Gardening is like a marriage. If you take something from a marriage, or from your garden, you have to put something back into it.

Garfield White is full of chestnuts like the quote above in his short documentary film that hit YouTube yesterday, as part of Food First NL‘s SCOFF Video Series. In just 4 minutes, he shows us he’s a catch of a husband, and a killer gardener, with a fix for anything looking to mess with the fruits (and veggies) of your garden bed labour.

Got slugs? No sweat: just build a slug zapper out of some rabbit wire and a D-Cell battery. While you’re at it, start dusting your crop with a 50:50 mix of flour and baking soda. “The flour sticks the baking soda onto the vegetables and that stops insects from eating your leaves,” he says. Problem solved.

Garfield’s got a fix for everything. Clearly, when his father-in-law asked him to promise he’d keep the family garden green in Port Blandford, he picked the right man for the job. This video is full of very simple, but very effective tips for home gardening, and stars an endearing man who has the makings of a should-be reality TV Star.

Watch the video here:

The short doc is part of Food First NL’s SCOFF video series, which was created to celebrate, preserve, and share a wealth of food knowledge from seniors in Newfoundland & Labrador, through 8 short, humorous, and enlightening documentaries.

These days, we only grow 10% of the vegetables we eat in our province, and we have 89% fewer farms than we had in 1951.

Many of us see grocery stores as the place where our food comes from now, instead of our backyards, farms, and the sea and forests that surround us.

We are losing our relationship with food, and with it, our food literacy and skills.

Luckily, we can look to our seniors to share what they know, and teach a new generation some old tricks.

Their food skills, knowledge, and memories of a time when they got much of the food they needed from the land around them provides a great foundation upon which we can build a more vibrant and self-reliant food system in our province once again.

The videos in this series include a bounty of simple instructions on food skills like bottling beets, building your own slug zapper, easily maintaining a potato garden one year to the next, preserving berries, building your own root cellar on any kind of property, getting the most out of your fish, and more, like how to make your own fertilizer that’s free, found on our own shores, and far better than anything store-bought.

By sharing these skills among seniors and with the next generation alike, we can save this food knowledge from being lost, while saving money at the grocery store by learning how to grow more of our own food at home.

Below is another gem from the series, featuring Donna & Garth Earle. Check out the full playlist here: