Ontario buy-local grocers go independent

This is great news. For a list of buy-local Toronto markets, visit MyMarket.

Dale Kropf calls it Independence Day: On July 3, his five grocery stores in southwestern Ontario ceased to be Sobeys franchises.

Corporate policies prevented him from buying local products, he says, so he joined forces with four other former Sobeys franchisees and formed the independent Hometown Grocers Co-Op.

“We feel that local food, local presence is huge in our market and we wanted to take advantage of that,” Kropf says.
Canadians are increasingly subscribing to the “buy local” and “100 mile diet” philosophies due to concerns over imported food, Kropf adds. “The pressure was always mounting — the more recalls, the more bad press from China or wherever the product was coming from. I know that in our case, our private label pickles are made in Indonesia. I couldn’t believe that.”

As a franchisee for a large grocery chain, Kropf says, corporate policies stipulating that he only buy federally inspected meat prevented him from stocking local products. Most federally inspected meat in Canada comes from large corporations such as Maple Leaf, Cargill and Tyson.

Read more on CBC

Urban organic gardening

This is our backyard. It is a bit chilly out right now, but not for long (I hope). I have started some seedlings of herbs and vegetables a few months ago to be grown here and in some planters I am introducing. I’ve already planted the tomatoes and started building the bamboo supports. The rest of my post will go through steps I took to get to this point.

As you can tell from the second photo, I’ve allowed for some extra space on the right for various herbs and vegetables (this is the half-sun/half-shade plot). The garden is already populated by some herbs, two apple trees and a sour cherry tree that I introduced last summer. Aside from edible plants, I am introducing a few native plant species to add some variety in the garden.

I know a thing or two about gardening and sustainable farming having learned to grow herbs, flowers and vegetables from my grandparents. They built, moved to and lived in a self-sustainable cabin in the forest in Ukraine (out of necessity and passion). I spent my summers with them and performed various chores on our little family farm.

All those years of grandma yelling at me to get my ass moving watering are finally paying off! Ah, grandma.

Now I can put these skills to good use in my immediate grown-up urban surroundings in Toronto. I hope to make the food on our table more healthy and delicious, and do my part to make Toronto and the planet a greener place to live.

Over the winter, I worked on two planters made from a set of drawers we picked up on St. Clair sidewalk. Complete with rope handles, treated with a coat paint (recycled from older mixed paints), pimpin’ wheels (picked up at Active Surplus) and filled with a mix of last year’s compost (we compost any food that can be recycled in the garden – last year we’ve collected and processed close to 100kg) and home-made potting mix. As you can probably tell, they will need one more coat of paint.

After the planters were built, I’ve ordered some untreated seeds from Stokes Seeds from St. Catherines and set up a light table for germination and seedling development. I also bought  250 organic peat pellets on eBay that will surely last me a few years. I planted the seeds in the basement under timed fluorescent lights (making sure the temperature of the light is suitable). I wish my house was designed in a way that lets the sunlight do the job, but because of harsh Canadian climate and limited light, I had to resort to these lights.

I have been watering and taking care of the seedlings according to their appropriate temperature and light setting. The fluorescent light-bulbs were timed, so that the seeds are getting the right amount of light at all times. I ran the whole rig through Kill-a-Watt, which lets me monitor the electricity consumption. So far, in the past two months that I’ve had it running 12 hours daily, I’ve clocked 50 kWh, which is about $5 at about 10¢/kWh. Talk about efficiency. And even though it looks like a little grow-op, unfortunately I am not growing pot. To avoid moisture problems (although the seeds are encased), our basement dehumidifier (which helps us keep our heating costs and gas usage down) is usually run in the room if the humidity rises above a certain level – it also allows me to recycle the water collected from the air to water the plants.

Sounds pretty OCD, doesn’t it? That’s not it, just yet.

Here is what my germination and transplanting schedule looks like. I have  a few other tables that I’ve gathered from various e-books that help me fill in the gaps on seeds that did not have any information on the packets. I never cease to be amazed at information and tools that are at our disposal in this interconnected technology-enabled world. If you can come up with an idea, you can gather all the related information and tools within minutes.

I know what you are saying. What a nerd!

But you know what – I am just hoping to have a pretty good yield of tasty vegetables and herbs throughout the summer. Some of the plant seeding (mostly herbs and salads) will occur outdoors and will be staggered so that there’s a consistent yield throughout the year. Eventually, I plan to water these with rainwater run-off collected in one of the RiverSides rain barrels. I would strongly recommend getting one – I have had the pleasure to work with them on Thirsty City walks and they are really passionate and knowledgeable about their cause. Instead of overloading our Toronto sewage system, you can water your garden with water that is collected by your roof during every rainfall. I am also planning on renovating one of the storage rooms in the basement to be a perfect root-cellar in the winter.

Overall, the whole project takes some research, work and dedication, but I think it’s completely worth it. Everyone should have an opportunity to experience food through home-grown plants. I truly believe it’s one of the most important skills to have – renew and foster what nature gives you, aside from just consuming limited resources. Of course, not everyone has a backyard to experiment, but there are always ways to engage yourself with nature and do something you really like doing, and they can be very productive and not at all costly. At the very least you can plant an oak somewhere or sit around making cross-bows out of pop cans.

Of course, all of this this is nothing new. Most of my neighbors have decent lots and most of them garden. I know a few people who compost and grow vegetables on their balconies.  I think that it is really important to fulfill your OCD-fuelled interests – and it does not take a lot of money, time or initial knowledge to do it. Here are some good resources to get you started on urban gardening or whatever obsession is your favourite.

• Instructables – lots of gardening tutorials.
• Freecycle and Craigslist – can help you get some free gardening supplies.
• Green Enterprise Toronto – get in touch with some local Toronto businesses for supplies and advice.
• Scribd – has a lot of gardening e-books.

Happy gardening!

Update:

Since my original Urban organic gardening in Toronto post has been getting a lot of attention, I felt that I needed to follow up on my progress. It has been a particularly rainy summer here in Toronto, so fruiting has been delayed. My tomatoes have only begun to turn red a few days ago once our days became more sunny (whereas last year we were enjoying cherry tomatoes all summer). But take a look! These cherry tomatoes we picked today.

They taste great – really sweet and meaty in texture. A few of the Beef Heart tomatoes ripened as well, and we ate them right away. I get a feeling I’ll be picking these every day for the next few days. I barely had to water them this summer – and spent about 15 minutes once a week plucking the plants to stunt the plant growth and add more weight to the tomatoes.

The bamboo supports did a great job, but I am not sure if I am going to use the string next year. The tomatoes are turning out to be a little too heavy for it. For tomatoes and taller plants I am going to reinforce the existing supports with more bamboo to form more of a cage. Otherwise, bamboo ended up being the perfect material for this – a better alternative to PVC or metal.

I also didn’t make the best choices when it came to sun positioning and planning. By oversight I planted artichokes and jalapeño peppers in a semi-shady spot and due to to a really wet, dark summer they haven’t grown as fast as expected. Based on this year’s results I’m going to move things around next year and move more planters into the driveway – we have lots of unused space because we don’t drive and it tends to be one of the sunniest spots in the summer.

The salad grew pretty wild and I’ve gone through several seeding rounds. We haven’t bought fresh greens all summer – I was particularly happy with green salad and parsley. Fresh parsley made all the difference in salad and cooking – awesome flavour. Salad is really crispy and juicy thanks to all the rain. The planters worked great, but I feel that I need to paint them for next season with some crazy designs.

So yeah, overall, we’ve manage to enjoy homegrown veggies, spices and salad despite having a fairly cold summer with fairly minimal effort.

P.S. One weekend, Studio Restaurant on Church St. was kind enough to put out a whole jar of crushed eggshells (about 1kg) outside for anyone who was interested. Thanks to them, my garden is happier than ever. Every diner should do this – there would be enough gardeners to collect the crushed shells. They are a great organic source of calcium. I collect my own, but nothing beats a kilo of them.