Garden Route Therapy

Since returning to work I have been loading up my bicycle with supplies and heading to different City of Toronto community centers to deliver garden/nature activities to camp children.  Together we’ve been mixing seedballs and compost tea, sprouting snacks, learning about red wigglers, transforming into butterflies, playing fancy flower bingo and carefully observing pollinators at work.  I’ve especially enjoyed sharing story time with The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone (Timothy Basil Ering) and a new addition to my collection, Wangari’s Trees of Peace:  A True Story from Africa (Jeanette Winter).

At one of our sites, I was pointing out to the children that the eggplants had not gone beyond flowering despite us being well into August.  I pondered aloud why this should be and heard one little girl responded that it was because of the BIG strike.  Well actually, Mother Nature definitely hasn’t been on strike while we left our gardens unattended.  It was rather humbling to return to our sites and find jungles.  The rain certainly helped keep many things alive, despite the lack of sun and heat for the eggplants and tomatoes alike.  There are certainly a lot of weeds but in some cases this has helped to safely hide our growing treasures.

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This past Sunday we went ahead and celebrated summer at the High Park Children’s Garden with the Tastes of the World Garden Fiesta.  Visitors to the garden had an opportunity to try flavorful vegetarian dishes, representing different parts of the globe, prepared by our Youth Cooking Program, using predominately local ingredients picked from the garden and purchased at the Dufferin Grove Farmers’ Market.  My two favorites were the Ethiopian lentil salad with beautiful beets and sticky coconut rice served with peaches (a local twist to this recipe from Laos).

This special event included musical performers and garden activities, including  the chance for children to play with their food by creating edible snack sculptures.  It was delightful to watch their imaginations at work as they created exotic creatures from local produce, each one a work of art.