Island Artisans – The Zero Mile Diet

The Hundred Mile Diet is a phrase familiar to anyone who has decided to make local food a larger part of their diet.  But how about the Zero-Mile Diet? Today on Island Artisans I talked about a very inspirational visit to one of Victoria’s best-known gardeners who says you can grow your own food 12 months of the year.  Local food is IN: All you have to do is go to a garden centre these days and see how many people are going out the door with young veggie bedding plants, and all the retail space given over to seeds, hoses, tools, everything you need for backyard food production. 

Someone who has been a real advocate for backyard gardening for years is Carolyn Herriot. She ran a nursery in Victoria for 20 years but now she concentrates on her company called ‘Seeds of Victoria’ she runs out of her Garden Path Centre, which is where I visited her a couple of weeks ago. It is a wonderful space just loaded with edible goodies, many of which are also ornamental in nature.  There is an orchard of fruit trees, a long strip of berry patch with all kinds of raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries and strawberries, where Carolyn shared the first of the season with me, and that berry was so perfumed and luscious it was heavenly!  So something like a few fruit trees and this berry patch are a great place to start a garden, because they are a perennial source of food.  From the berry patch we moved on to a section of the garden that was both old and new, a source of food and a source of seed, and Carolyn is a big seed saver.

This photo shows a seedpod from a leek, which was left to overwinter in the garden, and is now ready to produce hundreds of seeds.  Carolyn says people who aren't quite sure about gardening should just rip open a packet of seeds and try. "You really have to ignore a garden to make it not work. All it needs is a little bit of paying attention."

I know a lot of people may be intimidated just by the idea of getting started, digging up the sod in your backyard, rototilling, backbreaking labour…but Carolyn dispels that fear in her latest book,  The Zero-Mile Diet, A Year-Round Guide to Growing Organic Food. It is packed with everything you need to know to start and maintain your garden, and it has details on how to build something called a lasagna garden. That garden requires no digging, and it’s a great way to recycle plain corrugated cardboard and all your fallen leaves. I have some of these gardens in my backyard now, which are producing garlic, fava beans, broccoli, and peas.

Carolyn's garden is also home to chickens and ducks. Did you know that ducks eat slugs?  One of my most annoying garden pests.  And part of the book is dedicated to backyard poultry management, and again, she says it really isn’t that time consuming in order to enjoy some fresh eggs.  "I call them 10-minute eggs.  It takes 5 minutes a day to feed them and collect eggs and make sure they're okay, and then 5 minutes a week to clean out their coop, I lay down a tarp, then just pick up the whole thing and carry it over to the compost.

What you see in her garden is what you get in the book. Tons of colour photos, diagrams, hints, seed saving techniques, recipes for preserving food, and it shows how you can take a piece of land, like she did 5 years ago, which was covered in very poor soil, and transform it into a self-sufficient food garden, and that’s really her hope for Vancouver Island, to transform this society from one that only produces four percent of its own food to one that could be producing fifty percent.

Once again the book is by Carolyn Herriot.  It’s called The Zero-Mile Diet, A Year-Round Guide to Growing Organic Food, by Harbour Publishing. 

New! If you missed listening to the show, you can catch up with Island Artisans by going to this page on the CBC Radio All Points West website.  Enjoy!