By Allen Garr
| Image: iStock |
Published: December 29, 2009
Vancouver is slowly turning the tide on manicured turf, writes Granville columnist Allen Garr
We were once green with envy when we looked at our neighbours’ lush lawns. But now that more and more of us would rather grow it than mow it, that envy is turning to disdain.
Lyle Davies, Vancouver Councillor Andrea Reimer’s grandfather, was a man well ahead of his time. Just after the Second World War, Davies moved to the Marpole neighbourhood of Vancouver. One day when his wife was off at work, Davies ripped up his front lawn and planted potatoes. When his wife returned home she was surprised. The neighbours, though, were outraged and, according to a story that is still retold at family gatherings, a “delegation” piled onto his front porch to let him know it.
That neighbourhood anger was simply a sign of the times. Author Ted Steinberg lays it all out in American Green: The obsessive quest for the perfect lawn. North Americans, and particularly those living in new suburbs, had turned lawn maintenance into a kind of “moral crusade.” The point of salvation was reached when you had a thick, pampered expanse of grass that was uniform in its makeup, as close-cropped as a ’50s brush cut and, most importantly, weed-free.
Yet that cultural climate didn’t just blossom overnight; it was nurtured over hundreds of years. The principal influence was Britain, where rich folks lived in mansions surrounded by endless rolling swaths of lawn maintained by small armies of serfs armed with scythes. Wealthy Americans travelling abroad admired and then imported the foreign grass species that originated in Africa, Asia and Europe.
What Steinberg refers to as the “eventual democratization” of the lawn came in 1830. Gone were the slaves and serfs and scythes. Enter the lawn mower, again from Britain. First there was the push mower, then a machine that could be drawn by horses. It wasn’t until 1893 that a power mower was introduced, fuelled by either gas or kerosene.
And all that foreign grass needed water – lots of water. The lawn mower was followed by the sprinkler in 1871, which spread in use as communities developed central water systems.
Those new subdivisions with their abundant lawns led to a new industry known as “lawn care,” and one essential element in that care was pesticides, which apparently owed their origins to chemical warfare products developed during the Second World War.
Homeowners got hooked. In the year 2000 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service observed that homeowners use up to 10 times more chemical pesticides per acre on their lawns than farmers use on crops. Meanwhile push mowers were replaced by gas mowers, trimmers, and leaf blowers, and that obsessive quest is today a serious threat to the planet. No, just because it’s small doesn’t make it innocuous: running a power mower for one hour is the pollution equivalent of driving a car 1,050 kilometres.
The passion for lawns has begun to fade recently, but judging from the teams of two-stroke terrorists who regularly invade my neighbourhood to cut and trim and blow my neighbours’ lawns, that fade is slow.
In 1994 the City of Vancouver launched its Green Streets Program, which encourages folks to replace boulevard lawns with gardens. In 2005 the city followed other municipalities in the region and passed a bylaw banning the use of cosmetic pesticides. And last spring Vancouver’s mayor Gregor Robertson allowed a large chunk of the city hall lawn to be torn up so vegetables could be grown. There are even some potatoes. And no delegations turned up on his porch to complain.
Allen Garr is a Vancouver journalist with a passion for birding and beekeeping. Read his past columns here >>
By Allen Garr
| Image: iStock |
Published: May 13, 2009
Demand for heritage seeds sparks a feeding frenzy
When I caught up to Jeanette McCall last March she was in the midst of a tremendous storm. The owner of West Coast Seeds was breathless, and just this side of overwhelmed at what was happening to her business.
While the global economic downturn was crushing most entrepreneurs, McCall’s niche seed operation was exploding. The appetite for her organic, heritage seeds jumped last year by 40 per cent. This year it is up 270 per cent.
Let me explain a few things about heritage seeds. The end of the Second World War was about the time we entered the era of factory farming, the mass production of fruits and vegetables for faraway markets. Many of the diverse varieties being grown at the time were cast aside; the gene pool shrank in the hunt for the few varieties that would grow uniformly, resist diseases, travel well and be able to be picked green and ripen in transit. In many cases hybrids were created. And in many cases taste was sacrificed. Think of those pinkish tomatoes you buy in the winter that taste like cardboard.
When she bought the business 18 months ago, McCall says, she looked at it as something she could do part-time: “I thought I could work a few hours a day.” Now she says she and her staff, who work out of a small barn in Delta, are going seven days a week. They are so busy they have had to enlist their children to help out. One kid is there with her grandmother doing nothing but putting UPS labels on orders. There are so many orders they are running out of stock.
And the top sellers are vegetables: tomatoes, squash and onions. So what is going on? In these difficult economic times, in this political environment, what with the 100-mile diet and folks more conscious about what they are eating, more of us are growing our own.
It’s happening on rooftops, in backyards, patio planters and community gardens. And gardeners are being more particular about where they get their seeds, which for more and more people means getting heritage seeds.
Over the past 20 years, Seedy Saturday at VanDusen Gardens at the end of February has become the Mecca for people looking for organically grown heritage seeds. If there is an urban agriculture movement in this city, it is here. This year the Floral Hall at VanDusen was packed to the point of paralysis. There were more people than ever before pressing past each other to check out heritage seeds being offered by a dozen seed sellers.
Hugh Daubney, an emeritus research scientist with Agriculture Canada, was there making a pitch for Canada’s heritage seed program, called Seeds of Diversity. He says hybrids tend to be more general in terms of where they can be planted, and the diverse options with heritage seeds allow you to find a variety that works best in your area. Besides, maintaining a diverse biosphere helps prevent one disease from wiping out a whole species.
Patrick Steiner with Stellar Seeds in Sorrento gave a workshop on seed collection. He pointed out that one advantage of many heritage seeds is that they are “open pollinated.” That means their seeds will produce the same fruit, time and again. With hybrid seeds, on the other hand, you never know what you’ll end up with. And growing from heritage seeds, you can even do your own selecting over several seasons to pick the best fruit to provide you with seeds for the following year.
Last January, long before this year’s Seedy Saturday and before Jeannette McCall and her staff were being overwhelmed by orders, Bruce MacDonald was going through his seed packets dreaming of the spring plantings to come. MacDonald is the “propagator” at VanDusen Gardens. This will be the third year he has put in a heritage vegetable patch.
MacDonald says his first notion was to try and locate varieties of veggie grown in Vancouver at the time it was first settled. He searched through the archives for old seed catalogues and newspaper clippings. Where possible, he labels his plants with information he’s dug up.
But like most gardeners, MacDonald has a romantic streak. For him, vegetables grown from heritage seeds are more “exciting” to eat. He says the idea of striped tomatoes, speckled lettuce, German butterball potatoes, things you can’t find at the grocery story, “it just suits my style.”
It may suit your style too.
Read past columns by Allen Garr.
By Granville Online
| Image: Granville |
Published: February 24, 2009
Granville magazine columnist Allen Garr is a Vancouver journalist and commentator who has made time for his passions: birding, gardening and beekeeping.
By Allen Garr
| Image: iStock |
Published: February 24, 2009
The ultimate urban bird is more like us than we think.
Just at dusk on a chilly, cloudless day during last December’s cold snap, I watched as a young woman began her journey from her office on Still Creek Drive in Burnaby to the Gilmore SkyTrain station by first opening her umbrella. When I asked her why the umbrella, she simply pointed upward and said, “The crows.”
And indeed there were crows, Northwestern crows to be exact, one of nine distinct North American species. There were thousands of them, perched on trees, nodding, flicking their wings, lining the edges of the roofs of every building on the block, swooping in by the hundreds from as far away as Point Grey in the last bit of light.
This roost of crows, estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000, has called this site home since the early ’70s. Before that, according to local crow specialist Rob Butler, they would roost up Indian Arm or north of Bowen Island. And while the bush that surrounded Still Creek when they first established that roost has been removed to make way for office buildings, the crows have continued to return each evening undeterred.
While the heavy footprint of human habitation has threatened other species at times to the point of extinction, crows, members of the corvid family that includes ravens and jays, have thrived. In his book, In the Company of Crows and Ravens, author John Marzluff notes that when woodlands are converted to suburbs, the crow population increases by 300 per cent. Simply put, human settlement offers crows more protection from predators and more feeding opportunities. If nothing else, the explosion in the crow population is a measure of urban sprawl.
Marzluff makes the not-uncommon observation among corvid aficionados that “to a surprising extent, to know the crow is to know ourselves.” We have engaged in a cultural exchange of sorts; more than any other birds, corvids have shared an intimate history with people. In North America, crows and ravens were waiting when humans first arrived by way of the land bridge across the Bering Strait. What these scavengers saw in our forebears was a new source of food, offering far easier and more plentiful pickings than they were used to when they tracked behind four-legged carnivores. What the humans saw was a creature that would weave its way into their dreams, as it has on every continent on the planet. Crows and their relatives can be found in Norse mythology, in prehistoric cave paintings in what is now France, and in Aboriginal legend.
For the people who settled in the Pacific Northwest, the raven became part of their creation myth. Consider Bill Reid’s iconic sculpture of Raven opening a clam shell to release tiny human figures inside. To the south and southwest, it was the crow that played this role. The intelligence and wiliness of these birds caused them to be cast as tricksters and messengers of the gods. Their habits of scavenging caused them to be valued as nature’s cleanup crew.
In spite of their big brains, or maybe because of them, corvids have through history been both revered and reviled. Before the Black Death hit Europe, they were street cleaners; after they had been seen to be feasting on the bodies of plague victims, they were associated with bad luck and death.
Marzluff says corvids are unlike any other bird; in terms of intelligence, they are ranked as high as the great apes. “They are able to learn, remember and use insight to solve natural and human challenges,” he notes.
He won’t find any argument from me. Before the city removed the old chestnut tree in front of my house, I looked out one afternoon to see a crow with a crust of dry bread fly into the crotch of the tree where a rotted-out branch had left a hollow that filled with water. The crow dunked the bread in the water to soften it as deliberately as my grandfather would dunk a slice of toast in his tea to make it easier to swallow.
As for the crowd of crows that makes the daily commute to Still Creek, we consider them a mixed blessing. We will notice them more for the next few months. Adults and their teenaged offspring will forgo the commute to Still Creek while they build nests in town to raise another generation. They’ll clean out our alleyways, but get us up most mornings earlier than we would like
By Allen Garr
| Image: Ellen Ho |
Published: November 12, 2008
No, it's not a mysterious plague decimating our bees; it's an entirely man-made crisis. Do we have the leadership needed to address it?
For the past two years the question hasn’t changed. If anything, I’m asked more often. As I work my bees at VanDusen Botanical Gardens, folks will lean across the split-rail fence and inquire with some considerable concern in their voice, “How are the bees?”
Tourists from abroad and folks from Vancouver seem remarkably well informed. But then the problems facing honeybees have been making headlines everywhere, from the New York Times to local community papers all across the continent. And people actually seem to take the plight of these insects personally, realizing, of course, that their fate is linked to ours.
They understand that something is seriously out of whack with the symbiotic relationship between bees and the plants they pollinate—a process that has gone on for tens of thousands of years, a process that until recently we have taken for granted and one that we have relied on increasingly to feed the human race.
So I take a deep breath and I tell them, in as much detail as they want to hear. For me it is a sad story: the bees are not doing all that well. To make matters worse, and not for lack of trying, there is no end in sight. And, at least in B.C., this crisis has put the beekeeping industry at serious odds with government officials and the scientific community over just what to do about it.
If you want specifics about the state of honeybees in this corner of the world, talk to John Gibeau. He is the president of the B.C. Honey Producers Association, but, more to the point, he handles about 50 percent of all the honeybees that are used as pollinators in the Fraser Valley.
Each fall he signs contracts with farmers who grow blueberries, raspberries and cranberries, and collects a cash deposit so that each spring and early summer he will deliver beehives to their fields when those crops are in bloom.
As a result of the complex calamity that has been taking its toll on bees, for the past two years Gibeau has failed to meet his commitments. Last year he needed over 6,000 hives but he was 2,000 hives short; he ended up giving some farmers their money back. Two years ago, when those first alarming headlines began to appear, he was short by 1,000 hives. And when I spoke to him last summer, he already knew he wouldn’t be able to make his commitments for this coming spring.
The cost to agriculture in B.C., says Gibeau, is “in the millions,” to say nothing of what beekeepers are out of pocket. Some crops, like blueberries, simply can’t create much fruit without insects to help them; their pollen grains are too heavy to be carried by the wind. While there are hundreds of pollinators found in nature, including bumble bees and Osmia bees to do that work, the most common and effective insect for the mass monocultures we have taken to planting to feed us is the domestic honeybee.
By Allen Garr
| Image: Christina Symons |
Published: August 26, 2008
Size does matter, and bigger isn’t always better.
I have five apple trees in my yard and the most remarkable thing about them is that they take up less room than my dining room table. In the past, putting just one or two fruit trees in a small city yard would mean the whole yard was full. It also meant hiking up a ladder to harvest the fruit. And as for condo dwellers, forget it; you had to make do with a patch of begonias and impatiens, and take a walk to the corner store if you wanted apples.
My trees, on the other hand, cast no real shadows of their own, leaving lots of room for other stuff and none of the branches is above my chin. I’ve got mine in the garden, but those folks in condos can now grow a fruit tree in no more soil than you can fit into a half barrel.
A couple of things make this possible. For starters my apple trees are growing on dwarf root stock. The person I bought the trees from grafted a scion, a bit of branch, from a specific type of apple onto dwarf root stock, which restricts the size to which the tree will grow. Then, when I planted those trees, I trained them to grow on a frame, like a trellis of sorts; the technique is called espalier. My trellis, which runs along side my garden fence, is made up of posts eight feet apart with three wires stretched between them at 18-inch intervals.
Dwarf fruit trees and espalier aren’t new. According to author Harold Tukey, dwarf trees grew in Greek gardens 300 years before Christ. Alexander the Great brought back dwarf apple trees following his conquests in Asia Minor.
By the time Louis the XIV had Versailles constructed in the 17th century, the palace’s kitchen garden had espaliered peaches, pears, apricots, plums, cherries, figs and nectarines. And gardeners working in monasteries throughout Europe were in the habit of espaliering fruit trees along the walls of their enclosed compounds.
But what was once an esoteric pursuit of the rich or cloistered has become available to all of us. In this part of the world it is thanks in no small part to Jan Traas. The Dutch fruit grower moved to B.C. with his family in 1953 after a dike in his homeland broke and led
to a flood that put him out of business there.
It was in the B.C. Interior where he observed that, compared with Europe where dwarf and semi-dwarf trees were in fairly wide use, British Columbia fruit production and fruit quality were considerably lower.
The smaller trees are easier to manage for pruning, harvesting and disease control. And if they are grown on wires, more of the fruit is exposed to the sun, improving the quality.
Traas bought land in Langley and ordered root stock from England’s East Malling Research Station, a world leader since the 1920s in classifying and cloning root stock. Then he set up a root stock nursery. His first customers were orchardists in Kelowna. But soon, by word of mouth, he was selling all across the continent. The dwarf and semi-dwarf apple trees you buy at the VanDusen Botanical Garden plant sale or at the UBC Apple Festival likely come from that original stock.
Tony Maniezzo is the UBC gardener who takes care of the 60 or so espaliered trees in their botanical garden and is quite happy to share his knowledge. He helped the folks at Strathcona set up their espaliers a few years back.
He will tell you that you should set up your frame before you plant your tree. When you buy your one-year-old tree, called a whip, make sure of the type of root stock it is on. Growers
still use “M” or “EM” designations (for East Malling) with a number attached. Mine are mostly M9s.
Regardless of the shape in which you want to train your tree, he says, “every espalier starts the same way.” Plant it in front of the frame, then prune it just below the height of the first wire. From then on it is a matter of pruning and training.
It takes some patience and some care, but in a few years, each spring you can look forward to a pleasant wall of blossoms and each fall you will have a small harvest of fruit all within easy reach.
Allen Garr is a Vancouver journalist and commentator who has made time for his passions: birding, gardening and beekeeping.
By Allen Garr
| Image: iStock |
Published: June 03, 2008
European chafer beetles, syrphid flies, spiders, ladybugs, aphids, nematodes: which are the good guys and which will destroy your lawn? Allen Garr weighs in
Any given sunny summer weekday that you wander down a city street, you can find a park board worker on her knees at the base of a linden or tulip tree. In her hands she will have small bag filled with several hundred adult ladybugs freshly removed from a refrigerated container.
Before releasing these, she will spray them with sugar syrup. This will ensure they don’t just immediately fly away, but rather will crawl their way up the trunk, into the branches and straight for the masses of aphids that have been sucking sap from the tree and excreting their annoying “honeydew” on parked cars below.
The Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation has been engaging in this kind of biological warfare for many years now. The city’s arborist, Paul Montpellier, figures it will spend $10,000 this year on buying millions of ladybugs to defend the city’s street trees, particularly the most susceptible linden and tulip.
This particular species of ladybug, Hippodamia convergens, is called the “Tyrannosaurus Rex of the insect world.” Adults will consume 5,000 aphids in their lifetime and lay a thousand eggs, which produce equally aggressive larvae or grubs. These larvae look nothing like their parents, which we have convinced ourselves are cute, almost cuddly; we make up nursery rhymes about them and replicate them in the form of children’s toys.
The ladybug grub, on the other hand is frequently described as alligator-like in shape: it is dark and usually has yellow or orange spots.
But whether you think they are cute or creepy, before you squash a bug, make sure it’s not a bug you should hug. In the battle against garden pests, we can and do get lots of help from insects.
Spiders are among the most reviled bugs. But ask Laura Doheny at David Hunter Garden Centers, and she’ll tell you these eight-legged creatures “do the most wonderful job of cleaning up the garden.”
Syrphid flies, or hover flies, are great predators of aphids. But they can give you pause; they can be mistaken for wasps except for their big heads and multifaceted eyes.
And there are ground beetles, which you may have regularly whacked while you were weeding. Well, believe it or not, their favourite food is slug eggs.
The deliberate use of biological predators to rid plants of pests was once the preserve of organic farmers, when organic farming was considered some kind of weird cult. But as we have come to learn of the dangers of chemical solutions, more people have been looking to bugs for help. And that now includes city folks.
Aside from the possible damage pesticides do to the environment and to your health there is this: “Spraying works,” Paul Montpellier says. “It kills everything.” But, he adds, the first things to bounce back are the pests we were trying to get rid of in the first place. The natural predators don’t recover nearly as quickly.
The city of New Westminster was hit with the European chafer in 2001. It is a small, brown beetle you do not want around. What does the damage is the beetle’s grub, which feeds on the roots of your lawn, killing off huge swaths. If that isn’t bad enough, crows and skunks love to feast on these grubs and tear up the turf to get at them.
The solution recommended by the city was a biological predator called a nematode. The particular nematode species that attacks the chafer grub is a microscopic round worm. The best time to cut these guys loose is in early July. That’s about the time the chafer’s eggs will start to hatch and their grubs will be setting about making a lunch out of your lawn.
In 2005 the City of Vancouver passed a bylaw designed to reduce the use of pesticides. And it appears to be working. Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, which has monitored the bylaw for the past two years, says fewer people are reaching for spray cans. More are buying biologicals.
Most garden shops in the city now carry a regular supply of ladybugs and nematodes in packages just the size you need for a small city lot or backyard garden.
And just remember this: biologicals don’t offer complete pest eradication. They just help keep things under control. Who can’t live with that?
