Stone Soup to Feed 200 People

• Please enjoy the story of the Urban Heirloom Harvest Fest:

"The community vegetable pick up was a people powered success. Through produce donated from local community gardens to selling it prepared at Withrow's Framers Market Heirloom Festival, allowed for a group of us to raise some funds and encourage the participation of everyone who collaboratively collected as Toronto Compost (supporting community gardens) to venture down to Growing Power's urban farm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for some workshops and learn how to give back to our gardens and the people of Toronto.

"The trip allowed for many friendships, like my new mates Ravenna, Ian, and everyone of those "worm lovers" (Toronto Compost), plus a host of good folks from the TCGN. Some of my new amiga/os and I eventually made our way down to Havana, Cuba to learn from the masters of urban ag and the purpose of our gardeners collective, to get some exposure to Will Allen and Growing Power an urban farm and education centre in Milwaukee.

"I just want to say thanks to everybody for growing all those community gardens that gave us the seeds to create a story that hits a note with any community gardener/farmer that I have come across. Havana to Manhattan, Milwaukee to Salt Spring Island.

"I have been in Milwaukee for a month at growing power and will visit Chicago, work and learn with a couple of other organizations I met at the first national urban agriculture conference here in Milwaukee. Just give me a day or two to get to a computer and respond.

"I just wanted to re-interate that in regards to what I already shared about Habana, that my experiences would not have been possible with out Ravenna as I don't speak a fluent sentence of espanol. It was a rare opportunity to travel with a dedicated and amazingly gifted urban agriculturalist and because of this I can't say enough about the amazing success that transpired,

"I am thoroughly looking forward to hearing Ravenna's story and understandings about these particular experiences.

"The key ingredients for over all success where passion/dedication, a little belief in the mystical cause this trip seemed to perfect with all of the "chance" occurences, camaraderie/team work. and an amazing group of people ie Composting Peeps who have inspired me to make and take my efforts to an all encompassing level."

Thanks to the T.C.G.N. peace always Andrew

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"Working on the Harvest Festival was very meaningful for me. I had been looking for work for a while and wasn't finding anything. I went to my first TCGN meeting. The festival was in two weeks and at the meeting we came up with the idea of collecting food from community gardens across the city to cook a Toronto-produced meal. We wondered if we could collect this food by bike trailer so that it would further fit into the philosophy of reducing the footprint of the meal and keeping it at a human-scale and someone suggested borrowing the trailer from the Green Gardeners. Andrew (it was his first TCGN meeting too) said that he works on a farm around Hamilton and his farm would be willing to fill in the gaps if we needed anything like potatoes or garlic. I had just started working at a restaurant near Withrow Park and would ask if we could use their kitchen as a launching point for the festival.

"I was touched by the democracy, warmth, and welcome of TCGN: if you have energy and ideas, it doesn't matter if this is your first meeting or if you have been a member for years, you are welcome and treated as an equal. Xuan-Yen, Andrew and I set to calling as many community gardens as we could. We spent a full day calling and had no yeses, just answering machines and wrong numbers. The second day though we received our first donation and it started to feel like we may actually be able to pull this crazy idea off. Over the next few days we received many donations and spend a lot of time working out the logistics of picking up the produce and where we would cook it, who would help cook and serve, etc.

"I was touched by the fact that gardeners were so willing to give food from their gardens to complete strangers and that again and again things worked out: when we needed help someone would come along and help, the day we rode across the city and the day of the festival were both the sorts of days that the sunshine warms your soul.

"I stayed up late planning out our bike trailer route and woke up early to a gorgeous cool sunny morning and Andrew and I began the pick up. I was blown away by our capacity to travel across all corners of the city and pick up loads and loads of produce (after all the produce had been put in one place we ended up with a watermelon box (one of those roughly 4'x4'x3' reinforced cardboard boxes) and shopping cart full of produce). (The overlap between alternative transportation and urban ag is very strong) Visiting people's gardens and pausing to hear their stories was also very meaningful: seeing how comfortable people were in their gardens, and the joy in their eyes when they spoke of how their greens were doing or their varieties of tomatoes was beautiful.

"It was also good to travel around face to face and hear the challenges people were facing in their gardens and communities and to ask how TCGN could better support their efforts.

"We had way way way more produce than we expected. We spent all day the day before the festival cooking. Roberta, her partner Jeffery, Zora, Petra, Senning, myself, Sunday, and Tricia cooked through the day and late into the night. Petra, her friend (?), myself, and Andrew woke up early and cooked some more the day of the event. We ended up using absolutely everything that was donated (really wanted not to waste anything).

"We had two sorts of steamed kale, rainbow chard, beet greens, collards, beet salad, tomato salad, potato salad, salsa, mixed salad greens, 3 sorts of salad dressing (one with ground roasted coriander seeds, another with a mix of fresh herbs), 2 sorts of soup, babagnoush, and tens of varieties of fresh tomatoes just to eat. We had more volunteers to serve the food and others of us spoke to people as they received and ate their food and explained the story behind the meal. Not only was the food an incredibly tasty feast it represented the love and hard work of so many people. It was an incredibly tangible and powerful way of demonstrating our current capacity for urban food production and our future potential. There were so many gifts along the way: from people trusting us with their produce to people volunteering all over the place to people loaning us their kitchen, fridge, van, bike trailer, etc to giving people the food to eat. It was so deeply satisfying to talk to people about the food as we ate it together and to share the story. We invited the gardeners who donated food to come eat the food for free and many people came. I loved the symbolism of a meal created from so many gardens and so many people: it truly was a Toronto-produced meal.

"At the end of the festival we had leftovers and were trying to decide what we would do with them. We returned to the FoodShare kitchen and Carole Ferrari (of the Local Cafe) was there.

She had a commission from the NDP for their food during the election. As we brought the food in she was eye-ing it and then came over and asked us where it was going.

"We told her about the festival, she tasted it, loved it, and bought it all off of us. She later told us that Jack Layten from the NDP loved it and they were very impressed and excited about the idea of urban agriculture. So there was no waste and the food became an advocacy tool in the end.

"The money that we earned from the meal was used to provide scholarships for people working on the Urban Agriculture Co-op to go to Milwaukee to learn from Growing Power.

The meal was about giving and about bringing people together. It was about celebrating what we are doing now and giving hope for the future. It incorporated huge numbers of people into the process as givers of food, choppers of produce, bikers, eaters, storytellers.

"Zora, I don't know what format the stories in your book are taking but I would love to help contribute. I just dashed this off so if you let me know how you are formating the entries I would love to help polish this up and weave other people's perspectives into the story of this meal." Thanks! Ian

Hi All!

"I have a collection of pictures from the harvest festival that we all enjoyed last summer. I am documenting the event for my web site info...and realized that the story of how the festival came to be, would be a great story for Zora's book "Food for Peace Book". Just like the story of "Stone Soup" this festival brought together many different people, and many different community gardens (the goal of TCGN) We found out how each of us, contributing a modest amount of produce from each of our gardens, made a soup and great lunch for 200 people.

"May I suggest, that we can all write a paragraph or two, of how we participated in this event, and how this event affected: us, or our friends, or perhaps the growth we saw around us as we worked together, and we learned new skills. And could we send our little part of the story to some one with writing skills to put the whole story together? We can send out the message to other people we know that were there, that they could write a bit as well, I don't know everyone's name. And we can also make a picture story if we get enough pictures assembled.

"I have received several messages from Zora of the actual event, and from Ian, I have pictures from the places his friend went to get veggies wonderful idea, just a couple of days ago, I was talking about the same idea. that is: the Peace making in the civic society - in action. and it happened in our growing community. brilliant and beautiful.

"We have time to do that, the due date is marked to make people motivated. it is two full years how we started. we need stories on the paper, let us be initiators. I am sure that there are some amazing writers waiting to express..

"Andrew Flaman worked on collecting donations .cooking using a stone soup recipe, use what you have, was a challenge and full success. I have pictures of the food, kitchen, produce when it arrived to the kitchen...Let's do it the best we can.

Anonymous

Two messages from Zora Ignjatovic

I was chopping vegetables for two hours. all colours veggies looked like a rainbow when I put it into the big cooking pot. Petra was there to add last touch, to add more zest and flavour to the soup.work of heart, art and passion. people were happy to taste and to donate for the TCGN. amount collected was around I think $600. fun and educational. speaking about locally produced food and food security. we had it all there.

peace and love

Zora

Hi there,this is so nice and meaningful. I have a number of pictures from the kitchen, and festival. We need recipe too. Petra could you do that. collaboration is so satisfying.

I chopped the vegetables for 2.5 hours. and tossed it into the colourful big pot. No worry. heart was the main ingredient and Seasoning at end and make it special.

peace and love to all

Zora