We have already received our order from Salt Spring Seeds. Those guys are super-hero fast! I was so impressed!
Yesterday I was asked how I’d changed since moving to a tiny island. It was a great opportunity to self-examine what has happened to me in the past 2 years that we’ve been living here and then what has happened since we’ve been slowly learning to farm.
One of the biggest realizations was garbage. Yup. On Pender Island, you have to deal with your garbage differently because any garbage you create, you have to take it off the island with you or pay someone $5 a bag to take it off for you. This is a huge change in consciousness. We have a fantastic recycling centre on Pender that will take just about anything, from clean plastic wrappers, to bottles, to milk cartons, to old batteries. They do an incredible job down there and even though people get intimidating by their strict sorting regime, they provide the island an excellent service. And, at the recycling centre, they have a “free stuff” section. Marc has scalped screen doors there for making bat-houses, old glass sliding doors for cold frames (for the garden) as well as cast iron pots, enamel pots that are great for melting beeswax and even a couple books.
We’ve had to learn how to compost properly because we any food scraps we have can be turned into fertilizer for the garden. It’s been really neat seeing our food scraps (plant matter only please) turn into useable soil to nourish more food. I tend to have a fondness for most things cyclical.
We also fully utilize our woodstove. Any paper or cardboard that we can burn to heat our house, we take pleasure in becoming little pyro-maniacs.
Another way we’ve changed from living on a tiny island, is the way we eat. This has been somewhat conscious but a lot of what has changed our eating has been sub-conscious as well. We want to eat in seasons but sometimes we do so accidentally. When it is October and the apples are dripping off the trees and the trees so laden with fruit, we take full advantage. For a month, we squeeze, dry, bake, nibble and ferment apples. This results in the rest of the year being rather sick of anything to do with apples. Sure, we take them out of our freezer sometimes for an apple pie or an apple crips, or maybe even apple pancakes. We grab a bag of dehydrated apple slices for a snack. But we do not buy apples in the store anymore because of our over-dose on them in apple season.
This same principle applies to blueberries. We have 500 blueberry bushes here, that is an acre of blueberry plants! In July, when it is blueberry season, we wake up in the morning and pick blueberries, then we scheme on ways to sell blueberries, we talk to everyone about how many blueberries we have and if you’d like another bag just let us know. And we are blueberried-out by the time August hits. Then we do it all over again with blackberries. Of course, we freeze blueberries and blackberries because who can get enough of these sunshine bombs, especially in the darkest of Winters. But to think of buying these fruits, it seems rather absurd.
I haven’t bought a banana in ages. I love bananas but because I have other fruit available to me for free, I do not even think of their yellow goodness.
In the past two years, how have you changed because of where you live? Do you think where you live affects your lifestyle?
