The Focus Group
July 5, 2010
Scott Davis sent me an email a couple of months ago asking me to a meeting in Almonte which had potential to be interesting. Scott’s with the Eastern Ontario Model Forest, a non-governmental organization which works as a go-between among industry, government, and woodlot owners.
Elizabeth Holmes is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph as well as a member of the Model Forest staff. Her research concerns woodlot owners and what motivates them. This meeting of the first focus group for Elizabeth’s project involved a dozen individuals Scott rounded up. We would meet for a day while Elizabeth and Melanie took copious notes on the issues we raised in response to general questions about the provision of ecological goods and services through woodlot ownership.
Turns out the meeting was at the Union Hall in Tatlock. Many years ago two townships combined their efforts to build the hall: hence the name. It was a pleasant drive up through a well-treed landscape.
By the time the introductions were complete I realized that this would be a very informative discussion. The people in the room had unique perspectives and lots to say. The only thing they held in common (apart from availability on a week day) was a deep attachment the land they tend.
A few inherited their land. Some bought a hunting preserve and discovered its year-long appeal. Families discovered that the woodlot met their needs better than a cottage or golf course. Fleeing city concrete figured prominently in the introductions. Everyone plants trees. Maple syrup, of course, was mentioned often. Most were eager to recount their stewardship activities over the last few years or generations.
The first common concern to emerge had to do with passing our life’s work on to the next generation. Government recognizes the value of privately-held forest tracts by reducing the property taxes on managed properties. Tax breaks are also available to tree farms, though the same issue comes up: at some point the woodlot must begin to pay for itself. Otherwise the landowner or the family members who follow will be unable to keep it.
Elizabeth leaped in with the purpose of this first focus group, to define the terms of the dialogue which will emerge in the next few years between the public, government, and the land owner.
She explained that in Costa Rica, Bolivia, England, the United States and Australia, government or charitable organizations have launched programs to pay landholders for ecological goods and services. At least three similar programs are in early days in Canada.
These ecological benefits (I’m reluctant to use the acronym) are much easier to understand in a county like Bolivia where burning the forest for livestock grazing is a major environmental problem. A beehive (cost: $3.00) can protect ten hectares for a year. In-kind payments are more acceptable to landholders than cash, because with cash comes the perception of lost control of one’s land.
New York City discovered it was cheaper and easier to pay the farmers upsteam to improve the quality of the rivers than to build a new water treatment plant.
The Australian government has little trouble politically with the funding of water improvement programs, but how about in Canada? With so much of it around us, it’s hard to imagine paying for water (unless it’s in a ½ litre bottle). In Canada most ecological spending is based on guilt and goes to organizations. None of it currently gets to the provider of many of the goods and services, the farmer or woodlot owner.
Elizabeth’s study is to identify the issues and begin the dialogue for the move to recognizing and rewarding landowners and farmers for the critical role they play as environmental stewards.
Elizabeth Holmes:
The Eastern Ontario Model Forest is exploring ways to recognize the contributions that farmers and landowners make in providing ecological goods and services. Over the next year we will host a series of focus group sessions with you to identify how best to develop a workable EG&S program framework for eastern Ontario.
Here are a few questions we’ll explore with you in focus groups:
1. How might the responsibilities and costs for providing and safeguarding EG&S be shared among institutions, taxpayers, consumers and landowners?
2. What constitutes going “the extra step” towards providing EG&S, and how can that be translated into payment?
3. What types of incentive or forms of recognition are most valued by landowners?
4. What best EG&S practices and stewardship programs might we use as a base?
5. How do we generate and sustain funding in support of incentives?
6. Given the sheer complexity of ecosystems, how do we measure or verify that environmental goods and services have been provided or safeguarded?
We are very interested in the views of woodlot owners and farmers in eastern Ontario. If you’d like to participate in a focus group session, please contact Elizabeth Holmes at eholmes@eomf.on.ca or (613) 258-8415.
“You have a most civilized place to live.”
March 21, 2010
“You have a most civilized place to live.” Taking into account that he had to stand in the bed of the Ranger with three others and cling to the roll bar as the vehicle lurched through mud holes, and that lunch was a venison burger fried on a corner of the maple syrup arch, I was a little surprised when Dr. Armand Leroi made this comment to Bet and me.
On a brief visit to Kingston, Armand joined Saturday’s crew at the sugar shack along with friend and colleague, Dr. Adam Chippindale of the Queen’s Biology Department. They came to see what had been dragging so many of Adam’s students out of the lab and up Hwy 15 lately. Fourth-year biology students each year get to pick a guest lecturer for their final class. They selected Dr. Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the Imperial College in London, England. His BBC4 science programs* no doubt influenced their choice.
At least those sallow moths in the sap buckets received some high-powered attention on the weekend. For an album click here. Photos:
Earlier in the week Matthew Swift arrived. Matt is a sous chef at Red’s Bistro, a restaurant in the financial district of Toronto, and has a keen interest in new approaches to local foods. He joined friend Don Kerstens, one of the sap crew, to look at the setup and taste our Canada tea.
With a hot fire rolling under the finishing pan, Martin Mallet was in his element tracking the boil until the syrup hit the proper sugar concentration. “The Brix is at 66. It’s time to take it off.” No more endless speculation and arguments: that eBay refractometer was worth the money. Martin and Matt bottled 8 litres of syrup.
Things had gone normally until they took the small pan with the syrup off the arch. Then the three foodies kept gazing at that expanse of bare, hot steel. The urge to cook had struck. In his business Don Kerstens (selectfinefoods.ca) supplies specialized meat cuts to Toronto restaurants. He happened to have some premium pork chops frozen in a cooler. Into the boiling water went the vacuum-packed chops. Too hot? Martin added two pails of cold water so as not to boil them during the defrost.
A wipe of the flat surface with a wet towel and the arch was ready for cooking. Chef Matt seasoned the “pan” by melting the fatty edges of the chops into the steel, producing a black, smooth surface. A little salad oil, and on went the chops. Matt kept feeling them with his finger, turning them frequently. Then he took them off. Martin advanced with his thermometer. “68 degrees F in the middle. They’re not cooked yet.” Unbothered, Matt waited and chatted with me about how to get syrup into the chops without burning them. After a couple of minutes he put the chops back on the stove and finished them. He later told me he likes to let pork chops rest a bit halfway through. Then he poured a bit of syrup onto each, turned them, and used his Swiss army knife to slice them into thin strips on the tray. We ate with our fingers. They were delicious: excellent meat, cooked by an expert, with very little salt and pepper added and a light maple flavour.
Red’s Bistro staff take pride in winning cooking competitions in the Toronto area with innovative entrees and appetizers. I doubt if it will be long before some combination of maple syrup and Berkshire pork makes its way onto the menu in this high-end restaurant.
Next day I tried Matt’s technique to fry a couple of Don’s chops. Even with my limited skills they were quite delightful. Premium pork may well be worth the cost, and the end of a maple syrup arch trumps a gas barbecue as a cooking surface every time.
But the highlight of the week had to be a conversation with four-year-old Liam Chippindale, visiting the farm with his father and brother. He sat down with me and explained in amazing detail how his home’s heating system works. He combined acute observation and anecdote with a fertile imagination to fill in the missing parts, but basically there’s an ice volcano outside which runs water in to provide hot air through a floor register in his room and a wall register in his brother’s. Neat kid. He invited me to his birthday party in thirty days – at an amusement park.
*You can easily find a number of Dr. Armand Leroi’s programs on You Tube: The Evolution of Music, What Makes Us Human, What Darwin Didn’t Know, Aristotle’s Lagoon. Start with What Makes Us Human.
How to blow up a tree
August 2, 2009
The elm had been full of health when we built the house, but the blight took it and left a huge and rotting cadaver. I was afraid to cut it. As elms often do, three trunks had grown from a common stump, then together, and apart again. The disease had shorn the heavier limbs off it by the time I had worked up enough nerve to do something about it.
Over the previous years I had cut up and burned a number of large elms, so I wasn’t exactly a babe-in-the-woods when it came to felling large trees. Still, this one gave me the willies. Most trees lean, and can be tipped in that general direction with a large notch, some careful cutting, and a steel wedge. But I couldn’t tell where, if anywhere, this one wanted to fall.
A colleague, Pat Quinn, got wind of my problem. Pat is legendary for his explosive solutions to problems. “Rod, why don’t you just blow the thing up? I’ve got some dynamite the County let me have to clear beaver dams out of culverts, and it’s getting pretty old. I should use it up because it’s starting to sweat. Want me to come up on Saturday and take care of the tree?” I nodded, a little nervously. Like most of the rookies and all of the kids at Smiths Falls Collegiate, I was a bit scared of Pat. I told him I’d be ready for him on Saturday morning, though.
That afternoon I tried to cut the tree. Even with a huge notch and deep cuts all around, the tree would not tip.
Pat drove in Saturday morning. “I was a little nervous over some of the bumps on Hwy. 15 with that dynamite in the trunk. It’s sweating, and those drops on the outside of it are nitroglycerine. Be sure when you’re handling it you wear heavy gloves. Otherwise your heart will start to race like crazy from just a touch. It absorbs through the skin.”
I didn’t know if he was doing a number on me or not, so I tried to appear relaxed. Pat looked the tree over and decided to tie three sticks to the side of the trunk just to see what happened. He sent me to put in the electric cap fastened to the 200’ of wire. We would set it off by shorting the contacts across the poles of a 12v car battery.
Dutifully I carried the cap and the wire over to the tree where Pat had made a show of tying the dynamite on with his hands encased in heavy gloves. I looked back to ask him something. No Pat. That’s strange. I followed the yellow wires over a rise and found him lying behind a boulder with eyes shut and fingers in his ears.
“All right, Pat, quit foolin’ around! I’m going to hook them up now!” Feeling none too eager to bring cap to nitro, I nevertheless stuffed the cap into the end of one of the sticks. Then I did not run. I walked back to Pat’s boulder, but he made me find my own.
He fired the shot. It went “bang”. A bit of bark fell off the trunk, but that was it. A couple of Holsteins looked up, but soon lost interest.
Pat got serious. This time he jammed three sticks into a crevasse between two of the trunks and shot that. More bark flew, but the tree barely moved.
My turn. “Okay, this is what we’ll do. Over there on the other side of the house is a pile of clay. Bring over a pail-full of it while I cut a mortise into the trunk to hold the next shot.”
I fired up the saw and made a plunge cut straight into the back of the trunk. It went in all 30” of the bar’s length. I pulled it out and made three more cuts into the punky wood, until I had created a 4” mortise straight into the heart of the tree, just at the level where I had cut the wedge before. Then I hit it with the axe and wonder of all, the square plug of rotten elm popped right out.
Pat looked really apprehensive at this, but I pushed in three sticks of dynamite and a blasting cap. Then I used half a pail of clay to seal the hole.
The shot wasn’t particularly loud. It was more of a roar, but the hundred-foot tree seemed to lift slowly above the stump about four feet. Then it stopped and turned horizontal in mid-air before it did a spectacular belly flop into the neighbour’s quarry. It hit so hard most of the trunk broke up into chips.
When the dust had settled and the last few branches had found their way to earth, there really wasn’t anything to cut up and move, so Pat and I celebrated a job neatly done and he left with new respect for the power of dynamite sealed in a tree.
When the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear
May 14, 2009
It’s time to hunt for morels, according to one Internet article I read this week. In Leeds that was the interval from May 5th to May 13th, and yes, there were some to be had in local forests at that time.
Another blog quoted an unnamed newspaper reporter on the subject of finding the tasty fungi. The article suggested that the season begins in mid-April in central U.S.A. and moves north at a rate of 100 miles per week. Apparently it continues until three consecutive 80-degree days occur. I love the author’s certainty, but when he suggested there was little point in hunting for morels anywhere except around the stumps of recently-dead elm trees, I decided to see if this was hot air or not. Off I went to check out elm stumps. To my surprise, I had to conclude the guy is right. I came up with three new picking sites in a morning’s search.
Many bloggers this year are gushing about huge hauls of morels. Around Forfar the harvest so far has been sparse, though steady, with quite a few small blacks, but not many of the larger commons. One heavy rain and strong southern wind encouraged quite a few commons to peek out of their leaf and grass cover, though, and that evening Bet and I found a hatful where I hadn’t seen any a few hours before. Maybe it was the diffuse evening light which made spotting easier. Common morels are very well concealed at the best of times, and the temptation after you find one is to peel away layers of leaves and grass in case there are more which have not quite emerged, but therein lies madness. Morels only grow where they want.
Because pickings have been too slim to justify the effort as food-production, I’ve decided to separate the sport of morel hunting from the enjoyment of processing food for the table. The challenge of picking the pattern of the sponge-like fungus out of the other cover on the forest floor is fun in itself. It’s like those eye-twister games they run in The Citizen, or those Where’s Waldo? books.
It’s funny how the mind gets trained to find them. It’s often one’s peripheral vision that gives the first indication of the presence of a prize. Then it takes some methodical searching to track down the culprit. It’s quite like bass fishing, actually, and I think I’m getting better at it.
A cautionary note from a woman in Burbank, California appeared in a blog. She commented that she almost died after eating a skillet-full of sautéed morels and washing them down with beer. According to her, excessive consumption of morels and alcohol can create a compound which dissolves a membrane which protects the central nervous system. She claimed that her neurologist found the antidote (saline drip with B vitamins) in an old mushroom book.
The vast majority of blog posts, however, celebrate the great meals to be had from fresh and dried morels, so I suspect their benefits outweigh the risks. It might be a good idea not to drink alcohol during the meal, though, and of course one must never eat morels raw, or allow pets to consume them.
Last year we discovered the new gas range does a great job drying halved fruits even though it does not have a pilot flame. The convection fan and the light are perfect to dry tray after tray of the fungi.
From last year’s bumper harvest Bet froze some of the dried morels in paper bags, and stored the others in similar bags in a basket on the bookshelves. The room-temperature packages preserved considerably more flavour than the frozen, dried product.
We’re still hoping for a major morel hatch, but the oak leaves are now much larger than a squirrel’s ear, so time may be running out for this year. Keep an eye on the ground around dead elms, though.
the Walnut Diary 