There’s nothing worse than being stuck inside on a sunny day.This is the thought running through my head every day from February 15th to February 19th – a period that, beyond coinciding with the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, also marks the most unseasonably warm and sunny stretch of weather the city had seen to date.
And I’m stuck having to work. From home, no less, because this period coincides with the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, and my job is based out of downtown.
It’s not even Olympic festivities that I’m looking to take in, but rather to visit EYA’s Strathcona and Cottonwood Community Gardens in East Vancouver where my friend Allison has all week been taking groups of foreign kids whose presence in Vancouver has nothing at all to do with the Olympics on field trips. Usually, I’m as committed as any Olympic athlete when it comes to giving 110% at work, but by Thursday the 18th, my resolve crumbles. And, after a solemn promise to myself to make up the lost hours of work (and sooner rather than later!), Strathcona is precisely where I go.
Allison works for WildED (part of BC Spaces For Nature), which is a nonprofit organization that provides environmental education/nature awareness programs to school groups in various regional parks throughout the Lower Mainland. Rather than having students trekking through the forest, though, on this particular day, Allison is in the midst of teaching a 7-week unit on sustainability to the students of Chung Dahm Immersion School (CIS), and has brought them to Strathcona to teach about sustainability as related to food.
Her day having begun in the CIS classroom in North Vancouver instructing the students on the 6 “N’s” of food sustainability (test yourself* - they all start with the letter ‘N’; think of a synonym where necessary: N1, N2, N3, N4, N5, N6), I meet up with Allison, 43 grades 4-7 Korean students, their teachers, and the two EYA staffers leading the field trip, Samantha and Hartley. We’re a substantial group standing under the focal Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) tree – the only living thing present on the site when garden work first began there in 1985.
The weather is as temperate as I’d imagined, and I’m warmer still from my bike ride over. I pull off my jacket as the students are led in an icebreaker game of “Meet a Tree”, and yet another involving pairs of students touching different parts of their bodies together that concludes in 20 pairs (and one trio!) of students locked in familial embraces when instructed to place a “head to shoulder”.
Love and hugs out of the way, Hartley divides the students into two groups, sending one group off with Samantha for a guided tour of the Strathcona Garden proper while the rest remain with him in the Cottonwood Garden, and are again divided into two groups. One group, supervised by Allison, is put on compost-hauling duty while the other, supervised by Hartley, is to refresh the trails in the garden with new wood chips.
The students seem to be enjoying the weather as much as I am. Within short order, they are whizzing back and forth with wheelbarrows, shoveling too-full loads they have to struggle to push, and generally laughing and playing as they run just this side of roughshod over the garden and each other.
Kids will be kids, no matter what part of the world they’re from.
Team Mud Slinger’s task is to shovel and spread a large pile of humus on some nearby garden beds. Some of the beds already have things growing in them: at one extreme, some old kale that has ground robust and woody over the winter, and at the other, a new-looking herb that has perhaps popped up on its own to greet the early-spring sun. I learn from Hartley that it is mushroom compost that the students are spreading – lower in nutrients than traditional, kitchen-scrap compost, but still a valuable soil amendment – and that this is done in the garden every spring.
Team Trail Raiser’s task is more or less the same as Team Mud Slinger’s, only that instead of mushroom mush, they’re moving wood chips to various bare spots along the trails. Nothing new to see here, so I instead strike up a conversation with the CIS teacher, Kat, who herself lives on some acreage that she farms and raises chickens on thanks to a university POL class she thought was political science but turned out to be poultry science. Clearly not shy about the hands-on nature of agriculture, she tells me she recently had to “vaseline” one of her hens who laid a massive, three-yolk egg for fear that the hen had torn in the process, and would be attacked by the others equating the smell of blood to a predator in their midst.
After about an hour, the two teams coalesce back into a single mound of kids, and the group switches with Samantha’s group to now receive the tour of Strathcona Garden from Hartley. Crossing Hawks Avenue, we pause to look at compact rows of apple trees – 115 different varieties of apple in total – planted using a method known as espalier, both to conserve space and allow for a ladder-free harvest. We then enter the fabulous Eco-Pavilion directly adjacent to them.
Built in 1997 (four years after the Strathcona and Cottonwood Gardens were official established), the work was done by a female carpenter and a number of female apprentices under the age of 25 as part of a mentoring/work training program. The Pavilion is solar-powered, contains a composting toilet, and was constructed entirely from reclaimed wooden beams. It is a large, open-concept space that is used by EYA staff and volunteers as a place to have meetings, potlucks, and to perform garden-related projects, such as the Calendula (Calendula officinalis) seed collection that is currently in progress on one of the trestle tables.
One final stop – the beehives, which are all abuzz with excitement about the first flowers of spring – and all too soon, the tour ends. On our way back to the Cottonwood Garden and the school bus, Allison asks if any of the students have gardens at home, and to my great surprise, we discover that the family of every student in our group participates in community gardening activities back in Korea. The majority of the students are from the teeming city of Seoul, thus they all live in apartment buildings containing on-site garden plots that are used for growing food.
Many North American apartments don’t have as much.
It’s a telling example of how, although environmentalism as a practice is largely place-based (i.e. one must look to the physical composition of our landscape and our interaction with it for specific methods in how to lessen our impact upon it), general environmental pursuits – the countless ideas we can come up with to live more lightly upon land that provides for us – are universal.
For this reason, Allison can teach a group of Korean boarding school students about the principles of sustainability with the full assurance that the lessons they learn will maintain their relevance long after they return home.
__________
*Answers:
N1 - Natural
N2 - Nearby
N3 - Naked
N4 - Now
N5 - Nutritious
N6 - Not so much meat
