Although writing would be considered my specialty, I am more of a generalist than a specialist. There are advantages and disadvantages. I have noticed in job postings lately that employers are asking for the moon in terms of qualifications, so perhaps being a generalist is a good thing at the moment. However, there are a couple of items I wish to abolish from all job descriptions.

First, the ability to multi-task. Why should that skill be glorified? First of all, it’s impossible. According to Dr. John Medina (Brain Rules) and other researchers, the brain can in fact only do one thing at a time, although it is capable of switching back and forth and in between at lightning speed. Numerous studies have also shown that slowing down and bringing one pointed attention to a task results in the activity being completed sooner and with fewer errors. When the brain is fragmented and pulled in too many directions, it gets sloppy. Having to check all our various devices and social media networks constantly isn’t helping. So if I were writing a job posting, I would list “ability to focus” as a skill and instead of multi-tasking, “capable of managing multiple projects.”

Second, just because someone can put up a website and manage the content, doesn’t mean they are a graphic designer. If you want your website or blog or print campaign to stand out, hire a graphic designer or someone with an art background who understands layout and design principles, who knows their way around fonts, font sizes and white space. And this is very important, more often than not, the person who can draw can’t write (or spell) and vice versa. Different artistic expressions entirely.

In a traditional advertising setting, there would be a copywriter and an art director team assigned to your account. Together they would come up with a concept, or two or three. The art director would do the initial sketches, but often an illustrator or other graphic specialist would be called in to do the final work before handing it over to the production department. The creative director oversees all creative and could be a writer or an artist with good design and copy sense (likely more of a generalist).

So please, please stop trying to recruit someone who can write and design your newsletter. If you want your brand to have a pretty face, you need specialists among your generalists.

As we finished up, one of the participants pointed at the rotator man and said, “He looks like….” The name was right on the tip of his tongue. “Fin Donnelly?” I asked. “That’s it!” he said. “Yeah, exactly like him!” I said. That’s because it was Fin, my friend, colleague and federal New Democrat Member of Parliament who lives right near the garden. We’d agreed he would pop by towards the end of my workshop. Afterwards, we went over to his place for a cold drink on the deck and to check out his rotator.

Rotator on the right.

After Milo greeted me menacingly, Fin’s wife Linda, the gardener in the family, took me to the compost area. Turns out they have one of the small rotators from Lee Valley Tools. They are very cute and compact, but they get very heavy when full and are hard to turn. I once pushed one off its axis and nearly took out a fence. Small children and Pomeranian-Chihuahuas should be warned. This bin was very well managed thanks to Linda making sure the materials were well chopped before putting them in and that there was enough brown (carbon) added. The other bin, an Earth Machine, wasn’t in use, it’s best on the ground otherwise the leachate leaks all over the deck.

Then I spotted a big bowl of something under the patio table. “What’s that?” I asked. “Mewwwrrrr,” Linda said. Fin and I looked at each other quizzically. “Oh, man-ew-er,” I enunciated. “Isn’t that what I said?” asked Linda. “Not quite,” said Fin. Then Linda launched into why she had that bowl of mewwrrr soaking there. “It was all chunky, so I had to add water and let it break down a little.”

It is not unusual for me to have conversations about manure and other chunky waste products. It is also common for those conversations to further degrade. So it was no surprise when Linda began to tell me a story about a trip to Mexico when she had a bout of Montezuma’s revenge. Something she calls “cahll-ezse.” Another French sounding word, sort of like college with a soft “g.”  As if it were a pleasant walk through an alpine meadow. When I ask about the origin of the word, she shrugs and said she overheard it somewhere.

Meanwhile Fin was over in a corner digging out a giant zucchini. “Grew that baby with the compost that came out of my rotator,” proclaimed my favourite politician proudly. Seemed fitting for our afternoon to close with me crying, “Bullshit!”

Jules Hou and his family, including his parents, immigrated to Canada from Taiwan 17 years ago. When they arrived in BC, farming offered the simplest pathway to a new livelihood. Back home trees and plants were prized commodities, so they decided to start a nursery. Jules had a biology background, but no farming experience. He worked in a chocolate factory before emigrating.

The family struggled to make a go of it and Jules’ parents weren’t acclimating that well. They were living in Langley, far from the urban amenities that they were used to in Kaohsiung City. They especially missed the food, one regular menu item in particular, fresh mushrooms.

“My grandpa loves mushrooms,” says Jules’ son, Hao-Che. His father doesn’t speak much English, so he is telling me the story.

In Taiwan, fresh shiitake mushrooms are an everyday occurrence, eaten in countless dishes and delicacies. They are also thought to have medicinal properties. Jules’ mother suffered from hyperglycemia and several other ailments, her naturopath back home had prescribed shiitakes to increase vitality. Trouble was they could only find imported varieties from China that smelled bad (a sign that they are not fresh) or dried ones, even in Vancouver’s Chinatown, which was flourishing back then. Jules saw a market opportunity and a way to give his parents something that would make them feel like they belonged. He decided to start a mushroom farm, again with no experience.

They sold the nursery and began to look for an existing farm, but all the farms at that time were growing button mushrooms, a very different mushroom and a different process. Shiitakes grow on trees or decomposed wood, button mushrooms are grown in soil, need manure and a lot of chemicals. Fortunately, they finally found a shiitake farm, owned by a Japanese grower who was planning to retire. He mentored them. The process was much more complicated and time consuming than they had anticipated.

“It was all done by hand back then, we had no machinery,” says Hao-Che.  After school, he and his younger sister would have to make up to 16 mushroom blocks. That’s the first step in the process of growing wood-based mushrooms like shiitake. The children would mix sawdust and wheat bran together, shaping and pressing it into blocks, each block the size of a shoebox. It took a year before one block would start producing. When Jules took over the farm, the previous owner had seven or eight customers, they ended up with only two or three who actually bought from them.

“We didn’t have a heater or cooler. We’d have to look to the sky to see what the weather was going to be like, what the conditions were,” says Hao-Che. Jules travelled to Taiwan, Japan and China to learn more about growing mushrooms. Problem was, the weather there is very warm and the growing conditions are very different. More problematic, there was no one person to go to, in Asia each farmer specializes in one procedure. You have to learn from a different master at each stage of production. And the process for growing different mushrooms also varies.

For shiitakes, after the blocks are sterilized in a kind of pressure cooker, they are taken out to cool. Then each cube is inoculated with a mycelium strand, the fungi that grows the fruit or mushroom. During the spawning stage, the mycelium grows throughout the entire cube. The cube starts out brown-coloured, looking like wet wood, and by the end of the spawning stage (about six months), the cube is white. After spawning, the cubes are taken to the flushing barns. Hao-Che tells me the buildings where the mushrooms grow are kind of a hybrid, part barn, part greenhouse, they have a steel frame with plastic covering. Inside, the humidity, temperature, and lighting are all controlled and the mushrooms begin to grow. The first flush (harvest) happens after about two weeks, then every four weeks after that. There are three to four flushes for each cube.

Hao-Che admits it was a tough ten years with a huge learning curve for his father. To make it even more challenging, he decided to grow organically. It didn’t make sense to Jules to add chemicals when this was really about providing natural medicines for his mother. There were no organic mushroom farms in BC at the time and it was not a common practice in Taiwan either. Conventional mushroom farmers were critical and local health authorities made frequent inspections. Nevertheless they persevered and the farm is now certified by Fraser Valley Organic Producers Association.

Jules Hou

The plant now occupies about three of the 16 acre farm. Over the years they renovated and added new buildings, moving from hand production to automated. They have around 30 regular staff, including scientists who maintain the mycelium strands, as well as agricultural interns and WOOFERs. Asia Pacific Farm is now the largest Canadian producer of high quality, organic, specialty mushrooms, growing eight different varieties of mushrooms including shiitake, oyster, reishi, pompom and King Oyster. They sell to a number of wholesale distributors as well as to high-end Japanese restaurants like Tojo’s and Zest in Vancouver. Thanks to these organic mushroom pioneers we have fresh, health-giving mushrooms on our plates year round.

This article first appeared in BC Organic Grower, Spring 2012, Volume 15, Issue 2.

I could hardly believe my eyes. A sign had just jumped into my path. The Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. I had lived in this neighbourhood off and on for years, walked by this very spot hundreds of times and had never noticed this urban garden tucked in behind a row of old houses. But what’s so remarkable about my arriving at this garden gate? How did my life lead me down this particular garden path?

I had just arrived back to springtime in Vancouver, B.C., after two and a half years in “Winterpeg,” Manitoba, where you snowshoe to work until May. I had run screaming from the world of advertising. No more selling hamburgers and beer for me; my mind had begun to turn to greener fields. I was recycling everything in sight, but so far my only gardening knowledge was contained in pots of pansies on my balcony.

Right before I left Winnipeg, I went to see the movie Green Card, a romantic comedy set in New York City. Bronte (Andie MacDowell) is a horticulturist who volunteers with the Green Guerrillas, a group that gifts gardens to inner city communities. She has her eye on an apartment with a greenhouse. But there’s one hitch; she has to be married to get the apartment. Enter Georges (Gerard Depardieu), an illegal alien who needs a wife to get his green card. They agree to a marriage of convenience. As they strike their accord, a green chord resounds deep within me.

So there I was back on the west coast, jobless and homeless, sleeping on a friend’s floor, still resonating with this movie. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, so I took to aimless wandering. One day in a bookstore, I picked up a magazine I’d never read before called The Utne Reader. And what’s the first article I open to? “Zen,Wheelbarrows, and Collard Greens.” The author, Dan Barker from Portland, Oregon, gave away gardens just like Bronte did in the movie. It’s real, I thought. Maybe I could do something like that.

The very next day I was wandering up a street I had walked many times before, when suddenly the sign jumped into my path: The Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. I turned my head to look down the driveway and through outstretched gates, I saw an April garden, bursting with colour and new life, wild with scent and possibility. Like a Buddhist chant, the green chord hummed within me, and the chord became a cord, drawing me in. Spellbound, I passed through the gate and stepped into my new life.

A man stood there as if waiting for me. Without greeting him, I said, “What goes on here?”

Michael Levenston, director of City Farmer (as he turned out to be), was unruffled by my stupor and explained the purpose of their garden. “We’re here to teach people about composting. We use the organic garden to demonstrate how to grow food in small urban spaces without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Visitors can see the complete cycle of life here from table top to compost heap and back to earth again.”

“Yes, this is where I belong,” I said. “Where do I start?”

He pointed me to the head gardener, who signed me on as a volunteer.

I started the next day. And my first job? Sifting worms! Separating them from their castings in the shaded “worm corner.” Yes me, an associate creative director, with worm poop under my manicured nails! I never left. The garden healed, soothed, and nurtured me through that warm summer and guided me through a great transition in my life. My life was transformed by this meeting with the earth.

Soon I was teaching “wormshops” to kids and getting paid. Then I was offered a position as Compost Hotline Operator and my office — in the greenhouse! When I wasn’t helping people through their compost crises, I was weeding and tending flower beds, or talking to the media about worms, and finally writing about urban agriculture. It seemed that along with the apple cores and banana peels, my skills were being composted, too.

I was not the first to be recycled by this garden. Many preceded me, our head gardener among them. Wes was a French teacher for 25 years before he stumbled in, in search of new life. Many more followed; burnt-out and soul-starved like me with that telltale look of wonder on their faces. With hands in the dirt, they each go about quietly transforming themselves and eventually return to the world renewed. But they never really leave. This ever-widening circle of city farmers has become a community with the garden at its heart.

As I write this from my sunny little greenhouse office, crocus and primroses are poking their noses out of the chilly soil, and I find myself on the brink of another great transition. Spring’s cycle is about to begin anew, but with its rebirth another season dies. My longtime co-worker, Wes, is leaving the garden, moving on to the next phase of his life. He is salt of the earth, our Wes; his presence has kept us all grounded. Like an old married couple we have tended this garden — raking leaves in the fall; making Christmas baskets each winter with fir boughs collected from forest paths; harvesting fresh produce come summer for a local hospice. In among the seed catalogues, rainy day crossword puzzles, and shared lunches, friendship flourished. My heart aches at his departure and I wonder if I will make it through this transition. Is my season here ending, too? I am not sure, but I do know this: no matter where the path leads me, the garden will always be in my heart.

The other delightful discovery I made this week was that the construction company is storing the bags of asbestos-containing materials on site, right beneath my balcony window. The bags were falling out of the containment area; there were sticks, branches and other sharp objects lying about that could easily puncture the bags. WorkSafe BC asbestos procedures say the hazardous waste is supposed to be removed daily.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, who the hell is looking after the residents when a building is under construction?

Would like to know where this all fits in the Greenest City Action Plan.

As it happens when you’re gardening in a public area, someone stopped by to chat. I was picking last year’s chard and kale at the time and had just finished telling Mark about kale chips. He has not yet warmed to kale, but I figured the chips might tempt him to try it. The woman opened with, “Hey have you ever tried kale chips?” We laughed and brought her in on the joke, then moved on to other kale recipes. “Ribollita soup,” the woman said, “uses a ton of kale and it’s delicious.” I’d never heard of it, although it is apparently a famous Tuscan soup. She said she’d tuck a recipe in my compost bin next time she was walking by. But she made it sound so good, I decided to google it and give it a go that day. Glad I did. This is by far the best soup I’ve ever made. And certainly in the top five best soups I’ve ever tasted. So flavourful.

The recipe I used calls for diced Italian plum tomatoes, basil, carrots, garlic, celery, and those lovely white Italian beans – I used the cannellini but Great Northern are fine too. I left out the pancetta and used veggie broth instead of chicken, and substituted chard for the cabbage. There’s quite a lot of chopping, but it’s pretty easy to make. The pezzo forte is when you soak big chunks of sourdough in it, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with parmesan cheese. Now that’s chow bella!

In The Pleasures of Eating, Menjivar is inspired by the Wendell Berry essay of the same name. He lists a number of food activities, including growing our own, that will help us to better experience the pleasures of eating. He is currently Artist-in-Residence at a school in San Antonio and is working with a group of students on food related projects. They are redesigning the school courtyard and planting gardens. They planned a meal, cooked it for a family, then documented it in a ‘zine. They also recorded everything they ate in a food journal and have done some food mapping in a nearby food desert. There’s a lot more. The site is very inspiring and well worth exploring.

One of my favourites is Wish I Were Here. Menjivar was working with homeless youth in San Antonio. Each time they would come to his office, he would give them a photography book and post-it notes and asked them to stick their comments on photos. The post it notes were great conversation starters and led to some profound exchanges. When the project ended, they decided to send the book to the author as a thank you. I have a feeling it might have been the most profound acknowledgement that photographer had ever received.

There were several components to the module. We developed an activity booklet that teachers could use in the classroom. As I wrote it, I drew from so many places, Mary Appelhof’s great book Worms Eat My Garbage; the work that Carl Grimm was doing at the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, SLUG for short; and Schoolyard Garden Designs by John O’Brien. Activities included Compost in a Cup, Worm Bin Wizardry and the Fine Art of Decay.

We worked with Valerie Overgaard, a curriculum consultant, so that each activity had a goal area and icons that identified the key subjects. There were great people at the Ministry too, Rick Kool was the Education Coordinator at the time, a dynamo, and the brains behind the Eco Education Program. Valerie Calderwood was our main contact at the Ministry, an open and receptive presence during the contract. Our review team consisted of lower mainland teachers, Science World staff, other compost educators and Ministry of Education staff. Our working team was also brilliant and creative: Sue Ray, Elaine Chan, Nicole Thibault, Pamela Lee, the Force Four gang. Plus, we had a lot of help from City Farmer staff and the School Compost Education Group, a lower mainland/Vancouver Island consortium.

The contract was $45,000 and for that money we managed the entire project, gave them a six minute video, wrote and produced the booklet, a beautifully illustrated poster, trained the Green Team to deliver a “wormshop,” built a travelling glass front worm bin and a worm wagon to house it and all the other props and equipment.

We began the contract in August 10th of 1992 and delivered everything by September 24, 1992 – a ridiculously short time frame and I have no idea how we accomplished it for that money. Oh right, hundreds of volunteer hours went into the program. We had a letter from the R.J. Driedger, director of the Ministry’s Municipal Waste Branch, acknowledging our efforts. We launched the program shortly afterwards at the Porter Street Elementary School in Coquitlam.

The video won a Silver Birch award at the 1993 Integrated TV and Video Awards. The Green Team toured the province for many years and the compost module was its most popular offering. Although the province retained all the rights to the program, Force Four and Kids Compost BC acquired the marketing rights and sold the package all over North America for some time. I still have a few copies left.

But all good things come to an end I suppose and the Eco Education Program is no longer. It was a great program, maybe more relevant than ever. I’m sure it would still be a winner in schools. Too bad it couldn’t be dusted off and resurrected. Perhaps someone could put the bug in the ear of the Minister?