Okay, so I haven't written for awhile, but I learned more about my relationship to food this last week. I have honestly been eating very poorly, as I have a habit of having healthy food on-hand that is easy to prepare until I get too famished to care what I eat. Then I go in for cheap junk food.
But when I do plan what I eat, I can find some real gems. I did go to the Green Cuisine vegetarian restaurant downtown in Market Square ( http://www.greencuisine.com/contact ). Green Cuisine has a $15 cookbook for sale, which I am considering buying because it would be nice to get back into cooking for myself. They have awesome vegetarian, buffet style food that is pay by weight. The Lotus Pond restaurant also has vegetarian buffet lunches that are pay by weight ( http://lotuspond.webs.com/Index.htm ).
I went to what I thought was a Saturday (usually on Wednesdays) work party at Haliburton Community Organic Farm, but ended up instead in a beekeeping workshop ( http://haliburtonfarm.org/wp/ ). We as volunteers worked with one of the farmers and Gordon Hutchings (beekeeper) to set up a bee box (http://sites.google.com/site/hutchingsbeeservice/ ). We then were given a slide-show presentation about the hundreds of native bee species, how they are co-evolved to be the best pollinators for our area, and how we need shift focus away from the declining monoculture of invasive bees for pollinators and towards native bees are provided with food plants and suitable habitat. The bee workshop reminded us that most weeds are a stable and long-term source of food which helps the pollinators to survive in-between when our various crops are in flower, and so weeds should be left alone in fallow areas of your garden.
When leaving Haliburton, I picked up a brochure of the Get Fresh: 2010 Local Food Guide. This is an awesome resource (http://www.getfreshguide.com/) that talks about many places that grow, sell, brew, or cook local food. I am really excited about this initiative because so many of the businesses it lists I have not heard on, which means I probably have not been eating local as much as I thought.
Also of note, my first seeds are starting to germinate in the seed trays I left in the warm greenhouse like conditions of the living room windowsill. The seed trays I left on the windowsill in the bedroom are not doing so well. I believe that the temperature is too low because of the temporary sheet of plastic over the window, making the windowsill more like a cold frame than a greenhouse. I neglected to bring my camera with me to Haliburton, but here is a photo from Mr. Hutchings website showing the kind of bee box we helped him set up. Also, here is a photo of the seeds I have that have that are slowly germinating.
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