not far from the tree

Two new volunteers came to help out this week: Suzanne and Geir Arne. The former lives in the neighbourhood and the latter is visiting from Norway. He’s in Toronto for the world championships of rock, paper, scissors as the President of the Norwegian Association for Rock, Paper, Scissors (aka Stein, Saks, Papir). They were such stalwart volunteers, working under harsh climatic conditions and smiling throughout.

We harvested a host of carrots again today. This time we found the famed yellow carrots that Wendy had told Farrah about. The purple ones remain undiscovered (or maybe the rabbits discovered them long ago?).

I had another garden epiphany, like when I saw the egg-shaped and egg-coloured eggplants that set the world upon its proper axis. I was chatting with GeirArne trying to use just a little bit of my Norwegian (I was an exchange student in Porsgrunn, Norway a number of years ago) when I remembered the word for carrots: gulrøtter. Translated literally, this means “yellow roots.” Today’s most common variety of carrots do not have yellow roots – but the variety we picked today most certainly did! The world remains in perfect chaos.

By far the most elegant part of today’s harvest was the assortment of flowers that Suzanne cut. Having a degree in landscape architecture, I delegated her the official bouquet arranger for the day and she produced excellent results! They were the first items to sell at the market (each a lovely, local Thanskgiving centrepiece for only $5 a piece!) so she did us proud. And then she started inventing capitalist incentives for volunteers, trying to get me to keep track of profits and attribute those to volunteer labour. Silly Suzanne… it just ain’t gonna fly while I’m the group tyrant!

Not only did she and GeirArne harvest until they couldn’t harvest anymore, but they also helped carry our bounty from garden to market.

At the market, we were greeted by the regular wonderful crowd of curious and encouraging market-goers.

(Photo by GeirArne Brevik)

Farrah met up with us there, putting her sales skills to work.

Soon enough, the humidity was broken by a huge downpour of rain. And our poor little stall – the smallest one there and one of the few without any cover – was hit by a deluge overflowing from the roof of the church! We ran for cover under our neighbours’ tent, the naturally-raised beef folks. This gave us a chance to chat about rock, paper, scissors with Geir Arne. Farrah courageously challenged him to a game – and won! He brushed it off saying that his strength is endurance. A likely excuse.

The rain didn’t stop us. In fact, it helped clean our produce to look even better for customers! The clouds soon parted, revealing a gorgeous and sunny afternoon. We sold almost all of our wares – just a red cabbage was left over so we happily donated that to the Stop’s community kitchen.

This just might be the last market of the year for not far from the tree. Since the apples are long gone and the garden’s bounty is dwindling, we might not appear at the market next week. Instead, it’s time to develop a longer-term plan.

This all began as I was dreaming up an urban foraging community arts project, then the opportunity to harvest from Spadina House arose. We’ve tried out the harvesting/selling side of things as a pilot project and now it’s time to pack things up for the winter and re-examine how we might approach this as community arts, environmental education, and a step towards social justice. The project has amassed an amazing group of interested and interesting people who each have their own thoughts on where the project could go next. Stay tuned for information on a meeting to discuss those possibilities…