CBC News told us how Canadians consume an average of 26 teaspoons of sugar a day.

The Atlantic magazine published an infographic of what the avergae American consumes each year – which includes 142 lbs of “caloric sweeteners,” 42 lbs of which are corn syrup.

And an American survey showed that parents of fat or obese children don’t want people to call their children fat or obese. (Umm… sorry, then do something about it).

OK, the word “poison” may seem extreme – but read on. All things in moderation. At the high quantities that most North Americans are consuming sugar these days, sugar is a poison.

How shameful it is that our current generation of children is the first that will not live as long as their parents! And that their parents are the ones who are actively doing this to them, by loading them up with sugar.

In Canada, childhood obesity has nearly tripled in the past 30 years. In Japan, childhood obesity has doubled in just a decade – while the incidence of adult obesity has remained steady. This is because, while adults continue to eat their traditional Japanese diet, children in Japan are now being raised on our heavily marketed sugar-heavy “western” diet.

Yes, we can blame the food manufacturers and marketers. But even more, we can blame ourselves. No one is forcing any of us to eat what they are packaging up for us.

Manufacturers are slipping fructose into products that normally did not use to contain added sugars, such as pretzels and hamburger buns. The effect of this is not only to add extra calories to the product; the biochemical effect of too much fructose is far more sinister.

Fructose makes the insulin receptor in your liver stop working, so that insulin levels rise throughout your body. This interferes with brain metabolism of the insulin signal, which then affects the brain’s detection of a hormone called leptin. Leptin is what signals to you that you have eaten enough. Leptin also makes you feel like burning energy. If your brain cannot detect the leptin, not only do you feel like you are starving, and just want to eat – you also don’t feel like exercising.

So the effects of all of this added fructose on our diet are far greater than just the added calories. The whole fructose/leptin/insulin connection is explained in detail in a great ABC Radio interview with Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of Southern California, SF. While the podcast of the program is not available online, the transcript is. I highly recommend that you take an hour of your life to read it – it will more than come back to you!

So what strategies can we take to avoid added sugars, and especially sugars? Well, the time-consuming one is to do a lot of research, learn what you can and cannot eat and what all of the variants of ingredient names are, and meticulously read ingredient lists.

The easier strategy, though, is just eat food. (I go pretty much by Michael Pollan’s definition of “food”: If your great-grandmother would have known what it is – an apple, a potato, a cut of meat – then it is food. If she would not have recognized it – a Twinkie, a McNugget, a Cheeto – then it is out).

I’ll admit it – I was addicted to sugar throughout my childhood, my teens, my twenties. It was used as a reward food in our home. Saturday was known as “candy day.” If we had been good that week, we got a chocolate bar and a can of pop (sadly, that is now daily fare for so many North American kids). Even after I left home, sugar remined a reward food and a comfort food for me – a treat for completing a big university assignment, or to cheer me up if I was feeling down.

Through my thirties, I decided to cut down on the sugar. I honestly cannot say what really motivated me to do that. I guess I started noticing that I would feel lethargic after a big chocolate chip cookie pig-out. And the logical side of my brain started to realize that sugar had not been available in such quantities for the bulk of humankind’s existence – that our bodies were not evolved to eat it – and I wondered what it might be doing to me.

And now, I rarely eat sugar. Yes, it took years of willpower to get to this stage – but I have broken the addiction. It is no longer a matter of willpower. I no longer desire it. Truly!

That whole sugar/insulin/leptin cycle makes complete sense with my personal experience: I crave good healthy foods, I have no desire to overeat, and I have the energy and desire to exercise. I eat a fair amount of fat in my diet (mainly olive oil and other “healthy” oils), and I have been maintaining my weight for a decade now – in fact, just found out this summer that I have even lost weight – without trying! I have more energy I than I have ever had and, at age 47, I am in the best physical shape of my life!

In that radio show, Dr. Lustig calls fructose a hepato-toxin, or liver toxin. “We’re being poisoned to death,” he says. “That’s a very strong statement – but I think we can back it up with very clear scientific evidence.” He goes on to talk about how children are now being diagnosed with Fatty Liver Disease – a disease once only found in alcoholics. To me, this is not only scary, it is inexcusable behaviour on the part of their parents – their supposed care-givers and nurturers.

Read that transcript. Stop poisoning yourself. And, especially, stop poisoning your children.

Yes. But I love plants, too.

<–[Garden harvest a couple days ago]

I’ve been the self-proclaimed founder (and so far sole member) of the RSPCP* for years – on th lookout for withered, mistreated plants at supermarkets and reporting to the produce manager that their plants outside need watering, or rescuing (and occasionally confiscating) abused plants from my friends.

To me, it’s not so much about animals vs. plants. I eat both. It’s about not being disrespectful of their lives: ensuring them good quality of life while they are alive, and not being wasteful with them.

I do eat meat. But I am very careful about where I source it from. I avoid anything that is industrially raised. Anyone who claims to be an animal-lover, yet will eat standard that supermarket chicken or beef packed on a styrofoam tray is living a lie. Sorry – get informed, and live consistently with what you say. Either that, or stop claiming to be an animal-lover.

So I will eat deer or seal or wild duck – animals that I know had a good and natural life until, literally, the final seconds. (Not to mention are not pumped full of hormones or antibiotics that are bad for both me and the environment).

[Watch it, Bambi. Just cuz I grow my own veggies - doesn't mean I'm a vegetarian!]

I eat some small-farm raised chicken, turkey, beef or lamb – but I always try to source small-scale local producers, where I can be sure that the animals truly did have a reasonably good quality of life.

Unfortunately, this whole thing about “certified organic” has become big industry. Once animals are being raised on large industrial farms, organic or not, their quality of life is sacrificed. They are herded around in buildings, they are not permitted to graze on real plants, they live in their own shit. I don’t want to know that animals are being forced to live such horrible lives for my meals.

And “certified organic” has kind of lost its meaning anyway – industry has a lobbyists who push for products and chemicals that would surprise many people to find that they are permitted in the so-called organic products they buy. Here’s ine example – of Anheuser-Busch pushing the USDA to allow them to make so-called “organic beer” from hops grown with chemical fertilizers and sprayed with pesticides!

To me, it is not the act of killing an animal for food that is wrong. It is that the animal lead a pathetic, unhappy, and often tortured life up to that final moment. And the same goes for plants.

The other aspect of respecting our food sources – the plants and animals that die for us – is reducing waste. Here in North America, the average person throws out 110 kg of food per year. (Source: Wikipedia) That is nearly a pound of food wasted a day! Add to that the amount of food wasted in the production and retail stages, and we are talking a total of 650 kg of food wasted per person each year. That is not only disrespectful – it is stupid.

I think that one reason that I do respect plant lives every bit as much as animal lives is that I am a gardener. I nurture my little tomatoes, my lettuces, my beans, from seed. I treat them well – both so they will have good quality life, and also so they will produce well for me in return.

My greatest eye-opener, though, has come from my attempts to grow rice here on Vancouver Island. I did actually manage to produce 19 grains… although, when I planted them this spring, only three of them turned out have a real rice kernel in them.

<–[My rice plants, grown on the outer coast of Vancouver Island!, about to seed.]

But rice is something most of us think of as cheap bulk food – along the lines of pasta. We don’t see rice plants here, and it is easy to forget that rice is a seed: every grain of rice has the potential to become a plant that, itself, will produce another handful of rice. Now, I am careful to scoop every grain of rice out of the pot, to eat every grain of rice in my bowl, so that none of that potential ends up in the garbage.

Because, to me, it’s about respect.

*Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants

These scarlet runner beans are not mine. But I took this photo today. It’s a garden that I bike past often on my training rides. Yesterday, I noticed that their plants are loaded with beans, whereas mine are still just flowering. So I came back home to look more closely at mine.

And what I saw was numerous dead-end stems. What should happen is that, as each flower is pollinated, the red petals fall off and a bean pod grows there. But where my beans should be, there is nothing. The stem dead-ends. So my beans are not pollinating.

And that, of course, made me think about the bees. We’ve all heard about the global bee crisis. Populations are dropping worldwide. Although the experts have some ideas on possible causes, no one is exactly sure what is going on.

But one recent study has found that cell phone signals may disorient bees. Bees are sensitive to the electromagnetic fields of cell phones. The cell phone signals can confuse them, causing them to swarm unnecessarily, and all of that extra activity may be fatal to the bees.

[My beans: note the dead-end stems below the flowers, where earlier flowers used to be. This is where the bean pod is supposed to grow - but there is nothing.] –>

There are other likely causes to the bee declines, too, such as air pollution (which also can disorient them) and fungal infections. But in this case, the other garden is only 3 or 4 km from my home in straight-line distance, so something like pollution or infection seems less likely. However, that other garden is located just past the edge of town, in more rural country – so the homes are spaced much farther apart. Which means cell phones also would be farther away from the bees.

I have scarlet runner beans growing on my balcony garden too, and I noticed that, although most of them also have not pollinated, a handful of stalks are producing beans. I also have lots of flowers growing right beside the beans: petunias and nasturtiums. Flowers are great bee attractants – so I wonder if the flowers have pulled in the few bees that are around, and those bees then did the bean flowers while they were up there.

It’s hard to know for sure. But I do remember hearing people talking in Tofino last year, too, about their beans not pollinating, and blaming it on the bees. Well, not on the poor bees themselves – they already have enough to deal with. But on the bee decline – which is almost certainly our fault, even if we don’t know exactly what it is we did this time.

Over 70% of the world’s most important food crops are pollinated by bees. I’ve heard it said that, if bees go extinct, humankind will be starving within three years. I don’t know if that’s strictly true. But it’s true enough that, even if you don’t care about biodiversity and ecosystems, even if you only care about your own personal needs, you should still worry about the bees.

On a happier note: When I was in my garden afternoon to take the picture of my dead-end stems for this post, a bee alighted right in my frame. A bit out of focus, but here he is. So at least there is one out there!

It’s absolutely not intentional – but I find that so many of my blog posts have to do with gardening. I think that’s because the way that I think is in terms of connections (as opposed to objects, or things) and that gardening, especially vegetable gardening, represents the ultimate connection between humans and this planet we live on.

Growing my own food is really important to me. It is relaxing and meditative, a definite part of my personal mental-health program. It is also good exercise, it’s good for the environment, and it is definitely good for me: eating fresh, tasty, local, organic food.

A lot of people I know say “Well you’re lucky, Jackie. I don’t have a yard.” Well, I have not had a yard for the last two years (I was living in a townhouse in Tofino). And even now that I do have a yard with a productive little veggie garden in it, I still grow a lot of my food in pots on the balcony.

Here’s a little video of my balcony garden this year, just to give you an idea of what can be done with a very small space.

So I’m going to give a few tips here, for those of you who’d like to try:

First of all, remember that plants are people too. (Well, OK, not people exactly – but they are alive and responsive to the environment). You need to know your own climate and what you can and cannot grown there, and you also need to seed and transplant things at the right time of year. This is different for each plant type you grow. If you have never grown veggies before, there is a bit of a learning curve involved.

Out here on the west coast, West Coast Seeds is an amazing gardening resource. Their planting guide http://www.westcoastseeds.com/admin/files/2011PlantingChart.pdf is my planting bible – it tells when to seed, when to transplant, everything you need to know for each crop. If you live in a different climatic zone, your timing will be slightly different. You can find out what your own climate zone is (for Canada) by checking out these maps. (If you live elsewhere, you will have to Google the maps for your own country).

Each plant has specific needs regarding the soil, nutrients, moisture, and timing. There are many good gardening books out there – but again, West Coast Seeds has the equivalent of a planting textbook on line for free.  These planting instructions, for almost every type of food plant, would apply to most climates.

For setting up a garden on a balcony or a deck, the main things you need to provide your plants with are sun, water and nutrients. A balcony that faces east, south or west will usually get enough sun for most crops. A north-facing balcony can present a bit more of a challenge, but you will still probably be able to grow cool-weather crops. If your balcony is exposed to strong winds, you might need to erect a transparent barrier to protect the plants a bit. As for the water, well… that’s just up to your remembering! Regarding nutrients, plants growing in pots require more fertilizer than those grown in the garden – pretty much any liquid fertilizer will do, used according to the instructions.

Certain plants do very well in pots, while others really need more space for their roots. Things that do not do so well in pots are root crops (such as carrots and beets) and plants that require a lot of space, like zucchinis and other squash.

Cool-weather plants that do great in pots are most leafy crops (especially those with smaller root systems) like lettuce, chard and kale. I like to plant four or five lettuces in a row in those long narrow flower planters. You can harvest the whole head when it is mature (some small new leaves will grow back from the stump) or just harvest leaves as you need them.

Hot-weather plants that do well in pots include tomatoes, eggplants and peppers. There are so many varieties of tomatoes out there; try to get one of the easier-to-grow varieties. Some of the most fail-safe cherries are Tumbler (my all-time container favourite) and Golden Nugget. Of the large cherries, Early Cascade and Early Girl are two of the best. The beefsteak varieties are toughest to grow, so I would avoid them when growing in containers.

Tomatoes need large pots for their root systems, and lots of water while the fruit is swelling. It is also critical that you follow instructions for growing the tomato plants when they are young, or you may not get much fruit. Keep them indoors in the spring when the plants are young and tender, then gradually acclimatize them to the sunshine (they will get sunburnt and lose all of their leaves if you just one day thrust them out into the sunshine, just like us!) You can put them outside permanently in late May or early June.

Scarlet runner beans are extremely productive and grow great from pots. Seed them only when the weather gets warm, in late May or June, directly into the pots that you will grow them in (they don’t like transplanting very much). You need to place a trellis or strings for them to wind around and grow. They like to grow up, but if you pay attention to them you can force them to go sideways along balcony edges. They get beautiful red flowers in early summer, and big tender green beans in late summer.

Herbs and strawberries are other treats that are easy to grow from pots – and they are lovely to have just a few steps away from the kitchen. Rosemary, oregan, marjoram and sage will survive winters if they are not too harsh. You will need to start other crops, such as thyme and cilantro (coriander), fresh each year.

What about you? How does you balcony garden grow? Do you have any advice or questions?

Not sure if you will get this in time but I have a hankering for that bean and rice dish we had while you were here, but I can’t remember the details.

Even though Lucy and I are not in regular contact, we are those kinds of old friends who can pick up the thread of conversation as if we only saw one another yesterday – even if it has actually been a year or more since we were last in touch. She was one of my first room-mates when I moved to Australia in the late 1980s. My last visit that she is remembering was back in 2008.

But I’d already been thinking about that rice and beans dish, and how intertwined it is with many of my friends around the world. I first learned the recipe back in 2005 or so, when I was staying with a friend of a friend in San José, Costa Rica.

Gallo pinto (which literally means something like “painted rooster” or “speckled hen,” in reference to the speckled nature of the black beans mixed with the white rice) is standard breakfast food in Costa Rica. Rice and beans are served with most dinners there. In the morning, the leftovers are mixed together to make gallo pinto. My friend’s friend’s wife Nana showed me her recipe (ingredients in bold):

Boiling the beans: OK, in North America, everyone seems to claim that they are too busy to soak and boil beans, so they get canned beans. Don’t do it! Canned beans come out about ten times more expensive, they are watery and flavourless, and all that shipping of metal and liquid around is bad for the environment. Soaking and boiling your own beans doesn’t actually take any of your time, it just takes a bit of planning.

Soak the dried black beans in about twice their volume of water, for 5 to 12 hours (so you can put them in overnight and boil them in the morning, or put them in in the morning and boil them when you get home from work). Get them up to a boil, and skim off any foam that comes to the top of the pot. Then add chopped garlic and fresh thyme – 8 or so branches of it. (And salt)

You can buy thyme at your local supermarket – or grow a pot or two of it over summer. The leaves fall off as it boils – when it is all done, the stems are long and solid and really easy to pick out. Both the thyme and the garlic make a HUGE difference to the flavour of the beans, so don’t slack off here! If you’ve bought your thyme, put the remainder of it as it is into a ziplock bag, squeeze the air out, and put in the freezer. Remove stems as needed: you’ll probably have enough for another 4 or 5 bean-boilings.

The beans usually take an hour and a half to boil (covered) but that varies with the freshness of the beans. Taste one after an hour or so. When they are mushy on your tongue, they are done.

Then for the gallo pinto: Boil white rice as normal. (As for quantities, usually you want 2 to 3 times as much cooked rice as cooked beans. I like cooking extra of both and using the leftovers in other meals).

Chop and fry a medium onion in some oil on low-medium heat. Don’t be shy about adding oil – it is the only fat in this dish, and fats are actually good for you. The onions shouldn’t really be browning, or maybe just a tiny bit.

When the onion is pale and transparent, add the cooked rice (doesn’t matter if it is cold leftovers or warm and freshly cooked) and some salt. If you didn’t use enough oil, the rice might stick – stir it constantly in any case.

Coarsely chop a big handful of fresh cilantro. Throw it in, stir. Add cooked black beans, trying not to get the liquid (it tastes fine with the liquid, just colours all the rice purple and doesn’t look at pretty). Stir more til it is all hot.

I make big batches of it. It keeps five days or more in the fridge, so I can take out a serving and heat it up really quickly. I eat my gallo pinto every morning – and I mean every morning – for breakfast, with a fried egg on top and salsa on top of that. For vegans, it is tasty with the just the salsa (it’s already a complete protein) or you can smush some avocado on top instead of the egg.

I don’t function well on sweet breakfasts (like granola, or toast with jam). I really need my gallo pinto, and I go to the effort of gettting the ingredients when I am travelling. Last year, visiting my sister in Ontario, I made it there – and now black beans and gallo pinto are regular menu items in her household! This December, staying with my friends Pato and Angela in Punta Arenas, Chilean Patagonia, I made it and they loved it too! When I headed further south, past Tierra del Fuego, to visit friends Cristina and Oli on Navarino Island, I brought a big tub of it already made – and their two year old there loved it too. While on Navarino, I received an email from Pato:

Hoy vinieron a almorzar unos amigos de Natales vegetarianos. Angela preparó los porotos negros con arroz integral al modo de Jackie, con salsa chipotle y lo disfrutaron mucho.

…saying that they had some vegetarian friends visiting from Puerto Natales, that they cooked them rice and beans “a la Jackie” and that it was a big hit!

And then, stopping through Phoenix, Arizona, on the way home, to support friends Deaune and Mike in the running of their first marathon there, I cooked up another batch of gallo pinto -and, again, a hit! Deaune wrote me later, to say that my healthy recipes had inspired her and her family to make positive permanent changes in their eating habits!

So, even before receiving this email from Lucy, I had been thinking: What a great thing, rice and beans around the world. Nana’s recipe, shared with me many years ago in Costa Rica, has travelled to so many distant corners of the world: southern USA and eastern Canada; southernmost Chile; Australia and – now that Cristina and Oli have moved to Germany – to Europe as well! A pretty delicious connection, linking so many of my friends around the globe.

Please comment here if you cook up some gallo pinto, so we can all see  how far this connection continues to travel! (Comentarios en español beinvenidos… ¡los traduzco!)

<–[my spinach]

The sun is beaming in my office window here and, when I finish writing this post, I am going to head outside and plunge my hands into the earth. I have eggplants that I want to plant today. And I expect that the beans that I sowed last week will just be curling up from under the earth. I need to go out to protect them from the blue jays, who love to pull them up just as they emerge.

[my first little broccoli of the year]–>

Gardening – producing my own food, is a way of connecting myself to this planet: by the direct connection of my hands in the soil, and also by the food that I eat. (It’s barely June – but in the last week I have harvested asparagus, spinach, arugula, lettuce, bok choy, and more… the earth in my yard literally becomes me!)

Gardening is also a connection to the seasons, this perpetual cycle of change that repeats as a result of our planet whirling about the sun. I’ve been growing veggies since I was a kid – I learned both from my mother and by trial and error. There is a time for each plant, and I need to be connected to it.

<–[promise of tomatoes to come]

When I moved into a ground-floor apartment in Perth, Australia, nearly twenty years ago now, I started a new veggie garden at my front doorway. It was March – autumn in Australia. Not ideal timing to seed veggies. But, I thought, Canadian summer is about the same temperature as Australian winter. I’ll plant them anyway. They’ll just think they are in Canada!

Ha, no fooling those plants. The seeds sprouted, but as soon as they emerged to see daylight, they noticed that the day-length was decreasing. They might not have known that they were in Australia – but they sure knew it wasn’t spring! They stayed on hold through the Australian winter, right through to the spring, when they finally started to grow.

Even when I was not connected to the seasons (or tried not to be), I was forced back. The plants knew.

[two generations of lettuce]–>

Gardening comes so easy to me – instinctive – but I think that is because I have been doing it so long that it becomes second nature. I know which month to seed my tomatoes or my kale; I know which plants to seed indoors (for the warmth) and which will become palid and lanky inside and need the cold (the cabbage family, such as kale and broccoli and bok choy).

<–[my kale is ready!]

It is funny, sometimes, seeing people who are new to gardening but who have no sense of this connection – no sense of the specific needs of each type of plant. They seem to think that the act of placing a seed in the soil is enough. They may sow everything at once, or when they have time rather when it is the right season, or everything indoors or everything outdoors. But it is sad to see that, too, because those people probably get disheartened about gardening, when their plants don’t produce for them. Gardening, and growing your own food, is such a joy.

Gardening is me – literally. I am made of the food that I grow.

Sure, I invest a fair bit of time into my vegetable garden. But I value that time, my hands plunged into the rich earth and the sunlight streaming on my shoulders in order to create my food – rather than hunched over my computer earning money that will pay for my food. I reinforce my connection to our planet, to my ancestors, and to how produce is meant to be: crisp lettuce, tender broccoli, sweet crunchy peas, and tomatoes with a flavour that, sadly, so many people no longer know.

For most of human history, the world around us has changed very, very slowly.

It’s a bit hard to define exactly when humans first appeared on this planet, because there is no exact date; rather, it was a gradual evolution over many millions of years. But, for the sake of this discussion, let’s call it 200,000 years of human history, which is about how long anatomically modern humans have walked this Earth.

For most of that history, our ancestors existed mainly as nomadic hunters and gatherers, walking in small family bands (or societies) through small territories in which they collected their food. Communities were oriented around “place” – they didn’t have any travel options anyway, right? – and their knowledge of that place: seasonal changes, plant growth, wildlife movements, was key to their success in finding food… and, so, to survival.

By around 10,000 years ago, following the end of the last Ice Age, many of these societies around the world were making the transition to agriculture. Now they were even more bonded to their place, and their knowledge of natural cycles such as seasons, weather and growing cycles were even more critical to their survival.

Connection to place was not simply an airy-fairy spiritual thing – even though rituals and spiritualities did, in many cultures, develop to symbolize this connection (e.g. the Thunderbird on the Mountain, or the Pachamama). Connection to place was a practical key to survival. And caring for that place – ensuring that wild animals were not hunted to extinction, and that soil remained fertile for subsequent years and subsequent generations -  was a logical key to survival.

Up until only a few hundred years ago, most people on Earth never ventured far from their birthplace. It’s only just over 500 years ago that Columbus embarked on his voyages of “discovery”. By the 1700s and 1800s more of a mass movement of humanity started to occur, as Europeans set out on journeys of colonization. But even these were mostly one-of trips: people emigrated (mainly from Europe; also some from Asia and – not by their own choice – some from Africa) to new lands where they made their new homes and developed their new connections, learning what to hunt and how to cultivate crops.

But what’s happened now? In the last century (or less!) we have arrived to this state where nearly everyone in our western society is mobile. Most of us no longer live where we grew up – or our children no longer live near us. Many of us have moved several times in our lives already. And, more significantly, we know that we have the option of moving again. Our lives and our communities are no longer centred upon a place.

Caring for place used to be critical to our survival. It was in our face every day, our place. If we didn’t care for it, the consequences would be felt quickly enough: no animals to hunt, or crop failures.

Our increased mobility, this last century (which, if you take 200,000 years as the length of time humans have walked the Earth, means only 0.05% of our history) has affected our connection to place. In fact, I would argue that it has pretty much destroyed it.

And once we lose that connection: our knowledge of natural cycles and any awareness of our impact on our place, it suddenly becomes much easier for us to damage our place. We no longer understand the consequences of our actions.

What do you think?
Do you have a place you feel connected to?
Do you still live there?

Well, it was a technical success. My harvest (pictured) wouldn’t have quite sustained me through the winter. Yup, that’s the whole thing.

But at least I got a harvest! I wonder if this is perhaps the first rice ever grown on Vancouver Island (I actually haven’t even heard of it being grown in British Columbia – although someone must have tried). I am quite sure it’s the first rice ever grown and harvested in Tofino!

So, for those of you have been following along, you’ll remember that I had rice growing in shallower and deeper containers. (For those of you who weren’t, you can check out my previous reports May 25 2009, September 5 2009, and November 27 2009). For some reason, the plants in the shallower plastic container flowered more. However, many of the flowering stalks did not produce rice grains – the little things that look like rice are actually empty (e.g. the one at the left of the photo is empty, compared to the full ones at the right).

So I guess they did not pollinate – but I am not sure why. (I am actually surprised any of them pollinated at all – by the time they were flowering, it was mid-winter and I had them growing inside, on my bedroom windowsill. No insects around, no breeze). I had pretty much given up on them – tried to keep them as wet as I had been before, but I was no longer expecting much from them. (They are very pretty though!)

So the little rice that was there matured as I let the plants dry up, around March. So it took nearly a year to grow the plants from seed right through to “harvest” – longer than it’s supposed to take (around 200 days), but no surprise in Tofino’s cool damp climate.

I didn’t get around to seeding rice this year – it was a very busy spring for me – but I will try to do some next year. Hopefully I’ll be able to source some varieties better suited to our climate (these ones were just standard Product of California brown rice seeds from the supermarket).

Anyone else have any rice-growing stories to share?

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.

(And – apologies for the long absence on the blog. Between the long travels, as well as trying to meet several overdue paying writing commitments, I made the executive decision to focus on the prior commitments. But I’m back now!)

First of all, the blog. Well, to be honest, I didn’t really know what I’d write about. I know lots of bloggers blog about writing, but – well, it just doesn’t interest me to write about writing itself. There is so much out there that I am interested in, so I decided to just go for it, write about whatever was catching my attention at that moment. Or, whatever I thought was important to write about, but that I would be unlikely to get published in other venues.

What really surprised me was how much I ended up writing about food! About growing food, about gathering food, about sustainable and local food sources. The fact that I blogged about this so much really drove home to me how much our food supply, and where we source out food from, concerns me.

Interestingly, these posts have proven to be some of my most-read blog posts as well. Until the ultramarathon-running tips posts were published (Multi-day race prep, Jan. 4, and Foot care while racing, Jan. 13), which were extensively linked-to by various sports-people and through Facebook, the most frequent route through which people found my blog was by googling the terms “Growing rice in Canada.” Who would have known? I wanted to find a carb source that I could grow out here on the west coast besides potatoes. I thought of rice – couldn’t find any info about growing it here in Canada on the internet – so just tried it out. Well, apparently I’m not the only one who’s been searching for info about rice-growing here in the north.

Twitter has been a mixed blessing for me. I love it! Which is part of the problem. I do spend too much time on it, which of course cuts into my writing time. I still have not broken 100 followers – but my followers are great, all people who read something I wrote somewhere and decided personally that they want to hear more from me. So I feel that there really is a connection with them, far beyond the anonymity of the internet, and that is wonderful!

I’ve had trouble working out who to follow, myself, though. I now follow just over 50 Twitterers, and there are many others that I’d like to follow – but the reality is that if I follow many more, I won’t actually have the time to read all the tweets that come in each day (at the moment in the low hundreds, and, so far, I still read nearly every one of them). So right now, the twitterers that I follow are mainly news organizations (e.g. @CBCNews, @cnnbrk) and various book-oriented publishers or writers (e.g. @globebooks, @GuardianBooks, and many others – check out my own “Following” list on http://twitter.com/jwindh).

I also follow a few bloggers who work in writing or publishing, who do an absolutely stellar job of compiling articles that relate to the publishing industry: @inkyelbows, @thecreativepenn, @rachellegardner, and @nathanbransford. I highly recommend any writers to follow these guys – through the articles they’ve led me to, I’ve been able to keep up-to-date on the many twists and turns that the publishing industry has been through these last few months.

So, where am I going to go with all of this? Well, I think the biggest thing that I’ve realized is that most of my blogging and tweeting is really about two different things – (1) myself and my interests as both a scientist and a writer, and (2) adventure sports. I think these two audiences are mostly mutually exclusive, so I realize that combining everything in one feed effectively dilutes anything I blog or tweet about. So I think what’s coming up in the next few months will be to split things up – get another Twitter account and set up a separate blog for the sporting themes. So this blog may actually move a bit towards writing about writing from time to time, after all (since writing is the main thing I do, these days) – but it will still be what it is now: a compendium of stuff that I find interesting, written when the inspiration strikes.

I’m pleased with the year. It’s my first foray into social media. It’s been a learning experience, it’s been fun, and I think it’s been really useful. (The website/ blog has had over 8000 hits so far, and I’m pretty pleased with that. Thanks, everyone!)

And you may have noticed that I have not mentioned my use of Facebook. I’ve been reluctant to join Facebook right since it first came out because of the contract you must “Agree” to when you join. It has softened up somewhat since then (after Canada won a lawsuit against Facebook about privacy concerns) but it still requires that you assign Facebook all rights to anything you ever post there (which they will cede back to you when you delete your account provided that no one else has ever copied it anywhere… yeah, right). Every time I nearly succumb to the peer pressure (everyone is on it!) Facebook pulls some other move that draws me away again, e.g. this new scheme of tracking people through their so-called “Open Graph” system.

Sorry guys, I don’t want you to track anything about me for your marketing purposed. Not saying I’ll never join… just saying that I’ve been thinking of it for years, and still can’t bring myself to agree to what they want me to agree to. Or to how they continue to change their terms of use.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has been following my adventures and my ideas. Now that I know what I’m doing, I aim to make this blog a much more interesting place over the next year – so I hope you’ll come back frequently, to check in about what’s on my mind that week. And tell me what you think about it…