It’s a brilliant spring day on the horses-and-tractors part of the Saanich Peninsula, the pastoral paradise my pal Erin calls The Shire.
Lambs are gamboling. Robins and wrens are singing. The sun is coaxing crops from the fields. An imaginary choir sings Jerusalem in your head.
Rosemary Ishkanian unlocks the cashbox at her Mount Newton Cross Road farm stand and pulls out a single bill: $10 American.
OK, she says, that looks about right, given the number of missing daffodil bunches. Whoever took them was honest.
That’s good, for is there a better barometer of civil society than a self-serve farm stand that operates on the honour system?
No, no there is not.
Which is what makes it so discouraging when the stands get ripped off.
Most people — 99 per cent — are honest, the vendors all hasten to say. But there’s still enough roadside robbery to take the stuffing out of a grower. “It’s not a horrific problem, but it is a problem,” Ishkanian says. “I think it’s possible that it just wears you down.”
The main crop at her Willow Wood Farm is willow grown for basketry, furniture and living structures such as arbors and fences, but she also keeps a roadside stand where passersby can buy vintage varieties of daffodils in the spring, veggies in the summer and heritage pumpkins in the fall, along with duck eggs year-round.
Any theft is disheartening, but what really hurts is being robbed of something that took a lot of effort to create. “It bothers me when someone steals a dozen eggs or a jar of jam, say.”
Sometimes it’s not just food or flowers, either. At the Dragonfly farm on Central Saanich’s Thomson Place, a succession of robberies cost Dorrien Thompson $400 to $500 in cash last year until he forked out $130 for a skookum cashbox made from steel pipe. He can sort of rationalize losing produce (“Maybe they’re hungry”) but it’s flat-out deflating when the bad guys make off with the coins and bills.
“It almost made me stop,” he said. “It’s a little farm stand. You don’t make a lot of money off it.”
Former Central Saanich mayor Jack Mar, who keeps his Veyaness Road self-serve stand going over the winter (he has carrots, cabbage, beets and kale, and just began picking rhubarb), says 2016 has been excellent so far. But some years, the thieves will frustrate him to the point that he pulls the plug. “When I get upset, I’ll close down for a week or so.” Then he’ll think, no, it’s not fair to his regular customers to let one bad apple spoil the barrel, so he’ll open the stand again.
The thieves aren’t always who you think, either. Thompson said a farmer friend caught a produce pilferer in the act. “The lady was about 50, was driving a Mercedes Benz and had just left yoga class.” That farmer now only opens her stand once a week, and won’t leave it unattended.
Likewise, Ian Munro, who with wife Liz Munro sells the raspberry plants and dahlias they (OK, really it’s just Liz) grow at their McTavish Road home, has noticed it’s often the nice cars that leave without paying.
But, he emphasizes, those episodes are few and far between. “Please be honest,” reads the sign on the Munros’ stand, and for the most part, people are. The couple have come home to find toonies taped to the front door, left by people returning to pay for dahlias they took while cashless. Other customers will leave too much in the cashbox if they don’t have the right change.
Similarly, Thompson has had customers show up to pay off IOUs. He says one apologetic guy confessed he thought the Free Range Eggs sign meant the eggs were free, so he’d been helping himself.
Ishkanian figures some people will justify theft — or underpayment — by assuming a tidy Peninsula property is owned by some wealthy tycoon who only sells enough at the roadside to qualify for farm status and the tax breaks it brings. No, she says, farming is what she does.
Some vendors react to thefts by pulling their stands deeper onto their properties, or not leaving them unattended. “Due to theft, this area is now under video surveillance,” reads a sign above a West Saanich Road flower stand.
Some just close their stands. “A lot of them are disappearing,” Thompson says.
That’s too bad. As with the War on Terror, you hate to see the weasels drive reactions that diminish our quality of life. We want to believe we live in a place where the honour system can survive and we can trust our neighbours to be honest, pay what they owe and maybe lend a hand tipping the odd turnip thief down a well.
In other words, it’s not really about the daffodils, or the corn, or whatever. If you want a civil society, support your local farmers (or at least don’t rip off their roadside stands).
