Milton Street Festival, Part 1: Dance, Dance, Dance!

I spent a lovely afternoon at the 2nd Annual Milton Street Festival today, enjoying the music, the vendors, and the tantalizing smells of just about every kind of food imaginable. Plus the pleasure of bumping into just about everybody I know in town.

Yes, as big as Milton has gotten, it's still like that.

This year there were a number of added attractions, including a climbing wall, a bouncy tunnel for the kids, and skateboard and BMX bike demos. Oh, and a very special surprise event which I was made privy to by my secret inside source...



More video to come.

Springtime in Sprawlville

The problem with having multiple blogs, as with multiple children I suppose, is that somebody always ends up not getting enough attention. Which is probably why I only have one kid. But now that I'm back from the Liberal Convention, hopefully I'll find the time to do some more substantive posts to poor, neglected Sprawlville.

Spring should also inspire more frequent updates. I've got about half the garden dug up, and I have a couple of ideas that I hope will make things go a little more smoothly this year. One is to give up on my haphazard layout working around existing plants, and just go with straight rows. The oregano was nice, but by August last year I was having to hack my way through it with a machete just to get at the tomatoes.

The other idea is to lay down paper mulch in the form of newspaper. I first ran across this in conjunction with the no-dig method, but it's apparently just as effective on its own or under a layer of hay or other traditional mulches. In theory it's supposed to keep the weeds down, keep heat and moisture in the soil (or maybe not heat?), and then rot away by the end of the season. They actually have paper mulch at Lee Valley Tools, but at ten bucks a roll I figured newsprint would do just fine, thank you.

I picked up four different varieties of heirloom tomato seedlings from my Willow Creek friends at the Farmers' Market last weekend, and a bunch more seedlings from La Rose yesterday: mixed lettuces, swiss chard, bok choy, basil, and in a fit of optimism, a sweet red pepper plant. Now I just need some kale and an assortment of bean and pea seeds and a proper trellis, and I'll be ready to go!

BTW, the heirloom tomatoes came with an incredibly informative pamphlet with tips and tricks for growing tomato plants. Stuff a noob like me would never have known like pruning them back, or planting them deep to generate more roots. I'll ask Crystal and Kelly if I can post it here. Any other suggestions in the 'Vegetable Gardening for Dummies' vein are always appreciated.



I also wanted to share a couple of new blogs on the blogroll. Well, new to me.

openalex is a blog by Alex Aylett, who has some serious academic creds in the urban redesign and sustainability field. He currently lives in Durban, South Africa, so he comes up with some fascinating articles like this one about the Durban water & sanitation utility generating power from biogas and micro-hydro from excess water pressure.

The New Resilient is a group blog put out by some of the bright lights in the food security / sustainable agriculture / re-localization movement, like Jon Steinman of 'Deconstructing Dinner'. Always interesting stuff - and one of the nicest looking blogs I've seen in a while.

Pedestrian Fail

As seen on Mary Street by the new Town Hall expansion in February:


moar funny pictures

There's still no sidewalk on the other side, nor apparently any plans for one.

Home Farming In Guelph... and Washington!

A couple of friends of mine went to an open house over the weekend for an organization called Backyard Bounty, a group which turns people's backyards into 'micro-farms'.

The deal is this: you give their crew access to your backyard, front yard, side yard, wherever. They dig it up, they plant the vegetables, they do all the weeding, watering, etc. You sit back and watch it grow, and as the vegetables become ready for harvest, you get free food. But since you can only eat so much, the remainder is sold to local restaurants and markets.

Unfortunately they only operate in Guelph for now, but if the program becomes more popular, who knows?

And in a curious case of serendipity, I found this item in The Star this weekend:

Garden scores green thumbs up
Grow-your-own-food movement hopes patch of vegetables, herbs at White House to inspire others

WASHINGTON – Twenty-six elementary schoolchildren wielded shovels, rakes, pitchforks and wheelbarrows to help first lady Michelle Obama break ground on the first day of spring for a produce and herb garden on the White House grounds.

Crops to be planted in the coming weeks on the 102-square-metre, L-shaped patch near the fountain on the South Lawn include spinach, broccoli, various lettuces, kale and collard greens, and assorted herbs and berries. There will also be a beehive.

"We're going to try to make our own honey here as well," Obama told the Grade 5 students from Bancroft Elementary School yesterday. The youngsters will be return to the White House next month to help with the planting, and in late April to help harvest and cook some of the produce in the mansion's kitchen.

Obama said her family has talked about planting such a garden since they moved to the White House in January.

My only quibble: Obama's outfit wasn't exactly appropriate to the task at hand. Maybe I'll send her a Lee Valley Tools catalogue so she can get a sweatshirt, hat, knee pads, and a pair of decent gloves.

Breaking News: Sobey's Warehouse Shutting Down

I'm still waiting for verification and more details, but word from my source is that Sobey's warehouse in Milton is transferring all of its operations to the company's new distribution centre in Vaughan, putting its 300 or so remaining Milton employees out of work.

This comes less than a week after two of our manufacturing plants closed their doors, and brings the butcher's bill up to 700. Next up: Magna?

UPDATE: It looks like this one might just be a rumour. According to one person, it's still business as usual at Sobey's warehouse - although everyone there is understandably worried.

Another One Bites the Dust

Bad, bad news for Milton this week. Two of the town's major employers have announced that they are shutting down - first SKD, and now Meritor, both of which supply parts for the auto industry. Between the two they employed fewer than 400 people in town, but the implications are far more dire.

About 35 per cent of the private sector jobs in Milton are in the auto sector, with up to a fifth of residents working in the industry. Five of the town’s 10 largest employers are auto parts manufacturing plants, including SKD and two facilities owned by Magna.

Those two Magna plants alone employ 1,700 people - and Magna's been having a rough few months.

All of this inspired the increasingly impressive Tim Foran to write an op-ed that was... could it be?... maybe just a little.... critical of Our Lord Mayor Gord.

I know. I was shocked too.

Through his 43 years on council, 28 as reigning Mayor of Milton, Gord Krantz has picked up pithy phrases for virtually any situation.

Asked about averages, he’ll warn, “If your head’s in the freezer and your feet are in the oven, then the middle of your body — the average — is warm.”

Asked about capital projects, he’ll tell you one has to decide if it’s a want, a need, or a nice-to-have.

It’s a communication method the conservative politician uses to stress an attitude of cautious consideration, and it’s certainly calming. It’s especially salient when compared to uber-councillor Colin Best, he of the constant presence around town, who has not yet learned to translate his work ethic and diligent examination of political affairs into an ability to communicate a message clearly.

Since the global recession began, the Mayor’s message has been consistent with the middle path he generally takes: Milton is not immune to the gathering storm but the Town will do well weathering it.

Under the circumstances, it seems like the most politically astute position. Panic and you sound like Chicken Little; ignore it and you look like Nero fiddling while the Town burns.

“This is what happens when you’ve been around a day or two as I have. You’ve been through those peaks and valleys,” Krantz recently said at a Milton Chamber of Commerce breakfast.

But now, the cyclical trough Krantz speaks of has become a widening chasm in Ontario, with manufacturing jobs being lost by the thousands.

Already this winter season, three of Milton’s largest employers have received protection from creditors, and it appears one of them, the local plant of the auto manufacturing company SKD Automotive, is on the verge of shutting down — resulting in hundreds of lost Milton jobs.

The Mayor had previously predicted the local auto industry would be affected, “but not greatly”, with some layoffs, “but not major.”

His optimism though seems based on his tried-and- true method of staying on message rather than recognition of current realities.

Trust me - for the Champion, that's positively damning.

I sure hope Tim still has a job next week.

Leslieville Wins OMB Ruling vs. Wal-Mart. Why Not Here?

OMB rejects big-box plans in Leslieville

Plans for a $220 million retail "power centre'' south of Eastern Ave. in Leslieville have been turned down by the Ontario Municipal Board, a decision that has city officials celebrating.

"This is a total victory for the city of Toronto," city lawyer Brendan O'Callaghan said yesterday.

"It's not every day that we're that happy with an OMB decision," exulted Paula Fletcher, the councillor for the area.

No kidding.

The property in question, in the heart of burgeoning Toronto' film district on what used to be the site of Toronto Film Studios, has been the subject of furious debate ever since Smart!Centres bought it and proposed a Big Box retail development. Local residents howled, local councillors took up the cause, and the OMB actually listened. Because any idiot could see that it was a bad idea.

In a 55-page ruling, OMB vice-chair James McKenzie sided with the city's experts, who in effect said the SmartCentres/Toronto Film Studio application didn't constitute good land use planning and would probably "destabilize" the designated employment district south of Eastern Ave.

Professional planning consultants and real estate advisers the city hired as experts had warned the OMB hearing that the application risked causing "retail contagion" in the area. Allowing the large centre would make it easier for subsequent retail applicants to get a foothold, argued real estate expert Jeffery Climans.

This would rapidly bid up the market value of the industrial and commercial properties in the district, leading to lease terminations and limiting the ability of existing businesses to renew their leases, Climans said. That would result in a general disruption of the area's business fabric.

Sound familiar? Contrast that with the attitude of Our Lord Mayor in this 2007 Toronto Star article on the demise of Milton's downtown core:

Mayor Gordon Krantz, a former small business owner, sees the downtown decline as a simple by-product of capitalism.

"Businesses locating on the outskirts could locate right downtown if they wanted – but they don't," he said. "That's called free enterprise.

"So businesses have to adapt. You have to continuously reinvent yourself. You can't survive on sentiment and emotions, that's for sure. It might sound hard-hearted, but that's the hard reality of it."

I will never, ever understand the affection people in this town seem to have for Gordon Krantz. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, and maybe he did good things for Milton in years past. But whether it's greed, hubris or encroaching senility, his words and actions over the past ten years have been short-sighted, ill-informed, and ultimately destructive to this town and our way of life.

Time to retire, Gord.