Yesterday, Merry Bewick down on Chestermans Beach called me up and asked if I would come over and sign a copy of one of my books, that she had purchased as a gift.

I’ve been carefully tending my tomato seedlings since March. I’ve done a great job, I must say – some are approaching a foot in height, and a few even have buds on them.

So imagine my surprise when I saw Merry with a window-full of full-size tomato plants, many of them laden with fruit!

The challenge growing tomatoes here in Tofino is that we are on a skinny peninsula, surrounded by the North Pacific. Although we get a good deal of sun most summers, we just don’t get the heat that you need to ripen tomatoes. The plants grow; they even look great. And you can usually manage to get some hard little green tomatoes by September. But to get them to ripen before the winter starts to set in again (usually the second week of October; we don’t have fall), you really have to grow the fastest-ripening varieties. I have had the best luck with cherries: Tumbler and Golden Nugget. In the full-size varieties, Early Girl, Early Cascade and Alicante work best.

So I asked Merry what variety they were. “Oh, you know, stolen seeds,” she said. “Tomatoes from the store, that I ate and took the seeds out of.”

June tomatoes, I thought… no bugs around in winter, when they’re blooming. “Did you pollinate them yourself?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said, holding up a little blue paint-brush (see photo, above). “This is the bee!”

Merry said that some of the tomatoes were plants that she seeded about a year ago, and others she had grown from cuttings. “I just lop the tops off and thrown them in there,” she said, pointing to a bucket on the floor.

Well, you just keep on learning, don’t you? I am surprised that the tomatoes continued to grow through the short days of winter. But then again, I kept a green pepper plant alive and growing at a south-facing window a few winters ago, using a Q-tip as my bee, and getting some early spring green peppers too. I think the secret is two-fold: lots of light, and also that the plants don’t chill down at night, as they would in a greenhouse.

Thanks for the tips, Merry! And especially thanks for the tomato, which I enjoyed with my fresh home-grown Port Alberni lettuce (transported that same day from Port by bike!) in an extremely tasty and environmentally-friendly salad last night.

I brought them inside at the end of summer – you can read about them up to that point in my September 5th blog entry.  I thought that was that – a “technical success” in that I had plants, but no actual rice.  But the plants were just too beautiful to throw out, so I brought them inside, to the south-facing window in my bedroom.

I didn’t think that the plants were doing much there, but now looking back to those September photos I can see that they have definitely bushed out.  Interestingly, I left one bucket of plants downstairs, on my heated tile floor at my front entrance: more heat, much less light.  Those plants have died.  So clearly the light is what they really need.

I haven’t paid a real lot of attention to them – not even watering them to the point of keeping them always saturated like before (I wonder if that is what has stressed them to bloom?).  But they’ve been looking great…  And then, this morning, I went for a closer look and noticed that two of the plants (of a total of  12) have little blooms coming out – and it looks like  few more will bloom soon.

So, the Tofino rice experiment is not yet over!  I don’t anticipate getting more than a tablespoon or so of rice – but even if I can start to select for a line that is more cold-tolerant and faster-maturing, well… that will be a good start.

Next year I will do two things differently:

1.  I will try to get a seed that is already from a colder climate (these were from California; I’ll see if I can get some from Japan).

2.  And now that I have a garden in sunny Port Alberni, I will move some of my plants out there to see how they do.

And you know what is the most interesting thing about this?  On this blog, I can check the stats, to find out what search terms people are using to find my site.  And you know what the most common search term that leads people here is?  “Growing rice in Canada”.  So, even though this is not being talked about a lot in the media, it is pretty clear that it is on a lot of people’s minds.

I’ll keep you posted on what happens, so be sure to check back!

I’m pretty pleased – that’s a November vegetable harvest from my garden in Port Alberni!

In this photo you’ll see freshly picked celery, brussels sprouts and swiss chard.  I picked the peppers and tomatoes (green) about a month ago, and have been letting them ripen slowly inside.

OK, I know that you can’t be doing this right across Canada – our Vancouver Island climate is a bit milder.  But still, there is a lot that you can harvest even into the first frosts – most of the cabbage family (especially kale, usually one of my standards, but I did not have access to the garden in Port Alberni until July, which is too late to seed it) as well as cabbages and brussels sprouts.  Many of these can take quite a hard frost – in fact, they get even more tender and flavourful after a good frost -  so you can be harvesting them until late autumn or early winter, even in the snow.

I also just picked my last lettuces a week ago, too.  So really, there is a lot we can do up here.

A hint with the tomatoes: if you live in places that get hot summers, you can probably ripen them up just fine on the vines.  But, if you live in a place where it doesn’t get that hot (like here in Tofino) or if you start the plants too late (like I did in Port Alberni this year), if you pick the fruits green, you can ripen them indoors over a period of months – I mean it, I’ll still be eating fresh home-grown tomatoes until the end of November!

The tricks for ripening them inside are:

1.  Pick them before the weather gets too cold and wet, and definitely before your first frost – otherwise they may get blight or other fungus.  Indoors, that fungus will grow and spread faster than the tomatoes can ripen (so if any of your fruit are showing signs of it, get rid of them right away – they have no hope).

2.  But leave them on the vine as long as you safely can before picking.  The bright green ones that have not reached full size yet have more trouble ripening – they met rot or just wither up before ripening.  But if they have reached fullsize (you can kind of tell both by size and by colour, they become more of a yellowish green) they will likely ripen up if you follow steps 3 and 4.

3.  Make sure they get good air circulation, so they don’t rot or mould.  I find they work better spread out or stacked very slightly on a tray, than in a bowl.  They may ripen slightly faster in a bowl, but you really have to keep an eye on the ones further down.  Remove any that show signs of rot or mould immediately.

4.  Do not put them in the sun!  Sure, you can put nearly-ripe red ones there – but if you put green ones there they will probably dehydrate before they ripen.  Don’t let them get too cold or too warm – just room temperature works fine.

So there you go – still eating mostly local here in Canada in the last weeks before winter.  Here’s my lunch today:  my home-grown celery stir-fried up with the local sockeye salmon I canned up in the fall and brown rice (OK, not local, I am still working on that), with those tender little sprouts steamed on top.

Still, it’s been a pretty interesting exercise.  I learned a lot from it, and I want to try it again next year.  As you can see from the photos, the plants actually grew really well.  They are healthy, very sturdy, and each plant has between 4 and 7 tillers (the individual branching stems that come out of the plant’s base).  According to the rice-growing manual, plants can have anywhere from 3 to 33, depending upon how closely the plants are spaced and amount of nitrogen.

Considering that I am growing them out here in Tofino – not known for its heat! – they’ve done really well.  We had some unusally warm weather here in July (for us, that means sunny most of the day and temperatures in the mid-20s).  But we’ve still had lots of days when there was fog for most or all of the day, especially in August (we call it Foggust).  I wish I had taken some of them to Port Alberni, where normal summer temperatures are in the 30s, and there is sunshine almost every day, all day.  Next year…

OK, I am going to bring the plants inside now.  My upstairs bedroom window is south-facing and gets quite a bit of sun.  I think it’s probably too late for them to flower at this stage, but I’ll put them up there anyway and see what happens.  I’m trying to figure out, from that rice-growing manual, what the panicle looks like (that is the part that develops into the flowers and produces the rice grains).  It says that the panicle becomes visible when it is about 1 mm long, at which size “the young panicle has many fine, white, hairy structures at the tip.”  I think that my plants have formed these little panicles (see photo to the right) – those little hairy things have been on the plants for at least a month now.  But with all of the fog and rain we’ve had the last month, the plants and the panicles have not really grown much – in fact, some of them seem to be degrading and turning brown.

I’m still excited by the whole thing, though – just the fact that I grew rice plants here at all!  If anything significant happens with the plants inside, I’ll definitely update here.  Otherwise, check back next year for news of my 2010 rice crop.

Here are some things that I have learned, and will try to work on for next year:

1.  Rice takes from 90 to 200 days to mature, depending upon the actual variety.  Apparently Louisiana rice matures the quickest (mine was a short-grain from California), so I will see if I can find some of that for next year.

2.  I started mine indoors in early May (on a heated tile floor for the first 6 weeks).  I’d actually started a long-grain bulk-bin variety in April – I don’t know where it was from, but presumably it was a more tropical one.  Anyway, they sprouted into feeble little plants that eventually moulded and died, so that’s when I started the Californian seeds.  Next year I’ll start these ones in late March or April, to give them a better head start than they got this year.

3.  The plants definitely need heat.  For June and the first half of July I moved them out to my back sundeck by day and then inside most nights.  That’s a lot of work, and not reasonable if you are actually trying to grow a useable quantity – so I don’t think you could grow rice with any practical results (i.e. significant quanity) in a climate like this, with our cool nights.

4.  You can see from the photos that I planted them in a variety of containers.  The ones in the clay container are, for some reason, the healthiest and sturdiest-looking.  One thing I learned is to plant them in a shallow container (like my white plastic one), with the soil level about 1-2 cm below the container brim – that way when it rains, the plants do not get too flooded.

5.  Mosquitos lay eggs in your little rice paddies!  What I’d most like to do is try them out in one of those shallow black garden pond-containers you can buy at garden centres (in sunny Port Alberni, not here!) and make it a little ecosystem with some fish in it to eat the mosquito larvae.  Otherwise, in the buckets, I just poured off the water every now and then – so the plants were in muddy soil but with no standing water for a day or two – to kill off the mosquito larvae.

6.  I kept one rice plant inside in my sunny bedroom window the whole while.  It has grown taller than the others, but has not developed tillers like the outdoor plants – it is really just one tall and slender main stem with one very weak and scrawny tiller off the side.  It does have the little white hairy things that I think are panicles, though.  So outdoors seems to be the better option for them.

I’ll keep the comments open on this entry – if anyone else has tried growing rice in this type of climate, or has any idea where to purchase brown rice from Louisiana, I’d love to hear from you!

It’s set me thinking…  because I don’t have a workout regimen.  OK, last year I was training quite hard for a triathlon – swimming and kayaking, and doing a bit of weights too, as well as my running and biking.  But that triathlon was last August – a full year ago – and I have barely done any training at all since then.  And especially not arm training.  I’ve been in my kayak only two or three times this year, and I’ve hardly been in a pool since January either.

So I’ve been reflecting upon this.  I haven’t been “working out”, yet my body is stiff and sore from exercise.  And I realize that it is my chosen lifestyle.  I try to live as low-impact on the world as I can, at least in most areas of my life, and this means that I must keep active.

I don’t own a car – I bike as much as I possibly can.  I brought my bike to Vancouver for my writing course at UBC – and, even though I had use of my friend’s van, I rode my bike up that big hill every day.  (Hills are great armwork on a bike!)

I also put a lot of effort into growing and gathering my food – July is one of the prime months for that, and that is why my muscles are so sore now.  I’ve dug and planted two veggie gardens in the last month, I was clamming for four days in late July (the last low clamming tides of this summer) and I also scored five freshly caught local sockeye salmon, which I butchered and canned.  All that digging – for clams, and in the garden – has been great for the arms and legs and back, and I can even feel it in my core muscles.

I am fit mainly because I am active.  Yes, I do “work out” or “train” when I have the time – but I am active for several hours of every day.  Every day.  I refuse to “buy in” and just drive around when I can bike, and to purchase all of my food when I can actually get much of it myself.  I value the slower pace of biking – not stressing and rushing around.  I value the freshness and healthiness of my locally grown and gathered food.  I value the calming and meditative hours of work that collecting or growing my food entails.  I value having the kind of fitness that is not gained by three or four hard training sessions a week (aerobics or running or spinning or whatever), but the kind of fitness (and associated calorie-burn) that comes with a high level of “background” physical activity.

It strikes me that this, really, is how all of our ancestors have always lived.  It is only in the last half-century or so that most of us spend much of our day seated, in cars or at desks.  People used to walk or ride bikes a lot, to get anywhere at all – they did not expect to zip across town in some matter of minutes.  It is also only in the last half century that people get most of their food from the supermarket (that they drove to).  No wonder there is such an obesity epidemic in North America.  It is not just the poor-quality processed food many people live on, it is also that they have no background calorie burn.

Most people categorize what is “normal” by looking around them and observing what other people are doing.  So you might look at my life choices and say that I am not “normal” – because I am not behaving like most North Americans today.  But my formal scientific training is as a geologist, and we geologists are trained to understand time.  Humans have been on this planet for over one million years now – up until the last century (i.e. for the first 99.99% of human history), moving around under our own steam all day long in order to collect our food was “normal”.

The way we “Westerners” are living now is what is abnormal.

I moved from a beautiful house in the rainforest, with a small sunny yard mostly taken up by a big and productive veggie garden, to a townhouse last autumn.  I can’t say I was 100% self-sufficient in my veggies – but, over summer, I sure did not buy much at all.  Even in the winter, by having root crops such as carrots and potatoes in the ground or stored, and growing some of the greens such kale, chard, and sprouting broccoli, that grow year-round in our mild coastal climate (yes, here in Canada!), I was able to provide a fair bit of my winter food too.

Now, my first spring in the townhouse, I am working hard to get some food growing in a few pots on my small but sunny deck.  I have lots of herbs, four varieties of strawberries, a few greens such as kale and chard, and tomatoes seedlings that are springing up higher daily.

But the new crop that I am experimenting with is rice!  Yes, I am working towards a Canadian rice crop.

I don’t know if it will work.  But I do seriously fear the coming food shortages – which could be caused by any number of things including:
- long-term climate change as well as short-term catastrophic events (storms and floods) related to climate change
- blight and diseases of crops as we continue to focus on a few varieties and lose the genetic diversity of different species
- contamination of traditional crop varieties with genetically modified versions
- diversion of food crops for use as biofuels, so we can feed cars instead of people!
- bulldozing productive agricultural land to make more houses and shopping malls

All of these things are already happening.  Each one threatens our food supply – and, as farmland shrinks and the world’s population grows, the only end result is that some people are going to run out of food.  Even China became a net food importer in cash terms last year!  That should worry you – it worries me.

I’ve been gardening in Tofino for ten years now.  In each place I’ve lived (Ontario, eastern Australia, western Australia, and now coastal BC) I have had to relearn how to grow veggies.  Back in Australia I lived on tomatoes, eggplants and basil – three crops which I have to coddle, creating warm and sunny micro-environments for, here in Tofino.  But here, I can grow lush greens: lettuces, chard, and kale, pretty much year-round.

Even though I don’t have much garden space where I live now, I know what grows here and how to grow it; if I need to, I can get my food production up-to-speed pretty quickly.

The one thing that really is a challenge here, though, is the carbs.  Sure, we can grow potatoes til they are coming out our ears – but if the food supply really gets cut off, potatoes 365 days a year could get pretty dull.

So, that’s why I am experimenting with rice.  I know it is a more tropical to sub-tropical crop – but, with our very wet environment here (4 m of rain per year!), I think I will have more luck with it than with wheat, which would just rot.  I’ve researched it on the net – there is a great free rice-growing manual out there – and found out a fair bit.  

Depending upon the variety, rice takes from 90 to 200 days to mature.  Apparently the Louisiana varieties are the fastest-maturing.  I tried growing some rice from the bulk bins at the grocery store in April (brown rice of course, white rice won’t sprout).  It sprouted well, and after two days I planted the sprouted seeds in a tub of saturated potting soil, and kept it on my heated tile floor.  The seedlings started to grow but then, one by one, they withered and died.

So, a few weeks ago I started again – this time with a short-grained brown rice from California (hoping that Californian rice, like the Louisianan varieties, is some of the faster-maturing stuff).  So far they are doing great.

It’s all a big experiment – seeing if I can keep them warm enough to get a crop out of them.  I don’t have enough plants to expect much yield.  This is just a test, to see whether it is possible and, if so, to learn what I need to know.  Some day this might be life-saving information – and I don’t want to be figuring this stuff out once things really start to hit the fan.

(For updates on 2009′s rice-growing efforts, see my blog entries Sept. 5 and Nov. 27)