Have You Ever...

Have you ever weighed out the options of ditching all you own, all you know, and leading a life of subsistence? If you could choose to opt out of our industrial agricultural system, and depend on a few acres of land year round, would you? Why would you choose this lifestyle? Or, why wouldn’t you choose this lifestyle? Take a moment to contemplate what you would choose to do. However, lucky for you, amongst a group of classmates in Environmental Studies, we devised a pro and con list for subsistence living to help your discernment process. Let me know if we missed any that you can think of!

Reasons to try out a subsistence lifestyle:

(a) schedule would not be dictated by the clock (b) provide an active lifestyle—physically, mentally, and psychologically (c) pride and satisfaction in growing your own food—self empowerment that is not at the disenfranchisement of others (d) know exactly what is in and what went into the production of your food (e) promote community building and engagement (f) a deeper connection with earth’s natural processes (g) increasingly attribute wealth to the land—not to material capital (h) independence from the economic market

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.

What's 4 Dinner, UVIC Sustainable Food, UVIC Anniversary of Guerilla Gardening, Campus Community Garden, CUAC

March 24, 2011

I discovered I live only a couple of blocks away from an innovative food-related business in Victoria: What's 4 Dinner (http://www.whats4dinner.ca/ ).What's 4 Dinner is a new concept in food services which helps people to prepare affordable family-sizing meals by providing a menu of meals each month that customers can select from, and schedule a time to come to the What's 4 Dinner and use the ready-to-use fresh ingredients to make the two meals (12 serving), leaving the dishes for the staff to deal with. It's just an interesting new split between public-private, profit-low-cost kind of cooking, which the website says results in meals that cost $4-6 per servicing.

I walked through the UVIC cafeteria today and noticed a big sign up that spoke about the amount of locally grown food UVIC uses, the food waste it composts,etc. I thought it was interesting to see how much work has been done on campus around food security issues while I wasn't looking (http://web.uvic.ca/sustainability/Food.htm ).

Winter Farmer's Market, Awesome Local Cheese and VIVA Raw Food Potlucks

March 22, 2011
Made myself a big pot of vegetarian chili with roast root vegetables and lots of boiled beans. I haven't actually cooked for myself in awhile. I felt good. On Saturday, I went to the Victoria Winter Farmer's Market ( http://victoriapublicmarket.com/?p=445 ) which was lots of fun: local meat products and goat cheeses, preserves and marmalades, apple cider for a cause, a bake sale for Japan, wild harvested mushrooms, seedlings from local farms, winter vegetables and much more. I discovered much to my surprise that I actually quite like goat cheese, specifically every flavor of Chevre (soft, unripened) goat cheese made by Salt Spring Island Cheese.

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.

Bliss Cafe, EAT Magazine, Food Not Bombs Volunteering

March 6, 2011

For breakfast I ate some of the house's leftover rice with vegetable stir-fry. For lunch I went down to Bliss Cafe ( http://www.cafebliss.ca/ ) and ordered a Chia Seed Pudding, which was $11.20 for a small bowl (complimentary chai tea). It's expensive, but raw, vegan food tends to be. But one can bring food home from a restaurant and make other meals out of the leftovers to stretch the food, like putting this sweet, cinnamon, batter-like pudding over porridge (okay, I put it over rice again because that was what I had). Also at Bliss, I came across a copy of EATmagazine ( http://www.eatmagazine.ca/news/bc/vanisland ) which is a magazine about food on Vancouver Island; it's full of great info about local food. For a one dollar deposit, Bliss also gave me a glass jar for my tea to go in, and I had brought my own tupper-ware to take out the rest of my meal in. I passed by Victoria City Hall, and noticed that they have a small demonstration food garden on the Pandora side of the building.

The Martlet | Growing local food produces security

Great to see support on campus and interest in the subject!

 The Martlet | Growing local food produces security