A super rad, honor-system, family roadside farm stand on Salt Spring Island.

Whew. The HEAT has arrived. With a vengeance.

I’m feeling sort of relieved that our tomato, pepper and eggplants will get the heat that they need to flower and ripen, and that our zucchini, winter squash, and experimental melons will (hopefully) now burst forth with obvious growth. However, I’m also feeling HOT. So hot that I’m hiding away inside, away from the sun and it’s glorious heat, to cool down and put something on this much-neglected blog.

So while I’m here, a quick update:

• The garden is doing pretty great! Leafy greens, peas, and broad beans are busting out everywhere and our onions and garlic are getting plump and nearing their harvest time. Everything else is chugging right along and looking healthy. Including the weeds. C’est la vie.
• We love everyone who comes by our market booth every saturday – whether it’s just to say hello or to purchase some produce. Thank you for your continuous support!
• Chris and I took a holiday. To Salt Spring Island. For three days with nothing but our bikes, backpacks and tents. It rained and we rode up way more hills than we were expecting, but we still had a great time exploring the island and wasting away the hours at local vineyards (we even ran into our Maple Ridge friends Kim and Rob there – total fluke, totally awesome).
• I’m officially into preserving food. I’m loving spending time in the kitchen, making use of excess garden treats. Most recently, Chris and I pickled 5 jars of garlic scapes. SO FUN. Can’t wait to try them. Official count: filled mason jars: something like 10, empty mason jars: something like 200. Our cupboards are slowly but surely transforming!
• We ate our first garden tomato today! A beautiful, sun-warmed, golden, Gold Nugget tomato. It tasted glorious.

That’s it for now. I’ll try to be better with my updates. I’m having a lot of fun seeking out a healthy balance of work and play in the garden this year. It’s been good. There’s a lot to celebrate and I should do more of it on this website.

xo

Chris posing at one of Salt Spring Island’s vineyards.

There’s just something about soil-covered, straight-from-the-garden carrots…

Mid-salad-green harvest shot. Planning to do a blog post with full-on shots of all of our garden beds so that everyone can get a better sense of what our farm looks like. PS – the weeds say hi.

Pickled garlic scapes!

And, in case anyone was wondering if Chris M and Julie still live on the farm, they do! We just barely ever see them because we all have totally opposite schedules. However, here’s proof that Julie is still very much on the farm (and still very much enjoys drinking wine when our schedules do happen to sync up).

Me, after harvesting fresh rhubarb from the garden, and the same rhubarb in it’s preserved state as rhubarb jelly.

This week I made my first ever canned (well, actually jarred) preserves. I am REALLY excited about this. Food preservation has been something we’ve been talking about wanting to do ever since the Farm for Life project began, but, until last year, it wasn’t something we prioritized. We were too busy making garden beds and getting used to harvesting our own fresh food while also holding down day-jobs and families and relationships.

That all changed when Chris K and I started dating and later moved in together here on the farm. Chris had (and still has) a big interest in preserving food, so, with his presence and encouragement, we began freezing food, drying food, and, his personal favorite, fermenting food.

However, until this past week, preservation by canning was still something we hadn’t tried. We’ve had all the equipment necessary for it since last year, but I kept putting it off because the idea of doing something wrong and risking botulism terrified me.

I guess it must have been the explosion of rhubarb in our gardens that inspired me to finally try it. I’ve been feeling motivated to keep on top of our food-preservation goals, so I read up on all of the safety and procedure details and away I went! I gathered an armload of rhubarb, picked out a recipe in one of our books, and got to work. Disappointingly, but I suppose not surprisingly given that it was my very first try, I burned my first batch of boiling rhubarb, sugar and pectin before it even had a chance of getting into my boiled jars. I was bummed, but not defeated. I went straight out into the garden, harvested another armload of rhubarb, and, with a close eye on the stove, gave it a second shot. Success! I created 3 beautiful jars of rich pink rhubarb jelly, one of which has already travelled to Ontario with Chris’ mom who was here visiting us while my rhubarb and I took over the kitchen.

With one successful batch of jarred jelly under my belt, I’m feeling so excited to try out other recipes. I have been daydreaming about having a pantry filled with colourful jars of healthy, homemade food for a long time, and now it feels like that is within reach. *happy sigh*

Julie wants to get in on the action so we’re going to have another rhubarb-jelly-making session. Maybe we’ll film it and throw together one of our little DIY videos. It’s been awhile since we’ve made one and it’s time she made more of an appearance on our blog. Stay tuned!

A screenshot of the title and image of our article in the current issue of The Footprint Press.

A few months ago, I was invited to write an article about our permaculture experiment for The Footprint Press, a local non-profit community newspaper. Issue 9 has just been released, including the article I wrote. You can read it online at The Footprint Press. I’ve also reprinted it below. Thanks Footprint Press for letting us share some of our story through your pages!

Adventures in permaculture: Building a permaculture food system in Maple Ridge, B.C.

The view from our house is not a very typical one for four university-educated, thirty-somethings. Instead of city skyscrapers and suburban townhomes, we look out over a classic red barn, a DIY polytunnel, a variety of fruit and vegetable gardens, and a motley crew of free-range chickens and ducks. Some may call it idyllic. We call it our in-the-making permaculture paradise.

My name is Jocelyn Durston and I’m one of four friends who make up The Farm for Life Project – a homesteading and market gardening experiment in Maple Ridge, B.C.

Currently in its third year, The Farm for Life Project has evolved substantially from where it first began. What started out as a personal food-growing venture now includes a small market garden business, a young food forest, and a variety of learn-as-you-go construction projects. Our gardens feed ourselves, other community members, and serve as a learning space for local school groups and gardening classes. Considering we started with a blank slate of heavily-grassed acreage and very inexperienced eagerness, it’s rewarding to see where we are now.

Our food-growing adventure began out of shared concerns about the state of our food and the earth. After learning about modern agriculture – the heavy chemical use, environmental degradation, inhumane animal treatment, injustices towards small farmers, and the risky business of GMOs, we decided to respond to our concerns in a personal, practical way – by growing our own food.

In addition to myself, project members include Chris Moerman and Julie Clarke (the landowners), and my partner Chris Kasza (fellow renter). Together, we live on 2.5 acres of ALR land in east Maple Ridge, and devote a lot of our time to growing food and building strong relationships within the community.

From the beginning, our efforts have been heavily inspired by permaculture. Founder Bill Mollison describes permaculture as, “…the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems”. In other words, by looking to nature for inspiration, we can design sustainable food-producing systems that support human life and all other life on earth.

With this concept in mind, we have been experimenting with an array of nature-inspired design ideas. Some of the more common gardening techniques we use include lasagna gardening, a no-dig method that builds beds out of layers of natural mulching and compostable materials, as well as livestock assistance, allowing our chickens to fertilize and till our gardens while our ducks keep the local slug population to a minimum. Some of the lesser-known, but exciting permaculture designs we use include a herb spiral which is a tiered, spiralling, multi-microclimate garden bed, hugelkultur beds which are built to mimic the rich, natural soil-building capabilities of forest floors, and a young food forest which includes nut trees, fruit trees, berry bushes, perennial herbs, vegetables and flowers.

These methods bring different plant varieties together to work side-by-side, enriching the soil and attracting important microorganisms, insects, and birds. Recognizing that diversity brings strength and resilience, as well as the fact that humans have become isolated from nature, we have also been intentional about creating wildlife-friendly zones. We have a small forest that is left mostly untouched, an intentional pile of logs to provide habitat for nesting ducks and other small animals, little hills of stones to attract snakes, and multiple ponds that host a loud chorus of frogs and provide swimming spots for our own ducks as well as two pairs of wild mallards. In the past three years, we have witnessed an encouraging increase in the variety of pollinators and birds on the property, and have appreciated the presence of bears, deer, coyotes, raccoons, owls, and hawks.

Learning about permaculture and applying it in practical ways in our gardens has helped us feel more connected to the earth and has given us a stronger sense of responsibility for it. We strongly believe that the adoption of permaculture philosophies are an important step in the right direction to provide for human food needs in a way that works with, rather than against, the earth.