It's never too early to plan for next year's garden
Urban farming is increasing and that's a good thing since homegrown produce tastes better and costs less
On Oct. 17, I finished cleaning out my garden in the 400-squarefoot glassed-in area in front of a restaurant near where I live in downtown Edmonton. And I did so just in time, for the very next day some winter weather arrived, albeit with only a “skiff of snow.” So I didn't put my bike away yet (a good thing since we now have nicer weather).
When I came to Canada in August 1952, I lived for three years in Saltcoats, Sask. The fall before, it had snowed there on Sept. 15, and the snow had stayed and buried the not-yet-harvested crops. So the next April in an early spring, farmers harvested the rest of their 1951 crop (with fewer losses than feared) and five months later took another crop from the same fields.
This introduced me to the local saying: “This is next year country ... we may not have a crop this year, but next year ...!”
I am now in the midst thereof with this garden. After a late start this year, I still managed to grow some produce the restaurant's chef could use, but not as much and not the kind she would have liked. So now we're talking about how we can use the space more effectively next year to grow more produce for her use, and more of the right kind.
This is a harbinger of things to come. Urban farming will grow as more people work at and stay closer to home, and learn that homegrown produce tastes better and that growing it is both satisfying and helpful to their budgets.
Three years ago, I read about a young market gardener in B.C. who grows vegetables in six other people's backyards. In his second year he grossed $50,000 and said he has “no overhead, for I pay the homeowners in produce and my only cash outlays are that in spring I must buy seeds and pay the man who rototills my gardens.”
And what his regular customers don't take off his hands every week, he sells at the local farmers market. Just one of a growing number of “green shoot” urban farming stories.
Of course, as winter closes in and gardens shut down, we must find ways to keep busy indoors. One lady in our building spends much of her time doing jigsaw puzzles with uncanny skill in our hobby room. Some of us occasionally pitch in (and I seem to be the only male to do so). Last year, her sister in Vancouver gave her an 18,000-piece puzzle as a Christmas present. A month ago we finished it and it now sits in its full glory, spread out over six tables, all 9.5-by-6.5-feet of it!
In my last column I promised to tell you about “taking the law into my own hands” during my recent hospital visit to get a pacemaker installed.
My appointment was for
6:15 a.m. By 8:30 a.m. I was under the knife. That took an hour, with me under “conscious sedation,” i.e. half asleep but sort of aware what was going on. I had a post-operative X-ray appointment at 10:30 a.m. and my daughter had been phoned to come and take me home at 11 a.m. But I was only taken to X-ray at 11:30 a.m., and once there, had to wait a half-hour for a five-minute procedure, after which I waited in the hall for another half-hour for someone to take me back to where my daughter and street clothes were waiting for me.
So I decided to simply walk back to where she was waiting for me until a nurse passing by told me to get on my bed and wheeled me there. Mission accomplished, for 10 minutes later my daughter and I were on our way home!
Inserting the pacemaker itself must be simple; for it's inserted under the skin below the left collarbone without any cutting into muscle tissue. But the threading, with guidance from an X-ray monitor, of the two leads from the pacemaker through a vein into my heart, one at its bottom
and the other at its top (and the latter must “do a 180” in the heart) must be more challenging.
Both leads have tiny screws at their very end to anchor them in the heart wall tissue. And I was told to take it easy for six weeks to give them a chance to settle there firmly. No raising my left arm above my shoulder nor any heavy lifting with my left hand.
This aroused my curiosity. For limiting the use of the left arm and hand, while an inconvenience for a right-handed person, must be awkward for a southpaw. So I asked if left-handers have their pacemaker installed under their right collarbone.
Apparently not! While I thought this may be a function of the location of the vein used to access the heart, in the diagram in the Understanding Pacemakers pamphlet I was given there seems to be another vein just as accessible on the right side as the one on the left. So, with only 10 per cent of people being lefties this must be just another case of a lack of “patient-oriented” thinking!
I was told the pacemaker would give me more energy but I'm still waiting. In fact, if anything, I'm now shorter of breath than before, something you can be sure I'll bring to the cardiologist's attention at my six-week followup visit in three weeks' time.
My earlier reference to reverse mortgages prompted more than the usual feedback. Not surprisingly not all was positive, for I learned long ago that some vendors of financial products and services are more interested in making the sale and maxing their personal benefit than in what would best serve their clients' needs.
And this is facilitated by the fact many of their sales prospects lack the knowledge to make informed financial decisions. So I will make this the subject of a column in the new year that will highlight the observations of those with hands-on experience with reverse mortgages and my more detailed thinking of the pros and cons thereof.