Beautiful

Go here. See this.

How many of those have you grown?

Home Garden is where the heart is

I've planted in seven garden plots this year, but our home garden is still dearest to me. When we moved in three and a half years ago, it was a 54 square foot strip of patchy weeds in front of the driveway. That summer, I dug it up with a spade, added half a bale of peat and a garbage bag of well-rotted cow manure, and had a bumper crop of tomatoes. The next summer I learned the pitfalls of monocropping, as blight hit my tomatoes. The following year I diversified, and this year - I think I like this one the best.

I planted vegetables that I knew my kids would enjoy picking and snacking on and vegetables that are best when brought to the table five minutes later. Lettuce, snap and shelling peas, cherry tomatoes, mizuna, carrots, shungikyu, basil, radishes, peppers, fall-planted garlic and the perennial chives. My son added three onions he grew from seed and an upside-down tomato he got for his birthday and my daughter planted a butternut squash.

And now that I've picked up the old seed packs and trimmed the grass, I can show it off! Tomorrow: first salad with lettuce and mizuna thinnings, chives, and radishes.

Buying Green

Did you get the impression, on Feel-Good Friday, that I was lightening up on the "vote with your dollar" movement? Well, it's Monday morning now.

From the Climate and Capitalism blog's review of Kendra Pierre-Louis' Green Washed: Why We Can’t Buy Our Way to a Green Planet:

Her new book Green Washed is a powerful critique of “the comforting message that we can shop ourselves out of our current environmental mess.”

“Too many businesses and environmental groups have led us to believe that if we buy the correct collection of products, we can save the planet. While these assurances have done much to assuage our collective guilt, and even more to create a generation of smug eco-shoppers, it has done next to nothing to fundamentally change the environmental landscape, while in many cases actively contributing to environmental degradation and misinformation.”

So far so good? Pour yourself a warm beverage into your reusable mug and lean back. 

In refreshing contrast to most books on consumerism, Green Washed pins the blame for excess consumption on our economic system, not on individual psychology.

“If we were to make reducing our consumption to a level that was both materially satisfying and ecologically sustainable our central focus, our entire global economic system would collapse. This isn’t a hyperbole. Our economic system is based on the need for perpetual growth; we either grow our economy or it dies, taking us along with it.”

Hm. Food for thought. Take a bite of that muffin.

Unfortunately, Pierre-Louis’s analysis of causes stops with criticism of growth. She doesn’t ask why the global economic system is so irrational. Why is the only alternative to one polluting product so often another that pollutes as badly or worse? Many brilliant writers have criticized growth, and offered detailed proposals for steady-state economies – why have they been ignored by those in power? What about our existing social and economic order makes growth so essential and environmental destruction so universal?

Because it doesn’t pursue those questions, Green Washed proposes band aid solutions when major surgery is needed. Having firmly rejected individual green shopping, the alternative Pierre-Louis offers amounts to green shopping in groups.

And the bracing shock of cold water. 

Projects that improve the sustainability and resilience of local communities are important, but they are no substitute for political and social action against the global forces that are destroying our world. Unless we stop and reverse those forces, Pierre-Louis’s shadow economies will be small green islands in an ocean of environmental destruction – and water levels will continue rising.


Back to work.

Feel-Good Friday II

This just in! A study that suggests voting with your dollar has a positive result that I didn't note in my indictment of the tactic. Supporting small businesses can improve your (the collective 'your') health!

From the linked article:

Counties with more small businesses tend to have lower rates of mortality, obesity, and diabetes, while those with more large retailers tend to post higher rates of these poor-health indicators. The authors explain that communities with thriving small businesses may be more likely to support bond issues for health infrastructures, recruit physicians, push for local anti-smoking legislation, promote community health programs, and support local farmers' markets.

And, in a fabulous coincidence, the Regina Farmers Market opens tomorrow!

Feel-Good Friday

Here's a story to warm the cockles of your heart - especially you Saskatchewanians in -30 weather.

You may be familiar with the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model of farming. Eaters subscribe to receive a weekly box of vegetables over the growing season, and pay up front in the spring when the farmer needs to purchase major inputs. They also share a bit of the farmer's risk; if the farm is flooded and some of the vegetables are unharvestable, the subscribers do without. They are supporting local agriculture, typically small family farms, and sustainable growing practices.

Paul's cow*.

CSAs are springing up all over the place, and 30-year-old farmer Paul Slomp has taken the idea even further: he has a beef CSA called Grazing Days, just outside of Ottawa. This article explains how he serves people who want healthy, sustainable local beef but lack freezer space or desire to buy a half a side of beef as they are often sold from a local farmer. “People sign up for how much beef they would like over the course of nine months, and we deliver it to people’s homes in small 10lb to 20lb portions once a month or once every other month – depending on the household’s needs.”



The article mentions Slomp's sustainable practices:

Grazing Days’ Paul Slomp – who often calls himself a “grass farmer” – frequently stresses that properly managed grazing of cattle improves the health of our soils. Managed grazing, he says, protects our streams, rivers and aquifers; it sequesters carbon, and is an effective way to harvest solar energy.

I learned a bit more about Grazing Days this week, and this is why I really get a kick out of it. Slomp started the business when he had $10,000 to his name. He wanted to avoid the debt that hobbles so many farmers, so he sold bond-like contracts with 4% interest to friends and eaters, pre-sold a season's worth of beef, and was able to purchase 14 head of cattle that first season and pay rent on 75 acres of land. He didn't have enough money for a vehicle, so he rides his bicycle 21 km daily to his land from his home and rents a car for delivery days. He also rents freezer space from a warehouse in Ottawa. He's also building up to forty head this coming year.

That's what I call ingenuity!

Happy Friday. I'll be enjoying my evening with family, a grass-fed beef roast, and some Okanagan wine.

*This isn't Paul Slomp's heifer, but it is a heifer (or steer) belonging to my dad, whose name is Paul. The picture is from about 1960. As you can see, the animal is also grass-fed. Cut me some slack. I don't have a lot of cattle pictures on this computer.