Green Living Ottawa

The Ottawa Farmer’s Market at Lansdowne in the Glebe opened today.  Vendors at the Ottawa Farmer’s Market only sell locally produced products (unlike the Byward and Parkdale Markets where much of what is for sale is imported, often from very far away).

Mike and I arranged to meet friends for lunch at their fabulous “food court.”  Mike had Thai and I had a burrito.  Baked potatoes, Swiss dumplings and full breakfasts were also being cooked up.  Honestly, you can’t get a better meal for the price anywhere in Ottawa.

So what locally produced foodstuffs are available so soon after the snow melt?

• Maple syrup, of course (including candy floss made from maple sugar, yum)
• Honey and assorted honey products
• Several varieties of greenhouse grown cucumbers
• Last year’s potatoes still in very good shape
• Spring garlic (these look like green onions but can be substituted for garlic in any cooking recipe)
• Seedlings
• Apples and cider
• Beef, bison, lamb
• Lots and lots and lots of breads, pies and other baked goods
• Crafts: wooden utensils, trellises, clothes
• And even locally grown wool in assorted colours

The Ottawa Farmer’s Market is currently open Sundays from 8 am until 3 pm.  However, starting June 26 it will also be open Thursdays from 2 pm until 7 pm.

I have been an armchair permaculturalist for many years, leafing through photographs of dirt lots transformed into gardens of eden, dreaming of one day turning my yard into a thriving ecosystem of gourmet stature. This Spring I committed to taking my dream out of the house and into the yard.

Permaculture emphasises edible forestry and so I decided to start by planting berry and nut trees. I wanted trees that had been selected for the palatability and generosity of their harvests as well as their hardiness and disease resistance, but all I found locally were trees grown for their “landscape potential,” so I googled. (BTW, if anyone knows of a good local nursery, please comment.)

After looking through a few sites, I settled on Rhora’s Nut Farm and Nursery. Their web-site is an ode to nut trees.  These people clearly love what they do.  They treat trees as parts of communities of organisms, offering bags of inoculant containing the spores of helpful mycorrhizal fungi specific to each species of tree, and warning against the use of pesticides. Although their trees grow in Niagara, the idea of shipping trees to Ottawa did not seem to faze them, so I picked some trees, set a shipping date and waited. (For those of you who might be curious, I ordered 1 swiss stone pine, 3 elders, and 2 bush hazels.)

Yesterday my six trees arrived in a cardboard box, packed with damp shredded newspaper, postmarked the day before. As per the instruction sheet I rushed to get them into the ground, mixing the innoculant with the soil as I went and watering them deeply when I was finished. I was a bit nervous about last night’s sub-zero temperatures, but aside from one of the elders, the trees seem to be unscathed. If all goes well my six trees will grow up and in a few years they’ll start bearing fruit and there will be one more local source of food for my household and the households of my furred and winged neighbour.

Today the headline “An Age of Scarcity” made up the front page of the the Ottawa Citizen. The “news story” was the rising price of oil and the rising cost of food. For most of us environmentally-inclined types, hardly news. However it was the scare-mongering attached to these announcements that really got me wanting to post and the newspaper’s insistence that living with less will be a terrible, onerous sacrifice.

I’m tired of living in a society where everywhere I turn the “news” and advertisements scream at me to be afraid, the subtext being that if I buy something–the newspaper or whatever product is being marketed–my chances of avoiding whatever I’m supposed to be afraid of will be increased. Yes, there are massive challenges that we need to deal with, we know that, but there are also many solutions, a lot of which are already in play, and many of which could end up being more fun and satisfying than the mouthpieces of mainstream consumer-society would have us believe. And the good news is, if we get our act together here in the over-consuming parts of the globe that will reduce the stress placed on resources in other parts of the planet. It’s one of those win-wins.

So let me turn around the front-page news story. Let me declare that here in Ottawa we are in an era of abundance. This statement is easily as true if not truer than the story presented in the newspaper. Let me explain:

• We have an abundance of bike paths and sidewalks, and an abundance of bus routes (a buspotter friend of mine once told me that Hurdman station serves more bus routes than any other bus station in North America).
• We have an abundance of unused car passenger seats that could be filled by carpooling commuters, cutting the cost of gas in half, thirds or even quarters and easily off-setting the rising cost of oil.
• We have an abundance of empty lawns that can be transformed into orchards and vegetable gardens. After all, most of our city and suburbs was built on once prime farm land. In the older suburb where I live, all the octogenarians still live off the land, converting half of their ample yards into larders. One old guy who lived down the street had such abundant harvests that he would leave produce on a little table next to the street for his neighbours.
• We have abundant unused roofs just begging to be filled with green roofs, gardens or solar panels.
• We have an abundance of plastic water bottles, paper and cans that have yet to find their way to recycling facilities
• Each of us has an abundance of stuff in our homes, our garages and sometimes even in those storage buildings popping up in industrial parks all around town. Annie Leonard informs us that only 1% of stuff is still in use 6 months after it has been bought. That makes for a huge abundance of unused stuff just sitting around, waiting to be redistributed to people who would actually use it. Think of all those underused power tools waiting to be shared.
• Think of all the clothes in the closets of Ottawa, many of them worn only a few times a year or less. They can be redistributed as is through second hand stores, exchanged with friends at exchange parties, or upcycled by creative hands into entirely new garments. Fashion magazine Elle Canada even ran an article in February 2008 about the joys of spending a year without buying any new items of clothing.
• In this town we also have an abundance of policy makers and citizens, activists and students, shop keepers and customers all of whom are capable of making conscious choices, as long as they aren’t scared into a state of denial.

Since it was such a nice day, Mike and I decided to walk home from work. And since we were enjoying the walk along the canal so much, we decided to make an outing of it, stopping at the halfway point, The Royal Oak, for beer and munchies. Who ever said commuting had to be an ordeal?

I have to confess being a little slow to accept the nice weather. Today’s outing was my first patio sit of the season. Fortunately The Royal Oak had the perfect beer for summertime patio drinking. The Royal Oak is currently having a Best of Britain Festival (on until April 27th). As part of this festival, they’ve imported a bunch of kegs of British beer, including Fuller’s Organic Honeydew beer, a “wonderfuly refreshing golden ale”, made entirely from organically grown ingredients. They’ve even got a Butternut soup on the menu that features the beer. The Organic Honeydew is a light hoppy summer beer and I hope the Oak will continue to carry it, even as their British festival winds down.

The Royal Oak Pub, 221 Echo Drive, on the canal, (613) 234-3700

A few people have sent me press releases about Earth Day events in Ottawa and I promised to pass the information along, so here goes:

• April 18 and 19 at 7:30 pm, Dancing the Earth for Earthday, the premiere of the Buddha and the Tree of Life, a dance performance by Anjali at Arts Court.

• April 19, 10 am to 4 pm, The EcoStewardship Fair at the R.A. Centre. I’m a regular at these fairs, which provides a venue for eco-conscious consumers to find eco-conscious products and for eco-conscious citizens to find eco-conscious groups to support and join.

• April 19, 10:30am Our Land Our Future, preschool Earth Day activities at Centennial Branch of the Library.

• April 22, 15h30 à 19, Foire sur l’environnement et la santé, Ecole secondaire publique De La Salle, 501 ancienne rue St-Patrick. Ouvert aux parents, aux élèves et au grand public.

• April 22, 7 pm, Global Warming, the Swedish Experience, a talk by the Ambassador of Sweden to Canada, Ingrid Iremark, at the Main Branch of the Public Library, 120 Metcalfe Street. Admission is free.

• April 29, 11:45 am - 2:15 pm, The Six Sins of Greenwashing, The Hampton Inn, 11:45-2:15, presented by Scott McDougall, President and CEO of Terrachoice and the Canadian Marketing Association.

• May 3, 8:30 to noon, the Sunoco Earth Day Tree Planting as part of the Riverside South Reforestation Project: the goal is to plant 2,000 trees that morning.

• May 3, 8:30 am to noon, pancake breakfast followed by another tree planting at the Kilborn Greenspace in Alta Vista, between Featherstone and Prospect.

• May 8, 11 am to 1 pm, EarthCARE Expo, on education and the environment, at Confederation High School.

• Also, HGTV is having three days of Green television programming on April 19, 20 from 1 pm to 5 pm and on April 22 from 8 pm til midnight.

If any of you know of any other Ottawa Earth Day events please post the information in a comment. (BTW, I have to manually approve comments because of all the spam this site gets, so please be patient if your comment does not show up right away).