05.05.08
Compost!
Today we hopped in the van and drove to the Landfill. Actually, we drove long distances down highways with no exits, cursing ourselves for yet again having missed another poorly marked offramp. Such long, long highways with seemingly no end in sight.
Once we finally got on the right road, we laughed at how many signs there were for the landfill. And when we got there, we were greeted by so very many individuals bearing and wearing safety equipment. The landfill is a very safe place. Children are not permitted to exit vehicles while there, but there are many lovely expanses of virgin grassland begging for a game of tag. What torture.
It’s the best place to see hawks and eagles. They are perched on the tops of trees, watchful sentries on fenceposts. Their enormous, predatory eyes and regal bodies wait for whatever rodents and small bird are crawling under the ever-growing piles of trash. There’s an individual falconer who works at the landfill – she stood at the top of a mountain of multicoloured nastiness with hawk on her gloved arm, saw us pointing at her and waved, showing off the bird. Here is the majestic tradition, modernized.
Throughout the month of May Vancouver and Delta households can get up to one cubic meter of free compost from the park-and-garden waste compost at the landfill. It’s Bring Your Own Container, though. We went with all our old manure and dirt bags and I shovelled the black earth into all of them. 1 cubic meter is a lot of dirt and I didn’t have enough bags for it all but hey, I got plenty for my postage stamp of a garden!
07.15.07
Divine Mysteries of the Veggie Garden
We’ve started to eat the small harvest from the garden. I’m cutting leaves of lettuce, fresh herbs, digging up fingerling carrots and snipping peas from the vine almost every day now. Zucchini, cucumber and tomatoes are ripening, and there are white miraculous cauliflowers cradled at the center of big matte green leaves. It’s amazing, and as we sat down today at lunch to eat a home-grown replica of a diner meal (Chicken Strips with Barbecue Sauce and Garden Salad) I felt a sense of connection with life cycles, a kind of connection I don’t know if I’ve ever had.
How is it that the children will gladly eat our own lettuce and not that from the store? It took little Em a bit of time to adjust to the complex flavour of peas fresh from the pod. Now she delights in their inconsistency – what will this pod taste like? Is it young and tender and sweet or older, with more guts and a little bitterness for good measure? She loves the opportunity to pass judgement and fill up at the same time.
03.12.06
Lawns and Gardens
Today I wandered for hours taking photos of dormant gardens. Of early bloomers stretching sleepy arms up to the sky. And ignore those green expanses of lawn. Those perfect squares of grass with no weeds or saboteurs, dotted with the last remains of this morning’s heavy white westcoast snow, display themselves openly or hide behind brick fences. And I think about the difference between gardeners and lawnkeepers. It’s a small thing but a big one: the essential activity.
Lawnkeepers spend their time cutting things down. Like loggers or very dull, vegetarian hunters. Imagine spending your life looking for something alive to cut down. Lawn becomes symbolic of limitation. Your entire act is to LIMIT.
Gardeners spend their time coaxing things to grow up. They only cut down to encourage growth and more often are seeking ways to include more and more growth. Imagine spending your life looking for something more you can foster. Garden becomes symbolic of directed development. Your entire act is to EXPAND.
Today I played a game: imagining the people who live inside those houses, their outlooks as represented by the amount of garden versus lawn. So many were 75% limitation, 20% expansion, and 5% controlled (by concrete walkways they did not design). A couple that I loved the most were almost 100% expansion – even the walkways were subverted from cityspace to directed, symbolic wilderness. For a moment, gazing at these gardens, I felt free.
