Eating the Sun

I bite into the first home grown tomato of the summer and it’s like biting into the sun.

The fruit is juicy and red and succulent. It tastes like the physical materialization of sunshine. In its simplest form, it is: the sun’s ultraviolet rays are used by the plant to create sugar through the process of photosynthesis. Those sugars are then used as the building blocks for the plants growth.

That it came from our own little garden makes the fruit taste sweeter still.

I’ve grown up around gardens. Some of my first memories stem from the garden my grandfather, Lucien, grew near his northern Ontario home. He and my grandmother Evelyn lived in a squared log cabin on the mine property where they raised five children, my father the second oldest among them. Lucien was a plumber and a tinsmith who worked underground in the Palmour gold mine for forty years. In the winter he made and cared for the ice at the curling rink and hockey arena on the mine site property. It’s my belief that the long winters and a life underground – bringing the air in and the water out of the stopes and shafts of that gold mine – gave my grandfather an urge to foster something green and living.

(Lucien and Stephen in the garden at Palmour, circa 1976)

Lucien grew things that should never have grown in his hard pan soil, where the average frost free period was less than 90 days. Of course, all manner of root vegetable sprang forth from his tilled earth: turnips and carrots, potatoes and beats. But he also grew cucumbers, peas, pole beans and sometimes even the impossible: corn.

I remember sitting on the red-and-white Adirondack chairs in front of his log home’s veranda and biting into a carrot or snap pea or a salted down cucumber. When I eat peas off the vine in my tiny Victoria, BC yard (frost free period: 200 days) I am instantly transported back to Palmour, so intense is that memory.

When I watch Rio and Silas grazing on the vegetables in our yard it makes me feel very happy.

Lucien’s garden obviously inspired my own father, because when we moved into a house at 932 Government Road in Porcupine, about 7 miles from where my father was raised on the Palmour Mine site property, we asked a local farmer to till up a 1000 square foot plot of field, and along with three other families, planted our own garden.

The garden was as much a social experience for my family as it was a source of food. It become a commons where the four families would congregate and labour, and celebrate late into the night.

I recall standing amid a sea of turnips one fall with the hose in my hand washing them off. I was Rio’s age – seven or so.

I also recall the day late one June when my mother, waking to find that there had been a hard frost through the night, had to carry watering cans from our mud-room several hundred yards out to the garden to douse the plants to keep them from freezing. The pipes my father had run out to the garden had frozen, and the fragile plants needed water to shake off the evening’s hard frost.

What makes the story more characteristic of my mom is that she did this in her nighty. Apparently there was no time to lose by changing: just throw on a winter parka and rubber boots over her white nightgown.

We had a reputation on Government Road.

I think that experience left a scar because it was sometime after that before I had a garden of my own. In the early 1990’s I lived in Lake Louise, Alberta, where we joked that the frost free day period was 17 days. But in 1996 I moved to the tiny hamlet of Harvie Heights, Alberta, just four kilometres from Canmore, and a stone’s throw from the Banff National Park boundary. It was still hard country to grow much of anything in, unless it’s an aspen (and they don’t taste very good).

But a sun filed back yard inspired the digging of several raised beds, and I managed to grow a fair mess of vegetables. Of course, salad greens did well, but so did potatoes and peas, all aided by a cold frame to protect the plants from nearly interminable frosts.

When I moved to Victoria the intent was to grow more food; to become part of the food security movement; to have fun preparing for the pending holocaust.

But the events of the last three years intervened, and instead of cultivating my own tiny plot of urban land, I found myself renting again, and without much of a yard to grown things in. But this spring, Jenn and I decided that despite those obstacles, we would make an investment in our tiny patch of earth. So we dug up some of the lawn, added sea soil and compost to the mix, and as the summer days have progressed, our miniature garden has flourished.

On days when I work from home I spend half an hour or so each afternoon tending to the dozen tomato plants, the swish chard and spinach, the peas and beans, and conspiring as to which rectangle of lawn could be dug up next to make way for something more productive than Kentucky blue grass.

Spending those moments in the garden is a form of meditation. It is present moment awareness in action. It is the incarnation of now. Looking at the timid carrot tops struggling to reach the sun, it’s possible to get caught up in what might one day be, but for the most part, caring for this miniature garden is the process of connecting with the current: the current of life, and the current moment of our experience.

Growing food is one of the most important things we can do: It is an antidote to the helplessness that sometimes accompanies talk of the global Armageddon of climate change and loss of biodiversity world wide. The more food we grow, the less we have to rely on global agri-business to supply our nourishment. What we grow in our yards tastes better and is healthier. It is a connection with the sun, that glorious source of all of life’s energy. And it’s a connection with Lucien, who I miss despite these eighteen years since I saw him last.

And for me at least it fills me with delight to simply poke around the tomato plants and marvel at what some half decent soil, a little water and the life inspiring rays of the sun can produce.

And just last week – the last week of July – one ripe and succulent tomato fell off one of the heirloom varieties we had planted into my waiting hand. I hadn’t intended to pick it just yet, but it volunteered. I stood looking at it for the longest time, and then placed it at the centre of a clean white dish in the fridge, like some minimalist plating from Iron Chef America.

When Jenn, Rio and Silas arrived home I took the plate out and cut the tomato in four pieces and we each had a bite. Rio or Silas weren’t really into it. That was fine. There was more for Jenn and me.

And there will be many more in the weeks to come.

Eating that tomato was like eating the sun.

p.s. There have been lots of tomatoes since that first suculent morsel;
here Rio and Silas display the bounty of the season.