The trouble with attempting to be progressive is that there are often rules against it, whether written or unwritten. It may be the neighbours who don’t like the fact that you tore out your front lawn and replaced it with potatoes and squash plants, or in Dirk Becker’s case, it is the District of Lantzville’s […]
Category Archives: Urban Farming
The Bear
The bear came last night. A sow, a big momma, a big hungry momma. Even though we’d hidden the bin, she tore the critter-proof lid off and devoured the remnants of human meals past. This was the first bear we’d seen in the backyard. There had been signs before, but never a face-to-face encounter. Bang. […]
Paladio Peas
Fresh peas are one of the joys of gardening. For the past two seasons we have grown a variety of pea called “Paladio”, available through West Coast Seeds. These pods have up to 10 large sweet peas in them and are quite prolific. This year we have, in addition to eating lots of peas, harvested […]
The Humble Blueberry
So after my last post, which I admit was a little depressing – sometimes these things need to be stated though – I thought I’d cheer things up a bit with a photo. Our species has come a long way from the times of hunting and gathering for survival, we have almost all of the […]
Goats @ Google
As I take a break from writing my comments to the Draft Sustainability Discussion Paper for Castlegar, I was drawn to this blog post from Google on the use of 200 goats to maintain a field… The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the […]
Food Inflation
While pundits and economists everywhere welcome in the “recovery”, a different story is brewing in the US produce sector, from the Producer Price Index (PPI) report for March 2010, it seems that the price of food rose 2.4% in March alone – the largest monthly jump in over 26 years. Some of the startling food price […]
Castlegar Yard Waste Pickup
The City is once again providing a yard waste pickup program. I’m thinking of using it this year for the tenacious weeds that keep popping up in our veggie patch. Most of our compostable material goes into one of our three compost systems. The toughest choice comes with tree prunings, this year we have already amassed about twenty […]
Peak Oil Vignette 5 – Hope and Reality
Walking from the large brick building that used to house the airport terminal operations, but now was given new life as a fruit farming centre, Janie scanned the snow line on the mountains surrounding the valley. The flat land around what was once known as the West Kootenay Regional Airport was once a living farm. In fact, […]