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HomeEc #17: Bar Snacks (Monday May 27th, Handlebar, Toronto)

Howdeee!

Dana and I have just returned from an unbelievable month of travel.  After visiting Spain together, Dana got to sneak a few days in London; Joel had a business trip in Dallas and we visited Nashville together.  We don’t usually travel this much these days so it was an exciting month; but we’re thrilled to be home in time for the start of planting/ gardening seasons and for the start of many Farmer’s Markets too!

We’re also excited about HomeEc!  HomeEc is a non-competitive food event that’s often a potluck attended by a group of strangers.  Each month has a different theme and it’s an excuse to meet people, share food and conversation.  It’s generally held on the last Monday of the month.  You can see an archive of the events here.

Our theme for this month revisits the theme from HomeEc #1 – it’s time to make some Bar Snacks!

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What To Do with Smoked Mackerel

As I child I would spend portions of every summer in Nova Scotia.  We had lots of family out there and it was a great place to be.

Some of my fondest memories involve mackerel jigging.  Jigging is like fishing except that you don’t use fishing rods.  Our equipment was basic: 10-15 feet of thick fishing line wrapped around a cork.  The cork would be loosely tied to the boat (so you couldn’t drop it) and the line(s) dropped into the water.  Most people would fish with two lines and the most skilled would have multiple hooks on a single line (my Grandfather would fish with 6-10 hooks at a time).  THe fisherman (or woman) would gently bob their line up and down (thus ‘jigging’ it).

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Square Foot Gardening: Fundamentals of Drip Irrigation

Today is the fifth part of a series on square foot gardening and covers our journey of attempting to create a significant urban garden in part of a parking space in an alley in downtown Toronto.   The entire story is saved under our tag for Square Foot Gardening.  This is the last article in this series for a while (at least until the weather warms up enough to start planting).  We’ll continue it soon.

When Dana and I studied Food Security in the fall I was struck by many things but the one that stuck with me was how urban farmers in the third world are able to grow significant crops with limited space and extremely limited supplies of water.

Water has been an issue for our garden.  We carry it 1-gallon at a time from a kitchen faucet in the coffee shop we live above.  It’s about a 70 foot walk and it takes a long time and many trips back and forth.  The course really opened my eyes to three factors:

  • We are spoiled to have a seemingly abundant water supply so close.
  • We are using more water than we need (and taking longer than needed to do so).
  • The low-technology and high-innovation solutions being used in the third world could (and should) be used to conserve water and other resources here.

After taking the course I decided that I would spend a significant amount of time figuring out how to reduce our gardens dependency on water.  I’m hoping the first step was our commitment to square foot gardening.  The second step will hopefully be drip irrigation which we’ll introduce in this post.  Once we’re completed installing the system (in 1-2 weeks), we will share a walk-through of our system but this post will contain enough information to get you up and running.

Drip irrigation is remarkably simple.  There are few components: Read more

Square Foot Gardening: A Preview of Our Parking Space Garden

Today is the fourth part of a series on square foot gardening and covers our journey of attempting to create a significant urban garden in part of a parking space in an alley in downtown Toronto.  For the rest of this week we’ll cover everything you need to build a square foot garden, how to fill it with soil (and what soil is used), link to great sources and discuss some of the benefits, limitations and even concerns.  You’ll have everything you need to know to build your garden by the weekend.  Next week we’ll share more detail on planting, watering and more.  Over the summer and into the fall we’ll cover our adventures, successes and failures as they happen.  The entire story will be saved under our tag for Square Foot Gardening.

We are almost ready for the growing season!  The raised beds are built, gardens are in place and soil is ready to go! We have 66 square feet of gardening space and will be growing herbs on the fences around our gardens too.  Here’s a preview:

What’s left to do?

  • Build a platform to raise our rain barrel off the ground.
  • Install the drip irrigation (we’ll cover the basics tomorrow and have a detailed walk-through once it’s installed in our garden).
  • We’re considering adding some eavestrough to collect more water for our barrel
  • Plant!

All in all, it’s taken about 10 hours of building (plus an exponential amount of effort in research).  Thankfully the research and building are tasks that we’ll benefit from for years; if all goes to plan we will able to sustain this garden for at least 10 years and only need to add compost each year (in addition to planting of course!)

I can’t wait to see it start to come to life!  How’s your gardening coming?

Square Foot Gardening: Mel’s Mix (The “Soil”)

Today is the third part of a series on square foot gardening and covers our journey of attempting to create a significant urban garden in part of a parking space in an alley in downtown Toronto.  For the rest of this week we’ll cover everything you need to build a square foot garden, how to fill it with soil (and what soil is used), link to great sources and discuss some of the benefits, limitations and even concerns.  You’ll have everything you need to know to build your garden by the weekend.  Next week we’ll share more detail on planting, watering and more.  Over the summer and into the fall we’ll cover our adventures, successes and failures as they happen.  The entire story will be saved under our tag for Square Foot Gardening.

Today’s post will be the most controversial of this series.  It’s a topic that I struggled with as I researched through the winter.  I’ll try to explain my perspective and rationalization and encourage you to do your own as well.

For the last few years, we’ve had some success with our fence garden.  Here was our final harvest of last year (of course we had harvested through the summer as well):

And, as I’ve been candid about, we’ve had our struggles.

I would break down our three major stuggles as: Read more

Square Foot Gardening: Building the Frame

Today is the second part of a series on square foot gardening and covers our journey of attempting to create a significant urban garden in part of a parking space in an alley in downtown Toronto.  For the rest of this week we’ll cover everything you need to build a square foot garden, how to fill it with soil (and what soil is used), link to great sources and discuss some of the benefits, limitations and even concerns.  You’ll have everything you need to know to build your garden by the weekend.  Next week we’ll share more detail on planting, watering and more.  Over the summer and into the fall we’ll cover our adventures, successes and failures as they happen.  The entire story will be saved under our tag for Square Foot Gardening.

Yesterday we shared the basics of Square Foot Gardening; today we’ll show you how to build the raised beds.  If you’re not comfortable with power tools, it’s best to shop at a store that will cut them for you (many large hardware stores will).  I’m not a pro with power tools but I found the following to be very easy for my skillset.  I used a skillsaw (also known as a circular saw) and a cordless drill with a drill bit and 3.5 inch screws.

The completed boxes are rock-solid and look like this (although I also have some rectangular ones as described yesterday):

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Square Foot Gardening: An Introduction

Today is the first part of a series on square foot gardening and covers our journey of attempting to create a significant urban garden in part of a parking space in an alley in downtown Toronto.  For the rest of this week we’ll cover everything you need to build a square foot garden, how to fill it with soil (and what soil is used), link to great sources and discuss some of the benefits, limitations and even concerns.  You’ll have everything you need to know to build your garden by the weekend.  Next week we’ll share more detail on planting, watering and more.  Over the summer and into the fall we’ll cover our adventures, successes and failures as they happen.  The entire story will be saved under our tag for Square Foot Gardening.

For the last few years, we’ve dabbled in gardening.  We’ve had our share of mistakes, failure and even a bit of success.

If you’re new around these parts, Dana and I live downtown Toronto.  We don’t have a yard of our own but we do have a great landlord who has been generous offering us a generous share of space to use and we make the most of it.  It’s not ideal for gardening as the space amounts to part of a parking space and a lot of fence in the back of an alley.  But it’s our space and we think we can make the most of it!

This was part of last years fence garden:

If you want to see more of our fence garden and how it’s progressed over the years, check out our fence garden section!

This year we are making the biggest changes we’ve made since we’ve started the garden.  We’ve spent a lot of time reading and researching and planning and scheming.  Here are some of our challenges: Read more

We’re Bacccckkk! Here’s Where We’ve Been – and What’s Coming

Hola!

It’s been quieter around WellPreserved these days; we’ve been slower to respond on comments, haven’t been tweeting, updating Facebook or Instagram.  Our posts and newsletter have continued to be published but we quietly snuck out the back door!

We’ve just returned from the trip of a lifetime to Spain.  Many people from the community that is WellPreserved helped us plan our trip by sending suggestions, advice and other ideas for our trip.  We’ll thank all in coming posts and are so appreciative – there’s so much to share on Spain, food, cooking and preserving!

Two quick trip photos (the one of Dana is in a Sheppard’s field; the one of me is in a cafe/ pub in Barcelona where Picasso and other artists hung out):

We’re fired up for summer and have so much to share in the coming weeks and months – both from Spain and from here.

Here’s a sneak peak of what’s to come:

  • Gardening/ Growing.  Starting tomorrow we’re going to feature a step-by-step guide to square foot gardening.  By the end of next week you’ll know everything you need to know to maximize gardening in small spaces.  We’ve planned for months and are excited to share what we’ve learned, built and hope to inspire some others out there.  We’ve been hit and miss with our gardening over the last few years and we’ve got big plans for this summer!
  • Spain posts.  We’ll be sharing a series of posts that relate to the glorious food experiences we had in Spain.  We’ve shot some video, a tonne of pictures and have so much to share that we think you’ll enjoy.  We’re going to spread the posts over a period of time so we don’t tire you out all at once.
  • Small batch preserving.  Our larder is relatively well-stocked and it’s the start of summer!  We already have several hundred recipes for preserving on our site so we’re going to dedicate much of the summer to small batches to share really simple ideas if you want to preserve smaller portions, have limited time, space or budget.  Preserving doesn’t need to be a big ordeal with giant batches (though they can be fun).  Of course we’ll still have a few big batches.
  • More.  I’m not sure what else – yet.  But am hoping to get some more foraging in soon as well as some fruit wine fermenting.

What would you like to see added to the list?