Midge's Blog

Jane Jacobs tribute

Just put up a new entry on The Dirt at You Grow Girl.

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Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006

I know this isn?t exactly about gardening, but it is about a fellow avid gardener who passed away earlier this week. I don?t know how many people know of Jane Jacobs, myself having studied human geography and urban planning in university, she is one of my idols. If you haven?t heard of her, just google her name and start reading?maybe you will be swept away too.

Jacobs grew up in the States, but has lived in Toronto since 1969, when her family left the States to escape the chance of her sons being drafted to fight during the Vietnam War. She has been one of the most vocal and influential critics of urban planning throughout the years, fighting against the building of major expressways that have destroyed neighbourhoods and promoted the povery of inner-city neighbourhoods in cities like New York and Toronto. She has fought for planning centred around neighbourhoods and citizens, and against planning catering only to the automobile. She has championed the organic, complex, and disorganized nature of urban neighbourhoods, and criticized the suburbs for their isolation, poor economics, and automobile-centredness.

She has been one of the biggest proponents of mixed-use planning (complete communities where shops, residences, and recreational areas are all within close proximity to each other, often with shops along the street level and residences above them), which has been regaining popularity in North America over the past decade and a half or so.

Her books are timeless, and perhaps her most famous one, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was first published in 1961, and is still an inspiring read to anyone who is interested in progressive urban planning.

If you want the readers digest version of her work, Wikipedia has a great overview. And for a more personal mini-biography of her life, the CBC has a great tribute up on their site.

The Fig Tree: Year Three

Well, it?s finally getting to the point where I?m not afraid it?s going to snow again up on the hill, so time to think about getting back into the dirt! So far, I have renewed the old garden plot, though I?m going to try and swap it for a better one in a couple weeks, and started to ponder what to do with it and my little balcony garden.

This afternoon I was sitting at my desk, working on my thesis, and listening to CBC?Thursday is garden day. So, I just called the Openline on BC Almanac (a CBC Radio One show) to talk to Brian Minter of Minter Gardens, and ask about what to do with my fig tree. As you may remember, my fig tree is basically a stick, here it is last summer:

It has been a stick since I bought it, and it has only grown two tiny branches and no figs at all. I was at a loss of what to do with it next, so while I was listening to BC Almanac while working on my thesis tables, I decided, why not ask someone who can really give me a good answer? So I hit redial about 35 times and finally got through.

Now, I know I am a long time gardener, and that I am part of the You Grow Girl community, and that I might seem like I know what I'm doing, but boy did Brian Minter put me in my place! I guess I have a lot to learn about fruit trees! The instructions:
1) Cut off about a foot from the top of the "tree"...this will be totally painful, but apparently it is necessary in order to get it to branch out, and really should have been done when I first got it.
2) Apparently the potting mix I used is holding too much moisture, so I am supposed to fluff the soil with a gardening fork, and then mix in some bark mulch so it will retain less moisture.
3) Finally I have been starving the poor thing--and they had a good laugh at my lack of care in this respect, as I have not been feeding it any plant food. I am to add lime to raise the PH and make it hungry(?), and then also fertilizer to feed it.

Supposedly, by following these steps, I will have a healthy, lush Figgy by the end of the summer! Progress will be documented. And wish me luck on getting a top row garden plot!

Tasty summer-y eats

Some of my most recent culinary inventions that have turned out well:

Quinoa salad:

Basically, cook up a bunch of quinoa, and then when you're ready to eat it, toss in some chopped avocado, sundried tomatos, spicy tofu (optional), and season with garlic powder, flaked dulse seaweed, parsley, and lemon pepper. I know it sounds like an odd combo, but it is soooo tasty. Love it hot or cold.

Next, meyer lemon cookies! For those who are not familiar, meyer lemons are a tasty citrus hybrid, blended from lemons and (I believe) tangerines. They are slightly sweeter and more orange-y tasting than a normal lemon. I adapted a vegan choc. chip cookie recipe into this, and the ones I made were gluten free, but any kind of flour will do. I had some meyer lemons, and wanted to use them in baking, and they turned out soooo well, they were quite possibly the best cookies I've ever had!

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup earth balance margerine
3 tbsp. fresh meyer lemon juice
2 tsp. rice milk
zest of 1 meyer lemon

Preheat to 375(F). Mix wet ingredients in one bowl, dry in another, then combine all. Bake around 12 mins (mine were pretty thick, I just patted them into little rounds). Let cool. Optionally--I iced them with buttercream icing made with 2 tbsp. of meyer lemon juice.