Dig this
Plotters, dragons and potato heads, plant the Island’s future
By Bruce Mason, Gabriola Sounder
Monday, May 5 2008
Everyone who grooved to the 2008 Dancing Man Festival has fond memories of the 10th annual, 11-day community celebration and looks forward to next year. We will have a report on how it all went down in next week’s Sounder.
But as performers strutted their stuff to appreciative audiences there were other major events that are very newsworthy, including the Gabriola Health Care Foundation’s highly successful garage sale and the equally healthy, visionary and growing developments at the Commons.
A visit to either was worthy of heart felt applause and a chorus of “Bravos!”
On one hand there is no doubt whatsoever that more and more Gabriolans are dedicating themselves and taking responsibility for improving healthcare on the Island (please see “GHCF: a tale of two sales and growing support,” right).
On the other: the Commons, which is another very good news story, make that many stories.
Garden coordinator Jill Elcock took me on a tour that include the senior’s gardens, Aurora kid’s garden, and community garden - which all fit perfectly under the umbrella of People for a Healthy Community - the allotment garden, orchards, the beaver pond (no beavers in sight) and the potato cooperative where it was busy indeed.
I spotted Victor Anthony in the crowd and asked him to share his perspective on the mind-boggling work being done all around us.
He seemed as excited about all that as knocking out a standing room only crowd with Kathy McIntyre at the first performance of the Dancing Man Festival in the Roxy, April 24th.
“Food security was a contributing factor in the decision that my wife Joëlle and I made to uproot and emigrate from the Nashville, Tennessee area,” he began. “There were other factors such as Bush and the fact that we are running out of fossil fuel, which is obvious from the price at the Co-op pumps today.
“We hoped we had found a close knit community, which was important,” he continued. “During one of my first trips to the Village I met folks from the Commons and right from the get-go, I felt like a tile in the mosaic and inside the big picture.
“Maybe because I was new to the Island I could see a bit more of the forest while others were looking at the trees, but the idea that we could grow our own food - which we can’t do on our property - at the Commons, well that is huge, a VBD (very big deal)!”
Back home Victor grew up on a one-and a half acre property in Nashville that included his fathers whopping half acre vegetable garden.
“I’m talking about six rows of corn 80 feet long and enough vegetables to feed the neighbourhood as well as the congregation of our church and also keep our deep freeze full all year,” he explained.
“One of my regrets was having to leave my kid sized garden tools behind,” said Antony, who is in a full blown garden rebirth at the Commons, “helping out folks who can’t use the roto-tiller and spreading manure shoulder to shoulder.”
He’s making friends with folks he never thought he would get to know. That’s mutual. Many of his fellow gardeners don’t know Victor is an outstanding musician. But they love the fact that he dubbed senior gardeners “Dragons,” the rest, “Plotters,” except for the “Potato Heads.” And he referred me to Judith Roux to explain the latter.
“We struck a farm management team to envision what the Commons could accommodate and to satisfy the Agricultural Land Commission which wanted us to keep growing things on the Commons,” she recalled.
“One of the ideas we came up with was growing potatoes in the south area which used to be a hay meadow,” she continued. “The soil isn’t as deep as we expected; there is clay eight inches down and the best thing we could do is till it and grow potatoes so it can become part of the allotment gardens in the future.”
“At the Farm Forum 25 people paid $10 to join the potato cooperative, and will share the crop. Some have dropped out but as you can see we have very active work bees,” she continued, before going back to installing deer fencing with other folks.
Amid the rumblings in the world as if a war is coming and predictions of an unprecedented global food crisis that grow much louder each day, Victor Anthony said: “We can do this, on this island, with the size of our community and a bunch of like-minded folks, we can grow our own food, help each other out and take care of ourselves.”
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