STREET crEDIBLES!

Fri afternoon Marie and I got a call from the project manager, Amanda, for the community garden at STOP Community Food Centre and confirmed our volunteering for the community garden. Woohoo! We started the next day from 10 - noon. Arrived before Amanda, and met Herman who is given an honorarium to look after the garden and spends most of his days there working it and keeping an eye open for problems - people stealing or messing it up. He lives in a house across the lane and can watch it from there.

We got the tour from him and were told not to touch anything and told us why as some vegetables were young and some special Caribbean type stuff. Naturally he is very protective!

He is a real charmer after you work with him for a while. We took a break after an hour crawling around on our hands and knees under the tomato plants picking weeds. He had mixed up a beverage from the various mints in the garden and some gingerroot and asked us to try it. It was delicious! It was sweet but not too much and the ginger was predominant over the mint but not too much and there was a natural fizz but not too much nice body but not too much - it was just right. Had a full glass the next and chased it down with cold coffee. Amazingly perfect.

Had a great morning. We are going back Wed from 5:30 - 8pm. Marie is quite excited about the Green Barn Project, STOP is part of it with Foodshare, at the old Wychwood TTC Barns. We are keeping our ears to the rail on that one but in the meantime we are looking forward to working with the people at STOP.

So for the last 2 days, we have been putting up a small garden on the balcony, with green onions, peas and M wants to try some beets while there is still some growing season. We are making some room up by the windows to try to grow some things over the winter. Next year we plan to go crazy. M is inspired to do this having a small book called The Apartment Gardener.