Just wanted to clarify that the School Gardening post was actually posted on July 23. Blogger does not seem to want to let me change the date...

School Gardening - a Growing Adventure

My, how time flies. It's been almost two weeks since I last blogged, and I've received my first official complaint from "the readership." What have I been up to, if not blogging? Well, I've been preparing for a long-anticipated visit from a dear aunt, getting ready to host a WWOOFing family, and organizing a sleepover birthday party for a seven year old. (How'd THAT go? It was lots of fun, except for bedtime. A bit like playing a giant game of Whack-a-Mole...) So - back to the topic of School Gardening.

In early July, we planted a vegetable garden on the grounds of our little country school. July is late for planting, but we had to wait for volunteers to break new ground, disc and till the soil, and add compost. We were also delayed by a solid five weeks of rain, which turned the ground into such a marsh I almost gave up the vegetable idea in favour of rice.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Why did we plant a vegetable garden at a rural school, in a valley with a strong farming heritage? Most school garden programs target city schools, where kids may be out of touch with the land and where their food comes from. Isn't a gardening program in the country a bit... redundant?

Sadly, it's not. Although many of the children in our school come from a heritage of farming, none of their ancestral family farms have survived the advent of industrial agriculture. Many of these rural-dwelling children have parents with jobs in town - or jobs out West. Their food comes from the grocery store. Most had never put a seed in the ground until we started the school garden.

That's ironic, when you consider that this river valley once supported hundreds of small, self-sufficient farms. The typical farm would have supplied its own dairy, eggs, meat, fruit, and vegetables, as well as its own firewood. There was a strong network of trade among the farms, and a tradition of mutual assistance. Of course, the work was labour-intensive, the days were long, and nobody got rich. But, as our county councillor recently remarked, "At least back then we couldn't be starved out of here."

The reasons for the decline of the family farm are complex, and a topic for another time. Suffice to say that starting a vegetable garden at the school is, at least in part, an attempt to reconnect the children with their own heritage. Now, I want to be clear that I'm NOT talking about approaching this as a "living history" lesson. This is not about keeping the past alive, or promoting a nostaligia for an obsolete method of farming. This is about sowing the seeds of revolution.

The small, sustainable family farm is not dead. It has taken a severe beating, yes, and it has hung on for a number of years by the barest of threads. But I believe that the small family farm is in the midst of a revival. In fact, I believe the family farm MUST be revived, if North Americans are going to cope with the coming crises resulting from Peak Oil and Climate Change. Relocalization of food production is going to become crucial. Industrialized agriculture, with its dependency on fossil fuels, is simply not sustainable. We need people who know how to grow food locally, without reliance on fossil fuel inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, fossil-fuel-driven implements, packaging, refrigeration, - all dependent on oil.)

When you teach children how to grow their own organic food, you're undertaking a powerful, political act. When a child experiences the physical connection between her hands, the soil, and the food that grows out of that soil, she has been directly empowered to think beyond the constraints of obsolete regulations, money, and power structures. The child discovers that she can use her own hands, her own mind, and her own labour to work with the soil and nurture the growth of healthy, delicious food. The result is a growth in self-confidence, physical strength, health, and awareness that she, too, grows out of the land.

And Another Thing...

Continuing on yesterday's theme (because I guess I didn't get it all out of my system yesterday)... What message are our children deriving from our society's preoccupation with "regulating" safety?

Now, before I ruffle too many feathers, let me reiterate: I believe in taking sensible safety precautions. I do believe a certain level of regulation makes sense. Seat belts save lives, and all that. Wonderful. What I'm railing against is the sorry notion that rules, regulations, and little pieces of paper can (or should!) protect us from every possible ill that might befall us. And I'm railing for a few reasons:

1. Human beings can not, even with their very best efforts, control the universe. Society's micro-management of "risk" is a symptom of humanity's misplaced faith in itself, in its ability to bend the rest of the world to its will, to control, dictate, and order events. This mindset is currently getting us into all sorts of trouble. As a species, we have major control issues, I reckon! Perhaps we obsess about the minutiae because - at heart - we know we can't control the big things. You know, Death, Destiny...

2. The Law of Diminishing Returns applies to safety, as well. We're now paying a battallion of experts to micro-manage risk. The inspectors from our school board, for example, get paid in the vicinity of $30 per hour to attend seminars (bringing them up to date on the latest safety standards), and drive all over the district making picky little changes to perfectly sound equipment. Parents, Home and School Associations, and school staff waste time, money, and energy "fixing" the "problems" the inspectors identify. And nobody is appreciably safer.
(Hey, in fact, aren't we putting all those inspectors at increased risk? The more driving around they do, the greater their risk of dying on the highway... And isn't all that driving contributing to climate change? Now THERE'S a risk we're not doing much to mitigate...)

3. The micro-management of risk is preventing us from experiencing things. We're safer, all right. We're also less active, more overweight, more fearful, and less alive. Think I'm overstating, here? Let me tell you about the Girl Guides of Canada and its new response to managing risk. "Safe Guide" is a phone book sized risk management tool that all leaders must read and pass a course on in order to be certified Guiders. It was written (presumably by a team of lawyers) in response to the tragic deaths of some Girl Guides at a camp a couple of years ago. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. It was written in response to the lawsuits arising out of the tragedy.

Now, the accident itself was terrible. The adults in charge behaved irresponsibly, and girls drowned. The whole scenario was unequivocally unacceptable.

But the response, in the form of Safe Guide, has been extreme. A leader who is following Safe Guide to the letter must now perform a written risk assessment in advance of every activity. And by activity, I do not simply mean boating, rock climbing, camping, or other potentially risky endeavors. I mean activities like allowing the girls to operate a glue gun. If we want to take our girls swimming, according to Safe Guide, we must now send a leader to the pool (the nearest of which is an hour away) three weeks in advance, to perform an on-site inspection and photocopy the lifeguards' certificates. We must then fax an application to the Girl Guides' head office, and obtain a go-ahead.

Now, really. Can't we assume that a publicly operated swimming pool will have checked the credentials of its own lifeguards? Can you think of any cases in which swimming facilities accidentally hired, say, a circus clown instead of a certified life guard? Is the leader's investement of driving time, gasoline, and energy, truly reducing a risk? Is this making anyone safer?

The result of Safe Guide, for our group, has been that we don't even attempt to do dangerous stunts like boating, rock climbing, or camping. We do an awful lot of crafts. Without a glue gun.

4. We're shifting responsibility away from the individual. This is the message I'm most concerned about, when it comes to what our children are getting out of all of this. Rather than taking the time to teach our children to be aware of their own environment, their own abilities, their own limitations, we are telling them that safety is somebody else's responsibility. Safety is supposed to be a shared responsibility. The manufacturer of a baby "Exersaucer" has a responsibility to use a baby-safe design and materials, and to inform consumers about standard operating procedures. The parents of the baby have a responsibility NOT to use the Exersaucer as a sled or a flotation device.

A society that focuses all its attention on regulations, without taking the time to educate and empower individuals, is a society that gives rise to phenomena like consumers suing McDonalds' for making them fat. (I am NO fan of McDonald's. I won't darken their golden-arched doorway, and I hope that fast food in general will eventually become as reviled as public nose-picking. But really, even McDonalds' most evil corporate stooge did not forcibly invade private homes and shove Big Macs down people's throats.)

5. We're focusing on the wrong issue. The obsession with micro-managing risk in the interest of "public safety" is diverting our attention from the truly risky behaviours our society is engaged in. It is ironic to me that, a mere couple of miles from our recently-dismantled (and perfectly safe) school playground, there is an overflowing septage lagoon that was quietly ignored by the provincial Department of the Environment, until local residents began noticing how bizarre their water looked. The lagoon's operators broke every regulation in the book. They even broke holes in the side of the holding tank when they realized it was too full, so that they could drain off some gunk and continue filling from the top. Where were the safety regulations that were supposed to protect those downstream? Where were the dilligent safety inspectors then?

Sigh. You know, I think I'll take a break from ranting in my next blog installment. The whole thing is tiring, and I need to remember to balance the challenges and the triumphs. But at some point, I will return to this last point - "focusing on the wrong issue" - and look at how it relates to farming, food, and public health.

But tomorrow, a happier topic: Growing a garden at school!

The Swing of Things

What do you see in this photo? I see a little girl fully engaged with her world. Shoes off, enjoying the squish of mud between her toes, she's looking for pollywogs, waterskaters, and possibilities. If she finds something interesting, she'll pick it up, find out about it. Or just watch.

But there's another camp of observers who undoubtedly see something else in this picture. First of all, the little girl is not wearing a hat and sunglasses to protect her from the sun. She's carrying a stick - what if she falls on it and pokes her eye out? And heaven only knows what's in that puddle. She could cut her foot on glass! Besides, she's going to get DIRTY!

It is, apparently, these observers who are in charge of playground safety compliance for our school board. They are a dilligent lot - nobody can complain that they're not taking the job seriously. By gum, if there's a new safety standard, it's going to be applied. Rigorously! So rigorously, in fact, that our school has had its swings removed for non-compliance. The children are safe now, alright. Nobody ever got injured staring forlornly at a swingless swingset (although, if and when someone DOES get injured in this activity, I'm sure there'll be a new standard to take care of that).

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all for safety. And so are the 15 or so other adults who have been trying to bring the swingset up to "code" for the past two school years. We did not build the thing out of popsicle sticks and binder twine, and locate it in a swamp full of alligators. No, we obtained the specifications from the school board, and had the swingset built to those standards.

So, what's the problem?

The problem is that the standards keep changing. First, we had to replace the pea gravel we'd used under the swings, as it was the wrong grade. (Replace pea gravel - check.) Then the inspectors decided the chains were the wrong gauge. (Buy new chains - check). Then the seats were the wrong type of material. (Acquire rubber seats - check.) Then the chains (correct gauge, now) needed to be painted with a special type of paint. (Cue Picasso - check). Then we had to cut down the trees behind the swingset, just in case a child might decide to jump off the swing into a tree. (Axe the trees - check.)

You have to understand that every change requires a vote at Home and School, which meets once a month, and holds the purse strings. It gets to be a bit weird to show up at meeting after meeting, only to discuss the swingset... again. Feels a bit like that Star Trek episode... you know, the one where they all end up playing poker, again and again? At least the Enterprise crew had snacks...

Anyway. We're still not up to code. By the time we've axed the trees, the standards have changed again, and now we need pea gravel spread to a distance of seven feet on either side of the swingset. And the clincher: now our new chains are substandard (yes, really) because the "new" standard requires all chains to be plastic-coated. And that's where we've lost the race, because we haven't been able to source the correct gauge of chain WITH plastic coating.

The super-dilligent safety team has taken the swings down, pending our ability to comply.

Now, this entire farce is obviously NOT about safety. Unless I've missed the nation-wide rash of children dying terrible deaths because they landed on pea gravel that's two millimeters away from standard. Or perhaps I'm unaware of the statistics showing that children's hands are being horribly maimed by non-plastic-coated swingset chains. If we're truly this concerned about our children's safety, we ought to just wrap them individually in bubble wrap and set them out on the lawn for recess. Forget the swings.

No, I think the reality is that we've constructed a swingset that could withstand a class five hurricane. The reality is that the majority of playground injuries occur, not due to unsafe equipment, but to lack of adult supervision. The reality is that we are living in a society that is increasingly getting in its own way with standards, rules, and requirements that no longer achieve anything meaningful.

IS this about safety? Or is it about perpetually refining the requirements in order to justify the highly-paid bureaucracy that runs it all?

Experimental Structures

Last week, the Mountain Man came down from his Eden to help us build a shade structure for our garden.

Of the various hairy young men "going back to the land" around here, Mountain Man is probably the hairiest, and probably also the most prepared for the rugged life he's chosen. He began with a piece of land and a wood stove that he rolled up the mountain all by himself. Now, his kingdom includes a self-built cabin, a fully occupied hen house, productive gardens, and a hammock from which to survey his domain.

I love Mountain Man's forest home. Terraced gardens spill a profusion of vegetables down the mountainside. Carved men sprawl like Rip van Winkel under spruce trees. The cabin itself - built by hand without a plan - is decorated with shells, stones, bits of tin, pressed into stucco, pretty as jewels. Mountain Man sees every scrap of material as a possibility. Any other man's junk becomes his treasure. I have never before seen a home that is such a perfect externalization of its owner's interior state.

So when the Farmer suggested we ask Mountain Man to teach us how to build with felled saplings, I was pretty enthusiastic. I'd wanted to build a simple "teepee" shape out of poles for my Scarlet Runner beans to grow on - mainly to give the children a shady respite on hot gardening days. But Mountain Man's experiments with tree weaving had produced structures that were much more beautiful, useful, and long-lasting.

Helpfully, the Universe had provided us with a convenient cache of materials, in the form of about forty felled maple saplings our neighbour had cleared away from his "view" in the spring. Unable to find time to burn the brush, he was happy to let us drag them away (though doubtless a bit puzzled). WWOOFer Ashley (from England), the Farmer, my middle son (Farmer-in-Training), my youngest son (The Fireman), Mountain Man and I met in the garden to begin construction.

Mountain Man began by planting two saplings about one and a half feet deep, directly across from each other. He then bent the tops towards each other and twisted the branches together. To my surprise, they held easily. It seemed to me that their natural springiness would make it difficult to join them, but they twined together like teenagers at a dance. After that, "construction" became a matter of planting more trees around the perimeter of the circle, bending the tops down, and joining them as before. Smaller saplings were woven horizontally through the uprights.

When I asked Mountain Man to explain his technique, he replied, "I just kinda let the tree tell me what it wants to do."

The resulting structure looks a lot like a giant basket, and already provides a great deal of shade. I can't wait to see what it will look like with a covering of red-blossomed runner beans. My only disappointment is that you can't build a permanent home this way. What a way to build! No blueprints to squint at, no nails to drive, no angles to join, no math to do - a completely intuitional way of creating.

There's a lesson here, I just know it, although I'm trying hard to just enjoy my shade house for what it is, rather than trying to make it stand for some gigantic philosophical tangent I'm taking. I think it's a reminder of what can happen when we don't demand utter control over things, when we let circumstances and the materials at hand dictate our path. When we let the tree tell us what it wants to do.

Shoo, Fly - Don't Bother Me!

Visitors to Old Man Farm often find themselves dancing. Within minutes of their arrival, people are hopping from side to side, waving their arms in the air, and dodging to and fro in an exotic rhythm reminiscent of experimental modern dance.

I'd love to be able to say that these folks are inspired by the landscape, or that their souls are so deeply moved by all we've accomplished here (muffled laughter) that they are dancing for joy. But I can't. The cold, hard truth is that most of our visitors have never encountered the sheer diversity of biting insects that exist here in God's Country. They dance because they are unused to being welcomed by a winged horde intent on making them - literally - one with nature.

You have to appreciate that each insect has its own personality, and will greet you accordingly. Clouds of black flies descend like adoring groupies, and try to get to know you intimately by crawling inside your ears, nose, and mouth. The mosquitoes greet you in embracing swarms, reaching out with long appendages to beckon you "come hither." At night, there are the no-see-ums - shy creatures that approach quietly en masse, leaving you with a sense of betrayal and burning. Finally, the horse flies and deer flies offer their up-front, no-nonsense greeting - "Hello! I'm here to bite you painfully on the ass."

Visitors to Paradise are often completely undone by this welcome. They huddle in the house, or swathe themselves like living mummies and go stumbling about in the fields. They fumigate themselves with enough chemicals to kill an entire Insectarium. They complain. Loudly. There is almost a sense of moral outrage. People want to imagine a pastoral ideal - gently rolling hills of green dotted by contented cows; fields of daisy and buttercup; the contented farmer surveying his domain. Nobody ever imagines the flies.

Flies are, to my mind, the true litmus test of whether someone can survive and thrive in this setting. People who are suited to country life discover and embrace one secret: Flies are a state of mind.

Think about it. There are over 100 species of black flies in Canada. The mosquito exists everywhere in North America, except for a couple of tiny islands in the Arctic (a setting which, despite its admirable lack of flies, has other obvious challenges). There are 75 species of horse fly, 42 of deer fly, and heaven-only-knows how many no-seeums (they're pretty small - perhaps they're too difficult to count). You can wear appropriate clothing, invest in a bug suit, avoid peak fly periods, adopt DEET as your new cologne, but the reality is - flies are unavoidable. Resistance is futile. You WILL be assimilated... at least, portions of you.

So here is the secret, Little Blossom. You must become one with the flies. Do not fight them. Move toward the flies. Find and embrace your inner fly. Do not dance, Little Blossom. BE THE FLY.