Traced Elements

Category: farm story

A Pemberton Food Story

Food was one of the reasons my partner and I decided to move to Pemberton in 2011 after only being here a handful of times. We had been growing food in our community garden in Whistler. We also made our weekly bike ride to the farm market on Sunday for a couple of years and I swear getting to know the people who grew our food made it taste better.

We didn’t realize it at the time but when we moved to Pemberton we were dinks (dual income no kids). Armed with an abundance of time and money we were eager to tear up our lawn in the Glen and get started on our first labour of love. A couple of loads of soil later and our veggie garden was born, complete with a PVC greenhouse and vertical herb planters. Within a year I left a cushy (albeit ill-suited) office job to work on a local organic farm. There my love of Pemberton and slow food grew to new levels. I knew intellectually farming would be hard work but nothing could have prepared my body physically. As hard as it was at times it was incredibly therapeutic to be working in the elements day after day. I got stronger physically and mentally as the months passed. I spent many days weeding and planting and harvesting in good conversation with new friends. I gained a deep appreciation for the dedication and perseverance it takes to be an organic farmer and hence a steward of the earth. I learned from my experience growing food that it’s not always perfect, straight and neat. It’s scrappy and messy and mucky and absolutely gorgeous all at once, just like life.

In 2014 our dinkdom concluded and our hearts grew with the birth of our daughter. The abundance of time ended as did my days on the farm, in the mountains or spending my days making food in the kitchen . They were replaced with early am nursing sessions, diaper changes, a whole lot of raw love and a good sprinkle of depression. There were tough times and bliss-full times but one of the things I looked forward to was our weekly CSA harvest box from Ice Cap Organics. I would wake up on pick up days as giddy as a kid on Christmas morning. I knew how hard people had worked to get those boxes filled with a rainbow of nourishing veggies, eggs, chicken even flowers and it felt good to be sharing it at the table each day as a new family.

Here we are three years later and life is opening back up again. We have a new plot at the community garden to experiment, learn and teach with. Now those days making food in the kitchen are shared with our daughter who knows where her food comes from and loves to help cook it. I have the pleasure of cooking food at a local organic eatery called Stay Wild. Just like working on the farm my life is uplifted every time I’m there. Relationships with the women I work with and the people we serve are just as enriching and nourishing as the food. As I write this and think about food and Pemberton I am reminded of Lisa Richardson’s article where she spoke of, “the opportunity food offers us, to grow – not just out there in the soil, but as humans”, and I am thoroughly grateful we decided to call this fertile place home.

March 18, 2018
Eggs and the place we call home
1. The best eggs I’ve ever eaten were done over easy, and served on crusty toasted hazelnut and currant bread that was smothered with melted butter and peanut butter. A strict vegetarian, I hadn’t eaten eggs for years, but started craving them while pregnant with my first son. This decadent breakfast, repeated many times through the pregnancy felt so nourishingly good. My son, Isaac, was born a huge, healthy baby (it must have been the eggs) at home in Victoria on a rainy day in May. The next day my potato plants were a foot taller. My son’s father might have been hard to live with, but he was an amazing gardener and grew a jungle of food and flowers in our backyard.
2. My friend “Chicken Jen” (who lived down the road from me in Sooke) turned a residential lot into a productive and wild vegetable and herb garden in less than three months, with the help of home-made portable PVC dome chicken coops. The chickens removed sod, and aerated and fertilized the soil in each successive round bed that she planted, and her “ladies” gave her surplus eggs to sell. Her vision for her abundant garden, created while her kids were only two and four, still astounds me. 13 years later, the nickname Chicken Jen has stuck.
3. I moved from the island to Whistler with Isaac and my new partner. I was pregnant again. Our access to food and gardens dried up in the mountain resort. Sure, we could get good local food at the farmers’ market, but we didn’t know the farmers. We no longer hacked down chard from our front yard, or picked brambly blackberries, or gardened for 10 months out of the year. We missed eating farm fresh local eggs.
4. After seven years in Whistler, our growing brood (I’d had one more child) moved to Pemberton. We bought our first home, got a dog and planted a garden. On one of my first rides around town, I discovered the egg box on Urdal Road and I knew we were home. We traded zucchini, cucumber and greens from our first lush, wild backyard garden for composted manure from our neighbour’s farm and for heirloom eggs in every colour.. Having access to real food right where we live, and knowing where it comes from is a big deal. It’s something we love about living here and it’s not something we take for granted.
5. Let’s play local food Jeopardy. The answer is: Bog’s, the Wag’n’Wash, the Animal Barn, AC Gas, Stay Wild, the Owl’s Nest, Mile One, Collins Cross, the egg box on Urdal, the farmer’s market, Brooke and Kevin’s place, and Pemberton Valley Wellness. The business names themselves reveal the flavour of this funky little town. The question: Where can you buy local eggs in Pemberton?
6. The secret: Everyone has their own source. If you don’t time it right on delivery days, you could be cruising around town, visiting all of these locations without realizing they’re part of a hyperlocal egg market. Alternatively, you might well disappoint your family by coming home empty-handed. Sorry, kids, no pancakes this morning.
7. You’ll be late, too, because you’ll have talked to friends and neighbours all over town. During our first couple of months in Pemberton, I would frustrate my partner every time I biked to the store to get milk for his coffee. My 15-minute round trip would invariably take an hour or more, slowed by the pull of my grocery store conversations.
8. Eggs are a window into the local food system in Pemberton. Local food is grown in abundance by experts and amateurs throughout the valley—but you need to know where to go to get it. And to find out where to get it, you need to talk to people. That’s the fun part. If they made it easier, something would be lost.
9. We have a great farmer’s market and some awesome local businesses and CSA programs to get the straight goods right from the source. But you can also find your eggs or fresh basil or seed garlic on the Pemberton Food and Farm Facebook page, a matchmaking service for people looking to buy or sell food, seeds, plants or other random farm and garden stuff. Looking for a Thanksgiving turkey, alpaca wool, goats or egg cartons? Selling tomato starts, plums, bushels of basil? The source or recipient are only a couple of messages away.
10. Farming and backyard growing in Pemberton is surprisingly untrendy. People just raise food and grow stuff here because they can, or because they love to, and it just makes sense. Keeping backyard chickens isn’t new, and while I’m tempted sometimes to imagine myself as more of a homesteader than I actually am, I don’t think I have the heart to deal with bear proofing and the collateral damage when raccoons or cougars or coyotes get into the coops. I barely have the heart to steal eggs from aggressive chickens.
11. Every egg carton has a story. One of our local egg suppliers sells her daughter’s eggs and tracks the cartons to see if they get returned to her shop. One of the farmers at the market in the summer said new cartons cost more than twenty cents apiece—that puts a serious dent in his egg profits. Farmers don’t become farmers to get rich. But what is shared and supplied and circulated in this community is rich. It’s the soil, the place, the creatures, the stories.
12. Eggs have been one of the nutritional threads in raising my kids—one of the first meals they could cook for themselves—one of the nutrient dense meals I’ve eaten through pregnancies, breastfeeding and birth. One of the food sources that connects us to the place where we live.
13. My baker’s dozen. I’m lucky if there are eggs in my house or it’s back to part 5 of this story. My favourite homegrown breakfast:
11 o’clock braised greens & eggs

INGREDIENTS
- A few giant handfuls of greens from the garden (kale, chard, spinach, collard or beet greens)
- A few cloves of garlic (homegrown if you can), peeled
- Coconut oil
- A couple of eggs
- Flax oil
- Condiments (homemade kimchi, sauerkraut or hot sauce & Bragg’s)
- Ground flax seed
- Leftover brown rice (optional)
INSTRUCTIONS
- Wash greens and tear into large pieces.
- Wilt greens and simmer garlic with a splash of water in a pan with a lid.
- Add a small amount of coconut oil to the pan.
- Add a couple of eggs and fry them up in the same pan.
- Serve eggs and your pile’o’greens with hot sauce, Bragg’s, flax oil, flax seed, and homemade kimchi or sauerkraut (*recipes for vegan kimchi and sauerkraut to follow in future posts).
- Add a scoop of warm leftover brown rice, if you have some.
- Eat with thanks. Be nourished.
March 3, 2018
Rural Matchmaking

Last week, I filled out an adoption application for an older Dachshund named Sammy who is down somewhere in Surrey BC. I did the paperwork on behalf of my sheep Vinnie, who lacks the opposable thumbs, concentration and linguistic skills to do so. Vinnie loves dogs, but they all think he is a weirdo and run away from him. This Sammy dog apparently loves sheep, but they all think HE is a weirdo and run away from him. Do you see where this is going?

Sammy is 12 but is in great health and a complete love-bug, the woman who is fostering him told me when I called her. He’s an absolute sweetheart who loves kids and wants to be part of whatever is going on. It seemed as if all I had to do was fill out the required forms and then- as if I was some electronic far-reaching cupid- Sammy and Vinnie would live happily ever after. What I want is beside from the point. At least it’s almost spring, so the strict embargo I have been living under- “NO MORE ANIMALS UNTIL SPRING!!” is almost lifted anyways.

So I filled out the application, talked to Sammy’s foster mom, then followed up with the rescue organization when I didn’t hear back from them the next day. “We’ve actually received a stack of adoption applications” the woman told me. “We’re just going through them now.”

I hung up the phone, and put away my ever pressing anxiety that I WAS NOT DOING ENOUGH TO MAKE THIS DOG APPEAR RIGHT NOW!! And told myself that was it; it was now up to the Universe, or God, or whoever it is that makes these sorts of decisions. The real decisions. Like if my sheep will finally get a dog of his very own.

Sammy. ‘Could I be your dog??’

Vinnie. ‘Oh where, oh where oh where might my little dog be?’

But then yesterday, Vinnie pogo-sticked up to my car as I was leaving for work with an excitement usually reserved only for DOGS! and these words appeared on the screen of my mind:

“YOU ARE GOING TO GET MY DOG!!!! MY DOG IS COMING!! I AM SO EXCITED!!!!”

“Vinnie, I’m leaving to go to work.”

“NO!! YOU ARE GOING TO GET MY DOG!! MY DOG IS COMING!! MY DOG IS COMING!!”

I got out of my car and put Vinnie back on his side of the fence, and he bounced out after me again. I had the distinct impression he would bounce after me all the way to work. So I put him in his stall for the day and left. The prevailing anxiety that I AM NOT DOING ENOUGH TO GET THE DOG!!! returned and circled my brain like a bird trying to land on the ocean. GET THE DOG GET THE DOG GET THE DOG!!!

I tried to tune into Sammy but the signal of him had kind of gotten lost, as if my application was sitting under a pile of papers somewhere, or as if there was something important I had left out. Or as if it really WAS out of my hands and that somewhere down there in Surrey the fate of this dog was being decided without me. I actually intended to write this post about something else entirely. But Vinnie BOUNCED onto the screen of my mind and wanted me to tell you HIS story so I shut up and listened.

I found Vinnie on Facebook. An amazing woman named Katie Cowley raised him when his mom rejected him and his brother, and he had a difficult time of it- even more difficult than most bottle babies. He had a really hard time learning how to drink from a bottle and perform other simple sheep-y tasks, like eat grass or make friends. This caused him to be rejected by the flock and instead his companions were dogs. Then his brother died, which caused further alienation. So Vinnie grew up into what my sheep rancher friend Nikki calls a ‘Shog’- an animal with the body of a sheep but the consciousness of a dog. A bit of a misfit. A reject, some might say. To me this makes him special… and perfect.

When Katie moved from the farm where Vinnie was born to Squamish, she needed a new home for Vinnie. I had just moved to Pemberton with my teaching business Mountain Horse School, and I found Katie’s post for Vinnie on Facebook. (The REAL online dating site for all of us weirdo rural animal matchmakers). I have a very unique collection of animals- whom I call my teaching posse- and together we run kids’ day camps and classes and events and offer relationship based riding lessons and animal/nature/horse based therapy for those with autism, ADHD and other neurodiversities. We even host workshops, classes and sessions for adults too!

I collect animals with unique stories and experiences that make them especially open to encounters with humans. They are all calm and very grounded, with especially sweet and curious natures- which makes them incredible medicine for someone who is anxious or traumatized, or who wants to savour the feeling of a relationship with a being who offers love more simply and more readily than a human. Often my animals find their way to me via extraordinary means, and when I saw Katie’s post about Vinnie (then unfairly but perhaps accurately called Dumbo) something in me went DING DING DING!! And I knew I would be getting this little sheep.

Part of my role as lead human in my posse is doing my best to keep each critter not only safe and fed, but happy and fulfilled. I could see that Vinnie was sorely missing having a dog in his life, and not just any dog; a dog that understood him. A dog that could play his game of slow motion virtual head-butting, and fill his dog-deficient neural pathways with bright and shiny love. So if such a dog ‘just happened’ to appear in my Facebook newsfeed, I must do my due diligence as keeper of the posse’s internal and external happiness to make sure this dog arrived at the farm. Right?? Even if such an animal would need to live inside the house with me. (Who am I kidding? My dog-deficient neural pathways could use a dose of bright and shiny love, too.)

Writers note: Between the time I wrote the text of this piece and the time I got into town to post it (crappy internet being a side effect of rural living) I received a text from the rescue saying that my farm ‘sounds like the ideal environment for a dog like Sammy’ and I should hear back from the woman who is to do the site visit in the next couple of days. So there are a few more hoops to jump through, but it looks like Vinnie is close to getting his DOG!! I will keep you posted. 🙂

February 23, 2018
The dirt on how the PR girl met the farmer

March 11 marks four years since I met the farmer that would change the course of my life forever. You see, that day I went on a date with “SnowboardingFarmer,” aka Riley Johnson, a Pemberton guy I met on an online dating site.

We won’t talk about how he postponed our date twice; once because his snowmobile broke down and the second time because his basement flooded and two baby rabbits died on the same day. Those things don’t matter anymore.

March 11 was the perfect day to meet him.

Perfect, because he called me that day to see if I would be able to get together – THAT AFTERNOON – for a drink after work. No notice, at all. So, I met him wearing an old plaid shirt with jeans, and unwashed hair frizzing in a ponytail. He showed up in a plaid shirt too and came clomping up the stairs to the Mexican Corner in Whistler wearing huge mud splattered work boots.

“What is THIS?” I asked myself as he sat across from me with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

Both of us showing each other who we were. Me, inadvertently, since I would have made way more of an effort for a blind date if I knew that it would be happening that day. Him, by design, since if any Whistler girl is going to embark on a relationship with a Pemberton farmer you might as well show her the dirt up front.

After eleven years in Whistler marching down quaint cobblestone lanes in heeled boots, working my way up the ladder in Whistler Blackcomb’s public relations department, and networking and attending special events like a fiend, finding myself falling in love with this muddy farmer was both the most surprising event in my life and the easiest thing in the world.

One of the first ways I acknowledged the significance of my new relationship was a call I made to SPUD organic produce delivery. When they asked me why I was cancelling my longstanding and recurring order, my answer was simple.

I fell in love with a farmer.

February 22, 2018
Anna Helmer’s Farm Story continues

Deep winter confessions of lavish plan-hatching and mild delusions, meet work in someone else’s root house. (Just don’t call it mindless.)

A farming luxury: to lavishly plan the work of the coming season when there is no chance of starting any of it for at least two months. Cue careless disregard for work. Sloppy accounting of work requirements. Expansive imaginings absent anything but the faintest work alarm bells, easily ignored.

The carrot crop proposal, for example. With a foot of snow on the ground and the clouds heavy with more, it seems totally reasonable to be planning to plant 2 acres of them this summer. The chefs are asking for more and the customers say they are the best at market. Ergo the ego demands, therefore the farmer plans, hence we can ignore the actual work involved. 2 acres. At least.

I am not totally unaware of how things will unfold in real life. There will certainly be a privately raised eyebrow when enthusiastic planning first encounters carrot reality and the 5-gallon pails of seed start showing up sometime next month. Second thoughts will come flooding in, assuming they haven’t already, when I find myself still seeding well into the evening come that day in June. Assuming (again) that I follow through with seeding the entire 2 acres, the subsequent weeding and irrigation requirements will cause heart palpitations in July and August, and the harvest will be frankly sobering, or perhaps borderline terrifying, because it will take for freakin’ ever to get them all out of the ground. And exactly one year from now, on a snowy day in mid-February, there will be tears because by now the unsold remaining crop will be sprouting hairs and getting soft in storage.

For now, however, it’s a really clever and enterprising idea, worth pursuing and budgeting for. It’s even spawning tangential plans: a cooler expansion. My optimism knows no limits. These days are golden.

To stay in farming shape, to maintain my farming bona fides now that markets are done for the season, and basically to keep it real, I am moonlighting as a forklift operator at a local seed potato farm, which is not as glamorous as it sounds.

More precisely, I am stationed at the end of a seed potato sorting conveyor line and every 15 minutes I get to hop on an electric forklift and pick up a 2200lb sack of Red La Soda seed potatoes. I take it to the scale. If it’s too heavy, I remove potatoes; too light and I add them. Weight confirmed, I check that I remembered to slip the tag into the attached tag-holder and I move the sack to the collection area. That done, I return the forklift to the ready position and help my work partner manage the next bag. Twenty-two sacks make a full load on an 18-wheeler. It takes about a day to get it done, if nothing breaks down. It is unusual for nothing to break down.

I like working on other people’s farms because I love considering a mechanical time-out to be an opportunity to get a walk in the sunshine. When they occur on my own farm, they can be expensive, disappointing and dreaded.

It really goes on and on, doing the same thing over and over, with one hour for lunch. In these circumstances, a good co-worker makes a very positive difference. I have just the guy. His good humour rarely falters – the one time it did, he had an orange and was completely restored. The other thing I liked was that he never stopped trying to do a good job. There are a lot of challenges to managing 2200lb of potatoes every 15 minutes, none the least of which is staying focused, and we worked as hard on the first bag as we did on the 22nd.

I am going to stop you right there before you call this mindless work. It is not. I think that phrase was floated by someone who could not handle the pressure of coming up with his/her own stuff to think about. (S)He panicked, quit, and branded it mindless.

It is not mindless. Once you have sorted out the physical aspects of what you are doing, your mind is free to be engaged. How do you think this article got written? Still and all, it can be nice when there are breakdowns to liven up the day.

So. Work. Thank goodness I have some to do or my theoretical planning for the summer might be absent a whiff of reality and I wouldn’t want that.

Anna Helmer wrote a slim volume and put it on Amazon where it is a best seller in that category.

Portrait by Maureen Douglas.

February 17, 2018