My First Authentic Canadian Food Experience: Wild Nova Scotia Blueberries

This post is part of the Canadian Food Experience project proposed by my friend Valerie Lugonja, who is a board member of Slow Food Edmonton. The project began June 7th, 2013, and has a Facebook page. As we (participants) share our collective stories across the vastness of our Canadian landscape through our regional food experiences, we hope to bring global clarity to our Canadian culinary identity through the cadence of our concerted Canadian voice. Please join us. 

I grew up in Nova Scotia. My family were there for generations, going back to the early 1600s. My mother's side is a mix of Dutch-German "foreign Protestants" and English-by-way-of-Connecticut Planters who settled in the South Shore and the fertile Annapolis Valley. My father's people were English-by-way-of-Massachusetts Planters Loyalists (one was tried for recruiting for the British Army during the Revolution!) who forsake the land to become sea captains based on the Parrsboro shore and brought home their brides from England.

One of my earliest food memories is picking wild blueberries with my parents. Each tiny wild blueberry is an explosion of flavour, unlike the larger high-bush blueberries. We kids would just use our fingers to pick, and inevitably eat more than went into our buckets, while my mom supervised us and kept us entertained with stories of watching her colour-blind father pick whole buckets of green berries when she was a child. Dad did the bulk of the picking using an antique blueberry rake made of wood and tin shaped like this one:

blueberry rake, photo via eattheweeds.com

DIY denim Bermuda shorts

This slow fashion tutorial is so easy, even I couldn't mess it up:

1. Take your formerly-favourite boot-cut or flared jeans that are suddenly looking tired now that everyone is wearing skinnies. (Or, someone else's that you scored at a thrift shop - look for good quality denim with no inside-the-thigh damage from wear.)

2. Cut them right above the knee. If your jeans are like mine, you'll be able to tell where that is without measuring because the knees are just a little worn - but you may also wish to measure along the inside of your leg from crotch to knee, mark that measurement on the inside-of-leg seam of the jeans using tailors' chalk, then cut. (Save the offcuts. You'll use them to creatively patch another favourite pair. I'm thinking I'll use boro embroidery as my inspiration for that project.)

(Want shorter shorts? Try measuring the inseam of a pair whose fit you love, then adding a couple of inches to give you room to roll the hem.)

3. Hem as desired. For now, I've just been rolling mine up to hide the raw edge. If yours won't stay rolled up, you can use iron-on hem tape, turn them in and hem, or bind the edge with a pretty ribbon.

4. Bonus points if the jeans were too small and you updated them by inserting a ribbon panel along the outside-of-leg seam. (I did this as a teenager, and I'm planning to use the trick for a couple of my daughter's favourite pairs to extend their life.)

Et voila! You now have a pair of the on-trend denim shorts that every shop seems to be flogging this summer - and you've extended the length of time you'll wear a favourite piece of clothing.

Slow News Summary: Spring 2013

First slow news summary since February. Are you ready for all this link love?

On slow design, slow making, and slow home:

As expected, slowLab have relaunched their crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Their end product will be the Slow Design Knowledge Platform (a web-based learning tool, community hub, and research incubator) - and their pledge rewards are absolutely the coolest. I've signed up for the collaborative Slow Design Reader and the ability to host a Slow Dialogue in my city (details to be announced soon!), but I'm also coveting the exquisite porcelain cups and wishing I had the cash to travel to their location and do an intensive workshop. Sigh. (BTW, if you were one of their supporters on Kickstarter, you should be aware that your credit card was never actually charged and that you need to repledge if you want to support them.) Oh, and if you happen to be in NYC for Design Week 2013, they're doing a brilliant HUMAN CHAIR project that you can participate in:


HUMAN CHAIR #slowhuman from slowLab on Vimeo.

• A new tapestry exhibit explored The Power Of Slow.
• Gregoire Abrial's brilliant exploration of slow design (PDF, en francais).
• Robyn Griggs Lawrence described slow design, and so did the Happy Spaces Project.
• I am so inspired by the work being done by the Slow Textiles Group in London.

On slow fashion:

• Ecouterre continue to dominate slow fashion reportage with stories about a mending library, the fashion calendar, a mass-produced upcycled-clothing collection, a kick-ass slow fashion hoodie, and H&M's dubious efforts to rebrand itself as the standard carriers for ethical fashion.
• Everyone seems to be connecting the dots between the horrific factory-collapse tragedy in Bangladesh and the pressing need for both slow fashion, and activism that pushes fast fashion retailers to ensure worker rights and safety. Alabama Chanin, Future Threads, Natural Life Magazine, and Ecouterre have all written eloquently on the matter.
• Natural dyes have been making the blog world sit up and take notice, with Ecouterre profiling the Textile Arts Center and Colorant's cashmere collection, both from Brooklyn, GOOD highlighting a pair of cool "neighborhood dye" projects in Oakland, California, and the Kitchn showcasing Sasha Duerr's jawdropping Seasonal Color Wheel:
  
   
• Assemble Papers interview Kate Fletcher about the Craft of Use project
• Social Enterprise as a business model for fashion
• A farm-to-fibre fashion project in Vermont
• Design For Mankind profiles some gorgeous slow fashion lines
• Slow Fashion Forward created this image to explain slow fashion:

On slow food:

• A mouthwatering recipe for lasagna to protest the horsemeat scandal.
• A great interview with Carlo Petrini.
• An online, crowd-sourced map for foragers.
• Lucky me, I got to go to the Eat Alberta conference this year, and I never want to miss another one. My Storify of all the Eat Alberta tweets (more than a few of them mine) is on the Local Good's blog.

On slow travel:

• A slow festival in Italy
• Slow travel with children
• The Idler is being added to my must-sees when I make it back to London.

On slow living, slow parenting, slow money, and so forth:

• Here's a fascinating blog for you slow journalists: the Slow News Movement.
• In the run-up and aftermath of their annual meeting, Slow Money got lots of press, including interesting articles in Greenmoney and the New York Times.
• The Times also made the case for Slow Television.
• The always-wonderful Slow Mama blog has included posts on frugality, asking for help, mastering a craft, and a great gift idea for Mother's Day, along with many musings on life as an adoptive mother.
• I love the idea of these handmade postcards.
• Here is a terrific interview with Carl Honore.
• Oooh, another magazine devoted to slow living.
• Candidate for new favourite blog: Slow Living Essentials. Among other things I love the format Christine uses to look back at each month on her goals.
• Locally, Prairie Seen were the organizers for Slow Art Day - check out their photos and thoughts.
• The Art(s) of Slow Cinema on Looking Slowly

On sustainability and environment:

The monarch butterflies are in trouble. Plant more milkweed! (If only the fix for the massive declines in honeybee populations was as simple to implement.)

Bioregional dyeing in Alberta

Lately I've had my nose down, researching what fibres and dyes I can use for my projects that are completely local (I'll save my thoughts on regional fibres for another post.). Although I have used commercially-made acid dyes to dye fabrics in the past, my experience with natural dyes has been limited - so, I'll be blogging about it as I learn. I'd love to grow the dye plants that can be grown here in USDA Zone 3, and also take a bio-regional approach by foraging for dye plants that grow wild here.

rose hips and bark from today's walk

There is basic information about natural dyeing using local plant materials here and here and some inspirational photos here; I'm also now doing more detailed research using the books from this amazing bibliography. Oh, and this link talks about traditional natural dyes used by first nations artisans for porcupine quills, which may provide some more ideas for bioregional dyeing.

My dyeing set-up: I'm hoping to work outside when the weather is good, but the ventilation is good in my kitchen when I'm working with nontoxic dyestuffs. I already have pH paper, a big enamel lobster pot, a thrifted glass casserole dish, thrifted canning jars, tongs, a dye measuring spoon, and a set of Majic Carpet acid dyes with formula books in my rug hooking stash. Oh, and a propane camp stove in my backpacking box, and a clothesline that needs to be installed. Yesterday I visited a local art supply shop and added a tjanting tool for batik work and a natural indigo dyeing kit, and ordered some goodies from Maiwa in Vancouver. There may be some additional instuments that are part of the materials for the Surface & Textile Design intensive at the U of A in July (so. very. excited.). I still need to look for second hand: more dye pots, slotted spoons, bowls, and measuring spoons - made of stainless steel or enamel or (if I get lucky) copper - and a kitchen scale and hot plate.

Dye sources I will plant in my new garden (many are also food sources, yay!):

• Rhubarb leaves (note: poisonous!)
• Hollyhock 'nigra', for the blossoms
• Heather
• Woad (I have ordered seeds from Wearing Woad in BC - a noxious weed here so they *must* be harvested before going to seed)
• Carrots (I have seeds from Cubits in Ontario)
• Beets (I have seeds from Cubits) (too highly fugitive)
• Blueberry
• Cherry tree and/or pear tree - for the leaves
• Blackberries - for the leaves, berry dye is fugitive
• Marigolds, for the blossoms (which coincidentally are our city's official flower - no idea why, since they're not exactly local)

Dye sources to forage locally (many of these are wild or invasive):

• dandelion
• goldenrod
• big basin sagebrush / Artemesia tridentata
• curly dock / Rumex crispus
• sheep sorrel / Rumex acetosella (this can give a beautiful green)
• tansy / Tanacetum vulgare
• horsetail / Equisetum arvense
• fennel / Foeniculum vulgare
• St John's wort / Hypericum perforatum
• prickly pear fruit
• elderberry
• Canada thistle / Cirsium arvense
• common mullein / Verbascum thapsus
• prairie sunflower / Helianthus petiolaris
• rose hips or petals from the wild roses that flourish in the nearby ravine
• bark from dead lodgepole pine (on a trip to the foothills) or birch
• fallen leaves from birch or trembling aspen
• acorns from burr oak (which is planted as a shelterbelt tree on the Prairies)
• there may be more on the noxious weed list that I can experiment with
• certain lichens and mosses grow in abundance in the woods near me, so they might also be worth trying

In addition, I can collect wood ash from the weekend bonfires the teenagers have down in the ravine, and dig a little of the red clay that's everywhere here to use as a source of iron. I should also experiment with using our hard local water instead of distilled water to see how it changes the colours I get.

Reference books I am using:

• Harvesting Color, by Rebecca Burgess (2011) 
• A Weaver's Garden, by Rita Buchanan (1999)
• Wild Color (Revised & Updated), by Jenny Dean (2010)
• Eco Colour, by India Flint (2010)
• The Complete Guide to Natural Dyeing, by Eva Lambert & Tracy Kendall (2010)
• The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes, by Sasha Duerr (2010)
• Alberta Agriculture's Weeds of the Prairies (2000) for plant identification

What are you making?

My YEGhead: planting seeds & watching them grow. Metaphorically.
Via Make Something Edmonton on Facebook.

Tonight is the launch party for the amazing Make Something Edmonton project, and I was lucky enough to grab a ticket before it sold out. Hopefully today's snowstorm won't prevent me from going!

In the spirit of the event, I thought I'd make a little list of what I'm making:

1. The Local Good. I've been on the volunteer board of directors of this amazing grassroots organization for several years now, and I am extremely proud of the work we are doing to make it easy to find the amazing local projects, businesses, and events in Edmonton. In our early years, we noticed that we'd met lots of people doing similar projects with common goals who were not aware of each other's work, and we felt that the best way we could make change was to bring them together so they can exchange ideas, create collaborations, and make amazing things happen. All our projects, from our events listing and blog, to themed Green Drinks networking events, to the Good Hundred Party and educational panel discussions, are based around the simple idea of fostering community by making it easy for people with common values and interests to find each other.

2. My bicycle blog, Loop-Frame Love, which I co-write with a rotating cast of collaborators. There has been a lot of heated rhetoric around bike lanes in our city lately; this project makes a small difference by showing that cycling in this city (and my co-bloggers') is not just for hipster messenger dudes on fixies, weekend warriors on mountain bike trails or training in pelotons, and wierdo commuters on hybrids wearing safety orange. There's a wonderful community of year-round bike-culture bloggers in Edmonton, and we hope that ours adds to the diversity and approachability of cycling voices in the city. So far our biggest contribution has been the Critical Lass rides we organize for female cyclists in street clothes, on a route suitable for novice riders, to promote cycling as an approachable, fun, everyday activity. Although there are other social rides sans politics and testosterone in other cities, we were the first in the world to take the tongue-in-cheek name "Critical Lass" for ours, and that name is now also being used in bike-culture model cities like Chicago and Seattle. LFL has outgrown our Blogspot space, so this spring we are relaunching as loopframelove.com, and we've just recruited fabulous new co-blogger Emma; we're also planning monthly Critical Lass rides and our first-ever Kidical Mass (for families).

3. This blog! If you're visiting from my twitter feed, this is where I explore the slow movement and all its facets, and gradually figure out shape my encore career will take. I know it involves slow design and slow craft, so it will be all about Making Something Edmonton - but I'm still finding my voice. Another ongoing topic of this blog is using my standard suburban move-up home as a slow home renovation case study, and an upcoming post will talk about creating an annual block party with my neighbors to build community in my neighborhood (where most residents have moved in in the last two years). I will also be planning a slow movement themed unconference as a collaboration between this blog and The Local Good this autumn, so stay tuned for details on that!

Slow News Summary: Mid-Winter Edition

Pssst: Keep it on the down-low, but I hope to have some exciting news to share soon about a slow design event that I'm planning. Meanwhile, check out all the slow goodness that's been popping up on the intertubes:

Calgarian Laura Cardwardine's brilliant Loom Chair was shown at the Prototype exhibit at IDS13 in Toronto last month. Via her page on Cargo Collective - follow the link to see a slideshow of how she designed & created it. 

On Slow Design, Slow Making, and Slow Home: 

• slowLab's Kickstarter campaign has ended. While they did not reach their ambitious funding goal, they did significantly grow the online conversation about slow design and their network of like-minded designers. They did have enough pledged for the first stage of their project, so we can expect news very soon about a new crowdfunding campaign. If you don't want to miss hearing about it, they suggest you can join their mailing list on their website (bottom left corner) and/or like their Facebook page.
• One of my new favourite blogs is Handful of Salt, whose description of DesignCraft overlaps rather significantly with the ideas of Slow Craft. Their recent profiles of Fibershed, Selvedge magazine, Denimu, and John Whitmarsh will give you a good sense of why I'm now a fan.
• Abigail Doan on makers' and artists' work spaces and collections: "... one thing that I am now convinced of is how place genuinely influences creative outlook and possibly one's attitude towards the harvesting of materials."
• Wabi-sabi, the sublime, and the beauty of imperfection.
• Via Poppytalk, a heartfelt post by Bookhou that all makers and buyers of handmade objects should read, about why handmade costs what it does.
• Erin Loechner, on why design is important, asks, "Do the objects we surround ourselves with tell a story?" (I have such a blog crush on her.)
• Treehugger's Lloyd Alter gently mocks Dezeen's Marcus Fairs about his 'green design is dead' post.
• I'm fascinated by this post from Atlantic Cities on how the internet reinforces inequality by disproportionately representing the interests, ideas, and knowledge of affluent users - and the implications for slow-mapping projects in both gathering and disseminating the maps that they create.
• An awesome device that will allow people to recycle their own plastic for use in their 3D printers, or 3Doodler pens, is a much-needed development. Meanwhile, Make: had a brilliant post explaining why extruders might not exactly herald a home-manufacturing revolution. 
• Do we really need a motion-sensing fork to slow down our meals? Or a special bag that encourages people to reuse items?
• I ran across reports of some now-ended slow craft exhibits here in Canada! In Edmonton last Autumn, the Alberta Craft Council's PASSAGES exhibit explored time and place, with a highlight being the monumental 120 foot knit runner by Margie Davidson representing each minute of a year with a knit stitch. The Manitoba Craft Council's SLOW CRAFT show last summer is described on their website and this wonderful article about slow craft by one of the featured fibre artists, and the works are shown in this a Flikr set (I think the massive hand-bound artist book and the embroidered prairie soil profile are my favourites).

On Slow Fashion:

• Feel Good Style and Fashionista both profiled the slow fashion movement as a whole and upcoming American brands and international events and designers.
• Slow fashionistas rejoice: EcoSalon is back! Since their relaunch they've written about the leather industry, insourcing, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, tech that helps you declutter, digital second-hand shopping, the sharing economy, upcycled and made-in-the-States fashions, a slow art exhibit in Sweden, and a DIY handbag roundup. 
• The Simple Things shared the story of a tailor who specializes in repairing beloved pairs of jeans on their blog. I want one in my city, please.
• The Local Wisdom photo shoots in Vancouver & NYC got some great advance coverage from Ecouterre, and the inspirational teaser photos have now been posted on the Local Wisdom blog - and the Craft of Use site itself has now launched! I love this project's focus on how we use and repair garments in day-to-day life, and its goal of amplifying these practices and changing our relationship with material objects so that design becomes more grass-roots and process becomes more important than consumption.
• London slow fashion stylists ReWardrobe had brilliant coverage of menswear trends, the good stuff from London Fashion Week, art installations of discarded textiles, and Greenpeace's Detox campaign on their blog. 
• Every now and then a great DIY tutorial pops up among the endless stream of selfies on fashion blogs. The Year Of Slow Fashion has had a couple of terrific ones, making boot socks and turning flared jeans into skinnies.

Slow Fashion Forward have posted a wonderful set of simple guidelines to help consumers make more sustainable fashion choices.

On Slow Travel:

• Thank goodness for travel blogs in the depths of winter. They let armchair travellers dream of beachcombing in Wales, visiting a museum about steel drums in Guyana, seeing Maryland's North Central Railroad Trail or the national parks of Italy by bicycle, or exploring secret London.
• Here are some good tips on slow travelling when you're pressed for time, or anytime.
• This guy is going to retrace the path that humans took to migrate around the world - by foot. Epic.

On Slow Food:

• SFUSA have a new president, and a great blog post about 'forgotten foods'.
• Saskatoon's Star-Phoenix interviewed Saskatchewan's Slow Food reps about the lessons they brought home from Terra Madre.
• Grist wrote about how our supermarket choices are limited by food industry mergers and aquisitions.
• Here's a great interview with Dr. Susan Rubin about engaging ways to educate children about food.
• Slow Food International have created a guide to eating less, good, clean, and fair meat called Too Much At Steak (PDF), and Forbes covered SFI's Slow Wine guide.
• The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity explain why biodiversity is crucially important.

On Slow Living, Slow Parenting, and Slow Work:

• You know about the National Day of Unplugging on March 1st, right?
• A few upcoming conferences: Slow Money are holding their 4th annual national gathering (USA) at the end of April. Slow Food Canada's national meeting will be in Oosoyos, BC, also in late April. Slow Art Day is April 27th. Finally, the Slow Living Summit in Vermont will be held in early June, and the list of speakers looks amazing.
• Carl Honore is currently on a speaking tour to promote his new book The Slow Fix, so naturally there's been a spate of articles, extracts, interviews (the link is audio, highly recommended!), an archived livefeed (skip the first 12 minutes of dead air), and book reviews.
• A bold editorial rumbles about the end of big box chain stores, while another reveals the poor quality of the typical warehouse job for an online seller. The challenge and opportunity that both reveal: rebuilding local economies.
• The NYT tells us that spending more time doing less paradoxically increases productivity. 
• I love this story of a public library adding a seed bank to its services.
• There've also been articles on 'slow news', 'slow data', and the debut of a blog devoted to 'slow education'.

On Sustainability and Environment:

Must reads from the past couple of months: The Atlantic on how food and climate are connected; Mother Jones on the enormous challenge of preventing polar bear extinction; and The Guardian on domestic spying at the behest of the conservative Canadian government on citizens who disagree with their environmental policies. 

Slow Pastime: Family History Stories

Remember when I said I'd share a few of the more interesting stories from my family tree?

I love the simplicity of this sunburst-style family tree from Modern Trees, which can go to seven generations. via Eco & Elsie. Maybe for my birthday?

1. The Irish Ancestor Who Wasn't

Sometimes family stories aren't exactly correct. We'd been told that one of my maternal great-great-grandfathers was named Caleb O'Leary, an Irish orphan, who died tragically young under suspicious circumstances when my great-grandmother was a toddler. He was found dead on the railroad tracks, his family believed he'd been murdered, and local police refused to investigate because they assumed he'd been accidentally killed by a train while drunk (prejudice against Irish was commonplace at the time).

The digitized records tell a different story. After years of fruitless searches for him under the name O'Leary, among families who emigrated during the potato famine, I went back to basics and looked at the census records we had for him. Turns out Caleb's surname wasn't recorded as O'Leary, but as Leary - and the Learys were listed as being of German ethnicity. Leary is an anglicization of the German Lerich/Lerch/Lorch (from "The Valley of the Larks"), and the family arrived with the first wave of Foreign Protestants who were brought in from central Europe to settle Lunenburg, Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s. Caleb was raised by his aunt, Ellen Leary Weagle, but had he actually been orphaned? His birth parents are listed as George Leary and Alice, of New Germany, Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, in his marriage record. However, there is no record of a marriage between George Leary and an Alice, and all the Alices that appear in the census in New Germany and other nearby communities in Lunenburg County were far too young. George's marriages were to Desire (or is it said Desiree?) Peet, then Clara Grace Fiendel after Desire's death. At first I thought Alice must have been a relationship between the marriages, and then I found the date of Desire's death, about 9 months after Caleb was born. Then I went back to the NS Archives' website to take another look at the marriage record, and realized that the whole page of marriages was written in the same hand with the same pen at the same time - it had been transcribed at some point! An illicit relationship with a teenager that was hushed up successfully and appears in none of the other family trees or family stories, seems far less likely than that "Alice" is just a mistranscription of "Desire" from a damaged or difficult-to-read church record, and that baby Caleb was sent to be raised by his dad's eldest sister while his grieving father struggled with the farm and five other children under age nine.

This also provides an explanation for his identification in family stories as Irish: Desire's parents were George Peet, who was born in New Dublin, Lunenburg County to a family who had emigrated from Northern Ireland - and Maria Arenburg, from another South Shore German family. And George Leary's mother was Elsie Dougherty, from another Irish family. So Caleb's family was part-Irish. And his origins were garbled by subsequent generations because he died so young. 

(I'm now stalled out trying to find George Peet's family.)

As for Caleb's accidental or not-so-accidental death, there are no digital records for that, but years ago my sister found a newspaper article about his death at the Nova Scotia Archives that gave a date and confirmed that he'd been found dead on the railroad tracks. She has misplaced her photocopy of it, but the original will still be in the Archives waiting to be read. The "unsolved murder" story is waiting to be solved.

2. The Puritan Mother Who Was Burned As A Witch

Mary Barnes, the first wife of Thomas Barnes of Farmington, Connecticut, was one of the last three people executed in Connecticut for witchcraft. It's thought that she was hung, not burned at the stake, at the site where Trinity College now stands in Hartford. The records of her life and death are fragmentary; it's not clear who her parents were (there isn't a shred of evidence to tie her to the parents given in most family trees online), or who accused her of witchcraft, and although she denied being a witch, nobody defended her during the trial. Mary and Thomas had four children when she was executed, and they were young enough that Thomas brought in Mary Andrews (an elder daughter of a nearby family, who he later married), to take care of the children while their mother was in prison. Some have suggested that her husband wanted Mary out of the way so he could marry the girl next-door, but reputable historians point out that speaking in her defence might have only served to get her husband accused too, with the result that they'd both be hung and their children would become indentured servants - and remarrying the woman who came to care for the children after a wife's death was hardly uncommon during this period.

We are supposedly descended from Thomas' son Thomas, who would have been 10 years old when his mother was hung. He is my eighth great grandfather, from my dad's side of the family tree. Unfortunately the family trees that all this is based on are a complete schmozzle of duplicated individuals and alternative birthdates (as discussed here), and it looks like Thomas' son Thomas might be the son of Mary Andrews, not Mary Barnes - or could be from the family in Middletown instead of the family in Farmington. It will take a fair bit of research to sort the mess out.