Salsa Garden 2024 – A Summerland tradition is born

With thanks to Jan Carlson I am pleased to share yet another inventive, practical, and ecosocial initiative developed in our little Town of Summerland. Good people, doing good things, for good reasons, with good and great outcomes for each other, for our community and for creation. Jan writes:

The idea was to create a sharing garden at the roadside on Washington Avenue in Summerland, a town of 11,000 in the BC Interior.

We wanted to plant some fast growing herbs and vegetables and make them available for people in the neighbourhood to take home for their summer meals.

Washington Avenue has some unique characteristics (and it must be noted, some unique characters, ed.). On one end of the street there are single-family-dwellings with sidewalks and backyards; and on the other end of the street there are commercial farms in the Agricultural Land Reserve. It marks the end of downtown and the edge of the municipal sewer system.

Just over the fence is the incredibly prolific Summerland Community Gardens project on the site of Summerland Alliance Church, a project which well connected with the community food bank.

Many people walk this street. The agricultural workers from the huge silviculture greenhouses, the fitness groups, the dog walkers. We had a notion these healthy people might like to pick up some cilantro or take a leaf of kale home for dinner if we built a roadside garden.

We began to draw on the community for resources. Some of the seeds came from the Summerland Library’s seed sharing program. Superior Peat provided the excellent soil mix for our container garden. No sooner had we filled the container with soil than we found its first tomato plant surreptitiously tucked into the corner (we soon found out that the would-be gardener was the young mom across the street who has been gleaning gardening tips from us).

When we received funds from the Neighbourhood Small Grants program with Community Foundation of the South Okanagan we committed to having our salsa garden block party.

Sunday, August 18^th would be the day for our salsa party.  Surely our hot weather vegetables would be ripe and ready by then. A key part of the puzzle was to include our seasonal guest workers from Mexico whom we had hired to help with cherry harvest. These were to be the salsa makers.

As the end of a dismal cherry harvest loomed closer, it was clear that we would not have enough tomatoes and peppers ready for party time. Knowing that the farms to the south of us grow amazing produce and have an earlier season, we headed to Keremeos to check out the fruit stands.

What a find! For $40 I bought 20 kg of Roma tomatoes and two hands-full of hot peppers. All the hours and dollars and planning I put into my garden venture, and in the end my entire garden harvest could not match the output of these professionals. Such is the lament of the backyard gardener.

On the return from Keremeos to Summerland, we popped into Global Grocers on Main Street in Penticton. It was my first visit to this store. I was impressed by the variety, cleanliness and high quality of the international products. 

While I bought a case of quality corn chips to be eaten with our beans and salsa, the proprietor balanced multiple tasks speaking fluent Spanish to his Mexican customers, Punjabi to his capable helper and Canadian English to me. He did it all in a relaxed, polite and personable manner. He hurried without being rushed, he was multitasking without being frazzled and he managed to make each person feel that they had his undivided attention.

On the day of the salsa garden party, there was much sizzling and roasting, boiling and blending at the Carcajou Fruit summer kitchen. The three amigas who made the salsa were in their element. I learned that they are very adept at producing large quantities of food to share with their community. In Mexico they have numerous celebrations throughout the year where the neighbours come together by the hundreds to share a meal.  Our block party was a small gig for this crew.

Under the instruction of Pamela, the Salsa Boss, I learned that salsa is so much more than what we find on the grocer’s shelf in Canada. Over the course of three hours, my three amigas made 7 different types of salsa.  We will have a salsa garden party again next summer!

We will host a salsa making demonstration with Octavio at the Summerland Fall Fair on Saturday, September 14^th at 2 p.m.  We plan to use ingredients grown in our garden on that day.  If you have any extra peppers and tomatoes to contribute, please send them my way—because the huge tomato horn worms that I found in my garden yesterday remind me that things don’t always go as planned.

Contact Jan Carlson here.

Recipe for Pico de Gallo (aka fresh tomato salsa)
1 white onion, finely chopped
1 jalapeno pepper, finely chopped
2 limes, squeezed for their juice
150 grams/5 oz cherry tomatoes, cut in quarters
100 grams/3 ½ oz Roma tomatoes, finely chopped
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 handful cilantro, finely chopped
Salt & pepper, coarse ground
1 bag of taco chips, lightly salted