Celebrating food is part of every culture, says Debbie Bonsan, executive director of Midwest Food Resources, which has been helping families eat well and cost-effectively since its inception in 1997.
This is the fifth year of one of Midwest's newest programs, a community garden project. The garden is located on Gagne Avenue, using land provided by the City of North Battleford. Many of the gardeners live in apartments, says Bonsan, and some come from other countries where they are used to coming out of the city centre to have a garden plot.
Friends Jose Basquez and Dumar Castano are ready to harvest a sizeable crop of red beans typically found in South and Central America and used in chili and soups. Throughout the bean crop, corn plants are found as well. Planting them together is a common practice, says Castano. They've also been growing potatoes, cucumbers and zucchini.
Brenda Korchinski is a lifetime gardener. She's been gardening since she was two years old. For the last two years she's been gardening at the Midwest Food Resources community garden. Her crop includes a variety of tomatoes, squash, zucchini, corn, several different kinds of beans, onions, turnips, leeks, root parsley and more. She even has a cross between a pumpkin and a butternut squash - great for pies and soups, she says.
She freezes and cans what she harvests and, with kids at university, her family enjoys garden vegetables year round, at home and at school. Her yard at home has some small spaces to garden, but not enough to produce the kind of harvest she can reap at the community garden. She also enjoys sharing seeds, seedlings and gardening knowledge with the other gardeners at the Midwest garden, especially the newcomer gardeners, adding she learns from them as well.
Korchinski saves seeds from her favourite plants, including a variety of tomato grown by a relative who passed away more than 20 years go. It's nice to have seeds passed down by family, she says, and she names them according to who they trace back to.
Korchinski starts many of her plants indoors, where they flourish on the sunny windowsills of her office. She says she often shares seedlings with friends and fellow gardeners, especially tomatoes.
In the plot next to Korchinski's, a bright spot of yellow-orange nasturtiums is blooming. Nasturtiums are an edible flower. Korshinski doesn't have any flowers in her plot, edible or otherwise, but she does grow flowers at home - and not just for their beauty. Her family has always enjoyed edible flowers in their salads, she says. The kids grew up with it.
