The rolling farm­land of Ontario’s Hastings County

Recent events have me think­ing about our small world, par­don the cliche, and how tech­nol­ogy, old and new, can con­nect dots, neigh­bour­hoods and peo­ple. What does this have to do with gar­den­ing? Well, this post is also about bread, and a par­tic­u­lar wheat that’s grown in the Ontario countryside–Hastings County– just two hours out­side of Toronto.  Her Majesty the Queen also makes an appearance.

As it’s my first post here, a lit­tle back­ground on me: I’m a mul­ti­ple loca­tion gar­dener. In the city, I have a small rented gar­den, a com­mu­nity allot­ment, and (shh) a local guerilla gar­den. I’m also lucky to have a gar­den in the coun­try where I spend as much time as I can. City mouse and coun­try mouse, that’s me.

The past week­end I was in coun­try mouse mode, where older forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion oper­ate. For exam­ple, Dave, my neigh­bour, is “noti­fied” I’m home when he sees my hatch­back door in the up posi­tion across the field. Information shar­ing is mostly old style — actu­ally drop­ping by the house and yakking about the news in the nabe (a small col­lec­tion of houses in the mid­dle of nowhere.)

Big news this week­end was about one of our neigh­bours, Patricia Hastings. Dave: “You know Pat down at the end of the road? You know she’s got a mill now and she’s been stone-milling her own organic wheat. She’s grow­ing Red Fife, a spe­cial old kind. Well, they baked a loaf with her Red Fife flour for the Queen when she just came to Toronto.” He looked proud. “Wow!” said I. “That’s gotta be good bread.” “Oh yeah, it’s sell­ing in all the fancy stores in the city.” Patricia was invited to go down­town and Dave said she may have hob-nobbed with some roy­als, or royal “han­dlers”. All very excit­ing, 6 degrees of separation-wise.

I don’t know Patricia well, but when I’d meet her on the road we’d talk about our flower gar­dens, and I was always charmed by her English accent-music to my ears. I’d been to her farm for events held by Canadian Organic Growers, where she is head of the local chap­ter, but didn’t know a lot about the farm, other than it was organic.

Well, Dave my coun­try neigh­bour gave me the goods about the spe­cial wheat and flour Patricia’s pro­duc­ing, but what came next was really cool. Back in the city I punched Patricia and Red Fife wheat into Google and found that my coun­try wheat story had already found its way to the big city–some on this very site. (And this on my first week blog­ging here: Synchronicity or what?) I found bak­eries that swear by Patricia’s flour for their bread, like St John’s Bakery on Broadview, and that Patricia’s farm­ing efforts won a Premier’s Award for Agrifood Innovation Excellence. The Red Fife wheat is an Ontario her­itage vari­ety and its nutty flavour gets raves.

Slow Food co-chair Paul DeCampo (now at Food Share) is a fan as well, “Not sur­pris­ingly, I am kind of par­tial to the Red Fife loaf, and really respect St. John’s for work­ing directly with Patricia Hastings of CIPM, the grower and miller.

And it’s all made with wheat grown down the road from my house. I can’t wait to try some. The St John’s Red Fife breads are avail­able at Fiesta Farms and other loca­tions around the city. All their breads look amaz­ingly tempting.

Psst: I didn’t find any­thing on Google about Patricia Hasting’s brush with the Queen; that’s inside stuff, and you heard it here first.