I have been growing a little container garden on my balcony. Last year I had no outdoor space, so it’s a treat to be able to grow things. Or try to grow things. I have a knack for killing plants, except roses. Roses thrive under my watch.
But apparently so do tomatoes! My tomato plant now has 6(!) little green tomatoes on it, with more to come from the looks of it. My eggplant is starting to sprout its very first flowers, meaning it may actually sprout vegetables afterwards! And my purple pepper plant, which I thought had stopped growing with a few sad leaves, is green and growing again. It’s all very exciting. My neighbours must think I’m insane — I go out to look at them about a million times a day. “Oh, let’s see if anything has changed since I last checked an hour ago! Nope? OK then.”
But all this waiting and watching and labour intensiveness has got me thinking about food production. In the end, it will take far far far less time to gobble up the veggies than I’ve spent growing them. Weeks and weeks of attention for a few meals worth of food. I’ve always had great respect for farmers, who get a seriously raw deal, but growing my own veggies has made me realize how much goes into that tomato I pay like 50 cents for at No Frills. Then multiply that by the hundreds of veggies sitting in each supermarket every day. It boggles the mind.
On a related note, a man in the States is under threat of a $2,000/day fine for planting a “guerilla” garden on unused city property. He used a little boulevard to grow a bunch of veggies, some dumbass with nothing better to do complained and now the city is all in a lather about his trellises and other plant growing items. Seriously, these people need to get a grip. The land would have been otherwise unused, and now it’s growing food for people. Which is very useful, actually! Ugh.
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Ladyfest is having a fundraising garage sale on the 27th of this month at *Hotshot gallery in Kensington Market. It’s an excellent new gallery that has kindly offered up their space for us to sell stuff during Pedestrian Sunday. If you have any old stuff hiding away in the closet that you’ve been meaning to get rid of, we’d love to have it. Send me an email if you want to donate – we’ll have someone come by and pick it up, so you don’t even have to do anything!
If you don’t have anything to donate, but would instead like to procure things, stop by the sale on the 27th!
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Someone made a play about scleroderma this year for the Fringe Festival and I am going to see it tomorrow. For those of you who don’t know, scleroderma is the autoimmune disorder that my dad has had for the past 8 years.
Eye Weekly has a review of the play in this week’s issue that is absolutely infuriating, brushing scleroderma off as a “disease-of-the-week” and a “skin disease.” I can’t even express how ignorant that is. It’s so ignorant that I’m going to be writing my second-ever letter to the editor. They may not like the play, and that’s fine, but that’s no excuse to be flippant and callous about a debilitating disease. Scleroderma has never been anyone’s “disease-of-the-week” – it’s virtually ignored, which is why there’s no cure – and equating an illness with some kind of trend is disgusting. And “skin disease”? Like it’s a rash or dry skin or something. My dad just had surgery to have a feeding tube put in his stomach because his throat has become so tightened that he can’t eat enough on his own to be properly nourished. He’s a grown man, 5′ 10″ or 11″, who weighed 120 pounds a few weeks ago. Try convincing me that’s a skin problem, Eye. Jesus. This is why I gave up on arts journalism – writers who think it’s their duty to be a fucking emotionless asshole in the name of their criticism.
