FOOD | GROWING FOOD | GARDENING | HARVESTING

Growing Food Is In My Blood

We do miss our garden but we find other things to grow as we travel.

My mom had a small garden when I was a kid. I still remember picking peas fresh and eating them in the garden. And I will never forget how grossed out she got by the slugs on the lettuce. One year they poured a bag of elephant manure from the Calgary Zoo, which was a gag gift left in my dad’s trunk, on the rhubarb, and it got so big that it near ate our house.

The real gardener in our family was my Grandmother, though. She grew most of her own vegetables in the summer months, then would busily can and preserve them for the winter. Her pickled beets were so good! I didn’t appreciate them as a child, but I would love to have some now!

I wrote a bit about my life as a gardener and it has a lot to do with my Grandmother. She passed away last year and I still find it hard to believe that she won’t be back in my hometown waiting for me when I go back to Canada for a visit the next time.

Chris and I grew a lot of our own food back in our old life. We had a beautiful garden oasis in our backyard, and we tended to it with love and care. Our relationship was largely built over our mutual love of plants and gardening. We sprouted all of our food seedlings in the spring, doted over them all summer, then would hurriedly harvest and pick while canning and freezing, trying to get it all saved for winter.

This time of year was always really busy for us as we both also had seasonal jobs and had to get our client work finished before the end of September as well.

We basically slept, worked, ate, gardened, canned, then pressed repeat for most of August and September.

We were lucky in that we lived in an area where people existed close to the land. The West Coast is known as an area of Canada where the hippies live. I will attest that that is true, but those hippies sure know how to grow and eat good food! Every summer we also found ourselves attending workshops and classes that taught us a lot about food production.

Classes ranged from creating our own soil, to making our own cheese, and many topics in between. Our thirst for knowledge to do with growing and producing food was insatiable.

It still is.

I volunteered as a bookkeeper for a local food cooperative and we signed up each fall to volunteer for a huge apple cider pressing event. We also got together with fellow gardeners and had seed packing parties in the fall where we traded seeds that we had collected through the summer season, around the community.

We were very heavily involved in this aspect of life back in Canada.

When we set out into the world to travel full-time in 2017, we weren’t sure if we would have the opportunity to garden again for a while. But then we found ourselves working at a botanical garden on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, that experience didn’t have us growing food, but we tended to many plants on the property, and we taught the local staff how to make healthy and rich composted soil, an important ingredient in a healthy garden.

Fast forward 2 years and our composting and gardening skills came into effect again. This time we found ourselves in Uganda, and we happened upon a starving village.

Their crops had died from drought, and covid had killed their local economy. They were in a desperate state. We were able to fundraise from friends and family back in Canada to bring them food, but we were more concerned with the fact that they didn’t have small gardens growing around their houses. Plus we could see that their soils were depleted of nutrients so we set about teaching them how to compost and create healthy soils.

We spent 6 months in that village and helped them plant all sorts of gardens and got them composting and soil building. Unfortunately, we left before any of the food had ripened, but we enjoyed the process of growing it again, immensely.

We also had the utmost privilege of visiting our friend's coffee plantation. There we spent the day picking coffee berries which we got to take home and process into a week's worth of coffee that we drank. It was a big process and we surely gained a lot of respect for how much hard work it is to have our daily required drink.

For starters, did you know that only the red beans are picked? This means that no machines can harvest coffee plants and they all have to be hand picked!

We also did some housesitting in Botswana and planted a few things while we were there. They had started small tomato plants on their patio in pots, and we transplanted them into a garden after finding them some healthy soil at the back of the house where garden refuse had been thrown. Without realizing it, they had created rich natural soil which needed to be put to good use.

We also planted a bunch of pineapple tops for them and in a couple of years they should have pineapples growing from those plants.

By now, we have realized that no matter where we find ourselves in the world, we are always happier when we have our hands in the dirt and are connected to plants and nature. So we are now prioritizing that and recently discovered a platform where we can sign up to volunteer on farms around the world so that we can continue our stewardship of the land, without having to own our own property to do so.

If you are interested in learning about the platform, click here.

Currently, we find ourselves in Turkey and soon we are heading up to Bulgaria where we will be volunteering on a farm to help with their fig harvest amongst other gardening projects. After that, we are hoping to come back down to Turkey to help another friend with his olive orchard where we hope to learn a lot about olive production.

Learning how different food grows and sharing our knowledge with others has really become a part of who we are and how we want to contribute to the planet. We will never tire of the diversity of that which grows, and the different ways that people produce food.

We have already learned a lot, but there is always so much more to learn!

Happy travels!

xo Jill

This post is in response to the Globetrotter publication’s September Monthly Prompt “The Harvest and The Food.” Click below to learn about it and to take part if you want!

Hi there, we are 2 Canadians, Jill and Chris from Artistic Voyages. We have been nomadic since 2017 living in numerous different countries, and experiencing the life and diversity of our planet on the ground and firsthand. We paint FREE murals in exchange for accommodation.

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