The Quebec region of Canada, over towards the East side, is French speaking – speaking English there is considered a bit of an affront. Their choice of language is rooted in colonisation of Canada by the French in the fifteen hundreds which resulted in French becoming the dominant language. War with the British in the seventeen hundreds saw Canada become part of the British empire. Hence to this day Canada is part of the common-wealth (the Queen appears on the Canadian dollar). However, during the war and supposedly before, the French settlers had been better at integrating the native population into their new order, and in modern times Quebecers pride themselves on being different from the rest of Canada – not just because of language but also due to their heritage. The language was my initial motivation for heading to Quebec as it provided an opportunity to experience a different culture whilst practicing French. People in France had warned against doing this. The Quebecois dialect is very different from European French, and after a few hours in Montreal I realised that I couldn’t understand any of it. Some words and phrases are different but the biggest change is the pronunciation; the word ‘bien’ (meaning ‘good’ or ‘well’) goes from bee-ah to bee-eyn, for example. This sounded bizarre, and after three months in France it was a struggle to take the new accent seriously. Fortunately, English was widespread so this didn’t pose a major obstacle.
My first host was Harper. She was an independent soul who lived on an organic homestead in south Quebec, a short drive from the US border. Most of her days were spent expertly tending to the farm, which was an impressive setup with three large greenhouses, a couple of ponds and a portable chicken coop containing twenty four red hens. The edge of the property was fleeced in a thick layer of deciduous forest, and tucked inside the trees were two yurts and a heated A-frame cabin for the workers. Harper’s family lived in a wooden house in the centre of the property, which included a meditation room that looked out over one of the ponds. Her husband Caleb worked as a teacher in a nearby city but both he and Harper were qualified as meditation instructors in the Vipassana tradition (a form of Buddhism).
On arrival, the first job was harvesting tomatoes and loading up the weekly customer baskets. Weekly or biweekly baskets are a common method of distributing produce for Organic farmers. Customers sign up to receive a basket which contains a mix of vegetables produced during the previous week. Baskets are supplied until the harvest season ends (around October time in the Northern hemisphere). Harper’s baskets contained courgettes (zucchinis), aubergines (eggplants), mesclun (a mix of salad greens), tomatoes, cucumbers and other bits. Delivering baskets was simply a case of taking them to the nearby town of Sutton and piling them in the usual spot in front of a bagel shop. Quebecois heritage apparently included a characteristic method for making bagels by boiling the dough rings before stone baking them, a practice originating from the sizeable jewish population. The world has a way of reminding you just how small it is, and the baker in the bagel shop, Scot, turned out to be from the south east of England, born and raised in a town not far from my home. Scot had arrived in Quebec at the age of eighteen, disillusioned with Britain and looking for new prospects. Now in his forties, he had curiously held on to his British accent.
A steady trickle of Canadians came by to buy bagels or collect vegetable baskets, so I had the opportunity to chat with many of them. The stereotypes are correct; they’re super friendly and they mostly wear flannel.
The chickens on the farm were exceptionally productive, each producing on average one egg every eighteen hours. They were low maintenance too, only requiring one feeding a day and spending the rest of their time in a fenced off portion of the garden eating insects, seeds and frogs. Every month or so, when a section of the garden became over-grazed, the chicken hutch would be rolled to a new area – a natural method of weed management. This continued until winter, at which time the chickens were moved into one of the greenhouses to wait out the frost and snow. Vegetables in the greenhouses stopped fruiting when the winter rolled in, not so much due to the temperature as the limited daylight. A book on year round gardening told me that day length was a key factor in determining the success of a crop, so gardens in Southern Quebec could expect similar performance to gardens in Europe at the same longitude. Given that many vegetables grow slower in the winter, I was curious as to what people could eat in late autumn/winter besides eggs if they were looking to be self sufficient or eat local? Harper explained that crops like kale and pak choi continued to grow in winter, albeit slowly, so salad stays on the menu. Another option was to keep crops of root vegetables in the ground, effectively using the earth as a huge fridge. Whilst there is a risk that severe frosts and low temperatures could damage the leaves, it’s possible to maintain a steady supply of produce in winter (assuming enough was planted earlier in the year). Many of the remaining beds at Harper’s farm had a cover crop – basically any sort of greenery that helped preserve the health of the soil until the next season.
There was plenty to learn on the farm, and the nearby Mount Sutton made for an interesting weekend off. From the Summit it was possible to see a green carpet of forest extending into the United States, pushed skyward an intervals by boulder-like peaks. Autumn was beginning to trample stains of rusty red and mustard yellow across the landscape. It was a long cycle to Mount Sutton, and without a car I was limited in the number of places I could visit – Canada is truly vast. As such, I spent a considerable amount of time at the farm with Harper and Caleb, which naturally lead to us discussing their other occupation; meditation.
Meditation wasn’t something I had done for a while. I had used an app (Waking Up) for some months prior to travelling but had let my membership slide. Harper and Caleb took their meditation practice seriously, and regularly attended retreats at the nearby Dhamma meditation centre in Montebello, a town between Ottawa and Montreal on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River. I sat with them in their studio for half an hour, and found that I couldn’t maintain focus as well as I had in the past when using the app. Perturbed by my apparent cognitive decline and curious about going on retreat, I asked my hosts for details about the centre in Montebello. They informed me that the centre ran silent retreats for a minimum of ten and up to twenty days. Attendees were required to hand in their devices at the beginning of the retreat and refrain from any verbal, physical or non-physical communication with anyone during the entire retreat. Every day would be occupied by multi-hour bouts of meditation, under the guidance of the servers. This piqued my curiosity, in large part due to the fact the whole thing was free; accommodation and food were provided. Technically, a pay-it-forward system was in place whereby attendees were encouraged to donate at the end of the retreat if they felt they had benefitted. As a poor traveller, I felt confident that a very small donation would be adequate, and I booked myself in for a ten day retreat in late October (about a months time).
We continued harvesting as the farm wound down for winter. There were still some peppers and tomatoes to be picked, but the lettuce was on its last stems and the cucumbers were looking a bit meagre. The courgettes looked surprising good though, so we continued to pollinate the flowers using a soft paintbrush; pollen was brushed from the bright yellow male flowers and applied to the females flowers. The last job before I left was to transplant the baby pak choi from pots in the greenhouse to the garden, the first winter crop to go in the ground.
Having lost my primary intention of visiting Quebec (practicing French), I had lost some of the energy that comes from being a traveller. Without a reason or a sense or purpose, travelling can just become sight-seeing; essentially an expensive way to update instagram. The challenge also diminishes when you can speak to everyone in your native language, but I hadn’t fully realised that at the time. Instead I just found myself looking for something new that would push me out of my comfort zone, and decided upon hitchhiking. Free, fun and adequately risky – it sounded like exactly what I needed. I was right, it turned out, but it wasn’t until nine days later on an island in Ontario that I realised that I’d stumbled across an entirely new purpose for my visit to Canada during my time on the farm, and it wasn’t hitchhiking.