Learn How to Build a Hotbed at our Farm this Weekend!

This Saturday, March 25th, is the newest workshop in the Growing Food course series that Gail Szostek is teaching in Maple Ridge. The Growing Food course is a 12 month workshop series that teaches hands-on gardening skills every step of the way through all four seasons.

This month’s workshop will focus on growing and transplanting seedlings with the hands-on part of the session taking place on our farm! FUN!

The indoor part of the workshop will be held at the CEED Centre (11739, 223rd Street in Maple Ridge), beginning at 12pm. After that, the group will head over to our property to learn how to build a hotbed – a great garden structure that helps seedlings get established even when spring weather isn’t. The class will officially wrap up at 4pm (but we’re happy to give farm tours to anyone who wants to linger for a little while).

The workshop costs $40. RSVP’s aren’t neccessary, but are helpful. If you’d like to RSVP, please email Gail at greenspaceconsulting@live.com.

We hope to see you at the workshop and at our farm! For more info on the Growing Food course, see the workshop event link on the GETI website.

UPDATE: Here’s some more info from Gail…

Hi all!

The next Growing Food Session is this Saturday, March 24. This time we will be talking about starting your garden plants early. We will be starting at 12:00 noon at the CEED Centre, in the outside shelter area; we will be looking at different types of containers and soils to grow seeds in; we will be learning how to avoid “damping off” and learning how to “prick out”; we will be learning about what to watch for in seedling growth; and you will each get to take a seedling home with you. We will learn which seeds you can plant out in your garden now, and which ones need to wait. About 2:00 we will be travelling over to the Moerman farm to build an old fashioned “hotbed” which is the perfect place to start plants early without added electricity but still ensuring unseasonal warmth for the little seedlings. We will be digging, shovelling, hammering and constructing, so wear your work clothes and bring your gloves and shovels. The weather is supposed to cooperate and give us a nice sunny spring day, so it should be AWESOME!!

Guest blog post by Leah Kostamo: Practicing Gratitude

Photo Credit: Brooke McAllister

A friend recently connected me with Leah Kostamo, a local writer and environmentalist, and I’m thrilled to announce that she’s written a guest blog post today for The Farm for Life Project! Leah and her husband Markku have worked for the past ten years to establish the ministry of A Rocha in Canada (an organization that I’ve long been a fan of). As part of A Rocha’s work they established a Christian environmental center in Surrey, B.C. The center is a hub for a myriad of conservation, education and sustainable living activities. Leah blogs about their salmon saving, stranger welcoming and organic gardening adventures at leahkostamo.com. In today’s guest blog post, she writes about gratitude – something I think about often as I spend my days frollicking in the soil with people I love. Big thanks to Leah for sharing this!

Practicing Gratitude
by Leah Kostamo

The hallmark of a truly “simple” life is gratitude. “Gratitude is the heart of faith,” writes Mary Jo Leddy, author of Radical Gratitude. In this vein, she relates a lovely prayer of gratitude the Jewish people pray every Passover as they celebrate the deliverance of the Hebrew people from Egypt. The prayer centres around the Hebrew word Dayenu, which in English means, It would have been enough.

~ If you had only led us to the edge of the Red Sea but not taken us through the waters, it would have been enough.

~ If you had only taken us through the Red Sea but not led us through the desert, it would have been enough.

~ If you had only led us through the desert but not taken us to Sinai, it would have been enough.

Leddy suggests using this template as a helpful spiritual exercise in reflecting on one’s own life. For example: If I had only been born but not had a twin sister, it would have been enough. If I had only had a twin sister but hadn’t visited Orcas Island, it would have been enough. If I had only seen the sun set off Otter’s Point, but hadn’t experienced a snowfall in the Rockies, it would have been enough.

When we are satisfied with our lives as being enough, we are able to resist the whispers of consumerism that tell us we don’t have enough or we are not enough. When our sense of satisfaction is rooted in an amazement at the givenness of every gift—from friends to home to our very own lives—then we are grounded in the firm grace of abundance.

Gratitude’s starting point is wonder. I love what the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel says about true spiritual living: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.” He encouraged his students to take nothing for granted. “Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” The amazement comes as we realize everything we have and every gift we experience is pure grace. To be born would have been enough, but then I’m given a loving family. Wow! To be raised in a loving family would have been enough, but then I am surrounded by caring mentors. Amazing! We are invited not only to consider the big gifts, but the little gifts as well—the light slanting through the fir trees on a fall afternoon or the caress of a small child’s hand on our arm. It’s all grace. It’s all amazing. It all warrants our gratitude.

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Seed Sharing at the Farm

The guys get goofy while trading beans and tobacco seeds.

This past weekend, we sat around Chris and Julie’s farm kitchen table and shared seeds over beers. Chris K. and I had a shoe box containing seeds he’s been saving for a few years as well as all the seeds we’ve bought for our farmer market business this summer. Chris M. had the official ‘farm family seeds’ (seeds paid for through our internal community farm fund for personal food growing usage). Since we had different varieties of plant seeds in each pile, we decided to dedicate an evening to doing some swapping and sharing. It was fun to create new little DIY seed packets and expand each of the seed collections. There was also lots of talk about saving seeds at the end of this season so we can participate in more official seed swapping events next year. Seeds, seedlings, almost-spring-weather…2012 is going to be a great gardening year, I can feel it!

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“Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof. Take that Poppy seed, for instance: it lies in your palm, the merest atom of matter, hardly visible, a speck, a pin’s point in bulk, but within it is imprisoned a spirit of beauty ineffable, which will break its bonds and emerge from the dark ground and blossom in a splendor so dazzling as to baffle all powers of description.”
~ Celia Thaxter