Migration complete! Back in the Yukon.

I checked the stats on my blog, and apparently for last month I had 78 pageviews from the US, while only 24 were from Canada.  Very few American's I talked to while living in New Orleans had any idea as to where the Yukon was, so I carefully labelled the map below, just for you guys!

I arrived back in Beaver Creek, Yukon yesterday.  There's still a foot of snow on the ground.  It's 9:30pm and the sun is still pretty high in the sky.  Today I got started on germinating seeds.  

Wearing three sweaters at once never felt so good.

(fyi - Everyone talks like this in Canada.  Everyone.)

Grow food, be part of the creation of a local food system AND make a living? Yes, such a thing IS possible..

Your typical high-end restaurant can be a really effective tool in creating a local food system.  They like their food fresh and want to be able to acquire more product whenever they need it.  

When growing food in the city, produce can be harvested, delivered and consumed all in the same afternoon.  

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It's a simple formula that many chefs and farmers are now using to recreate our food system:

In its practical sense, chefs who choose to purchase local product (as opposed to purchasing from a nation-wide food distribution company) can often rely more on their producers.  If they run out of a specialty product in the kitchen just before the dinner rush, they can more-easily acquire more of it.  Also, local product is basically as fresh as it gets.  No nation-wide food distribution company can trump that.

In its political sense, growing food to sell to restaurants, I think, is one of the best forms of protest.  Don't want to support companies which pollute water tables in Latin America and take advantage of countries who don't have as tight of environmental regulations regarding spraying a large (and by North American standards, illegal) amount of pesticides on sweet potatoes?  How about not wanting to support Kraft solely because (until you knew) you were never given the opportunity to consent to monetarily support the environmental/public health burden that is Monsanto?  

Growing a bit of our own food is a good start and enables us to decide what hidden environmental/social costs we do or do not want to buy into.  Growing food and selling it enables others to choose what they want to purchase.  

And regardless of politics and petroleum,  it just tastes better.

Here are some pics from a farm that I had a work-trade with in my neighbourhood.  They have three areas where they grow microgreens and a specialty salad and sell them to a bunch of restaurants.  They harvest twice a week.  Microgreens are delivered to the restaurants either the same day or the day after. They deliver to about twenty restaurants and have three full-time staff.  Wicked business.

Jim bragging about growing Mustards on less than an inch of soil.

Mustards growing on sidewalk. 

The salad harvest.  Wild flowers and various native and non-native greens.  

Anyone can grow microgreens in any environment on any surface

Use cinder blocks, bricks, ice cube trays, old drawers, or anything else you can think of and try it out.