When it comes right down to it, life is pretty simple. When you don’t have much, putting food on the tables and, indeed having a table under a roof, takes on a new and alarming significance. Food prices have gone up 26% over the last five years according to a study on food prices done by five Canadian universities. I think we have all noticed the sharp rise in food prices.
I read the 2023 study that forecast a Canadian family of four would be spending $1,358 a month on food in 2024. That is not what happened in many cases as families simply did not have the extra money to spend. What did happen is that people stopped eating out, started to skip meals and they started to change the types of food they buy and prepare.
If there was ever a time to start a food garden, this is the year. To give you some idea of how growing some of your own food can help with your budget, I talked to a family I know who grow a lot of their own food. They spend $550.00 a month on groceries for a family of two. Their grocery purchases include things like soap, detergent for the washing machine and other non-food items.
They also have animals and spend $360.00 a month on animal food for their chickens, other livestock and pets. That brings them up to a total of $910.00 for food for their whole establishment. They are downsizing the number of animals they keep as the price of animal feed is becoming very expensive too. The animals provide a great quantity of manure for their garden which is quite lush and productive. They grow fruit, vegetables, flowers for the table, culinary herbs,medicinal herbs and dye plants.
This year, some other friends got some seeds for squash from the Woven Grove on Denman. This is a little farm run by Dylan Gale and his wife Emily Guinane. They had seeds for the Oregon Homestead Sweetmeat squash bred by author Carol Deppe. Deppe has a PhD in genetics from Harvard university and she is committed to breeding open-pollinated crops that will produce heaps of food. Her books on farming and gardening are a treasure trove of great information. The crop of Oregon Sweetmeats this year was a bit frightening.
I was growing food with a couple of other families. I grew the garlic and split it among the three families, one family grew sweetcorn and the third family grew the squash. The squash family grew some Red Kuri squash which are small and pretty. “Kuri,” is Japanese for chestnut as the flesh of this squash is very dense and sweet and has a nutty flavour. I thought I had made a very good trade when my friend turned up with a wheelbarrow of these lovely little red squash. That was the first delivery.
The next day, she came by with a carload of Oregon Sweetmeat squash which are supposed to be 10 to 20 lbs but some of the ones I received were much larger so that I could scarcely lift them. Deppe bred them to produce a great deal of food so their seed chamber is very small. I had one too large to fit in my oven so I had to cut it in half. One half was solid meat and the other half had a little pocket of seeds.
These squash are more yellow and not as sweet as the Kuri squash. Once baked, their meat has a consistency similar to spaghetti squash and is very tasty in a soup or roasted and served with butter, Winter squash also go well in Thai and Indian curries. Roasted and mashed squash freezes well for later meals.
Some people raise a lot of these huge squash and cook the second-quality specimens up to supplement the feed for their ducks and chickens which is a good idea with the high cost of animal feed. Squash are also a great food for sheep who benefit from eating the seeds as they are a good wormer. The Oregon Sweetmeat squash is a very good keeper, lasting in some cases until the next summer so they are a good source of food in the early spring, Huger Gap.
You will be able to find some seeds for these excellent squash, which also make great pies, at Denman’s Seedy Saturday’s Seed Exchange Table 25 January 2025. Woven Grove does not sell seeds but they do share seeds with the community. They should also have seeds for a Butternut Remix which is a landrace of open-pollinated butternut squash that come in all shapes and sizes of the Butternut range.
Another seed they should be offering is the Gem Squash which is a summer squash from South Africa but it is more like a starchy winter squash although ripe in the summer. In South Africa, they boil the Gems. Dylan prefers to cut them in half and bake them and eat them with some butter. The Gem is ready by late July so that is another interesting squash to try. Next week, I will be explaining how to start a garden bed now so it will be ready to work in the spring.
