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

This guest post comes from Molly who moved to Ottawa from Calgary a few years ago and writes that she “is always pleased whenever she finds a small local business who shares her worldview that she can support.”

I’m a new mum and I have a dirty little secret. When our daughter was a few months old, my husband and I looked around the house and realized the dust bunnies were getting as big as our beloved mud-tracking, hair-shedding hounds. Once I accepted the fact that I am no June Clever (and my hubby is no Mr. Clean), it was easy to pick up the phone and ask for help. Being a baking soda, vinegar, and elbow grease kind of household, my only concern was that I needed to find someone who used cleaning products that were compatible with our green ethic. The Cleaning Crew came to our rescue and has been helping out every couple of weeks since. This young and energetic husband and wife team has been so successful with their eco-friendly cleaning service that they now have a small army of conscientious cleaners working for them. The Cleaning Crew uses Nature Clean products on our bathroom and kitchen surfaces and Murphy’s Oil soap on our hardwood floors. I’ve been so impressed with both their customer service and the quality of their work that I feel the need to spread the word. I think their rates are slightly higher than conventional cleaners but well worth the peace of mind as I watch my daughter, now eight months old, learning to crawl across my sparkling floor. More information is available on their website at: www.cleaningcrew.ca.

The Minto Suite Hotel is hosting a free showing of The 11th Hour this Saturday (June 21st) at dusk (which they’re estimating at 8:50 pm)  in the parking lot at Slater and Lyon.  The movie will be projected against the wall of a building.  Refreshments will be available for a donation.  All proceeds will go to The David Suzuki Foundation.  Bring a lawnchair.  (This event is weather permitting.)

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.

At the end of April Ottawa’s own La Siembra Co-operative won one of WorldBlu’s “Worldwide Awards for the Most Democratic Workplaces.”  I just wanted to post a quick bit of blogging to congratulate them on their award.

La Siembra, a worker-owned workplace, is the biggest producer in Canada of fair trade certified organic chocolate products.  To quote Co-Executive Director Martin Van Den Borre,  “We believe in fair, democratic employment for all–both our worker-owners at La Siembra and the producer co-operatives we source our ingredients from.”

La Siembra makes the popular Cocoa Camino line of products: chocolate bars, hot chocolate powder,  chocolate chips and chocolate syrup.  These products are available at most health food stores and many grocery stores across Ottawa, for more details check out their interactive map.

Just a quick note to let all the localvores out there know that Ottawa’s Main Street Farmer’s Market will be opening their season this coming Saturday, May 17th.  The market will run every Saturday for the summer from 9 am to 2 pm in the parking lot of St. Paul’s University on Main Street.  Only local producers selling their own locally produced goods are permitted to sell at this market.  See you there!

We got home from work on the latish side of the evening, but we fired up the barbeque anyway.  When it had heated up, Mike threw on a T-bone steak from the sampler pack I recently ordered from L.J. Helferty who raises cattle on a farm near Douglas Ontario (120 km from Ottawa).

The farm has been in the Helferty family for 100 years.  While the farm is not certified by any organic certifying body, L.J. assures me that no pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers are used on any of their land.  In the warmer seasons the cattle roam the pastures, eating to their hearts content.  In the winter they are fed hay grown on Helferty land. But the naturalness of these cows doesn’t end with their diet.  They are also free of growth hormones (except for the ones their bodies produce!) and antibiotics.

Besides all this naturalness, pasture-fed beef is supposed to be healthier to eat than grain-fed, something to do with the balance of fats.  I’m not a nutritionist so I can’t vouch for the biochemistry of the product, but I can say that the steak was delicious, certainly amongst the tastiest meat I’ve eaten.  I would highly recommend it to discerning carnivores and localvores.

Now here’s the most amazing part.  L.J. charges just over $100 for a sampler pack of 20 lbs of this tasty, healthy meat, delivered to your door.   The photo above shows the sampler pack taking up one of the drawers in our freezer.  20 lbs of meat is a lot of meat.

It might take a few days until someone from the family comes into Ottawa to run errands and can drop off your meat, but it’s well worth the wait.  (If you’re going to be in the Douglas area you can pick up the meat yourself.)

L.J. Helferty, www.totallynaturalbeef.ca, 613-649-2482

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.