Transition Brockville              

The Stop Community Food Centre / Elizabeth Fraser / 20 January 2012

I’m excited to announce a new online community food resource, providing through The Stop Community Food Centre.

This new section of our website, entitled the Learning Network, is a dynamic, online space for sharing resources and fostering dialogue about programming associated with The Stop’s Community Food Centre model.

The Union / Eric Dickerson / 14 January 2012

Character and individuality are just nice side effects of local sustainability. The real reason we should all care about local sustainability is the strength of our local economy. A strong local economy makes us more resilient to the ups and downs of the national economy.

It also creates a safety net for the future should we for some reason not have daily delivery of food and other essentials. If we are headed into peak oil, or a depression, we will find ourselves asking: “Why, in an area so perfect for growing food, don't we have any local farms?” and “Where did all those local shops and restaurants go?”

[ FULL ARTICLE HERE ]

The local Food Matters coalition will be holding a food gardening workshop in Brockville on Thursday, March 22, from 9:30 am to 12:00 noon.

The coalition is currently recruiting exhibitors and presenters for this workshop, and invites individuals and organizations who wish to encourage home and community gardening to participate. If you are interested or have suggestions, please contact coalition member Transition Brockville at transition@mybrockville.com.

London Community Gardens from Simon Brothers on Vimeo.

[ Hat tip to Carole Chang and the LLG Health Unit! ]

Energy Bulletin / Christine Patton / 28 October 2011

Growing up in America, my generation was taught that any and every need could be met by a particular product or service, all of which were just waiting to be purchased. To afford these purchases as part of a "lifestyle," the proper career path for middle class people was to attend college, learn an intricately detailed specialization in order to make a salary, and buy whatever we might need or desire, from childcare to lawn services to fast food to psychiatric services.

While specialization can certainly make economic sense, the pendulum swung too far. We grew up to be thoroughly knowledgeable in a very narrow field, yet helpless and unempowered in every other walk of life, at the mercy of a cheap-energy growth economy supported by underpaid or slave labor and ongoing environmental destruction. While we grew up believing that having the money to purchase all of our needs equaled independence, many of us have learned that we've inherited a thinly-disguised dependence on the vast, complicated systems needed to support us.

In order to reclaim skills once lost, regain a sense of control over the process of your life, and withdraw your support from the often-immoral, often-unsatisfying industrial economy, consider becoming a producer of the things you want and need - in your home, your garage, your workshop and your garden.

Mother Earth News / Barbara Pleasant / June/July 2011

One of the hallmarks of any healthy organic garden is the effective use of mulches. Defined as materials used to cover the soil’s surface, mulches help control weeds, prevent disease, conserve moisture, maintain consistent soil temperatures, enrich the soil with organic matter and just make the garden look good. According to Texas A&M University, a well-mulched garden can yield 50 percent more vegetables than an unmulched garden space, thanks in part to mulches' ability to reduce foliage and fruit diseases.

Most gardeners prefer biodegradable mulches, such as compost, grass clippings, leaves or straw, because they decompose into soil-building organic matter. In vegetable garden pathways or in orchards, sawdust and wood chips are hard to beat as perpetual mulches. Here we will focus on vegetable garden mulches used during the growing season, when their immediate purposes are to suppress weeds and diseases while moderating soil temperature and conserving moisture.

[ FULL ARTICLE HERE ]

Vancouver Sun / Randy Shore / 28 July 2011

A lifelong proponent of sustainable urbanism, [author Peter] Ladner brings his experience as a journalist, publisher, and civic politician and policy-maker to bear on a question that is burning brightly in the popular zeitgeist: How will we feed ourselves when global food systems falter?

The forces that are already undermining the systems that bring historically unprecedented abundance to grocery store shelves are torn straight from the headlines: soil erosion, childhood obesity, peak oil, diabetes and cancer, climate change, concentrated corporate control of agriculture (so-called Big Food), and deadly food-borne illness.

"People have a really hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that their food sources are not reliable," said Ladner. "It's hard for people who have always been able to go to the store and see the shelves to imagine that food may not always be there."

Local resilience is the only insurance against fragile food systems, he said.

[ FULL ARTICLE HERE ]