support for their personal project--they definitely are. They're work proves what's possible, and that dreams can actually come true.

A Lesson in Protest: How to Drive Away the Cops

Engage them in conversation, flatter them, and don’t take yourself seriously.

That’s what this guy did. I happened upon him, just as he was telling her that she was beautiful.

He went on:

You’re not a police officer. You are a divine human being, really, that’s how I see you. And the whole problem with this situation is you’re hiding behind that uniform, and won’t even tell me your name. We can’t actually have a proper conversation and work all this out. Seriously, what do you think of all of this?

I didn’t hear her response, only his response to her response:

She thinks I’m going to get bored of this. NO WAY! She doesn’t know my wife and kids. If I get bored of this, then I have to go home to them and read stories until they fall asleep.

Now let’s talk about lies…

At this point he pulls out a ten-pound note, and starts telling a story about how he went to the Bank of England last week. He asked the cashier for the ten pounds stirling the note is said to be worth. Of course, they offered him £10 worth of change, but refused his demand for ten pounds of silver. Hence, the note is a lie.

The whole altercation, if you can call it that, lasted for a very short time. As the guy continued to talk, every few minutes the most senior police officer came along and gave the order for the wall of police officers to move back. Eventually they were against a wall. Then they disappeared altogether.

The Weed in Amsterdam

So, I arrived in Amsterdam yesterday and overcame my disorientation in order to make it to the apartment where I've rented a room for a week. I was introduced to my house mate, who's name I don't know, but who I know some other things about. Let me tell you:

He is 33 years old, considers himself a kid, has an english degree and smokes dope; he's "from America"; he doesn't like to go out much so he's glad that I, as the new housemate am a girl so that he doesn't have to go out to meet one; he goes to bed at 4am every night and wakes up at 3pm; before he came here (one month ago) he was living with his parents in LA and collecting a government pension which was great because he made a lot of money and had a guesthouse and a pool but was just so sick of LA after 30 years; he's not running away--he's just DONE with LA; he really likes movies because he likes to travel, ya know? like, mentally; he thinks that horror movies have really gotten scarier because movie writers have gotten better at depicting evil, which is maybe a little extreme but maybe its important so that people know that evil like that really exists because, you know... its important to not be ignorant, that shit really happens, maybe not a lot but--once in a while. Oh yeah, and he has an English degree.

And that was what I learned about him in the first 15 minutes.

At 3am, my stomach woke me from the restless sleep due to the sound of his horror movies. I snuck into the kitchen and started rummaging. He stepped out of his room to inform me he was a bit out of it because he just took his sleeping medication. Which led to an explanation of his psychosis which might have been caused by crystal meth or all the acid he did when he was a teengager and... woah, he couldn't imagine that I had to get up at 7 the next morning and thought that maybe we could hang out when I got back from work but realistically he probably wouldn't want to go anywhere because, you know, he doesn't really like going out.

Taxes

Again I might be lagging but... I've just decided that I'm sick of paying taxes.

This is new because normally I like the idea of some responsible, socially minded, democratically elected body taking my money and investing it in roads and health care and all that nice stuff. But I've just decided, its time to quit this tax-paying shit, and it was a business journalist who convinced me.

I was telling him that I got this job in the Hague (a short term posting as a judge with the International Criminal Court, ha ha), and he said, "I hope this doesn't offend you but... how much do they pay you?"

I replied that it was the same, roughly, as what the BBC pays per-day. I gave him the number, in pounds. The reaction was an immediate FOTH (Fly-Off The Handle).

"WHAT!! That's what they pay you? You're telling me they get away with that?? And, what, you're telling me you pay taxes on that???"

Um... yeah, taxes.

"Well you know where that tax money is going, don't you? Banks, yeah... their taking your pocket change to pay for some fat-cat's bonus."

This really wasn't the rant I was expecting, from someone who writes about money all day every day, who is, basically, paid by banks.

He has a point though, don't you think?

Then to top this off, I get the news today that the Canadian government is handing more cutbacks to the CBC, and that they're even debating the idea of putting advertising on CBC Radio. If CBC Radio had ads, even I wouldn't listen, and I've always listened, I work for them!

My mind wandered to the lock-out of 2006, and how CBC employees teamed up with local community radio stations and worked anyway, had a lot of fun, and did a better job than when they had managers breathing down their necks. The CBC's got a lot of fans, so why not directly sponsor these stations? (Although I hate the idea of funding-drives like NPR has.) The problem is, we'd all still have to pay taxes, pay for subsidies for the oil industry, pay for wars we don't want to fight, all the while watching the things we care about being clumsily hacked-away.

Finance a la Mrbs: 101

If I know anything at all about finance, it must mean EVERYONE knows all about it. Because I lag when it comes to numbers (and apparently fashion). I remember something about derivatives in calculus, which I took twice: the first time I dropped out halfway through because I was sure that if I took it again, I'd get score 80% on the credit, when I was sitting at a grade of 72%. The second time I took it, I gave up halfway through, because I'd already gotten into the university of my choice, and couldn't be bothered to dedicate my brain to a subject I would never touch again. That is until, now... 15 years later.
I should've worked harder, and I should've suffered through first-year calculus at University along with many suffering friends, even though it would've brought my already weak GPA down further. (If I ever have kids, I'll tell them about having avoided that suffering, and how I shouldn't have.) Derivatives are important. They are the intersection between philosophy and math, and they've been used to make stupid amounts of money, enough money to save the world a few times, more money than there is. A derivative is a contract to buy something at a certain price in the future, no money down. I don't know if it has anything to do with grad 13 calculus. And I might be wrong on that. All I know is that it is a very tiny piece of a very large puzzle, and the only way I learn anything is by writing it down.
Apologies, if you learned nothing here.

Brick Lane

This is an adaptation of a thing I wrote at my creative writing workshop at Eastside books on Brick Lane. I was pretty happy with it off the bat--maybe its better read aloud as it was with the first draft--but now I'm feeling like it needs a lot of work. Brick Lane on a Wednesday night is a world apart and twelve senses removed from the Sunday morning experience.

Brick Lane is proof that ugly can be good. People don't love Brick Lane despite its ugliness, but because of it. They love it because it is a million contradictions crammed into a few blocks. You've got beautiful old factories that were never built to be beautiful, but they've got these old windows with a million little panes, and detailing in the pollution stained brick walls. Stick a neon sign on top of one of those walls and there you have what makes the place: something old, ugly/beautiful mixed up with something new, ugly/beautiful. Neither object is worthy of remark on its own.
The people here hold the same appeal. For kids and artists this place is a playground. They dress with a precise lack of style: big hair, bulky down coats, skinny jeans and track bikes. Throw in a mustache, here or their. Make it look easy, but know that every overpriced thrift store's been combed to come up with that perfect ensemble. These kids will catch your eye like a fluorescent stripe on a ski-vest circa 1991, they steal the show. But its the other people here, the ones who are almost invisible but not quite, that make the show. They work in shops that acquire their goods by faxing shipment orders to places that haven't yet caught on to email. They're the reason the convenience store is stocked with cardamom seeds and cinnamon sticks.

Les Canards

I fantasize about ducks, not so much those that paddle around in filthy municipal ponds back home, chasing chunks of bread thrown by bored children... They sort of disgust me, those ducks.

I'm more thinking foie gras, duck confit, magret. I'm addicted. Yet, with all that goodness and fat, eating them makes me ache with guilt sometimes. Its not guilt because I feel like I should go to the gym, but guilt because it can be too much of a good thing. Too much of things that are only mediocre make me feel that way too.

Oxford street in London makes me insane. I swore, after my first trip to Oxford street that I would never go back but somehow I find myself there regularly now. I've sort of gotten used to it, I wish that I hadn't.

Back to ducks. I imagine myself raising them, being followed around by ducklings on a daily basis. Somehow, the unglamorous task of raising them, having them shit on my boots, and then the gut-wrenching job of killing, plucking, dissecting them might make up for my indulgence. That is my fantasy.

Is this a mere canard?

ca⋅nard:

1. a false or baseless, usually derogatory story, report, or rumor.
2. Cookery. a duck intended or used for food.
3. Aeronautics. a. an airplane that has its horizontal stabilizer and elevators located forward of the wing. b. Also called canard wing. one of two small lifting wings located in front of the main wings.c.an early airplane having a pusher engine with the rudder and elevator assembly in front of the wings.