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I spent six hours repotting tomatoes on Saturday. And if that sounds right up there with a root canal, you wouldn’t be far off at all. I think I’ve about reached my natural limit of tomato plants I’m willing to nurture, and next year all the people I’ve started some for are absolutely SOL. The demands in time and effort are close to maxed out and it seems like forty adolescent tomatoes is all I can handle. See if you live in a normal climate, you’d start your tomatoes something like four weeks before last frost. They would have to be replanted once, from peat pods to four inch pots while they are still a manageable three inch size, and happily occupy maybe six square feet by the time they go outside.
Living in Calgary though, requires the starting of tomatoes in oh say, late March or so, while they won’t see the light of day until approximately oh say, June. In those three months, the baby tomatoes are guaranteed to outgrow their four inch pots and become hugely tall and root-bound. Apparently you don’t want that to happen since it’s bad for the roots, limits the uptake of nutrients, and is stressful for the plant, and who wants to eat stressed out tomatoes? Not me, man.
So when they reached what I thought was a good height of ten inches or so (although as with all my plans I was a week behind), I repotted the tomatoes into empty 2L milk and pop bottles. Why bottles? Well, I did mention forty tomato plants, right? And each large-ish plastic pot at the garden store (and the home hardware store, and the superstore) was approaching four dollars. You do the math. I could buy caseloads of tomatoes for those prices. Plus, and this is huge, I wanted to plant the tomatoes deeply, burying the bulk of each long stem because tomatoes are able to grow new roots out of the fine hairs they’re covered with, and a large root ball means a healthy plant. Well, every single 8” pot was wide and squat. Perfect for petunias perhaps, but completely opposite of the tall narrow pot I’d wanted for the tomatoes.
A container collecting frenzy ensued, with my boyfriends’ six-litre-a-week milk habit coming in quite handy. (No I’m not kidding, I wondered if we should get a cow on several occasions.) Finally I had a table covered in clean 2L jugs with cut-off tops and punctured bottoms and it looked like the bottle depot exploded all over the table.
Then it was a routine of moistening potting soil in two huge bowls, removing the cat off the counter, adding some soil to the bottom of each container, gently shaking the plant upside down to dislodge it, dropping the plant down the well, adding more potting soil, removing the cat again, watering the plant, using a chopstick to poke a hole to the bottom of the container and watching half the soil disappear in a river of mud down to the bottom, adding more soil, water, label, and finally locking the cat in the bedroom. Repeat X 40. I am not the most patient person, and the fact that I didn’t lose it once, speaks volumes to my newly cultivated zen-like attitude. Chop wood, carry water and all that.
The cool thing out of the deal is that in clear containers you can clearly watch the trickle of moisture down the sides and have a semblance of how dry your plants are getting. The downside is that my plants now take up a dozen feet of space and require some yoga skillz to water.
***Speaking of watering, some of the plants (especially the paste variety – Ardwyna) were looking a bit…. ragged. They were tall and spindly, not bushy and in general looked like survivors of a tomato-pocalypse. Some of their lowest leaves were yellowing too. I googled all the symptoms and the consensus was a mineral deficiency that can be cured with Epsom salt. So when I was done the Herculean task of repotting them, I watered them with a very dilute Epsom salt solution. Lo and behold, they all greened up, grew some more leaves and smartened up in general. I did not have this problem last year, so I am at a loss to imagine why they needed those nutrients, but there you go.
I’ve also started cukes and zucchinis this weekend, and they’ll be coming up too. God help me.
We are wrapped up in some typical spring weather in Calgary, and by typical I mean gale force winds and alternating rain and snow. So while we wait for some sunshine to peek out from behind the clouds I wanted to share my impressions of the organic grocery delivery service that we’ve been using for a couple of years now – SPUD! The name is an acronym for Small Potatoes Urban Delivery and they arrived here from Vancouver in 2005 with current locations in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA.
Running a well designed website they provide an array of organic choices aiming for mainly local producers – from fruit and veggies to bread, milk, meat and prepared foods, to cleaning supplies and personal hygiene items. While they were very fruit and veggie heavy at first, I’ve seen their lineup expand over time to include more and more convenient products. While I generally much prefer to go to a farmers market to stock up on food, there are many a time, especially in winter where such a trip is simply not happening. Left to choose sad looking veggies at the local grocery store (even if they look good I’d rather support local farmers with more sustainable practices), or schlepping across town on slick roads SPUD! Gives me a great alternative to both.
While their prices are fair to farmers, and there’s the convenience of delivery, they are often not cheap. It is not uncommon to see a single bell pepper or a zucchini hover around 2.50, especially out of season. A half pound of salad greens is typically over four dollars and organic, cage-free eggs are around six. Even when I understand deeply that the real cost of food is often not reflected at the grocery stores, sometimes SPUD!’s prices can be hard to swallow. I suppose the cashier till is where most abstract intentions to eat locally and support sustainable food break down in the face of limited budgets. I also reflect on the fact that I’m cooking for two, and our food budget is easily our largest expense outside of the mortgage. Having said that, I think we’ve developed a system that allows us to maximize our food choices for the way that we eat, and it clearly works for us. For around a hundred dollars a week we get six litres of milk, a couple of great Hoven farm steaks, a loaf of bread, a couple heads of garlic, zucchini and mushrooms for the week, six to twelve apples, a few lemons, two to five tomatoes, sometimes cukes or green onions, whatever seasonal fruit may be on sale, occasional toothpaste or tea, or crackers or burritos or eggs, as well as hazelnuts and mac’n’cheese. Some combination of those comprises our weekly baskets.
The best way to eat in a manner that does not cause damage to my ethical sensibilities and wallet is to deal with local farmers directly. When you purchase bulk meat from local suppliers, freeze/can seasonal produce, you mainly need milk and bread as well as some fresh stuff throughout the week. Dealing with a delivery service at the very least eliminates the many middlemen that reduce farmers’ earnings to nothing.
I love the fact that they provide pretty detailed info on some of their suppliers and you can find out who grows your food and where. I love the fact that you can buy bulk items in caselots, which is great when it’s say, peach season and they’re affordable and you want to freeze a few bags. I love the fact that they have great info on most of their products, telling you what’s in it, how to store it and how to use it. Their weekly delivery sheet has the bill on one side and a neat newsletter on the other, where they profile green websites, provide a seasonal recipe and share tidbits of news. You can find out exactly why there is a shortage of onions and potatoes – apparently it’s because farmers underplanted due to vast overproduction in previous years, or how the earthquake affected blueberry farmers in Chile. I love the fact that they interact with the community, they are on Twitter with updates and are supporting the Calgary Horticultural Society Fundraiser. I love their reward points that you can redeem for discounts, and the fact that THEY DELIVER! Their customer service is also pretty good with prompt refunds on bad produce (only happened twice I think), and relatively quick replies to questions.
Here are some features that they don’t have, and I wish they did. Product reviews. This is elementary, and many is the time I took a chance on something and found it too… granola for me. This is especially common with some soy-based, organic, vegan-whatever foods. They are so healthy that the taste is like cardboard. The product reviews would quickly weed out the stuff that consumers actually like and the stuff that is only for the hardcore health warrior. I guess I’m a gourmand first. I also wish they carried small lot seasonal stuff. Like now all the food boards are aflutter over morels, ramps, fiddleheads, etc. Have I seen any in Calgary? Nope. This is not only applicable to SPUD! but also to all the restaurants claiming seasonality on their menus. Yeah? Where? I also wish they carried more local products that I know are good but aren’t partnered up with SPUD! for whatever reason – Lundt carrots, or Hotchkiss tomatoes for instance. I’m sure there are many reasons why certain farmers would not be a part of SPUD, but since *I* don’t know them I can only sigh. Surely there are local greenhouse farmers that grow tomatoes, they can’t all be from Mexico or wherever.
So like every business they have their good side and some room to improve. But they deliver ethically sourced products and the vast convenience of delivery. And I support them for trying for a vision where farmers get paid a living wage so that stories like the plight of these tomato pickers happens less often. Since the government blatantly disregards our votes, voting with our dollars is often the most impactful way we get heard.
WWW.SPUD.CA
I actually sat on this review for hmmmm…. a couple of months? Simply because now that my words are actually being read, I feel some responsibility to distance myself a bit from the immediacy of the experience in the interest of being as fair as can be, while only visiting a place once. Not much responsibility mind you, but some. Point is, I had a very mediocre dinner with a friend here, and am unlikely to return simply because my budget does not run to revisiting restaurants that don’t rock my world.
Without further ado – there was still snow around when a girlfriend and I drove here one dark night and found a well lit restaurant with an appealing concept – Vietnamese fusion. I love me some Vietnamese food with a loving love, so I was convinced that there’s a way to take those flavors we all know and love and mix them in novel ways for our enjoyment. I also read plenty of innovative chefs doing crazy things with Vietnamese food so I was really excited about the trip.
The restaurant was pretty nice – gorgeous curved ceiling over the bar, very well done lighting, elegant woven mats and upscale place settings. All the staff was beyond friendly and knowledgeable when discussing the menu. I was steered toward the caramelized chicken and my friend was determined to try the savoury crepe (stuffed with prawns, mung beans, hickama(?), bean sprouts and green onion). The first alarm bells went off at the spelling of jicama – while pronounced hickama it’s certainly not spelled that way, and someone should’ve looked at the menu before printing it out.
We started out with two appetizers, the spring rolls (simply because I couldn’t picture giving them up for all the fusion in the world), and coquilles St. Jacques provencale – a French twist on a French dish, I suppose. The spring rolls were on the thin side, and were quite passable, although certainly no better than the spring rolls in our favorite Vietnamese joint. The coquilles St. Jacques rated about a 4/5. The scallops were cooked perfectly, so kudos to the kitchen there, and the sauce was lovely if uninspiring, but it was not the best sauce for the dish. Somehow the basil and the smoky-ness didn’t go with the flavor of the scallops and I hardly cook scallops, so I can’t suggest how I’d do it. Lemony cream sauce probably….
Moving on. We got our entrees and that’s where things derailed for us. My friends crepe was huge and absolutely flavorless. If you look at the list of veggies again, mung beans, jicama, sprouts, you’ll likely guess that they need a pretty strong flavor base somewhere to balance them out. And it was utterly lacking. No salt, garlic, sauce or anything to enliven the bland, watery mess of a dish, whose only hint of a redeeming quality was the crispy outside. The dipping sauce provided was too watery to make any difference, and rolled off the veggies leaving a faint sweet flavor in its path. After picking at all the outside crispy bits, she ate all the prawns and called it a night.
My caramelized chicken was not much better. It was a rather dry breast with a poorly balanced caramelized sauce with too many bitter flavors. It was served on veggies without a hint of seasoning and a mound of plain white rice. Since the only flavors were from the chicken, namely salty, sweet and burnt, the dish was not a satisfying entrée. The meat had too much flavor and the rest had none.
On that note we declined dessert and decided that while fusion cuisine is excellent when done well, it is a poor substitute for the primal satisfaction of a real bowl of hot Vietnamese soup or noodles when done poorly. Given the rather high prices at the restaurant we expected the quality to match. In our experience – it did not.
And if you’re wondering, see my restaurant rating scale here.
2.5/5
Colonial Fusion Cuisine
163 Quarry Park Blvd. SE
(403) 723-6669
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