In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan explains how the apple’s wholesome healthy image is largely thanks to a PR campaign from the early 1900s. Before the 20th century, apples in North America were grown mainly for alcoholic cider. That all changed in the 1920’s during the American Prohibition when the sale, manufacture, and transport of alcohol was banned. The saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” was invented by the apple growing industry when prohibition killed the cider market. The apple’s new image stuck, and cider became a forgotten part of North American culture.

For some reason I’ve always had romantic notions about apple picking, maybe I can attribute that to novels like The Cider House Rules and Fantastic Mr. Fox. I’ve always thought it’d be nice to enjoy a simple outdoor lifestyle climbing trees, travelling south along with the harvest. So I recently decided to give the apple picking lifestyle a try and started working part-time at nearby Merridale Cidery. Remarkably, when Merridale was founded in 1980, it was one of only 2 orchards in North America devoted to growing cider apples. It’s a small-scale organic cidery that makes delicious cider of varying flavours and potencies.

That's 800 pounds, only 3200 to go...

The work itself isn’t the glamorous clambering about trees that I anticipated. I was a bit surprised to learn that I’d just be picking the apples off the ground after other workers go around and give the trees a good throttling to drop their fruit. It’s both meditative and physically tough if you push yourself. You get paid by the crate, so there’s lots of incentive to pick faster. On my first day, I managed to fill 5 crates, that’s about 4000 lbs of apples. But yesterday I barely filled 3 crates because I was sorting through smaller apples half-eaten by deer. I won’t make a career of it, but it’s eye-opening and humbling to experience the life of an apple picker.

City Harvest is currently run as a co-op by three women – Sol, Sharon, and Heather –  who currently grow food in 2 small greenhouses and 12 yards that are scattered throughout the city. They’ve been at it for a couple of seasons now and sell most of their produce through CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) veggie boxes that are delivered throughout the growing season. Another portion of the food they grow is sold at a farmer’s market in downtown Victoria.

As of now, urban farming on the west coast appears to be a challenging business that demands resourcefulness – the retired washing machine City Harvest uses as a salad spinner is a good example of that. As Sharon put it, they’re not in it for the money, it’s more a ‘labour of love’. Interestingly, it’s not a question of lack of demand. There are more people willing to have their yards farmed than there are urban farmers. That’s probably because it’s an attractive offer to the yard owner – all they have to do is give up a part of their grass, and they’ll get a share of the food that is grown at no cost.

But still urban farmers struggle to make a living. A large part of the problem is that they have to compete with the under-priced food that is so readily available in today’s supermarkets. How do we get people to start spending more money on food, which has become so undervalued?

In the words of Conrad Schmidt, “the idea that more expensive food is better for people is a concept that’s hard to believe. The proof is in the history and consequences of cheap food. More expensive food means jobs not only for North Americans, but people across the world. It enables better income distribution so that not just the wealthy can afford to dine on meat while a billion people starve.”

Assembling the veggie bins

I’ve started thinking more seriously about heading down the path of urban farming myself. According to Sol it’s a really rewarding job full of interesting challenges, as we were putting together the last round of CSA boxes for this season, Sharon and Sol alluded to all the things they can improve on next year. It takes some time and experience to learn the ropes, but there seems to be huge potential. If you look at what’s happening in post-industrial cities like Detroit, urban farming seems to be a movement that’s on the verge of taking off and will be here to stay.

The Village Garden

The structures in the village are an eclectic mix of natural building styles. Most notably there are beautiful smooth contoured cob buildings made of clay, sand, and straw. Slanted green roofs covered in plants give the structures an earthy, hobbit-home appeal. Several new buildings are in the works, including a commons area that will aim to comply with the Living Building Challenge. The idea is to use only natural or reclaimed materials to build the most sustainable building possible.

Exemplary Cob

For many of the residents the living conditions are rustic – most temporary residents are camping, there are outdoor showers, composting toilets, plus an outdoor kitchen and communal dining area where meals are eaten together. Much of the food comes from a colourful garden that has recently been supplying a steady stream of fresh salad greens, zucchini, peas, and raspberries. There are also the usual barnyard suspects, including a cow, pigs, sheep, chickens, plus a 3-legged dog and a cat named Chairman Miaow.

Most importantly, the real draw here is community. The village seems to attract kind, ambitious, long-term thinkers of all ages - it’s a great group of people and there’s a genuine openness and acceptance of anyone who passes through. Since I first visited the eco-village, I’ve always made a point of seeking out places like this that offer instant community. Several of the current residents are from my home province, so with my arrival the joke is that it has become a refugee camp for Albertans. I’m not sure what we’re fleeing though, it’s more like we’ve all been pulled here to build something more meaningful.

Garlic Harvest

I wonder how many people know that places like this exist, and if they do, what kind of mis-conceptions they have. It’s certainly not a hippy commune that is trying to isolate itself from mainstream society. Instead, the mission of the village is to educate, inspire, and transform by co-creating a thriving learning community. The idea is to show as many people as possible that experimenting with sustainability is both rewarding and fun. Sure, I occasionally miss some of the creature comforts like a bed and proper washroom, but life is good here, it will be hard to pull myself away…

Last week I heard Sam Comfort, a bee-keeper from New York, explain his take on the phenomena at the Calgary Permaculture Guild AGM. The owner of Anarchy Apiaries is clearly passionate about his business, if the bee hive tattoo covering his arm wasn’t enough of a hint, the t-shirt adorned with honeycomb and ball cap with a symbolic hexagon would give it away.

Busy bee

Comfort started out in the commercial bee-keeping world, and then gradually got more involved with keeping his own hives. He’s bold, and doesn’t wear any protective gear when dealing with bees – just for some added excitement.

He laughs at the fact that people have blamed declining bee populations on cell phones, and instead of Colony Collapse Disorder, he prefers to call it People Collapse Disorder. He says declining bee populations stem from the fact that people are not interested in the foundation of our eco-system and are not doing things in a holistic manner. Some of the factors that have affected bees are:

• Poor nutrition for bees from monoculture farming
• Lack of genetic diversity due to 100 years of artificial breeding which has resulted in oversized bees
• Overused comb

These factors have resulted in weaker bees. As a result, bees have grown more susceptible to mites, fungi, and bacteria. Sam says he’s seen mites take over unhealthy bee populations, but says that the mites are just a symptom of the deeper cause.

Most bees today in North America are kept in ‘inspection drawer’ or Langstroth hives. This type of hive was invented in the 1800s to maximize honey production. It’s the method of bee-keeping where wax foundation sheets are laid out in drawers, and bees then build their honeycomb on top. To further increase honey production, bees have been bred to be bigger, and their ‘swarming’ behaviour has been suppressed. This is a problem because bees need to swarm in order to ‘reset’ and stay healthy. Sam explains this idea nicely on his website:

“For over 100 years the beekeeping industry has been oversizing bees, typical capital-driven thinking “bigger is better,” bigger bees make more honey. It was only a matter of time before an opportunist arrived that really took advantage of an oversized bee. That pest is apparently the varroa mite.

I discovered that bees, when shook from “standard” beehive comb into an empty box with no hexagon-ridged foundations, will build a slightly smaller size wax cell than they had been forced to previously.

By allowing each generation of bees to draw its own comb, the width of the cells in the core brood area shrinks and seems to stabilize after 6 to 7 generations at a much smaller size than the ubiquitous industry standard. Once this cell size is reached, the bees are able to keep varroa mites below life-threatening levels and secondary diseases are less frequent, perhaps do to less stress.”

One of the solutions to all this is to use top bar hives – a simple hive that provides bees with an empty space with no wax foundations to build on. This allows bees to follow their own cycles, design their own comb, and raise their own queens, which leads to healthier bees.

The last few weeks have been pretty emotionally charged with too many nights of staying up way too late. That’s easy to do in Sweden this time of year, when it starts getting light again before it ever gets properly dark. Not only that, but our community is slowly being dismantled one person at a time, it seems like every night is a farewell party for someone leaving. Our bubble is slowly deflating and it’s a bit sad to see all these amazing people go.

Our Graduation Evening

It’s funny looking back at my first posts about Sweden, when I couldn’t see what the program was all about. In retrospect, I made the mistake of looking at it as a serious academic Master’s in Sustainability. Since January my frustrations have stemmed from wanting to write a good thesis after having had only a lecture or two on research methods. As a result, it felt like we were conducting research on a trial and error basis, which is a bad way to do research if you only have a few months. So in an academic light MSLS was maybe not a huge success. But if I look at it as an alternative educational program with an emphasis on learning how to work with other people and build community, it was undoubtedly a big success and I don’t at all regret coming here.

During our graduation evening, our program director (somewhat tipsy) admitted that if you look at MSLS on paper it’s just a bunch of bullshit. She probably won’t appreciate the fact that I’m quoting her, but her point was that it’s the intangibles that matter. Few MSLS grads will deny that it’s an experience that turns you upside down and shakes you to the core. I have been shaken, and I am curious where this will lead me next. It’s comforting to be part of an alumni network of like-minded people, and it feels a bit like we’re now part of a secret society. Aside from a passion for making the world better, we have our own lingo and a common tie that no one else can truly understand – 10 months in a microcosm of the world, in a sleepy little town called Karlskrona…

Urban Vegetables

Critics of urban agriculture often say there’s not enough unused land in cities for urban food production to be feasible, or that producing food on such a small-scale doesn’t make economic sense. This may be true in many cities of the world where green space is hard to find, but in North America it’s far from the truth.

The average American Lawn is about 1/5 of an acre, and over 80% of all Americans have access to a lawn. The area of land devoted to lawn in the United States is so big that grass is the most cultivated crop in the country, exceeding corn. Too bad you can’t eat grass… but at least it shows there’s a huge potential for urban agriculture.

Urban food production has been on the rise lately, and it’s a trend that likely won’t slow down anytime soon. Vancouver for example, recently set a goal for 2020 to increase city and neighbourhood food assets by a minimum of 50% over current levels. A big part of reaching this goal will be to use lawns to grow food.

For our thesis, we’ll be looking at three ways this can be done:

1) Permaculture design and edible landscaping –  designing yards that yield food but require less maintenance than your average vegetable patch. This usually involves the use of perennials such as fruit trees and berry shrubs, and designing water catchment systems that catch and channel water, so you don’t have to water yourself.

2) Commercial urban farming – growing food in a city for a profit. A model known as Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) promises that you can yield up to $50,000 in gross sales on only half an acre. Using this method, one urban farmer can tend several yards that belong to other people.

3) Do-it-yourself gardening – The commoners, anyone with a shovel and some seeds can grow their own food. There’s no reason not to, it’s healthy, rewarding, and fun.

Also an excellent month thanks to constant sub-zero temperatures. As a result I’ve spent a significant amount of time enjoying the frozen sea. I’ve even been able to skate to school on a regular basis, which is pretty handy when you live on an island. I can now say I’ve experienced the full gamut of outdoor skating conditions, ranging from terrible (thick frost layer with hard caked snow) to utterly sublime (pure black ice with a smoothness rivalling the oval’s skating surface).

Re-learning how to skate

All this ice is pure luck, when I wrote my last post I sure didn’t think it would last. According to the locals it’s rare to get any ice at all this far south in Sweden, so clearly everyone is taking advantage of it. Not just for hockey as you might suspect, but also for less conventional activities like ice-yachting and ice-motor-biking. There’s even one guy who regularly rigs himself to a kite and gets whisked along at tremendous speeds.

~~~

In thesis-land things are coming along nicely. We just gave our first set of presentations, and we’re working on sorting out our methods. The exact scope of our project is still an ever-evolving beast that seems to lunge in different directions depending on the day, but it’s early stages still, I’m confident we’ll tame the beast soon.

Sunset on Saltö

A frozen sea...

Unfortunately the timeframe of nice ice has been pretty short, as I write this the Baltic looks more like a puddly mass. At least that means I can now fully focus on my school work.

For my thesis I have partnered up with two Americans: Luke – a Californian with an entrepreneurial spirit and a background in Natural Building, and Tara – a recent college grad from New England with a keen interest in urban agriculture. Collectively, we are known as the Timberbeams (that’s both because we are dependable people and because we have the highest collective height out of any thesis group).

Our thesis is tentatively titled: “How the Pacific Northwest was Won – the Case for Food, not Lawns.”  We will investigate the main barriers that prevent people from using their urban yards to grow food, and what methods can be used to overcome these barriers. We plan to look at the inputs (time, cost, resources) required for various types of edible landscapes, so we can make concrete comparisons and recommendations.

True, it might seem strange we’re focusing on the Pacific Northwest, considering we’re living in Sweden and all. But for strategic reasons (existing connections, lack of a language barrier) we decided this would be the best way to go. We’re just out of the starting blocks, and it has already been amazing how many enthusiastic responses we’ve had from people willing to help us out. It will be very interesting to see where the coming months will take us as our thesis continues to evolve and progress…

Amidst the bustle of finishing off the semester, I recently moved to a new place on an island near the local Fisk Market. I’m now living in a garage that has been tastefully converted into a cozy little cabin. I sleep in a loft and my kitchen is the size of a postage stamp. It’s a great example of how to efficiently convert un-used space into something useful. I suspect this could become a trend in North America too – once more people start to discover the supremacy of bicycles over cars, they will need to find other uses for their empty garages.

My Garage on Saltö Island

The best part of my new place is that an awesome classmate lives two steps away, plus we have a really great landlady, Anki. She invited us over this past weekend to treat us to a traditional Swedish dinner. I haven’t eaten out very much yet here, so I was excited to finally experience a real authentic Swedish meal. We were served pea soup along with a thick/sweet/warm alcoholic drink called Punch, which we drank out of little metallic cups. Naturally, the soup was complemented by an obligatory wheel of Knäckebröd and cheese, with pancakes for dessert. I had to laugh, because I have always thought pea soup and pancakes were quintessentially Dutch creations. Maybe North European cuisine isn’t quite as varied as I originally thought.

Over dinner, it was really interesting to get some insights into Swedish culture. In many ways Anki is a typical Swede. She speaks excellent english, her house is spacious and tastefully decorated, she’s a mother of two, and joked about how she is her current husband’s third wife.

Sweden happens to have the highest divorce rate in the world, and one of the lowest marriage rates, so alternative family arrangements are very common. I have another classmate who is doing a home-stay here – for the first semester she was living with a father and two kids. She is now living in the same house with a mother and the two kids. Some might say the degradation of traditional family values is the result of an ultra-liberal socialist society, but I don’t really see too much wrong with it. Sweden also has the second highest proportion of women in parliament (over twice as much as Canada), so presumably the two stats are related. For more insights on Swedish culture and the pitfalls of socialism, check out this informative video.

So now that the new semester is here I can focus entirely on my thesis, exciting stuff! More on that in the coming weeks…

A common phrase you’ll hear this time of year is God Jul. It’s loosely translated as Merry Christmas, but a truer translation is Good Yule. Yule is a long-standing tradition in Scandinavia and Germanic Europe that originally had nothing to do with Jesus. Instead, it has its roots as a pagan midwinter festival that celebrated the solstice and spirits of the dark. It’s not a surprise, considering the darkness that falls over Sweden in the winter.

Festive Lights

Back when people lacked proper ways to measure time, the shortest day of the year was believed to be December 13th. This was the day of Lussi, a female being with evil traits. It was believed that trolls and evil spirits would go down chimneys to capture children who had been mischievous, who would then be forced to help prepare certain tasks for Yule, which fell on December 25th.

Over time, the line between religious and secular traditions seems to have become muddled. Lussi somehow became intertwined with Santa Lucia, the Patron Saint of Syracuse who lived in the early 4th Century. According to legend, Lucia suffered a martyr’s death after refusing to renounce her Christian beliefs, withstanding 1000 men and 50 oxen who tried to drag her off to a brothel.

It’s unclear exactly how Lucia became associated with the pagan tradition of Lussi, but obviously their names are similar, and it’s likely that the Christian authorities preferred to the story of the ultra-devout Lucia to the witch-like Lussi.

Santa Lucia

Whatever the case, today Santa Lucia is widely celebrated throughout Sweden on December 13th. The main event involves the rather hazardous act of precariously perching a candelabra on the head of a girl who has been elected as the Lucia for a particular region. The crowned Lucia then leads a procession of other candle-toting girls who sing a few songs, and then retreat back to their mothers waiting in the audience. I got to see performances both at the main church and at school, both times I left wondering how they get the wax out of their hair after they’re done. Turpentine?