I came to Newfoundland for the first time just over four years ago. I can still vividly recall taking the ferry across from Nova Scotia in the late winter, listening to the groaning sounds of the ice around the boat. Within two months of arriving I made my first trip to Bonne Bay, a remote fjord on the west coast of the island. I went to learn about the food system and fisheries in the region as part of a PhD program I was beginning at Memorial University that fall.
Maple syrup conjures up images of towering arboretums in places like Quebec or Vermont, but it’s a little known secret that the rugged and hardy maple trees of Newfoundland make darn fine maple syrup. With nothing more than a half dozen maple trees, some old salt beef containers and a handful of 25 cent metal tree taps, you’re good to go and can expect to end up with over a dozen bottles of hand made maple syrup.
Spectacular vistas, whales breaching, ice bergs floating by, and a foragers paradise. We are blessed with many wilderness areas that offer abundant edible plants. I rarely go on a hike without stopping to have a little taste of this or that. In this post, I will touch upon some of the edibles currently available in our wonderful wilderness.
Thanks to the listing from Seeds of Diversity, I was able to locate a gentleman in Newfoundland who has a great deal of experience growing a wide variety of potatoes here. Last week, I recieved by my set of samples from George, and here's what my benefactor told me about the varieties:
Red Dutch: A very dry, yellow flesh red from Holland in the 1940’s. An excellent potato. Late maturing.
Northern White: A white flesh variety, from Quebec apparently, from the early 1900’s. Very high yield. Good taste.
This recipe is a super food flavour high five for your mouth. That doesn't make much sense but neither does doing something 8 days a week or letting rampant kale and confusing garlic scapes go to waste because of lack of inspiration. Don't let them fall victim to a wilty death in your fridge! Thanks goes to Murray Meadows Farm for the kale that they're now selling in bulk for a great deal and The Natural Gardener for the kind gift of scapes that they dropped off to us at the office.
Check out the new video " The 100 Mile Nautical Diet" encouraging you to enjoy the variety and value of seafood available off the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. Restaurants and home cooks are showing renewed interest in what our waters have to offer and CURRA's new video is a great place to start learning more. CURRA's "The 100 Nautical Mile Seafood Diet is a short video, directed by Anne Troake, that promotes dialogue about ways to build a diet heavily reliant on food from the sea around Newfoundland and Labrador, including both traditional and contemporary uses."
This post is the third in a series that Sarah Campbell, an intern with FSN, will be doing around the International Year of Family Farming this summer, gathering stories of family farming from around the Avalon Peninsula. Look for more stories in the coming weeks!
Last weekend I was happy to be able to speak with Jeremy Carter of Nagels Hill Agri-Products, both at the kitchen table and out in the fields. Below you'll find audio recordings of our conversation as well as photographs from the field. I really enjoyed chatting with Jeremy about the business of farming and his work as a farmer – take a listen! I hope you enjoy it as well.
The land Jeremy farms is maybe most known as being the home of Mount Scio Savoury – a business which Jeremy's father started back in the 1960s. It has been in the family since Jeremy's great-grandmother bought a piece of land on Mt. Scio Rd. back in the early part of the 1900s. The family has bought up fields here and there over the years to expand it to the size it is today.
Jeremy himself started farming, as he says, “seriously,” in 1986. From a farm focused on savoury, Jeremy has made the transition to one growing a diversity of crops – “about a dozen.” This allows him to have more security in the face of unpredictable weather and markets. It's this type of problem-solving and willingness to adapt to changing circumstances that farming needs, for him: “There's almost always another way […] that's what fun about it – figuring these things out. […] Numerous experiments, that’s the nature of farming.”
He spoke to me about the importance of “devis[ing] […] system[s]” to solve problems, as well as the need for adaptation, experimentation, and “ingenuity.” Not to mention the fact that Jeremy is, like a lot of the farmers that I’ve met, a dyed-in-the-wool “pack-rat” (the better to have odds and ends to devise creative systems with!).
All of this underlines what seems to be a truth of farming – that it is the business of thriving in an ever-changing world, which farmers do and have done by being resilient, creative, and having a mind for adaptation.
You can find Jeremy's food at the St. John's Farmer's Market on Saturdays from 10-2pm, June to October, and at the farm – 100 Mt. Scio Rd.
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“That’s the arugula. […] You can sort of see I’ve got in in stages.”
“This is the bean experiment I was talking about. See there’s a bean there, and then there’s one there, and I don’t know if there’s really much of anything in between. I planted a lot, right, but that’s all that damp cold weather we had, the beans just don’t… Oh, there’s one there. See, it didn’t really, it’s not really doing so well… If I’d’ve transplanted them, I could have had a full row.”
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“It’s picturesque, anyway.” “It is picturesque.”
“That’s scallop shells that Peter from Raymond’s, he wondered if I had any use for them, and being a pack-rat I thought, well maybe. It is a source of calcium for your soil, right, it’s just it’s very long-term.”
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“The French shallots don’t flower. The seed shallots do flower. […] The French shallots […] you can see they’re sort of a purple colour. […] [It’s] an ongoing thing I’ve been fooling around with for a few years. […] Shallots are wonderful.”
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“I run a bit of heat to get it started, but […] the way I run the greenhouses it’s just passive solar heat.” “And it’s warm.” “Yeah, it’s a lot of heat.”
“I guess the plastic probably gets ripped over the winter?” “It does, yeah. I keep changing the way I arrange [it]. Trouble is, it’s very windy here, as you’ve probably noticed, and so structures – it’s an Ontario company that does this, it’s not really designed to withstand the amount of wind that we have. So that’s kind of been a big thing over the last few years, to try to figure out what I need to do to resist the wind. So what I’ve started doing is putting more [tracking wire] on the arches so that there’s more points of attachment […] That should improve it. We’ll know after next winter, or storm season.”
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“This is the reservoir. It gets kinda dry here sometimes. These are rocks off the field that we used to make a little dam. […] Remember I was saying that the soil doesn’t hold on to a lot of water so, although, you know, it’s kind of a wet place, once it gets dry your soil doesn’t have much reserve and it’s good to have some source of irrigation.”
“Is this Queen Anne’s Lace, is that what it’s…" “Yeah, it is. [...] It’s quite pretty, actually.”
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“Oh, the wintertime. Do you do things in winter? Repairs, or?” “I do have another business that I’m involved in. […] That takes up more time in the winters. […] I heat with wood as well […] which is kind of a partial winter job. Especially last winter. […] That’s another whole interesting lifestyle.”
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Thanks Jeremy!
