August 18, 2008
I’ve been busy this summer getting ready for a move to the U.K., hence the sharp drop in the number of posts. I will be gone for two years. While I am away all of the posts that I have made will still be accessible through the archive. I’m excited to announce, however, that starting in September of 2008 an environmental studies class at Carleton University will take over making new posts for this blog.
I hope you all continue to read and to comment.
Cheers,
Alette
May 19, 2008
The legislation to ban cosmetic pesticides in Ontario has been tabled. Now the Government of Ontario is taking comments on the proposed law. The public has until May 22nd to submit comments.
Here are four comments the David Suzuki Foundation suggests:
“1) Overall, I strongly support the ban on lawn pesticide use and sales.
2) Please let cities and towns pass bylaws that are even more health-protective than the provincial ban.
3) Please ensure pesticides are permitted only when necessary to protect public health. They should not, for example, be allowed on golf courses.
4) Please develop an efficient process for adding new pesticides to the list of prohibited products.“
Please make your voice heard.
May 4, 2008
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?
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.
April 30, 2008
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.
April 25, 2008
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:
