friends of dufferin grove park
April 2004 Newsletter

In this issue:

Councillor Giambrone's park clean-up day, Sunday April 18, 10.30 a.m. to 12.30; (lunch at the pizza-oven at 12.30). Instead of cleaning up all over the city on the mayor's clean-up day (April 24), Councillor Giambrone says it's better to stagger the neighbourhood cleanups. That way, he says, the Parks department workers will be available to individual areas to take away the collected litter.

The councillor's idea is to focus on the gardens and the playgrounds. There will be rakes, gloves, and trash bags available for people who want to rake the leaves off the flowerbeds. There will also be shovels for returning some of the sand into the sandpit (lots of sand runs out when the kids play with water and make rivers there).

Other clean-up day tasks: At the end of March, we sent an inventory of some of the more urgent park maintenance tasks to our park's new supervisor, Brian Green. We have not heard back yet, so we'll add some of those tasks to the clean-up as well. Please bring hammers from home, to pull out projecting nails from the playground fence and from benches, and to repair picnic tables. Recreation staff will be there to help. We'll also be doing an inventory of other necessary repairs, and we welcome scouts (we'll equip you with a clipboard) who can go around the park and map broken things, dog holes, erosion in the dirt walkways, etc. We'll have a wheelbarrow and sand for filling the most dangerous potholes (and the deep hollows at the base of the slide and under the swings in the playground). The rest of the items will be added to the city workers' "to-do" list, and submitted again.

For years now, the park's dog walkers have done a lot of work on clean-up day (they started it in our park!), and this year they'll be at it again. As in other years, Judy Simutis will be making treats for the dogs in the smaller bake oven. At the bigger oven, we'll celebrate the clean-up with the year's first pizza day between 12.30 and 1.30 (costs covered by Councillor Adam Giambrone). For more information, call the park at 416 392-0913 or look at the current events page

Dufferin Grove Spring Arts and Crafts Festival

Sunday May 2, 1-5 pm.:

This is maybe a "first annual" festival of excellent arts and crafts, including pottery, fabrics, sculpture, and some of the jewellery makers that have been at the farmers' market "first Thursdays." The soap makers and ointment makers will be there too. This is organized by park friend Carolin Taron, who says it will be a beautiful day with good food and music as well. In the park outside the rink house (where the tasting fair was last fall), or inside the rink house if it rains. For more information, call the park at 416 392-0913.

Tiny drill hole caused rink to shut down early: The two giant vats of brownish liquid outside the zamboni garage are brine vats. Brine is what circulates in the pipes underneath the concrete surface of the rink, and keeps the ice frozen in the wintertime. The city technical services staff noticed this past winter that there must be leak in one of the pipes, since the brine (salt and water) needed more topping up than it should. They shut down the rink at the beginning of March break (to the great disappointment of the kids), even though the ice was in excellent condition, because they were concerned about the salt pollution happening under the rink, with the brine leak. (It's illegal to leak salt into the ground except on roads and sidewalks.)

Soon after the rink was shut down, the technical services people came and drained all the brine that hadn't leaked out already, into the two big vats, so they could try and find the source of the leak. Then an expert in brine leaks came. He discovered a drill hole in the concrete near the tennis practice board. No one knows who might have drilled that tiny hole, although the city workers are wondering if the community might have done it (…..since they're sure they didn't, and that only leaves us?) Two more drill holes were also discovered. Sabotage? Concrete worms?

This latest discovery - that a tiny hole in the concrete could leak out enough brine that our rink had to be shut down - adds to the odd saga of our rink. The rink was rebuilt in 1992, by the lowest bidder for the job, Gagliano Concrete, a company inexperienced in rink building (which went out of business soon after). In October 1999, technical services staff discovered that the floor was sinking under the compressors, leaving the giant ammonia tank swaying above its cribbing, dangling off its supply pipe. It turned out that there had been no examination of the stability of the soil underneath the compressor room prior to building, and the compressors had been vibrating so much on top of unstable ground that they had caused the floor to sink. A partial repair was done that winter, to allow the rink to open. There was to be follow-up in the summer, but it never happened.

This past rink season the intermittent brine leak was a cliff-hanger, and other equipment breakdowns added to the suspense. Just before the rink was shut down, Jutta accidentally discovered an ammonia leak at midnight. That's how we found out that the rink's flashing ammonia-leak sign is not connected to any central alarm, and therefore it alarms nobody.

When the rink had to close prematurely, five of our rink shinny-hockey organizers sent a letter to park manager James Dann, asking him to seek a rink consultation from CIMCO, the respected ice rink company that supplies all the rink equipment. The group wants to have an evaluation of the problems that may interfere with our use of the rink in future. They also want CIMCO's advice on how best to avoid such problems from now on. When this consultation is set up, we'll let rink users know. In the meantime, here's a puzzle: the technical services mechanics tell us that on many days during the rink season, the rink lost 80 gallons of brine most days, out of this little drill-hole. That's a lot of water. It didn't come out the top like a geyser, or we would have seen it. Did all this water hollow out a cave under the concrete pad of the rink, so that the concrete is just hanging in mid-air the way the ammonia tank was? As of now, there are no plans (by the city) to find out.

Soccer

Community soccer times:The park soccer field, which was totally re-levelled and re-sodded the year before last, will be available for open (community) soccer on weekends: from 3 to 9 p.m. on Saturdays and all day on Sundays.

On week nights, the field is permitted to the Toronto Eagles Soccer Club and to the Portugal 2004 Soccer Club.

The Portugal 2004 soccer club can be reached at 416 537-2233. They may still have a few spots for kids.

The Toronto Eagles can be reached at 416 588-9355. Their registration dates are every Wednesday evening between 6-9 p.m. at their clubhouse in Christie Pits. You can also find out more about both soccer clubs by going to our web site www.dufferinpark.ca and clicking on sports.

Park Food

This first pizza day at the oven is Sunday April 18 12.30 to 1.30 (as part of the community park clean-up day with Councillor Adam Giambrone). Regular Sunday pizza days will begin again sometime around the middle of May, depending on the weather. The oven will be available from noon to 3 on Sundays (except if it's raining), with the same $2 charge for dough and basic toppings as last year. Wednesday pizza days will resume nearer to the end of May, from noon to 2, and Tuesday pizza days will start at the middle of June. School groups and day cares are welcome to book time before the community time on Wednesdays (from 11 to noon), and birthday parties can join in on Sundays at the regular time (warn us ahead) unless the party is big - then you can book a special space from 11 to noon or from 3 to 4. To find out more or book a space, call the park at 416 392-0913 and leave a message. You can also click on picnics.

Last January five park staff visited Fort York and spent the day cooking and baking with Bridget Wranich, who is in charge of their old-time kitchen. That was so much fun and so inspiring that the park staff intend to do some open-fire-cooking beside the playground on warm mornings in May and June. A good place to get some breakfast pancakes (made with fresh-ground flour) and organic coffee, and find out about pioneer cooking methods at the same time. We'll have more information in the next newsletter (or just go down and have a look).

Last June our park got two kitchen grants: $20,000 from the city's Food and Hunger Action Project, and $8000 from the Geoffrey H. Wood Foundation. These grants allowed us to make a little kitchen in the last unused bit of the rink house - a little alcove in the garage. The kitchen got plenty of use even before it was finished. Now it's very nearly done (we just need to instal a hood over the stovetop) and we've just submitted our final report to the city. To read the story of our kitchen, click on bake ovens & food.

One of the unexpected results of the kitchen is that after all these years, we're finally going to have to incorporate and apply for non-profit status for the Friends of Dufferin Grove Park. Even though our food is very cheap, the kitchen made it so much easier to prepare the food, that our net income from food sales in 2003 was $30,980.71. That's enough money that we'll have to start reporting GST and all those things that we were able to avoid in the past. However, the additional paperwork is probably worth the trouble. Of the amount we made from food sales, $29,894.69 was used to pay additional staff (above what the parks department already allocates for park staff). The additional staff hours we were able to pay meant that we could increase other activities in the park too. So we found out a kitchen can support a park, as well as supporting individuals that come to use it.

Such an outcome is important at a time when it seems that parks departments are sometimes too cash-strapped to care for our public resources properly.

Bread-baking class

First bake-oven bread-baking class starts April 30. Background: At 7 a.m. on a Thursday morning at the end of February, Jesse Archibald showed up at the door of the rink house and said he was interested in seeing how our ovens work. It turned out that he's an artisan baker who has baked a whole lot of bread in his 26 years - at Pan Chancho Bakery in Kingston, at various other restaurants, and most recently at Ace Bakery in Toronto. (His job at Ace was to work on the installation of a new baguette "system" that could turn out 2000 baguettes an hour - not like baking at all, Jesse says - just servicing machines.) The Ace Bakery stint made Jesse want to take a break from that world and spend a bit of time in our park instead. So he's been baking bread for market days and now he's ready to teach a bread course. The first class will be limited to 12 people and will involve six intensive classes on three weekends. Jessie plans to repeat the series regularly and he encourages people to take only one of the sessions if they can't manage three weekends in a row, and then take another one on a different occasion.

The first session is on Friday night, April 30, follow-up on Saturday morning (May 1): starting a sourdough, basic egg bread with variations on a theme (challah, cinnamon buns, and hot cross buns), and "dissecting a recipe." Doughs will be started on Friday night, shaped and baked off in the park ovens on Saturday morning, ready to take home for brunch.

The second class is on sourdough progress, and will include sourdough pancakes, apple charlotte in egg bread, and sourdough muffins, and "gaining an understanding of proofing." That class will be on Saturday morning (May 6) with the follow-up and bake-off on Saturday early evening.

The third class will be about mature sourdough baking, with country sourdough and long sourdough, and gaining an understanding of sourdough maintenance. That class will be on Saturday morning (May 13) with the follow-up and bake-off on Sunday morning (May 14). Cost is $40 for each two-part session, which includes materials (generally, two loaves of bread to take home) and recipes. Please talk to Jesse if the cost is a problem.

For more information, or to sign up, call the park at 416 392-0913 and leave a message, or click on bake ovens & food.

A visit from Botswana: On Friday, march 26, City Councillor Adam Giambrone brought three members of a delegation from the municipal region of Southeastern Botswana, in Africa -- the mayor, the CEO, and the head of their HIV/Aids Homecare program -- to Friday night supper at the rink house. We don't normally have Friday night supper between seasons, and originally, none was scheduled. But Councillor Giambrone urged us to put on a special supper, in the spirit of hospitality -- the Botswanians had asked to meet some ordinary Torontonians. So we put the word out through e-mail and a few posters, and very soon the dinner was all booked up. Jesse Archibald, the new baker and cook in the park, made up a menu, and he and the park crew cooked a very fine meal. The delegation from Botswana were welcomed by over seventy neighbourhood people (kids, parents, grandparents, friends).These Botswanians were so inspired that they stood up in the middle of dinner and each of the three gave a short speech. We found out that over 30 per cent of the younger people in Botswana have HIV/Aids, and that our visitors feel deeply grateful to Stephen Lewis for bringing the African catastrophe to public attention. But we also found out that Botswana, a democratic country, has enormous waterfalls and other beauties that tourists would enjoy: they are eager to see us over there!

And when Councillor Giambrone took the visitors out to the ovens and pointed out various parts of the parks where people play sports, where they have campfires, where the Clay and Paper puppets perform, the Botswanians said: it sounds like you have many different villages here, rather like in our country.

Coming up in Spring and Summer:

-- Day of Delight: the dreamy, first-day-of-summer opposite number of Night of Dread, by Clay and Paper Theatre. Actually, this event may not be in our park at all - David Anderson is hoping to stage it June 19th on the Philosopher's Walk beside the Royal Ontario Museum this year, but nothing is set yet. At least the rehearsals will be in our park.

-- Festival of outdoor theatre: Five groups from Halifax, New York, and Toronto will be performing a variety of short plays outdoors in the park during the last week of June. Put on by Stranger Theatre, the group that performed East of the Sun last September. Food is an important part of this festival. They have just been approved for a Trillium Foundation grant that will also allow them to work with children at Moss Park and put on much of the festival there as well.

-- The Best of Dusk Dances: coming back again, in the week beginning on Canada Day weekend. Five dances in various locations, in and under the trees, out on the basketball court, anywhere they can fit into the park.

-- Lilith: a new version of the very successful outdoor park play by Clay and Paper four years ago, will be performed at the park on at least two weekends beginning in the middle of July (exact schedule not set yet). It will then tour a number of other city parks.

There are a number of other possible events just in the thinking stage (it would be very nice if some of the many musicians who are friends of the park could do music in the park). And Theo Hersh, a children's librarian at the Lillian H. Smith Toronto Public Library Branch, tells us that she intends to do an evening song-and-story time near the bake-oven, on Friday evenings around 6.30 to add to the joys of Friday Night Supper. This will begin in the first week of July. Look for more details in the May newsletter.

Summer activities for children: Last summer we tried having some summer camps, and that was an interesting experiment. The toughest thing about it was the custodial part. It's very hard to keep an eye on a group of little kids in a park - no walls. So we're having clubs this year, not camps. There is, for example, one day every week during the summer when Liz Rucker will be doing a long story/scavenger hunt session. And then there are various other clubs (on the list so far: chess club, yurt club, arts and crafts club, spinning and knitting club, campfire cooking club, music club, Shakespeare club, maybe a sports club for little kids, each having their regular weekly half-day). None of them involve having custody of the kids -- i.e the caregiver has to be in the park. More actual content, less babysitting, is the idea. We will have two teenagers available to take a couple of kids each when there's no caregiver with a kid who can stay. They will charge the going rate for babysitting.

These various ideas are still being discussed. (To put in your two-cents-worth, e-mail us at kids@dufferinpark.ca, or call the park at 416 392-0913, and the right person will call you back.)

The yurt has returned to the park and we'll put it up again for two weeks beginning at the end of June (more centrally this time, nearer to the playground). Ian Small and Michelle Oser bought this yurt when they were in Uzbekistan with Medecins sans Frontieres, and they had a yurt-raising and then various activities in the yurt, including music and films, in our park three years ago. The Spiral Garden program at the Hugh MacMillan Centre used the yurt for its children's day camp over the last two summers, and now it's our turn again. This is a magnificent structure: look for the date of the yurt-raising in the May newsletter, if you would like to feel like a nomad for a day and help lash the tent poles together.

Farmers' Market

The market has been doing well inside all winter but by now everyone is really looking forward to moving outside again. On the first really nice day, the tables will move out along the outside wall of the building (Phil Matthewson and Melvin Laidlaw have their tables there already). Then when spring is really there and the ground has dried up, the whole market will move back down along the path, under the trees.

We have gained a few vendors since the fall, and some who dropped out for the winter will soon be returning. To find out more about the market, or to locate a vendor, click on farmers' market. To get on the weekly "market news" e-mail list, send a request to market@dufferinpark.ca. or just come down to the market on Thursdays between 3.30 and 7 and see for yourself - the market is anything but virtual.


For ongoing updates on Dufferin Grove Park, and to share your views on community issues, join our Friends of Dufferin Grove email listserve. Just click here to join.

Newsletter prepared by: Jutta Mason; Illustrations: Jane LowBeer

Technical support: John Culbert

Web site: Joe Adelaars, Henrik Bechmann, Caitlin Shea

Park phone: 416 392-0913; street address: 875 Dufferin Street

E-mail: dufferinpark@dufferinpark.ca

List Serve: Emily Visser, Bernard King

Park photographer: Wallie Seto