Galiano Club Blog

There will be Zucchini races again this year (start planning now!), and a pie baking competition. This year the Garden Club is organizing 11 different competitions, and the annual Adults vs. Kids Soccer game will be on.

The Picnic is a collaborative celebration, and last year over 20 different organizations participated to make it a fun event for everyone. If you’d like to get involved contact us to see where you can help.

No doubt about it, this past winter was a tough one for many Canadians. And even our mild west coast climate had a few surprises for us. This wet spring has seemed later than usual to arrive, so it may be hard to believe it’s time to start thinking about preparing for next winter. But when it comes to food security, living on an island makes us even more vulnerable than most North Americans. Not only does most of our food come from our centralized food production system, we’re dependent on the ferry service to access it.

Filling your pantry, especially for the winter with its unpredictable weather, is a way to make sure you will have enough nutritious food if the power goes out and ferry service is down. It can be very reassuring to know that you have enough on hand to feed your family for a few days, or longer, if need be.

Here are some tips to help you make sure you’re in good shape by the time the cold weather returns:

• Stock up on extra fresh local produce all summer long. Fresh ripe local food is at its peak nutrition, and buying it in season and preserving it yourself is more affordable than buying canned or frozen mid-winter. Many producers have ways you can buy direct from the grower or fisher, including farm gate sales and farmers’ markets. Galiano’s Saturday market is a great source, as are other local farmers’ markets and grocery stores. The Food Program’s Gleaning Program is a also fantastic way to access local excess produce—contact Emma for more info. And don’t forget all the bounty that Galiano has to offer industrious foragers—nettles, berries and seafood.
• Attend one of the Food Program’s Community Kitchens to learn more about pickling, preserving and cooking local ingredients. The Food Program has a dehydrator and vacuum sealer available to borrow—contact Alison.
• Start your winter garden now. Linda Gilkeson says that in our mild climate, most vegetables store better in the garden than in a root cellar. Linda Gilkeson’s Year-Round Harvest, Winter Gardening on the Coast is one of our favourite resources, and it and others are available from the Food Program’s lending library.
• Now is the time to think about where in your house you can squirrel away potatoes, garlic, grains, storage apples etc. in cool, pest- free storage.
• A great tip from Root Cellaring, Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables, by Mike and Nancy Bubel: While you’re starting seedlings for this year’s garden, stash away a bucket or two of garden soil and compost so that early next spring, you have some available that isn’t soaked with rain.

On Sunday, May 25th from 3pm till 5pm, Come join us for a celebration of the Two Islands United project.

This project has been a joint effort between the Galiano Community Food Program, and AMES (Access to Media Education)

Over the past two years we’ve been organizing gatherings between the elders of Galiano and Penelakut to discuss Wild Food Foraging and food sustainability on both our islands.

The AMES production team, led by Richard Wilson, Deblekha Guin and a number of local youth (Arthur Georgeson, Tina Basarab, Rowan Oakley and Sophia Kontu) have been recording the wisdom of the elders and creating a series of short films for “SalishHarvest.com”, an interactive website that will be ‘going public’ on the 25th.

We are holding a community gathering to screen some of these shorts and to launch this site.

Please join us.

It is wonderful to think about the foods that are growing all by themselves which will make a great snack as we are out for a walk. Sheep sorrel and miner’s lettuce come to mind often found close to a path. Their tender leaves and lively taste are fun to discover and nibble. Not to rain on this feast, but a word for attentiveness: many of us, me included, walk with our beloved dogs along these paths. Dogs are such great companions, and, as you’ve noticed, they do have a habit of lifting their legs or having a quick squat now and then. Keep that in mind when you pick your snack.

Your garden will also give you tasty food at this time of year, not necessarily from the stuff that you planted but from the weeds that come up all by themselves. Chickweed, dandelion greens and pepper grass are often ripped out to make way for our own plantings, but they are delicious and nutritious greens to enjoy by themselves or added to whatever salad we might be preparing.

A picnic idea, for totally biodegradable plates to eat from, (no dishes to wash when you are finished), use skunk cabbage leaves. Don’t get carried away and try to eat your plate. The only part that is good medicine is part of the root, but that takes a lot of drying and processing, so for now just enjoy your single use, entirely expendable green plates.