Burrow into the green tunnel, pushing vines aside gently. Crouch and scuttle along the ground. Stop, kneeling, and there is another cluster of ripe red globes, hanging among the green leaves. These ones are like tigers, faint green stripes marking their dusky red surface. I grasp the tomato and it parts from the vine with a whisper of leaves. A bee drones by above me, and then he leaves the plastic shelter of the greenhouse tunnel. I drop the tomato into the pouch I made at the bottom of my shirt. As long as I stay crouched, the shirt stays pouched. Reaching again, I snag a half seen tomato screened by lush green leaves. This one is so ripe it has split. Well, can’t have that in the pouch, so I bite into it. Juice flows into my mouth, sun warmed and ripe as only fruit on the verge of spoiling just before your hand plucked it can be. Delicious. I can almost feel the sunlight sustaining my flesh, the dirt nurturing my body.
The next plant over is a different variety of tomato. This one glows with a deep red. Hmm, slightly different taste, a subtle difference of texture. Supermarket tomatoes taste all the same; in the garden, every plant has its own character, every variety its own nuances. I might as well never have eaten a tomato before, save to establish a proper frame for appreciating these, sun ripened, picked at the peak of their fruiting, straight into my mouth. There is basil growing nearby, planted along the base of the tomatoes, as complimentary in growing as they are in eating. I pluck a crisp leaf and pop it into my mouth with the next tomato, a little orange globe perfect for one bite eating. Divine.
The city seems very far away right now. What am I supposed to be doing? Oh right, filling the bag my mum is holding, not my belly!
I unload my makeshift shirt-pouch into the bag, and pick some bunches of basil to join them. The tomato plants fairly groan with the weight of the tomatoes growing on their vines bending them earthward again. The fine red soil dusts those hanging lowest. I rub my hands together. My fingertips are sticky with a yellow dust. Pollen? Residue from the vines themselves, as I gripped them to gently remove the fruit without breaking the vine? I don’t know, I don’t know so very much about the food I take for granted will appear in my grocery store, grainy of flesh and bland of flavour.
We are at a coffee house, a small farm, and education centre, a place to learn what food is and how it must live. This place is all these things. Just off the main highway 101 running from the Bay of Fundy across the peninsula of Nova Scotia to the port city of Halifax facing the great Atlantic ocean, this ambitious place exists. Just Us Coffee, serving fair trade coffee, making chocolate, offering a few foods made from local produce, including the bounty of this garden.
We are in the greenhouse of the woman who runs the garden, educates those seeking organic food information, and engages the curious through their taste buds. The Tasting Garden is nearby, orderly rows of plants identified by neat placards. A small wooden sign is pushed into the earth near some small tomatoes, inviting the walkers of the garden to Try Me! in cheerful hand painted letters. It was at this row, as i was dusting off tiny delicious tomatoes that we met Sandy, the woman of the garden. Sandy invited us to pick freely in her greenhouse, as she said she couldn’t possibly get to all the tomatoes that had grown this year. So I found myself tunnelling thru the green rows, plucking the red tomatoes. When we finally emerged, Sandy refused any payment for the bounty, nor any tomatoes picked by us for her own self. No, she was happy to see the delight we took in the tomatoes, and insisted we take all we wanted.
I have found this to be the case in Nova Scotia. The people here are so friendly, so helpful. Sure, they gossip, but what small town doesn’t? And that is really what Novoa Scotia seems to be; a series of small towns along a few major highways, the fresh ocean breeze everywhere. People here reuse their stuff, sometimes to a degree that seems ludicrous to my Albertan ways of consumership. During the garage sale my mother and I had, I was amazed several times by the resourceful people buying the items for sale, and explaining how they would turn what I perceived to be scarcely better than junk into useful items. Reuse was everywhere, and the old stuff was especially prized for its old fashioned standards of workmanship.
This valley where my mother currently has a house is lush. Farms take up most of the landscape, and small farm stands are frequently seen along the roadways. Drive up, and a small stand crouches at the base of the family’s lands, stocked with the latest harvest. More often than not, no one is around, only the food and a small metal container requesting exact change. The prices are marked; choose your food and pay appropriately. The difference in taste is pretty hard to miss, once you get home. Some of the beets are scraped, some of the apples bruised. This is the food that doesn’t make it to the supermarket with it’s expectations of perfection. This is the food for eating, not looking at. What matter if the beet needs a little dirt in a scrape cut out of it before cooking? What matter of an apple grown lopsided due to being pushed up against a nearby tree branch? Or a little dirt on a basil leaf?
This food bears the marks of the land it grew in, the marks of the hands that harvested it. This food is real, it is local, and our dollars support our neighbours, not the companies that would make a fertile seed an illegal thing. This food is alive in a way I hardly appreciated a decade ago. In this valley, such food is commonplace, and the natural way to do things. The humid air enables such tremendous growth, the soil sustains such thriving plants. The farmers still live here, you can still meet them. You can still pick your own tomatoes, and for free when your neighbour has too many.
Harvest time in Nova Scotia is a lovely time to be here.
Wherever you are, Be There 