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TODAY, MAY 12 SEATTLE/LAKE FOREST, WA 6:30 - 8:30 pm Third Place Books Lake Forest Park Towne Centre 17171 Bothell Way NE MONDAY, MAY 14 VANCOUVER, BC 7:30 - 9 pm Talk of the Town Lecture Series UBC Robson Square, Downtown MAY 12, 2007 -- Here's a great gardening-season story from Duane in Ladner, BC: A couple of years ago I was wandering the local vegetable store looking for treats I could sneak into the buggy before my wife, Maggie, got up to the till. She makes an awesome Caesar salad, so I picked up some mesh-bagged garlic. I don't know if I'd just missed the labeling on the product before, but it said "Product of China." Well. I lost it. There I was, standing in the aisle and talking out loud - nope, make that raving. "Jumpin' Jehosiphats! China? How the heck can this stuff be fresh if it's coming 10,321 kilometers in some stinking container ship? Can't we grow this stuff in Canada?" Maggie shook her head, leaned over to the women beside her and said, "I think he has one of those new hands-free cell phones." Anyways, it got me thinking. We don't really think about where our food supplies come from. Take our Caesar salad. Lettuce from California: 1,720 kms. Parmigiano and olive oil from Italy: 9,200 kms. Add up the anchovy paste, garlic and other ingredients, and it clocks in at over 37,000 kms! It's easy to dismiss it all with "we live in a global economy" hubris. The problem is that all of that food that comes from somewhere else requires oil to get here. To put it none too subtly, as the cost at the pump goes up, you can expect your food bill to follow. Research shows that it takes four calories of oil energy to get one calorie of fresh food to the farm gate. The numbers go up as the distance grows and the complexity of the processing increases. Processed cereals require five times their inherent food energy just to process, let alone grow, package, ship, and store. I didn't know all this before I threw the garlic back into the bin and stomped out of the store. What I did know is that it doesn't take rocket science to grow garlic. I headed home, dug up some wilting petunias, and planted some garlic. The first harvest was meager, but it was a start. I'd planted in the spring, which was wrong, as I learned from Ken Stefanson of Gabriola Gourmet Garlic who visits the Ladner village market each summer. He set me straight. "Nope," he said, "you've got to plant it under the full moon in October. Naked." It's a good thing I've got a tall hedge around my backyard. And that's how it started. Each year our garlic harvest gets larger. We now grow enough garlic to get us through the year. The garlic heads are as big as my fist, and the taste is amazing. You don't need much room. It grows all winter. It does wonders for your other flowers, as it acts as a natural deterrent to detrimental insects. Nothing is better than local food. Nothing is more local than your backyard. Happy planting.

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