Nanabush Food Forest Stories — fruit

The rhubarb patch keeps on giving this year, and sparked the start of our annual preservation efforts.  We’ve created some wonderful low and no-sugar fruit spreads, in limited edition batches.  I am proud to offer these alternatives to conventional jams.  Our fruit spreads contain only a fraction of the sugar, and do not leave you with that ‘furry teeth’ feeling.  When you take out all of that refined sweetness, you experience the real fruit.  We will be bringing them to the Just Food Farm Stand (at 2389 Pepin Court beginning July 7th). In my humble opinion, the vanilla-ginger rhubarb combination is...

Puttering through our Basecamp Food Forest, we are enjoying the experience of ‘discovering food’. We love Kogane cabbage, and could not find a source for more seeds, so we started the last of our saved seeds this year and let them all go to seed. We’ll be set for kimchi material now! They are the yellow flowers in the background. In the middle, a pleasant discovery of some alpine strawberries, with astralagus, wood sorrel and borage in the foreground. You could not ask for a happier mix of plants! The astralagus (a.k.a. milkvetch) fixes nitrogen and so helps feed the...

One of the challenges of ‘urban farming’ is that there seems to be great feeding pressure, possibly due to the distance between edible green spaces. A lot of animals live within city limits, and when they find a patch of succulent food, they make short work of it. Got to give it to the grackles, they are smart birds! They figured out that the haskap berries were ready for harvest at our basecamp food forest and cleaned us out! We managed to harvest some for ourselves, but the rest were gone within a day. The hungry birds then turned their...

Our vines are growing, and loaded up with some lovely little green gems. The Kolomitka kiwi plant is a very long-lived woody scrambling vine and creeper, which ultimately grows to 8–10 m. Kolomikta is the hardiest species in the genus, at least down to about -40°C in winter, albeit somewhat susceptible to late spring frosts. The plant was collected by Charles Maries in Sapporo, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, in 1878, and sent to his patrons, Veitch Nurseries, who introduced it into Western horticulture.