...won't somebody feed this little baby please! This is a song for toddlers sitting in their highchair. I learned in our Mother Goose sing circle. So when it came time to plant in the spring, I thought, I'll plant peas. It turns out the baby loves them. I bought an unusual variety from the Mountain Seed Company that was developed by months in the 15th Century. Their purple. They are not as sweet as I was hoping, but Emily loves them. I crack the pods open and put the peas on her tray and she gobbles them up. Sometimes  just give her the whole pod to play with. She'll mouth it and chew it until she finds the peas in the center. It's a great food for keeping her busy.

Last week-end was the Edible Nelson Garden Tour. People come visit garden hosts to share information about gardening. It was enjoyable to meet fellow gardeners as I learned a few tips and tricks. It turns out we were voted Most Diverse Garden. We DO have A LOT of food growing. Let me think....soy beans, potatoes, carrots, peas, lettuce, sweat meat squash, corn, tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes, blue berries, beats, peaches, poppies, peppers, eggplant...Anyway, we won a lovely basket of goodies from the Kootenay Co-op.

Other than that, I spend my mornings watering the garden, harvesting and weeding. Overall, it's pretty low maintenance right now. I find the watering takes a lot of time  (only one quarter of the garden needs to be hand watered, too!) But it allows me to observe what's happening, what plants are doing well, where the weeds have sprouted and what needs harvesting, not to mention that it's meditative and relaxing.

Perhaps this should really be two separate posts but some great inspiring occurances took place today. I bumped into a friend at the co-op yesterday and she mentioned she has a calender on Biodynamic Gardening. In an earlier post I mentioned that a random man at the copy centre handed me some copies on the subject. However, I found it difficult to decipher with it's astrological signs and symbols. But the calendar Ami has, she assured me, is easy to follow. So she emailed it to me this morning and as you can see below, you just have to follow the calendar. For example, tomorrow on April 23 it's best to seed a Fruiting plant, such as peas or tomatoes between 10am and 2pm.

Biodynamic gardening was developed by Rudolf Steiner who focused on the cosmic influences from the Sun, Moon, planets and stars as important factors in agriculture. Simply put, the earth's position in the solar system determines which seeds to sow and when.  Tomorrow I will plant peas outside in the garden and I will report my results. According to Ami, a friend of hers planted corn last year by following the timings of the calendar and no one in the neighborhood had corn as tall and strong as hers. I'm curious...

I just got home from watching NO IMPACT MAN, a documentary about a writer and his family in New York who decides to reduce his carbon footprint to ZERO. He buys local food and eventually lives without electricity. His family's diet is quiet bland because he has to depend on seasonal produce. He does start gardening with a mentor in a community garden but he didn't rely much on his own produce for his meals. I think he was primarily being taught how to garden on the mentor's plot so he perhaps did not take the veggies home. I digress. The point is that, if he did know how to garden or had a more elaborate set up to garden in his apartment or elsewhere, the transition to reducing his carbon footprint would have been easier. His wife complained that giving up the car and everything else was not as difficult as changing her diet because she could eat 'yummy' food. They might have been happier if they were growing what they wanted, rather than consuming a bland diet of potatoes and apples in the fall.

In short, if we have the skills to garden we can have yummy diets AND reduce our carbon footprint. It's win win!