We went on a driving adventure this weekend and found ourselves in the far reaches of Tsawwassen, just past Boundary Bay. What a lovely part of the Lower Mainland! We had gone in search of the Earthwise Society’s Tomato Fest. I’m so glad we went!
Earthwise Society promotes sustainability through education and community outreach initiatives. This working farm is based in South Delta’s Boundary Bay and they operate both the Earthwise Garden and Earthwise Farm.
The Saturday event had a number of attractions – the biggest of which was the sale of 400lbs of heirloom tomatoes. We brought home $11 worth of gorgeous tomatoes…zebra, chocolate stripe, sweet orange roma, and others whose names I’ve sadly forgotten. Talk about delicious!
The event also featured drool-worthy flatbreads being cooked in the cobb oven. We gobbled up both the sausage/tomato/egg flatbread and the apple/tomato/cinnamon version. The organic lemonade was also rather heavenly.
With our tummies full we joined the honey bee tour. I sure learned a lot! Did you know that a healthy hive (just one of the boxes pictured above) holds 60,000 bees? Yes, sixty thousand! A healthy queen bee will lay between 1,500 and 3,000 eggs EACH DAY! Worker bees live, at most, for 6 weeks. They literally work themselves to death; you can tell an “old” worker bee by its wings, they are completed ravaged. The most fascinating / horrifying factoid is that urban bees do much better than rural bees. Due to pesticides and the fact farmers now don’t leave forage (grasses and scrub) along the edges of their fields the bees are not surviving. However, bees in an urban setting have access to gardens that are in continual bloom. I’m nearly ready to set up a hive in our backyard!
Our boys enjoyed learning about the bees, we purchased some of their honey, we gobbled up tomatoes drizzled in the best lemon-infused olive oil I’ve ever tasted, and we brought home a massive bag of freshly picked corn. I am marking my calendar for next year; there is no way we are going to miss out on Earthwise Society’s Tomato Fest 2015.
