TGIF

 The week went by very quickly. Lots of manual labour and workshops. We had a full day with the tree guy and planted 750 trees as part of the centre’s restoration project. I’ll never understand how anyone does that for a full summer. We obviously had a different take on the whole “tree planting” thing than the industrial planting that happens across Canada. Each treeling received special attention and spots were chosen with careful consideration of what they need. 

The tree guy is hilariously polite and cares so much for each little tree, it’s amazing to experience. He’ll make a suggestion on where to plant the tree and then say “Sorry” “Thank you so much” “I appreciate it”. I don’t know if I’ve described him yet, but he’s probably between 40 and 50 (difficult to tell), is a self professed romantic, stopped working for 12 years to raise his two kids by himself and has an interesting history. He grew up all over the world as a diplobrat and has mentioned Burma, India, Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines. The way he tells it, he told his parents very early on that he wanted to work with trees and then just made it happen by teaching himself everything he knows. The tree guy has no formal training as an arborist but has learned from doing it for 30 years and treats the trees as important members of society.

As we’ve been learning, as a group, we get tasks done much more quickly than any of the staff expect. The trees that were supposed to take us two days to plant were in the ground in a single morning. One of the permanent staff said that we had already done more this season than any other intern group has done throughout their entire internship. 

We work like army ants; each person knows their place, their job and gets it done. Once one person’s task is done, we move on to help people who haven’t finished theirs yet. We rock. Basically. That afternoon we spent some time getting some willow cuttings to root them for replanting. That took all of 45 minutes and then the tree guy took us for a hike up in the woods and talked about the different indigenous trees and the imported diseases that are wiping them out. After the hike, we came back and sat around in a circle and talked about creating a sort of constitution for trees. His idea is to come up with “rights of trees”. I explained that there are a few interesting articles out there, accessible on the world wide web (that means the internet) that talk about this subject. He decided to look into them before we meet again. In the meantime, we talked about the ethics of clear cutting and how economy drives massive deforestation. Again, nothing new.

Another morning this week consisted of an organic agriculture lecture where we mainly talked about accreditation, certification and the different governing bodies that deal with organic products. I didn’t realize how stringent it is. Unfortunately, it is very costly and difficult to get organic certified and for people with small farms, surrounded by big “conventional” farms, it becomes problematic to get certified. The onus for planting the necessary 8m border to protect a farm from non-organic practices (spraying, GMOs and all –cides) is on the organic farmer. This means that a small farmer loses an 8m border of planting area that spans the entire farm, whereas the conventional farmer who pollutes air, water, soil and his crop can plant all the way up to the property line. Fair?

We had interesting discussions about the sustainability of conventional farming versus organic farming. This soon turned into a discussion about the difficulty in gaining accreditation and the compromises that have been made to make it more accessible for farmers. It’s a very interesting discussion to have in the presence of someone who is an actual organic farmer, as opposed to having the discussion in a classroom with a professor who has read studies on organic farming.

Our afternoons are mainly spent outdoors, working the land. It was raining most of the past few days, but by some stroke of luck, the afternoons seemed to clear up for us, just in time to go plant the gardens. We managed to get the CSA garden all planted, as well as the potatoes finished out at Simm’s house. I spent yesterday afternoon wheel-barrowing load after load of compost onto the berry bushes. I must admit, I am quite enjoying the manual labour. My back has been holding up well and I am feeling healthy and stronger by the day. It’s a great feeling to be able to move a wheelbarrow full of soil. Not something I ever thought I’d say. There’s something so incredible cathartic about weeding a garden. It’s nice to see the progress that we make. The effort and energy that I’ve been putting into the work here translates into something visible and tangible. It’s a nice change from the university life of writing papers and doing research that turn into 1s and 0s.

The best example was the CSA garden. We got it done in an afternoon. By done, I mean that we put compost on the field, tilled it, hoed it into rows and mounds and then planted each row and then placed chicken wire on the pea mounds so that they grow up the wire and have some support. The only unfortunate part about all of this, is that we won’t be here to see all of our babies come alive and produce yummy food. We’ll be gone.