Cedar Hill Urban Food Farmers

1. The contest is open to all individuals who live within the Quadra Cedar Hill Community Association area, and are 19 years of age and over. See QCHCA MAP for details.

As much as we’d love to receive everyone’s Eat Local Winter Salad recipes – because this Contest is organized by CHUFF volunteers, and as an initiative of the Quadra Cedar Hill Community Association’s Climate Action Group, entries from outside QCHCA boundaries are not eligible.

2. All entries must be received by midnight on Feb 10, 2023.

3. You may enter as often as you wish but each entry must be sent in a separate email, titled: Winter Salad Recipe Contest Entry.

4. EACH ENTRY MUST INCLUDE

1. recipe
2. an original photograph of the prepared salad (jpg, jpeg, png-not PDF)
3. contact info including your name, street address (required to confirm entrant’s eligibility), telephone number and email address.

Only contestant’s first names will be released publicly within the recipe posting.

5. Give credit. Recipes are to be attributed to their original source, if known. E.g. My Grandma Josie’s Favorite Slaw, or Whitewater Cookbook 2021. Contestants are responsible for any infringement on third-party rights.

6. Each entry must list the ingredients and the quantity required (preferably by volume, e.g. cups / teaspoons – ml / gr), followed by clear directions. Each recipe should include the suggested number of servings. Comments or stories about recipes, including why this is your favourite salad, are appreciated. And, please do tell us if you’ve grown any of the ingredients. See sample recipes HERE

7. TO BE ELIGIBLE, recipe ingredients must be vegetarian (no meat); ingredients must be 75% “local’ (by volume), and available locally at this time of year.

For the purpose of this Contest ‘local’ means B.C. grown. If an ingredient is BC grown and preserved for winter use, e.g. green beans you grew or purchased in the summer and froze for winter use, or tomatoes that you grew and dried, identify those ingredients as home-grown /preserved or BC grown/preserved, because – though not seasonal – they will be considered ‘local’.

For the purposes of this year’s Contest greenhouse produce grown in B.C. is allowable. The Contest intent of course is for entrants to inspire us and share salad recipes that have the lowest possible carbon and ecological footprint.  

The 75% local requirement allows for 25% of salad ingredients to be non-local e.g. olive oil, lemon, grains, seeds, etc.

8. Entries will not be acknowledged or returned. All entries become the property of QCHCA / CHUFF and may be edited, published or otherwise used in any way without compensation. QCHCA / CHUFF assumes no responsibility for entries that are lost, delayed, damaged, ineligible, or that cannot be processed for any reason.

9. Winners will be chosen in a random draw, on or about Feb 12, 2023. Winners will be contacted within 15 days of the contest close date via the means of communication provided in your entry e.g. email or telephone.

10. Prizes must be accepted as awarded and are not redeemable for cash. Winners may be responsible for picking up their prizes.

11. Winning contestants will be identified by full name on the QCHCA / CHUFF website and on Facebook. Entry constitutes permission to use the winner’s name, and recipe,for editorial and promotional purposes by QCHCA / CHUFF.

12. And now the legalese to protect our Contest partners – None of the participating sponsors, including QCHCA / CHUFF, their subsidiaries and affiliates, sponsors, advisors or any of their representatives are responsible for or bear any liability whatsoever, in any way, attributable to any prize awarded, nor makes any warranties or representation in respect of any prize awarded except as specifically made by the participating sponsors in these Contest Rules, nor undertakes any responsibility or liability for matters which may inhibit, reduce or prevent enjoyment of the prize.

13. The judges’ decisions are final and binding.

All entries must be received by midnight on Feb 10, 2023. Don’t delay: send us your favourite, local ingredient Winter Salad recipes today!

 

 

Here’s how:

Email:       qchca.chuff@gmail.com

Subject:   Winter Salad Recipe Contest Entry

Watch for all the great Winter Salad Recipes as they come in, at QCHCA.ORG

 

 

CHUFF is a volunteer initiative of Quadra Cedar Hill Community Association’s Climate Action Group. For more info on the wonderful work that CHUFF does and how you can get involved see: Cedar Hill Urban Food Farmers

 

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Salad Greens You Can Grow in Winter

A Guide to Planting and Harvesting Winter Salad Greens
by BC Farms & Food

Want to eat fresh lettuce and salad greens this winter?  Late summer to early fall is the time to plant your winter garden.

Spinach grows well throughout the winter when protected in a cold frame or tunnel. Low winter light slows the growth. Young tender spinach leaves have an earthy flavour that pairs well with fruit in fresh salads.
If you like fresh garden salads, you’ll be glad to know you can grow a full range of salad greens throughout the winter in our moderate southern BC maritime climate. Leafy winter salad vegetables come in a variety of flavours, colours and textures—from peppery to earthy, crunchy to delicate.

Flavours of Cold Weather Salad Greens
Fall and winter salad greens include such hardy plants as spicy arugula, fresh baby spinach leaves and cold-season lettuces. Baby beet greens bring lovely deep red and green colour to salads.
Brassicas and mustards, such as baby kale, bok choi, tatsoi, mizuna and red mustard offer crunchy, sharp and earthy flavours. The slightly bitter leaves of chicories like endive, escarole, frisée, and radicchio add texture and various degrees of bitters to mixed salad greens.
Mild-Flavoured Winter Greens
Most winter salad greens are hardy and have some bite. Are there any mild winter salad greens? Lettuce, of course—romaine, buttercrunch, oakleaf and other loose-leaf varieties, grow well in cool weather.
Mâche (Corn Salad, Lamb’s Lettuce) is refreshing and full of flavour. One of the most cold hardy of all greens, this lesser-known leaf vegetable can survive temperatures as low as -18ºC (0ºF). Mâche grows slowly in small, low rosettes and is ready for harvest when it is about 10 cm or 4 inches across. The leaves are delicate and damage easily in shipment, which is why you’ll rarely find mâche at the supermarket. (Grow this one yourself!)
Another mild, succulent and greatly overlooked salad green is the West Coast native, Claytonia (Miner’s Lettuce, Winter Purslane). Claytonia has sweet, green-tasting leaves and stems, and small edible white blossoms in the spring. Claytonia can grow without protection throughout the winter.
How to Grow Winter Salad Greens
If planting from seed, start most winter salad greens between July and September. Plant established starts as late as September or October. Keep in mind that the cold and low winter light will slow the growth, so plant a lot.
Mulch, cold frames, hoop houses and other season extension techniques can help speed growth and protect your plants from wind and cold. Because the daytime temperatures are warmer inside a cold frame, cultivars have a chance to recover from cold nighttime temperatures.

For a detailed guide on seed planting and harvest times for winter salad greens in southern maritime British Columbia https://bcfarmsandfood.com/salad-greens-you-can-grow-in-winter/

CHUFF thanks BC Farms & Food for this article.

Do you grow your own food, or would you like to start feeding yourself or your family sustainably? Join CHUFF – neighbours helping neighbours grow good food in the Quadra Cedar Hill Community Association neighbourhoods.

For CHUFF’s next monthly gathering – September 25 HATs Off to the Winter Garden – a long-time grower shows us what she is planning and planting in her winter food garden, and we tour the Garry Oak ecosystem she has stewarded over the years in her backyard. Contact qchca.chuff@gmail.com for more information.

 

 

CITY FOOD GARDENS
by BC Farms & Food
August 2022
Food gardens are changing the landscape of modern cities. Urban gardeners are reinventing balconies, rooftops, and community spaces as places to grow fresh food.

Community gardens like this one at Oswald Park in Victoria offer a place to grow food in the city.
The edible city gardening movement is transforming front and back yards, curbside medians, school grounds and parking lots into active food growing areas. Spurred by a desire to save money on food and to eat fresh produce, gardeners are digging in wherever they can. Municipalities are carving out spaces for community plots.  Schools are planting student gardens to teach young people about the value of growing food and ways to mitigate climate change.

Edible urban landscapes range from community pea patches and city farms to balcony and patio vegetable gardens. The real change  is coming in city and suburban neighbourhoods (ed: like our own Quadra Cedar Hill Community Assoc) as homeowners ( like we neighbours who formed CHUFF this Spring – Cedar Hill Urban Food Farmers) make over backyards into productive food gardens, complete with raised beds and hoop houses. Even front yard lawns are giving way to food forests, native plant meadows, and gardens that integrate edible plants like herbs, vegetables, and berries with ornamentals.

City Food Gardens – Finding Ways to Adapt

City gardeners face three unique challenges:
• Small spaces, with little room for growing food
• Transient living situations (how to take your garden with you when you move)
• Lack of land ownership

Beyond planting a seed, urban cultivators need to find practical, adaptable ways to grow food. This means vertical gardening (e.g. growing upwards on a narrow balcony), window-box food gardens, or planting on porches. It means finding tools and containers portable enough to adapt to spaces that lack sun or are exposed to wind. It also means creating a garden that will pack up for a move to a new home if necessary. Popular garden tools for urban gardening include fabric grow bags with handles that fold up at the end of the season, collapsible mini-greenhouses, and self-watering devices for pots.

A History of City Food Gardens

This vegetable garden was planted on an open city median between two sidewalks.
Small-scale agriculture has always been a part of cities, not only to provide food, but also as a way to manage urban pollutants. In sophisticated 19th century Paris, for example, which depended on horse-powered transportation, the city moved the vast amounts of horse manure that accumulated daily to areas just outside the urban envelope, where “French intensive” gardeners used it to grow the city’s vegetables.
Urban vegetable plots also made a major appearance during World War II as “victory gardens,” producing an estimated 57,000 metric tons of fresh fruit and vegetables in Canada and a third of all U.S. produce, and demonstrating the sheer power of urban growing.

Modern Edible Gardening

The new edible gardening movement not only empowers people to grow their own food, but creates unique growing areas to meet specific space needs: vegetable and herb container gardens for patios and balconies; rooftop gardens over restaurants to supply chefs; espaliered fruit trees and trellised vertical vegetable gardens along narrow walkways; or raised beds and greenhouses replacing lawns in urban yards.
City food gardens also provide a solution for how to obtain hard-to-come-by fresh ethnic foods. Gardens can be customized for a particular cuisine, such as an Italian garden with parsley, sweet peppers, Romano beans, heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, and artichokes, or a Chinese garden growing snow peas, bok choy, Chinese cabbage, chayote squash, and bitter melon.

Benefits of City Food Gardens
Edible gardening has much to offer city dwellers, and it’s not just about food. People find that when they have their own garden, it reconnects them to nature, the origins of their food, and moves them closer to the hands-on traditions—picking vine-ripe tomatoes, snapping open fresh pea pods, tasting fresh-picked strawberries— that make eating such a pleasure.

CHUFF thanks BC Farms & Food for this article.

Do you grow your own food, or would you like to start feeding yourself or your family sustainably? Join CHUFF – neighbours helping neighbours grow good food in the Quadra Cedar Hill Community Association neighbourhoods. Contact qchca.chuff@gmail.com for more information.

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2I grew up eating from a home garden leaving me with fond memories of standing beside the pea vines savouring their sweet taste. Tomatoes were never refrigerated and always juicy. Carrots grew beneath frilly leaves and corn grew on majestic, tree-frog infested, eight-foot-high stalks. In time, my parents assigned me my own garden plot where I planted beans and zinnias. Since then I’ve always wanted to grow my own food. A few years ago we bought our first house, and in the backyard of our urban lot, I have six large raised beds and a small coop for five hens.
I’ve morphed into an urbanite growing as much of my own food as I can. What I can’t grow I source as close to home as possible, though I still drink coffee and stock my cupboard with spices from the tropics. I’ve started quantifying the economic worth of my harvest – empirical data that feeds my scientific side. I now weigh my produce and calculate its worth based on grocery store prices. However, only a couple of months in, my experiment is already compromised. A new user of the garden has arrived on the scene.

“Mooooore,” my toddler demanded, pointing at the bed of strawberries one summer day. She had already shoved three whole berries into her mouth resulting in a red dribble down her chin. I caution her to take her time, but moments after she puts one into her mouth, she asks for another. After searching through the strawberry leaves, I couldn’t find any more ripe ones. I try to explain that more will be ripe in a few days – a concept she can’t yet comprehend. Spying a white berry with a blush of red, she tries to crawl into the bed, until I distract her with a pea pod.
No peas, strawberries, raspberries or cherry tomatoes have made it to my kitchen scale; instead they go directly into my toddler’s mouth as she wanders the garden, and she has voluntarily tried kale, nasturtiums and cilantro. Sometimes what goes into her mouth is rejected and left on the garden path, making me cringe because none of this food is making it on to my scale. Even though I can’t quantify what she is learning, I’m sure it has more value than any weight in produce. In time, I’ll assign my daughter a plot of her own.

Epilogue: The author harvested 196 kg of food from her backyard garden that year, the equivalent in calories to fully sustain a person for 62 days (at 2000 calories per day).

Jeannette Bedard is a scientist, author, mother, partner, and food grower. She is also a member of the QCHCA Climate Action initiative CHUFF – (Quadra) Cedar Hill Urban Food Farmers. The group meet once a month in a member’s food garden. Join us! To learn about CHUFF, contact qchca.chuff.com

While picking raspberries on the peninsula last week for jam, we learned the Heat Wave was accelerating harvest at local farms at a rate faster than consumers were buying, leaving good food wasted in the fields. We saw cauliflower the size of your head, beautiful nutrient-rich broccoli, salad greens browning in their beds – all needing to be picked now.
If you freeze or preserve food for winter consumption now is the time to get started.

On our way home we stopped in at Silver Rill to see if the corn was ready. Sure enough, we came away with the first of many dozen cobs we’ll buy this summer, some destined for that night’s dinner but most to be processed and put into the freezer for winter meals. At $14 a dozen it seemed costly until I price-checked it against a tin of corn in the grocery store. In this instance fresh, local is comparably priced, almost certainly more nutritious, and carries a much smaller carbon footprint.

According to Saanich’s Climate Plan, if everyone in the world lived the lifestyle of the average Saanich citizen we would require five or six planets right now for us all to survive. When we’re talking carbon footprints, every step counts.

Today I was basil picking in my home garden. Our small greenhouse offered up a 4 litre bucket full of fragrant basil which, within an hour, became packets of pesto, and lemon-basil vinaigrette, also stowed away in the freezer for winter meals.

That we have such a rich variety of locally grown fruits and vegetables available to us, whether from nearby farms or our own backyards, means we can eat locally year round with a little preparation. Jamming red raspberries, preserving basil, corn off the cob is simple to do, takes a little time but no fancy tools, and contributes significantly to reducing my family’s carbon count. And it cements my relationship with our farmers, reduces food waste, and contributes to the local economy.

BC Farms and Food lists dozens of Saanich Peninsula farms where you can buy direct from
the farmer, including these U-pick

Dan’s Farm & Country Market
Meadowbrook Farm
Michell Bros Farm
Northbrook Farm
Plentiful Plate Farm
Rosemeade Farms
Stewart’s Berry Patch
Violet Grove Farms

 

If you’d like the pesto or lemon-basil vinaigrette recipes, contact CHUFF – (Quadra) Cedar Hill Urban Food Farmers and we’ll post them next issue. qchca.chuff@gmail.com

Watch for CHUFF’s August activities in QCHCA Events listing.

YOU ARE WHAT ….. You Buy?  Waste?  Grow?

You’re likely familiar with the old adage “you are what you eat”. The expression apparently originated with French lawyer Anthelme Brillat-Saarin in his 1826 writing Physiologie du Gout, or Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante. I suspect most of us however link the phrase to the popularization of nutrition. 1930’s American diet guru and  nutritionist Victor Lindlahr is credited with being the first to use the phrase in English linking what one eats to the state of one’s health.

Today, that connection between our food choices and our health now extends beyond you and me to the survival of the planet as we know it. Here’s what noted author, entrepreneur, and environmentalist Paul Hawken says about the power of food choices in his 2021 book Re-generation: Ending the climate crisis in one generation.

“What we eat and how it is produced has a profound impact on climate. When you drive a car, you know you are emitting greenhouse gases. (But did you know when you go grocery shopping…) in many cases, the bags of groceries in the backseat have a greater impact on climate than the car trip you are making to and from the store?

Recent studies show 34% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are caused by our food system… including food production, transportation, processing, packaging, storage, retail, consumption, and food waste.”  Imagine then the power we have in our day to day lives to reduce our GHG emissions simply by re-thinking what we eat. And re-determining where that food comes from!

“Localizing food – buying locally grown food or growing our own – may be the greatest single activity one can choose that encompasses such a range of goodness for life, health, water, children, and the planet,” writes Paul Hawken.

Hawken’s point is being embraced by both wanna-be and experienced fruit and veg gardeners right here in our own neighbourhood. This Spring QCHCA’s Climate Action group helped seed CHUFF – (Quadra) Cedar Hill Urban Food Farmers – a group that meets one Sunday morning a month to tour each other’s gardens and share advice, experience, inspiration and yes even plants. Here’s what folks are saying so far – “I love getting into the backyards and visiting other people’s gardens.”  “Friendly group, not cliquey, knowledgeable.  “My food growing knowledge is expanding and so is my vegetable garden!”

Want to grow your own, or more of your own food? Reduce food waste and GHGs? Try CHUFF.

Next gathering Sunday 10 am to noon July 3^rd.  Topics: Self-sufficiency and rat control.

Contact shermorgan.hi@gmail.com for more information.

SOURCE: Re-generation. Ending the climate crisis in one generation. Paul Hawken. Penguin Books. 2021

How to accomplish all that in one act? Grow your own… food that is.

For the $3.69 you spend on a head of lettuce imported from California you could buy a packet of seed sufficient for you and your neighbour to be eating nutrient-rich lettuce from June to September.

Don’t have time? One positive outcome experienced by many families during our stay-close-to-home- Covid-summers was the choice to try growing a few vegetables. A phenomenon ensued! The primary B.C. producer of vegetable, fruit, flower and herb seeds sold out of many seeds. And, our children learned what fresh green beans really taste like. And, how fun they are to pick. And oh those tomatoes.

With our late Spring temperatures the soil is still cool enough to plant many of the early crops that are  gratifying to grow – peas, a myriad of lettuces and greens, then beans, squash, and yes tomatoes.

Don’t know how? Start small. Make it fun. And, if interested, join CHUFF – (Quadra) Cedar Hill Urban Food Farmers – a growing group of both gonna-be and experienced food growers that formed just this Spring in your neighbourhood. CHUFF is a volunteer initiative of the Quadra Cedar Hill Community Association’s Climate Action Group. What are people saying? “A friendly bunch of people … lots of useful information… loved the chance to see someone else’s garden”.

We meet one Sunday morning a month in member’s gardens to share our experiences and our quandaries (like, controlling rats in the compost). Next gathering Sunday May 29. Topic:  Notes from a Small Garden. Vertical growing, programmable water system, hardscaping on the cheap. Contact shermorgan.hi@gmail.com for more information

Do you already grow food in your backyard? Would you like to start?   Join CHUFF – Cedar Hill Urban Food Farmers is a growing group of folk who live within Quadra Cedar Hill Community Association’s boundaries (now including Swan Lake) who already grow their own food, or who want to start their own first garden, or who wish to support local, sustainable food producers.

Whether you have a backyard chockablock with beds for vegetables and fruit trees, [Read more…] about Growing Good Food in Your Backyard