Cycle of Weeds, Permaculture Opportunities, UVIC Environmental Restoration, Wwoof and Soil Apprenticeships, UVIC Food Courses, Gaia College and SOUL

March 27, 2011
I spent most of yesterday pulling weeds out two flower beds around the house. It was an activity not directly related to food production, but related to yard maintenance (by way of showing that neglecting the yard for a year does not yield good results). The soil was disturbed and bare, allowing early successional, colonizing plants (weeds) to take over. Pulling them up, further disturbs the soil and the seed bank, which leads to further weeds and more pulling...it is an endless cycle.

Green Cuisine, Lotus Pond, Haliburton Community Organic Garden, Beekeeping, Local Food Guide

March 15, 2011
Okay, so I haven't written for awhile, but I learned more about my relationship to food this last week. I have honestly been eating very poorly, as I have a habit of having healthy food on-hand that is easy to prepare until I get too famished to care what I eat. Then I go in for cheap junk food.

But when I do plan what I eat, I can find some real gems. I did go to the Green Cuisine vegetarian restaurant downtown in Market Square ( http://www.greencuisine.com/contact ). Green Cuisine has a $15 cookbook for sale, which I am considering buying because it would be nice to get back into cooking for myself. They have awesome vegetarian, buffet style food that is pay by weight. The Lotus Pond restaurant also has vegetarian buffet lunches that are pay by weight ( http://lotuspond.webs.com/Index.htm ).
 
I went to what I thought was a Saturday (usually on Wednesdays) work party at Haliburton Community Organic Farm, but ended up instead in a beekeeping workshop ( http://haliburtonfarm.org/wp/ ). We as volunteers worked with one of the farmers and Gordon Hutchings (beekeeper) to set up a bee box (http://sites.google.com/site/hutchingsbeeservice/ ). We then were given a slide-show presentation about the hundreds of native bee species, how they are co-evolved to be the best pollinators for our area, and how we need shift focus away from the declining monoculture of invasive bees for pollinators and towards native bees are provided with food plants and suitable habitat. The bee workshop reminded us that most weeds are a stable and long-term source of food which helps the pollinators to survive in-between when our various crops are in flower, and so weeds should be left alone in fallow areas of your garden.

Weeding Back Garden, Planting Seeds, Transition Town, Springridge Commons

March 7, 2011

Ate a date square at UVIC, and myroommate's leftover eggplant curry. For the last few days I have been spending at least an hour in the big back garden trying to rescue it by digging out the weeds: grass, dandelion, pop weeds and creeping buttercup. It is enjoyable to get out and take some ownership of this garden, but the weeds are going to be an ongoing project.

I wanted to get seeds from Seeds of Victoria or Two Wings Farm as local is awesome, but I can't get out to them, and I have no credit card to order online (http://www.earthfuture.com/gardenpath/Seeds_Catalogue.htm and http://www.twowingsfarm.com/ ). I went to the Big Barn by the Root Cellar today to buy gardening supplies at it turned out to be $40: a bag of potting soil ($5), 6 trays ($12), and 8 bags of various open-pollinated, organic seeds ($18). It was more expensive than I thought it would be, but I didn't dare try to germinate the seeds straight into heavy clay soil here, particularly not with the hard frost we had this morning.