How does your garden grow? With lots of help!

Opinion

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This article was published 30/03/2015 (3823 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GARDENING ACT OF KINDNESS: Bethany Paetkau and her gang of gardeners need help growing and harvesting food in Wolseley that will go to single moms at Villa Rosa, Agape Table at All Saints Anglican Church and low-income housing at the Madison.

The project is a partnership of St. Margaret’s Anglican Church and A Rocha, an international Christian environmental and conservation organization.

“We are open to having all people help us,” Paetkau says. “We get started in early May with main planting at the end of the month. Then they’ll be needing weeders and people to harvest.”

This collaboration has been “going big-time for five years in different locations around Wolseley,” says Paetkau. St. Margaret’s Anglican has used smaller garden patches to grow fresh food for charities around Wolseley for more than 20 years.

This year’s gardens — one at Ethelbert Street and Westminster Avenue and another at Preston Avenue and Arlington Street — are larger and will require a big, enthusiastic team. Interested gardeners should phone St. Margaret’s at 204-774-9533.

 

BLACKHEART BURLESQUE: The Pyramid Cabaret is hosting a strange but exciting event April 13 when touring burlesque group the Suicide Girls, out of Portland, Ore., make their Winnipeg debut.

The dancers hit the city with their big Blackheart Burlesque bus, full of bunk beds, feather fans and black garters.

Founder Missy Suicide, 37, has been touring the show for more than a decade throughout the U.S. Now Canada is on her radar, and Singapore gets a date later this year. The choreographer is Manwe Sauls-Addison, who’s worked with Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez and Lady Gaga.

They bill the show as “tongue-in-cheek humour and raw erotic sexuality.” Their specialty is pop-culture striptease, poking fun at Game of Thrones, 50 Shades of Grey, Star Wars, Orange is the New Black and more.

Why call themselves the Suicide Girls? “It refers to committing social suicide by being different — from the super-thin supermodel Kate Moss-type or the silicone-enhanced buxom Pam Anderson type,” Missy Suicide says in a phone call from Portland.

Suicide says she was influenced in the early 2000s by the young women with tattoos, multicoloured hair and funky clothes who hung around Portland’s city centre.

“I thought that the girls I knew were the most beautiful, fun interesting girls in the world with wonderful stories,” she says.

Ticketfly.com is selling tickets from standing room at $29.50 to VIP tickets at $119.50.

 

BEET HAPPENING: Mystery solved! They’re not serving 50 kinds of beets at the Beet Happening restaurant that opened last week at the corner of Notre Dame Avenue and Beverley Street.

Musician Justin Ludwar, who owns the new breakfast-and-lunch spot behind the big, blue door, says his first ideas for names such as Root Food and Sprout ‘n’ Seed got shot down, so he landed on a version of Beat Happening, a group he loved from the 1980s.

He and chef Virginia Jensen are serving up made-from-scratch, healthy and delicious food aimed at the Health Sciences Centre hospital crowd across the street. Ludwar says the medical types love the quick turnaround time for takeout.

The self-taught cooking enthusiast got his training through a twist of fate. “My wife did her master’s of fine arts in Glasgow, Scotland. I got a job in a school in Stirling, which was a 40-minute train ride and a two-mile walk. Great experience, but I made no money.”

He gave that up for a job working at Grass Roots Organic with chef Vic Henderson. Back home in Canada, Ludwar sourced local organic flour milled in Elie and fresh-roasted coffee beans from Peter De Luca near Teulon.

Beet Happening serves a lot of stick-to-your-ribs food, organic salads, fragrant coffees and to-die-for desserts.

 

THE SLUSH CUP: Manitoba skiers and snowboarders will enjoy their last weekend on the slopes at Asessippi Ski Resort, winding up with a crazy celebration called the Slush Cup on April 5. Participants sign up to go into the Slush Cup wearing crazy costumes.

“They go down our ramp, built the night before, and do some funky tricks going into the pool (slushy and cold) with ski patrol waiting to help them out,” says organizer Hannah Stollery. “There’ll be a be a hot tub, warm blankets and firepits waiting for them to warm up.”

Slopes open at 9:30 p.m., and all 26 runs are likely to be operational, as they’ve had lots of snow in the Westman region.

POETIC PRESTIGE: Winnipeg poet Carmelo Militano reads from his new poetry collection Morning After You in Toronto on Tuesday at the famous Art Bar, one of Canada’s oldest poetry venues. He’ll sit in the same spot as famous authors Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje.

“It’s actually free to the public, but it’s one of the pedigree places to read in Canada and then (you get to) sign the guest register,” says Militano, a teacher at Sisler High School.

He became one of the league of Canadian poets in 2004 after publishing his first poetry book, Ariadne’s Thread.

Got tips, events, special events going on? Call the tip line at 204-474-1116 or write Maureen Scurfield c/o Winnipeg Free Press, 1355 Mountain Ave. Winnipeg, Mb. R2X 3B6.