Jester Suzuki (Campbell) has been living food from childhood. My mother was a mother and wife for the first half of my childhood. There was always a room full of preserved food downstairs, frozen, canned, dried, wines, beers and "pops" were all handmade from scratch. I was fortunate enough to be moms "little girl" (as she had always wanted one and got two boys instead) and got to learn a lot of the techniques that mom had used, which she got from grandma and so on...

In high school I got back into cooking with "Home-Ec" as well as some other useful skills and eventually I took a Culinary Arts Diploma Program in British Columbia. Working as a cook for a decade, I slowly got into more of the "other" elements deep within cooking. From culinary herbs as a taste additive to those same herbs providing medicinal value, as well as "food preserving" (Rosemary, Thyme, Basil, etc... these culinary herbs were used to both flavour dishes as well as keep them from going bad(back before refrigerators were used) as well as having those "preserving" effects to the body(all these herbs have been used as anti-fungals/virals/etc.).

This got me onto my path studying Herbal Medicine and Alternative therapies, Nutrition, Raw Food, and eventually into Permaculture giving my life some sort of Wholism around food and Healthy Living. Now I am not only using food for it's health benefits on my own body as well as friends and family, but I am now using it for the benefit of the earth, the soil, the atmosphere and every other living creature on this planet.

PERMACULTURE IS AWESOME!

In the Summer of 2010 after I took my PDC I wanted to start growing anything with these new tools I learned. As I live in an apartment still, I started searching for a viable outdoor area to grow in. That is when I found out about Sharing Backyards and the movement of Food Not Lawns, where homeowners dig up their lawn to put in a Garden. As well as these two great ideas, another idea that is gaining popularity is Small Plot INtensive(SPIN) Farming, which utilizes the Sharing Backyards idea as well. By combining these 4 techniques of transforming Urban yards into a productive and sustainable food producing system, Sustainable Urban Food Farms is transforming Calgary into a sustainable community, one yard at a time.

www.sustainableurbanfoodfarms.com

Growing Season is Upon Us, at least for myself...

Preparing for spring sowing and more lawn transformations, an excitement comes over me and I cannot resist planting some seeds in my apartment. Under bright lights all day long, nursing seedlings to younglings and growing bigger than my apartment can bare