Reyouzd

Now here's a really neat project that surely exemplifies REUSE!  The Bruce Botanical Food Gardens being developed in Ripley Ontario is in the process of planning a mattress deconstruction project.  They intend to divert 360+ mattresses from 4 municipal landfills in Bruce County Ontario, deconstruct them and use the felt as a landscape filter fabric under their garden walkways and paths.  Then they are going to use the mattress coils as fencing materials. 

If you haven't already read about them, go to www.bbfg.org for all of the details on not only this project but to learn more about what this unique public garden will be all about.  It will be sure to be a place you'll want to visit!

It's been a bit since we've written here-we'll try to do better in the new year!  That's a positive New Year's resolution.

The Bruce Botanical Food Gardens (BBFG) has a really neat reclamation project in the works. The BBFG will be deconstructing over 360 standard mattresses to reclaim the felt for use as landscape filter fabric and the coils themselves will be used in the design of artful fencing!  More on this as the project develops.  You can keep up to date with what the BBFG is doing at their site...  www.bbfg.org It promises to be full of surprises!   

August 6 though August 21 is a very special Harvest time for the award winning Sea Buckthorn berries at The Healing Arc Inc. Research and Education Centre. 

The Sea Buckthorn berry is an import replacement for citrus and is The Healing Arc Inc. has branded it Ontario's 100 Mile Citrus. 

As recipient of the Premier's Award for Agriculture Innovation Excellence, owner/operator Marlene Wynnyk hosts an exciting 15 days of farm tours, harvesting, juice making and sampling.  Seminars will also be delivered on the Sea Buckthorn and its value to health and wellbeing as well as its considerable culinary values.

It's a spectacular sight during Harvest days. Don't miss out! 

There are four basics for human survival-water, food, clothing and shelter. We've talked a bit about water reuse (in this blog page) and shown examples of clothing reuse, leaving shelter and food to discuss.  Today we'll tackle food.  

Do you grow a veggie garden?  Are you one of those neat, organized gardeners who scowers the gardening catalogues each winter ordering seeds in lots of time to start them for spring planting?  Do you harvest your crops, diligently removing the remains and composting them over winter for next year? 

Well done!  But here's a little alternative for you to consider.   Grow your own seed.  If you grow some of the basics like lettuce, spinach, peas, beans, parsley, chives, dill, squash/pumpkin, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes, you should never have to buy your seed and you can enjoy your favourites year after year. 

It takes some endurance for the neat gardener but simply let the plant go to seed.  For instance, in the case of leaf lettuce, the plant will eventually grow a stalk about 24"-30" high with clusters of small flowers which eventually will produce seeds.  Be patient.  Let the seed pods mature completely and simply put a bag over the top, cut the stalk off turning it upside down and shake the stem until the seeds fall into the bag.  You will have enough seeds from one or two stalks to grow your next year's supply of lettuce...it's that simple! 

Spinach, dill, and parsley will produce their seeds in similar fashion.  I've even gone so far as to let the dill seeds fall off of the stalks onto the ground where the following spring they pop up all on their own...that's lazy gardening but it works very well!  It's even ready in time to make dill pickles and dill beans...go figure!

Peas and beans are simply left on the vines or bushes until they completely dry-you should be able to shake the pod and hear the seeds rattling inside.  Simply pick the pods off, open them up and voila-next year's supply.

Tomatoes and other fleshy fruits like pumpkin, squash, and cucumbers produce seeds in a wet condition inside their structures. They have a slimy covering that protects the seed.  In a completely natural setting, the fruit itself would rot, exposing the seeds to the ground below.  Over winter the slimy coating would be shed naturally and the cold weather would prepare the seed for growth in the spring. 

If you wish to save the seeds from plants such as these, you have to do Mother Nature's duty for her.  There is a bit of a trick to it.  Let's take a tomato as example.  Select a sample fruit from the tomato vine that is producing excellent quality fruit.  Let it over-ripen (this can be a bit ugly but you need to let the seed mature).  Cut the tomato in half and carefully squeeze out the pulp containing the seeds into a glass jar with a lid.  Add about a cup of luke warm water to the seeds and pulp, secure the lid, shake gently, and leave in the jar (with lid on)  for a few days (on your countertop).  You will see the slimy coating start to fall away from the seeds which will sink to the bottom.  There might even be a small skim of mould grow on the top of the water. After the seeds are cleaned (takes perhaps 3 days in the water), shake the jar gently once again and pour the contents into a fine mesh strainer.  Rinse the seeds thoroughly with lukewarm water, ensuring all of the slim is washed away.  Shake the strainer of seeds to remove as much water as possible, then put the seeds on a wire mesh frying pan cover or on a couple layers of cheese cloth which has been placed ontop of a wire rack.  Allow the seeds to dry thoroughly.  Once dried, they can be put into a paper envelope and sealed shut.  Make sure you write on the envelope what kind of tomato plant the seeds came from and what year you harvested the seeds.  Place in a cool dry place (a refrigerator) for several months and you're ready to plant again next year.  Cost to collect-$0, Time expended-about 10 minutes, Bounty next year-priceless! 

This is nothing new.  Farmers have done this forever.  But as urban farmers, we haven't always had the background in farming available to us.  Simple tips can enrich the gardening experience and make us feel much more in control of our food supply. 

Enjoy your summer....really enjoy your fall and really really enjoy the freedom of next spring!
 

You look at the photo above of gorgeous Georgian Bay and the concept of water shortage just doesn't seem possible. But I live right beside one of the Great Lakes and we have experienced Level 2 water shortages (there are only 3 levels-level 3 means you get that nasty red notice on your television screen!). During summer we are on water restriction for watering lawns.  If you have an odd numbered house (123) , you can water on odd number dates (1st, 3rd, 5th etc).   

With this in mind, I find it challenging to watch our sump pump discharge gallons of rain water that has fallen on the roof or ground, been channelled either to our sump or through an eavestrough only to be sent out to the end of the driveway to flow down the road to the next available swale often taking soil with it.  How incredibly wasteful of our natural resource. 

We have a swimming pool in the back yard. I have always felt this was a major ecological disaster and when the liner needed replacing and the filter system needed upgrading, I was almost ecstatic to see the end of this chemical dump.  We converted this massive hole in the ground to a koi pond and we send our rain water to the pool to keep it topped up. 

To take the advantage one step further, these fish keep our yard bug free.  We can sit out all summer and never have to worry about a swarm of mosquitoes.  We've had a short term frog as visitor and the fish have reproduced a number of times.  The fry love the shallow end! 

Fish poop is garden gold! Instead of feeding our veggies with water laden with chlorine (I live near Walkerton), we have the ability to scoop out water from the pond and feed our veggies-the water's free, it's chemical free, and the fertilizer is free too. 

This is likely not a solution for everyone and until our pool has more time to naturalize at the bottom, it's not exactly a lovely sight but as the cattails, arrow heads, water iris and hopefully one day a set of great water lilies grow, this pond of life is testament to the fact that mindset to reuse is truly  open to your personal innovation.

It came to me in one of my thought filled moments that perhaps the gaiety of childhood memories and activities might be a place to find messages of personal strength and resilience. Children are, afterall, perhaps the most resilient of us all in some respects.  They don't have the life experiences that propogate deep worry.  They don't have to be concerned about their job or relationships that affect others for the most part and money isn't usually a problem as long as an adult is there to supply their basic needs. Is it possible to reach back into that time to learn a thing or two about adulthood.  I concede that it certainly is.

Take for instance the following: (yes you may hum along if you like!)

An itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
And the itsy bitsy spider crawled up the spout again.

Does this not emulate life a bit.  We are all itsy bitsy in the bigger world picture and perhaps you have experienced your own devastating life event-something that knocked the wind from your sails and sent you into a tail spin-poor health, loss of job, loss of a personal relationship, an accident...akin to washing us down the spout.

However, there is always a point of turn around and it is our personal strength and dogged determination that can allow us to emerge again (and again). 

What is the message in this simply rhyme?  Regardless of what your life problem seems to be, keep your sights set on your concept of success-always imagine what it will be like when your goal is reached and keep pushing forward.  There may be diversions in your jouney but there are also opportunities for wonderful experiences that can round out and embellish your end results if you allow yourself to recognize them. I tend to call this my 'golden thread' of experience.  There.  A little word of encouragement from one whose path has been interrupted many times...but the lessons learned on the journey brought me here, to this work.  The diversion was for me, indeed, one of those sunny days.

I had a terrific time at the Edible Forest/Polyculture Workshop hosted by Brad Peterson and Jeff Kitchen at Brad's Aisling Keep Farm just north east of Chatsworth.  The guest speaker was Agronomist, Ruth Knight.  Little did I realize when registering for the workshop that Ruth would be the one and the same long time ago college buddy on mine so the reunion was an incredible bonus atop the surreal amount of information delivered in the workshop. 

Propogation techniques, nut tree planting, grafting techniques, fruit protection, pruning, and seminars on plant interrelations and soil science were extensive and very well-delivered. 

It was a gorgeous day -brisk enough for a warm jacket but not uncomfortable at all.  The outdoor potluck was stunning!  Everything from lentil potato salads to fried lettuce, butter tarts, cookies and fruit.  It seemed to me that people tried their best to be local which was an added bonus. And guests included participants from as far away as Sault Ste. Marie Ontario...a special treat for me after having spent 25 yeares in the northern city. 

I would highly recommend that you keep an eye on the offerings from Brad and Jeff at www.bradpeterson.ca . You won't be sorry!

Well, it appears that response has been great for the Permaculture and Edible Forest Workshop (see Events section).  A second date of May 8th has been added so for those of you who haven't yet signed on and would like to attend, please refer to the posting below for details.  DON'T MISS OUT. It promises to be VERY interesting.

Wow.  I attended a presentation on the do's and don't's of recycling for our local school board.  I learned alot about noncompatibility of materials and the complexities of waste sorting.  Did you know that those sandwich trays that you order up for your meetings have a top that can't be easily re-processed and a bottom that has to be chipped and sent to China for reprocessing only to be shipped back?  Did you know that (in our area of Ontario) we're told to put plastic forks and styrofoam soup dishes go into the recycling stream (to avoid confusion for the resident) but currently they go into back into the waste stream?- but only after being shipped from the source to a regional  recycling centre and manually sorted out from all of the other recyclables?  And 60% of our waste is in the classification of 'other'.  Garbage.

What was most astounding to me was that the items that children take in their lunches are so complex that recycling is a real challenge.  Chip bags consist of three layers of material incompatible with each other. Juice boxes, juice pouches, and granola bar wrappers have plastic/foil  cores and varying grades of impermiable printed paper. And all of that nasty plastic wrap is pure garbage.

One teacher duly noted that we have to be very careful what we ask for.  She had a few of one type of recyclable material coming into the school in lunch boxes but as soon as the parents found out that the material was being recycled, they flooded the teacher with it.  

The recycling representative said that we need to educate ourselves and buy more and more of  the products that can be recycled so that when a manufacturing opportunity opens up for the materials there will be a huge stockpile to supply the market with!  WHAT???  Where is the global thought process there?  We are to create as much recyclable garbage as humanly possible so that it can be shipped around the world, reprocessed and shipped back?  Where is the common sense in that?

I believe that the teachers in the meeting came away just about as frustrated as I.  One had given considerable effort to tackling the problem by posting a sheet informing the children of the items that CAN't go in the recycling.  Unfortunately, during the course of the presentation her garbage list grew instead of shrinking. Her frustration was evident-rightly so.  This will get interesting when fuel prices skyrocket!

I may be telling my age but when I was in elementary school I didn't take a lunch, I had to walk home at lunch and back to school after lunch-about 5 blocks each way. (I was proportionately thinner then)  I do realize that there is a lot of bussing going on nowadays and parents aren't home at lunch (they have to be at work to help pay for the disposable lifestyles we have adopted).  But even when I attended a school where I did need to take my lunch it was packed in a metal lunch box with a small thermos inside.  Cold drinks stayed cold. Hot soup stayed hot.  Fruits didn't get bruised and the only material I had to get rid of was one piece of wax paper from my sandwich. 

The Meriam Webster Dictionary (merriam-webster.com) defines 'stupid' as "lacking in common sense, perception, or normal intelligence"  I'm afraid to say that's it's my belief that we've become really 'stupid' people. Our lazy attitudes are smothering us in our own garbage and we've bought into the marketing ploys of the advertising world and the mega food companies hook, line and most importantly, sinker! 

Wake up people! Stop the merry-go-round.  Although I believe that where materials are used they should be recyclable, I can't help but wonder where in the world did we think feeding the recycling cycle is helping our earth when, in the big picture, it means is that we are shipping it all over the world. Last I looked, ocean freighters use fuel and it ends up in the water. Would demanding better solutions be more practical?

What steps can we take to correct the problem? Well, first of all, where the 3 R's are concerned, let's focus on the first two.  Reduce and reuse.  That will cut down on the recycle.  

For instance, let's just focus on a child's lunch.  What do they eat-perhaps a sandwich, a drink, a fruit and/or a cookie or granola bar?

1) If your child doesn't already have one, get them a (hard sided) lunch box. This will help protect those soft fruits (apples, pears, bananas) so they don't end up in the garbage pail.

Why not try a Thermapod?  http://www.thermapod.ca/default.aspx or the Fenigo http://www.fenigo.com/LunchBots.htm or visit EveryLIttleBit http://www.everylittlebitgreen.com/containers-more/ for the wrapping mat, containers and thermoses.  Yes, they can be washed-it's not a dirty word! 

And let's stop the trash cycling----Take care of it and KEEP it. Buy it only if it is multigenerational.  If you buy a box that has Superman or Sponge Bob on the side, it's unlikely your child will be using it when they get to high school or their first corporate job!  Superman doesn't make the lunch taste better-but it does however pad the pockets of the marketing agencies depending on our gullibility in this age of persuasion. And remember, they are manipulating your child in those trendy commercials.  Make sure it is sturdy container-one that breaks in the cold or if dropped only ends up in the landfill.

2) Eliminate ALL plastic bottles and aluminum cans-they aren't necessary-juice doesn't need a can and pop isn't part of a healthy lunch anyway.  Put a washable thermos in the lunch box for hot or cold liquids (you can send them soups or stews instead of the boring sandwich this way). Or, simply give your child a cup to get water from the school tap-one of those 8 cups of water they should be having anyway, right?

3) Eliminate ALL plastic wrap (this isn't recyclable-it goes straight to landfill) and plastic bags-put sandwiches and cookies  in a washable container. Look for one with a hinged lid if possible so it doesn't disappear. (see links above)

4)  Don't put foil lined, prepackaged foods in your child's lunch....read the ingredients-if your child's everyday health is of concern to you, you'll take the time to make sure they eat healthy foods. Make your own cookies or granola bars or simply replace them with healthy fruit.  

And remember, you're really not punishing your children to teach them to respect and take care of their lunch containers.  They need to think big picture too.  The world we make now is what we give over to them later.  So, let's think SMART.  Let's all be part of the solution.  

If you are struggling with teaching your children about the perils of garbage, please view The Story of Stuff
 

I received the following information on a really exciting Permaculture and Edible Forest Workshop from Jeff Kitchen.  He has invited me to share (Thanks Jeff!)

Permaculturists and Sustainability Practitioners!

Spring has arrived and it is time to register for the not-to-be-missed 2011
Edible Forest / Orchard Polyculture Workshop
Saturday, May 7th, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Aisling Keep Farm near Chatsworth, Ontario.

Come experience and observe a 4 year old Edible Forest while learning how to plant one of your own. Updates since last e-mail.  Not everyone needs to bring a shovel, perhaps half of all participants, and particularly if you want instruction in this part of planting technique.  There will be plenty of other tasks to learn about during the hands-on portion.  However, everyone should bring gloves and work boots, and come prepared for the occasion.  There will also be door prizes!

Those attending are encouraged to cut down on waste by bringing their own mug, bowl and fork.  Otherwise these accoutrements will be provided.

Everything else still applies.

Attached is a flyer for registration and to pass along to interested friends or colleagues.

For more details on registration, carpooling, the program, suggested attire, and potluck lunch - and other information - please visit

http://www.bradpeterson.ca/events/ 

Carpool organizing is available through www.erideshare.com  Just follow the "connect in 5 steps" directions at the top of the home page. Also, visit www.bradpeterson.ca/events for more specific details.

This special event is held every two years: the first was offered in 2009.  This year special guest agronomist Ruth Knight will speak about organic soils management, and Jeff Kitchen will offer a presentation on dynamic accumulators and a mapping exercise on edible forest elements and their functions. Jeff will also assist Brad Peterson in leading workshops and seminars on site design, spacing for commercial and back-yard production, propagation techniques, guild assembly and soil amendment techniques. 

There will be plants available for hands-on identification and planting as part of the day’s instruction.

Limited on-site camping is available, but will be weather-dependent. For those who prefer a roof over their heads, accommodations are available in Owen Sound ( www.bbcanada.com/ontario/southwestern.../owen_sound or ontario-hotels.net/Owen-Sound) and the Key Motel Chatsworth  www.keymotel.ca