Garden Mama Growing

Last spring, I was in a little thrift shop that was about to close and saw this “make the planet great again” sign hanging behind the cashier while checking out. In the moment, I was relieved that the Trump presidency was a thing of the past and that this message was a fitting way to twist his words into something more palatable than the nauseating MAGA motto. It’s been hanging on my front door since before he was named as the Republican candidate in the election that’s led us to this political disaster. Now I can’t help but feel like there is some synchronicity to the timing of releasing my first newsletter focused on food security yesterday while this raging political storm hits home.

When I started writing on this blog two weeks ago, I had every intention of cultivating a little place in the virtual world where I could share my fanatical obsession with growing food, heritage seed sources, teaching kids to garden, supporting local farmers and all other things that nurture resilient local food systems. While it is my own form of activism to spread the word on these topics, I wanted to refrain from making it a political issue by dressing it up with inspirational stories and gardening tips.

But food security is a political issue. One that I wasn’t expecting would take such a relevant and dramatic turn this weekend as Trump and Trudeau announced hefty tarrifs on traded goods, a maneuver that will most heavily impact those already struggling with astronomical food costs. It was only a few days ago I mentioned that Toronto, Kingston and Mississauga have declared food insecurity a municipal emergency in my post Growing Food: The Most Important Lesson I Will Teach My Children . This trade war will only serve to exasperate a food insecurity crisis that Food Banks Canada reports as impacting 1 in 4 Canadian households based on findings from this Statistics Canada release last August.

The University of British Columbia just released this Food Flow Interactive Map which helps put into context how significant these tarrifs will be by demonstrating where we get the food we buy on grocery store shelves, with their calculations that we currently rely on the US for 37% of our fruit imports and 67% of vegetable imports among the food products we obtain from the south.

When the world goes crazy, something in my soul keeps telling me to plant seeds. So tonight while my mind is freshly reeling from what these political battles mean for average citizens and mamas with babies to feed like me, I’ll poke through my collection to find the first few seeds to get started with winter sowing in hopes of having some fresh salad greens in a couple months. It’s still early for much else, but it’s some small way of reminding myself that the earth provides all we need if we nurture the connection.

Want to get connected with people who are GROWING for a food secure future? Join our Facebook community Let’s Get Growing Canada! or stay in touch with my monthly newsletter.