Life in Cowtown

This weekend my healthy and fat zucchini plant delivered a miraculous surprise – my very first squash. Now, this may not be miraculous to everyone, and to many gardeners this is old hat, and some have been swimming in zucchini every summer longer than I’ve been alive, but to me it was nothing short of wondrous. I grew a really neat squash called the eight-ball squash, and it was waiting for me like a cool pool ball just as the name promised.

After so many trials of weather and well, mainly weather this year, I think I’ve given up hope of seeing anything actually harvested from the garden. Deep in my mind I’m convinced that I’ll see nothing but pretty greenery this year, and I can chalk up this crazy season to a cool learning experience. Next year I’ll have a much better idea of what to plant, how much to plant, what’s worth planting and so on.  But in the meantime, when I saw a round firm dark ball lying on the ground beside the zucchini, at first I thought it was a neighbors’ kids’ toy. My shock when I realized that this is a grown squash could not be underestimated.

Triumphantly I carried the prize home, grinning like a cat who’d made it into the fish tank, and reflected on the fact that this will be the single freshest thing I will have eaten this year.

Looks kinda like a grenade, hey?

My rules for determining whether something is ‘worth’ growing again are quite simple. Is the difference from store bought to fresh out of the dirt significant enough to justify garden space, my main limiting factor? I kind of suspect a resounding yes! when it comes to tomatoes and carrots, but I’ve definitely removed radishes from the running. Yes they are super easy to grow, and need very little care, but given the fact that I couldn’t really taste the difference from regular radishes to the ones at the local Sobey’s, well, I may simply donate the extra room to things I really love.

Zucchini is not known for having oodles of flavor, it’s a rather bland vegetable, and I was very curious to see whether there would be any discernible difference between the organic zucchini at the store and the magic eight-ball in my yard. I washed it and sliced it, and took a bite. There was definitely a difference. It was not huge, not orders of magnitude huge like with tomatoes off the vine and the cardboard balls at the store. But it was noticeable and memorable. The squash was very tender, and moist as can be. The flesh was slightly sweet, something I imagine it loses in storage, and it has a super fresh green taste that tasted alive.  This zucchini has just earned itself a permanent space in my subsequent gardens.

I ate about a quarter of it raw, marveling at the taste, then practicing uncommon self-discipline, I sautéed the rest and served it over sliced steak. It was magic.

Oh so good....

For those interested, here is the link to the seeds.

West Coast Seeds

It’s hard to believe that a small tray of seedlings grew into this three foot tall forest.

Brand new 'maters

All the tomatoes love the maxi-kaps so much, that they just sprawled into lush bushy plants with thick stems and huge leaves.

They’ve survived our brutally frigid summer start and evening lows of 8 (which we still have).

All the leaves on the different varieties are different. From the broad velvety leaves of the Brandywines:

Brandywine... I think

To the lacy fern-like fronds of Ildi:

Totally different leaves

There are no tomatoes yet, but my knowledgeable friends are telling me it’s only a matter of days now.

I assume those'll be cherry tomatoes

I’ll do a tomato dance in my spare time.

In other news – I harvested my first zucchini yesterday, and I’ll be having some photos tomorrow.

Photo by Joshua at www.blogto.com

I’m a libertarian at heart. As a rule of thumb I am very dubious of authority, believe in individual’s right to choose his or her lifestyle in every respect, provided it does not infringe on someone else’s person or property. What does this have to do with chickens? A good deal, apparently. Calgary is currently evaluating going ‘back to its roots’ and rescinding the bylaw restricting chickens on residential lots.

Why were they ever banned? Apparently for two reasons, one – to seem more ‘progressive’ (snort) and less redneck (fail), and due to lack of common-sense rules that created a sizeable number of nuisance complaints.  So instead of implementing intelligent regulation, like a limit on a number of chickens per family, and removing the noisy roosters from the coop, they threw the baby out with the bathwater and prohibited all barnyard animals.  And all I wanted for Christmas was a goat…

There are many great reasons why people want chickens in their yards – the joy of impeccably fresh eggs, teaching children about food production and animal care, not supporting factory farming, reducing food miles, the joy of producing your own food, the ability to recycle some green scraps and on and on. Since banning roosters, the noise is hardly an issue (a lawn mowing neighbor is multiple orders of magnitude louder, and so are my neighbors children), and even the poop from a small number of chickens can be used as fertilizer.

Of course there is such a thing as being a responsible owner, which means cleaning the pens with some regularity, not exceeding the allowable numbers, and sharing excess eggs with your neighbors, or allowing local kids to drop by and say hello. But people who want to take on the responsibility of raising their food generally tend to respect those concerns, and it’s no different than pet ownership. Most will be caring and responsible and some will not. In either case I don’t believe extra government intervention and regulation is the answer.  I’ve kept a vague eye on stories of Seattle, Vancouver, etc. since their backyard chicken keepings and haven’t seen any horror stories to date. A few simple rules are enough for the vast majority of people to be good chicken raisers.  

So c’mon Calgary, get with the times (again), and let the chickens come home to roost.