Don Genova's Blog

On Vancouver Island and the more southwester part of the province farmers are ramping up for the coming season.  It may be still too wet to plough fields, but it’s in the greenhouses where a lot of the action is happening right now.  I've been sticking my head into some of those warm, humid structures at places like Hope Bay Farm on Pender Island, owned by Derek Masselink, pictured at left.

Derek and his helpers have been quite busy in their propagation house, a greenhouse where all the seeds are started. I first met Derek when he was the program co-ordinator of the UBC Farm in Vancouver, but about seven years ago he founded his own environmental design company based on Pender Island, where he and his wife also operate Hope Bay Farm, a fairly small patch of land on North Pender.  When I visited Derek was away from his computer and drafting board, working away in the greenhouse with some of this year’s early crop, which include spinach, scallions, shallots, leeks and some 'keeper' onions as well.

Last year Derek started a Community Supported Agriculture project and ran it for 25 weeks. That meant providing food for a number of families in the form of a box full of produce every one of those weeks.  "It felt like we were growing for one of the family," says Derek. "An especially understanding family as we didn't get too many complaints when we were heavy on the radishes and turnips and had a little less variety than we would have liked because of crop failures and a very challenging growing season from a weather standpoint."

Commonly known as CSAs, at the beginning of each year you make a contract with the farmer.  You pay your money for the whole season up front, and then every week you can go to the farm or a designated pick-up place and get a box of fresh produce. The box varies every week with what’s in season, and you’re trusting your financial investment with the farmer.  If they have a bad season, your box isn’t going to be as overflowing as it usually is during a good year, but it gives the farmer that needed capital at the beginning of the year to get things started.

At certain times of the year Derek would find himself out in the fields playing chef, seeing what was ready to harvest and how it might go together in a basket of produce.  Every week they would put a picture of what was going to be in the box on the website, like this one on the left, (photo courtesy Hope Bay Farm) so people would have a bit of advance warning of what they were getting.  Many of last year’s subscribers are coming back, some thought it wasn’t quite what they needed, but the whole process is evolving for them.  I should tell you though, that this whole CSA thing has been catching on across the province and that some farms have waiting lists for people to get on their roster…if you’re interested, the time to act is NOW.

With small farming these days, it’s not enough to just do the farmers market every week, or only a CSA or only sell to restaurants or have a farm stand.  At Hope Bay Farm they are getting into raising heritage breeds of ducks and chickens, and then there are the Icelandic sheep.

(photo courtesy Hope Bay Farm) "My wife trains border collies and we wanted something for them to train with," says Derek. "These sheep are triple purpose, milk, meat and wool. We have a small property so we are pasturing them with our neighbours wherever we can.  We send the young rams to be butchered and the wool is in demand from spinners."

I’m always encouraged when I visit a farm like this because it shows that something can be done for food security on a smaller scale in a sustainable manner instead of relying on large, mono-culture farms that have become prevalent in Canada since the Second World War. Derek says, though, in addition to diversification, in order to succeed, a farm like his depends on a number of factors all working together:  "You need to design a relatively quick return on investment so that you’re paying off debt instead of incurring more of it.  Quality in your products and your business dealings. Superb customer care and service. And Time – putting in the time to learn the business."

Related note on Food Security: Next Wednesday night, March 23rd at Canoe Brewpub, Slow Food Vancouver Island & the Gulf Islands present Nick Versteeg’s latest documentary, Food Security: It’s in Your Hands.  I wrote about this a few weeks ago as it made its premiere at the Victoria Film Festival. That was a sell-out, so Slow Food and Canoe have got together to show the documentary again, this time with food and beer pairings, dishes created from local producers of course. Canoe’s expert chefs have prepared amazing organic delicacies with greens from the Saanich Organics Farm, fish from Finest At Sea and mushrooms foraged by Eric Whitehead of Untamed Feast. Enjoy a refreshing complimentary glass of Kings and Spies from Sea Cider Farm and Ciderhouse. Advance tickets are $35 and $30 for Slow Food members from www.selectyourtickets.com.   More information at www.slowisland.ca.

There’s an old joke in the wine industry that goes something like this:  Want to make a little bit of money from a winery?  Start with a lot of money.  Unfortunately, the punch line has been proven true time and time again.  And so it goes for the owners and proprietors of Morning Bay Vineyard and Estate Winery on Pender Island, Pender’s only winery; after ten years of planting, growing, winemaking and marketing, they need some investors to keep a dream from becoming a nightmare.

Keith Watt and Barb Reid bought the property on Pender in 1992.  There was nothing on it, not even a road down to the waterfront.  But they wanted that dream becoming so common to middle-aged Canadians tired of the city; grow their own food, get water from a well, chop firewood…and make a living.  The vineyard and a winery were to be the answer.  Grow the grapes, make the wine on premises, sell it by the bottle and by the glass at the property, and offer tourists and Islanders alike a unique agro-tourism experience.

“I didn’t know much about winemaking when we started,” says Keith.  “But I do believe wine is humanity’s most sophisticated and interesting food.  The more I learned about it the more I wanted to learn about it, and that’s when I thought I needed a project that’s going to keep me learning for the rest of my life, and it was a great choice, it’s an unlimited topic.”

The logistics of being a successful winery on a Gulf Island are many and varied. Every year Watt has to deal with a crop that will vary with the weather, a finished product that needs to get shipped across Canada with transportation costs that always go up, and a labyrinth of provincial and federal regulations that require a degree in bureaucratese to figure out.
But Watt and Reid have built a beautiful two-storey winery, mostly with timber milled from their property, a vineyard terraced into the hillside and an outdoor performance stage that has been home to the highly successful ‘Winestock’ music and wine festival each Labour Day weekend for the past five years.
As a winemaker, Keith Watt is proud of what he’s been able to do. “From our first commercial harvest in 2006 I made a Gewurztraminer that won a silver medal at the All-Canadian wine championships.  I’m probably proudest of our 2009 Bianco and 2009 Chiaretto, our white and rosé blends. Everyone who tastes it says it’s got something that other wines just don’t have.”
Great tasting wines, a beautiful property, lots of potential.  The only thing missing after ten years of hard work is an account ledger that’s in the black.  That’s why the winery is for sale. Ideally, a new investor or investors will step up to buy a piece of the business and keep Watt and Reid as the operators.  But, if someone wants to purchase lock, stock and barrel, they’ll have to move. “There are many gorgeous places and worthwhile things to do,” says Watt. “So we’ll find something else.”

*Keith and I are scheming about offering a week-long series of cooking classes taught by me this summer at the Winery.  Check back to my blog under 'My Classes' for updates!

Early mornings are necessary to get a good start on cheesemaking at Hilary’s Cheese.  Hilary Abbott has been making cheese in the Cowichan Valley since the late 1990’s.  His only problem is that his cheese is too popular and he keeps running out.  So, most Thursday mornings you will find him in his cheesemaking facility, up to his elbows in curds and whey.  When I walked into his warm and steamy cheese room last week, he and an assistant were making cheese curds, a blue cheese and a Camembert-style cheese.  One of the blues is called Sacre Bleu, another one Youbou Blue, a somewhat skewed pronunciation play on the North Cowichan community of the same name.

One Camembert-style cheese is called St. Clair, but the inspiration for that name actually came from Sinclair Philip, the owner of Sooke Harbour House, who told Hilary when he started making cheese that he could NOT name any cheese ‘Camembert’ if it was NOT made in the particular region of France where Camembert is traditionally made.  So Sinclair ended up with a namesake cheese of sorts, which is still proudly served on the Sooke Harbour House menu.

Hilary got into cheesemaking for a couple of reasons, one of which was seeing beautiful raw milk being wasted on Vancouver Island because of the quota system, and the other was that Hilary was maybe a little tired of being an administrator in the education system.  He jokes that a mid-life crisis was solved by investing in cheese instead of a Lamborgini.  What he loves about the business is that he is his own boss…which also means he gets to work ALL the time!

Hilary sells all the cheese he can make, so you would think expansion would be very natural progression.  But it’s not that easy.  The cheesery is in the basement of his house, not that easy to expand the size because of the strict infrastructure requirements for such a facility.  His cheesemaking vats are quite small.  But there aren’t that many vats the next size up, most are too huge for him  to work with. Luckily he has discovered a new pasteurizer that he’s just getting hooked up that will help bulk up production. Another problem is finding employees that will stay with a small company and make the effort to learn the cheesemaking and cheese aging process, which will help production…and he could use some more knowledge himself, it’s been a pretty steep learning curve since his days sitting behind a desk.
That means trips to Italy and France, for example.

If you want to taste Hilary's Cheese in the Cowichan Valley, best place is to go to Cowichan Bay and visit Hilary’s Deli, where Hilary’s wife Patty runs the shop with all their own cheeses, cheeses from around the world and many other goodies including great soups and sandwiches.

In Victoria, Hilary's Cheese is carried by Ottavio's, The Market on Yates, and Peppers.  In Nanaimo at McLean's and Mark't Artisans, Whole Foods in West Vancouver and at Famous Foods on Kingsway in Vancouver.

Today on Island Artisans I featured Nick Versteeg of Glenora, just outside of Duncan and his independent production company, DV Cuisine.  Nick and I have worked together on many projects in the past, but on this documentary he pretty much did everything from shooting and editing and being on camera himself.  This documentary arose as a result of his last effort that I had a larger hand in, Island On The Edge.  That looked at how we have been steadily losing the ability to feed ourselves by producing our food right here on Vancouver Island.  Every time Nick showed Island on the Edge, he would have a discussion forum afterwards, and that spurred the creation of this latest effort.  The two main questions he wants to answer in the film are, 'Can we feed the world the way we are doing it now?' and, 'How can we get more people into farming?'

Nick traveled all the way to Malawi, Africa, to try to answer those questions, and throughout the documentary you see Nick follow the life of his farm, The Laughing Geese, through an entire year as that growth connects the other stories he presents, including that of the Tugwell Creek Honey operation in Sooke, one of the Island Artisans I’ve featured on this show in the past.

It's true that Nick is more of a filmmaker than a gardener, but that’s changing.   Actually, Nick was trained as a baker in his native Holland, following in his family’s tradition and he operated bakeries in Canada when he emigrated here, but the film bug caught him, he spent many years in Vancouver pursuing that venture, and then the Cowichan Valley caught him, along with gardening and the food security issue.   So life has certainly changed for Nick and his wife Elly since moving here.

Nick’s garden makes me a little jealous, because he’s been at it in earnest a couple of more years than I’ve been, but in the documentary he shows you how easy it can be to grow things, and the satisfaction you can get during the harvest when you get to eat them.  And this is what motivates him to make these documentaries, which are entirely self-financed and not what you would call money-makers.

So the ‘world premiere’ of the documentary is Saturday night at 7pm at the Odeon Theatre in Victoria, all part of the Victoria Film Festival. Go to Nick’s website, where you will also find out where Nick plans to show the documentary elsewhere around the province, always followed by discussion forums on the topics in the documentary.

My ‘sweet’ assignment earlier today involved judging over 30 samples of syrup for the Big Leaf Maple Syrup Festival.  Me and my fellow judges Bill Jones and Mara Jernigan tasted 32 different maple syrups that were made from sap gathered from trees here on the West Coast, and the winners will be revealed at the Festival, which takes place at the BC Forest Discovery Centre just north of Duncan this Saturday.  Lots of activities for the kids, and of course maple syrup tasting.

Today on Island Artisans I featured Jeff Wright of Old Country Seeds in Saanich.  Jeff is the official Canadian distributor of Franchi Sementi seeds.  Franchi Sementi is an Italian seed company that was founded 'way back in 1783 in Parma, Italy.  After two centuries of operations there, the company moved to Bergamo, Italy.  It has developed some 70 of its own varieties of vegetables it is solely responsible for propagating and the company is still family-owned.

One of the main reasons Jeff started planting these seeds in his garden was taste.  These carrots were planted last year and he's still harvesting them from his garden right now.  They are sweet and smooth. In addition to flavour, Jeff says the germination rate of the seeds is always more than what it is rated at, nearly 100%!  And the seeds can be used for more than one season, he's just finishing off a packet of radicchio that he bought six years ago.  The size of the packets is large, and you get your money's worth.

If you want to download Jeff's catalogue of seeds available for 2011, click here for a .pdf version.  I have a bunch of seeds to try out from Jeff, and I'm going to be planting some of the mixed greens (misticanza) in my greenhouse in a couple of weeks so I can have some nice fresh salads in a couple of months!

If you're looking for info on the Master Gardener day in Sidney on the 29th of January, click here.