Vert-à-Go

Public Talk: After Peak Oil

Date: 11 June 2008

Time: 7 PM

Place: J S Wood Library

Join guest speakers Rob Dumont, Ph.D. and Ewen Coxworth, Ph.D., as they discuss the implications of peak oil. Many studies are concluding that sometime in the next 10 to 25 years, world oil production will reach a peak and then decline.

Ewen and Rob will survey the search for alternatives for fuelling the world’s transportation systems. In addition to greatly improved vehicle energy efficiency and increased use of public and active transportation modes, alternative energy sources are needed. These may include biofuels based on urban wastes and forest products, and renewably-generated electricity to power plug-in hybrids. A vision of a possible Canadian energy system in 2058 will be described.

Hosted by the Saskatchewan Environmental Society (SES)

One solid 11-hour day in the front garden later, the erstwhile lawn has been transformed! There is an anemone border extending along the front with day lilies and hostas in the right-hand corner, and two new fancy day lilies in the bed by the tree (Black Stockings and French Lingerie, oo-la-la!). I’ll be planting carrots along the other edge (I’m not sure how they’ll do in the front, but should provide some pretty foliage if nothing else! I’ll also be adding lettuces, spinach and other greens that do better in a shadier setting, and sticking in some clumps of chives too.

I dug in some flat stones to create a pathway to where we’re hoping to place a chair from the Core Neighbourhood Youth Co-op. I’ll be putting ferns in the empty bed to the left of the herb spiral. We repositioned our larger rocks so they accent the corners and foundation much more nicely. We also will probably add a willow-branch obelisk in the v-shaped bed next to the shrub by the sidewalk, and train some scarlet runner beans up it. I got an ornamental chilli pepper which should look quite cool along with it!

I’ve rearranged a lot of the plants that I already had to make more purposeful and attractive groupings (shade-loving plants close to the house (hostas, lamium, campanula; dianthus along the edges of the beds for colour) and will be receiving donations of other plants from kindly neighbours (including irises–this will finally be the year when I put in bulbs for some spring colour! Right now it’s pretty much limited to some tulipa tarda and the lilac bushes).

Because the soil was in pretty poor condition where the lawn had been, I added a fair amount of cow manure to the new beds. This year I got it from the The Cyclones road and track club, a competitive club for disabled athletes, who was fundraising by selling well-composted organic manure from a local acreage. A 50-lb bag is $10 (buy 10, and get 1 more for free). They have a booth at the Farmer’s Market, or you can call Dale at 374-9046 or Becky at 955-9194. This is a great cause–one of the Cyclones has qualified for the Olympics and will be heading to Beijing!

I made a new friend yesterday as I was finishing digging up all the new beds. This robin trailed me around the garden the entire day, at times only 2-3 feet away, fixing me with a beady stare as he grabbed mouthful after mouthful of worms. His maximum seemed to be three worms at a time, but he kept trying to cram just one more in!

Ta da!

The soil level looks a little low because I am awaiting a delivery of composted manure and want to mix it in.

I had thought we were finished the other night, but then looked at it again and realised, hmm, this only spirals from halfway up to the top. So I basically rebuilt about half of it today, and I think it looks way better.

Then I watered it (creating a lovely wallow for the children), and will let it settle for a couple days, add some good dirt, and then get the herbs into it!

People walking by will mostly see the back side of it, because it gets the vast majority of its strong sunlight in the afternoon and I wanted it to face south, towards its rays.

The following is a call for volunteers from Erin Birns, the project coordinator for the Prairie Habitat Garden (PHG), which is next to the College of Education building at the University of Saskatchewan.

The PHG is a project developed by faculty and students in the College of Education. The goal is to be a source of information for all students about native Saskatchewan plants and ecosystems. We maintain the garden not only with the hope that it is beautiful to look at, but also with the intent that it act as a starting point–a tool–for educating students about the importance of sustaining our province’s native ecosystems.

The garden is BIG and staffed by only two people–maintaining it so that the plants can survive and thrive is quite the undertaking. I am therefore asking for your help over the coming summer months! Any volunteers who would be willing to spend a few hours of any weekday weeding/planting (or days! mornings or afternoons!) would be happily welcomed into the garden!

Contact: Erin Birns (erb738@mail.usask.ca), 381-8076

I have not visited the garden yet, but it looks like a fabulous project and I intend to go have a look very soon! Along with transforming a dull and underused space on campus with natural features such as native grasses, shrubs, trees, and wildflowers (creating a butterfly habitat), it also acts as a model garden to help and inspire Saskatoon students to create prairie habitat gardens in their own schoolyards.

The garden also incorporates a medicine wheel and has integrated First Nations perspectives into both its design and curriculum. For example, on Wednesday 4 June, it will be hosting the Third Annual Sowin’ Love day, where elementary schools will visit the garden to help plant grass in a buffalo stomp. A number of activities, games, and guest speakers are planned. Teachers will be given information on how to incorporate lessons on gardening, the environment, and Aboriginal uses of plants into their classrooms. Sounds like a great day out!

(photo: Tigerella and Green Zebra by Strata Chalup)

I am pretty close to having everything I need for the garden; now I just need to get the ground all worked, add manure, and finish hardening off the bedding plants.

This year I went to a couple of new (to me) greenhouses for my bedding plants. I first stopped at Shaughnessy Gardens, who offer a variety of unusual/heirloom tomatoes, as well as organic herbs. There, I picked up all my herbs (bar parsley and cilantro, which were sold out/looking a tad leggy), as well as some bell peppers, roma tomatoes and three nifty tomatoes which I have never seen here before: Thai Pink, Tigerella, and Green Zebra. At least a couple of these tomatoes, along with the peppers, will be taking up residence in our community garden plot, which gets a lot more sun.

I then stopped off at Floral Acres, where I picked up a Sweet Million cherry tomato as well as some Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes as well (I just adore those little guys in salads). And a butternut squash for good measure–I haven’t had a good crop of sweet peas in years, so this year I’m going to grow some squash up the fence instead!

Unfortunately, I wasn’t organised enough this year to get my seeds at Seedy Saturday in March. Jim Ternier from Prairie Garden Seeds in Humboldt has a big booth there with loads of interesting heirloom and prairie-appropriate varieties. He also sold some of his seeds at Steep Hill Co-op on Broadway, and if you are more organised than I was this year, you can order them directly by mail too. I did buy some of his garden huckleberry seeds from Early’s, which my mom started under grow lights and which we will both be trying out this year.

(photo: Yin Yang/Orca beans from the Park Seed Garden Journal, Geo. W. Park Seed Company)

I picked up the rest of my seeds at Early’s–lettuces, spinach, beets, carrots, green beans, and so on. I also placed a very last-minute order with Salt Spring Seeds for their orca beans as well as some Strela Green lettuce, an attractive variety that dates back to the 1500s. The orca beans are ridiculously cute, but I don’t know if they are going to arrive in time to get them in the ground. They are an early producer, apparently, so hopefully I’ll still be able to try them out. This seed company specialises in heirloom varieties and has a lot of really cool vegetable seeds.

Work is continuing apace on the front garden—you can see a new long bed for anemones extending along the sidewalk, with a new rock border. This border creates a nice wide edge with space for bulbs, and make it harder for our two small people to stomp across the middle of the yard and through the flower beds.

We stacked the old pieces of sod up along the edges of what will be the path, to get it out of the road while we’re working. I’ve been burying some of it upside down in the newly dug beds (about a foot down) so it can compost all by itself.

And what’s that poking up in the middle?

It’s the beginning of the herb spiral!

I shovelled dirt into a mound (could have gotten rid of some more of the upside-down turf on the bottom of it, but for some reason I forgot to stick it in), and then I started pressing rocks into the base to see how big we needed to make it. We actually enlarged it somewhat after this picture; it’s about 1.3m across.

We stacked up two layers of rocks all round, then once we got all the way around, started moving in to create the spiral and a small planting area at the top. We finished building it after it was too dark to take a picture, so I’ll have to post one tomorrow! It was a really fun project.

The Victoria Day long weekend is the traditional time for Canadians to put in their gardens. This year, the holiday really falls on the early side of the 24th of May, so I’m not panicking to get everything planted this weekend. I haven’t even bought any bedding plants yet, although I did plant some lettuce seeds in pots on the deck about 10 days ago, which are now enthusiastically poking their heads out of the dirt. I’ll plant some more in the next day or so so that I have nicely staggered crops of salad greens throughout the summer, and plan to put in some other cool-weather vegetables like carrots, beets, radishes, and spinach. Tomato seedlings could probably do with another week under their cosy coats, just in case.

One thing that we did start work on today, which I’m very excited about, is removing the grass from our front garden. I have been gradually chipping away at this pathetic area of sod for the past few years, expanding the flower beds and putting in low-maintenance perennials instead. Our house faces north and we also have a very old maple tree in the front yard, which means that it is an awkward area for gardening. Part of it is in total shade, part of it is about half-shade and half-blast furnace, and all of it tends to be very dry because of the tree cover. There really isn’t enough sun there for grass, and because I don’t like wasting water on a lawn, it can look pretty terrible when it’s dry. We do have a small patch of grass in the back garden for the kids to play on, but we never just go and sit on the grass at the front. So, its days are numbered!

We are planning on extending the perennial beds, putting in a path, and also a raised bed in the middle. We are still deciding between putting in a herb spiral (I think that it might be difficult getting the right kinds of stackable rocks for it–my mom and dad’s farm tends towards producing round, not flat rocks!) or something star-shaped like this raised bed kit from Lee Valley. I plan to put in most of our lettuce and greens out here, and will be launching an experiment with herbs and carrots to see how well they do with the somewhat limited sun.

So, we’re getting the ground prepared and then we’ll have a look at our rocks and see how they stack up. I’m also planning on getting some willow branch cuttings from my mom and dad’s farm to make an obelisk for scarlet runner beans…my sister’s branches actually took root and started to leaf out again, forming a beautiful living obelisk. Sweet!

City dwellers are becoming increasingly excited about the possibilities for growing food in the space that is traditionally dominated by a barren patch of grass. I’ll be posting more about the burgeoning Food Not Lawns movement in the coming week!

Do you have a pesky gardening question? The University of Saskatchewan’s Gardenline is now open for the season and is taking calls from domestic gardeners and small-scale commercial growers.

Gardenline offers information and advice on everything green. You can ask about starting seeds, growing vegetables, fruit, houseplants, trees and shrubs, yard and garden plants, and find out how to deal with diseases and pests.

The free phone line (966-5865) will be open until 31 August on Mondays to Thursdays, from 9am-noon and 1-4pm. You can also email questions to gardenline@usask.ca.

Gardenline’s web site also has a ton of very informative articles grouped by category (they are rather awkward to search, but fun to browse). You can find advice on planting early vegetables here.

(right: photo by Stephanie, aka wishymom)

Over the past year, honeybees have been dying in droves across the world. To compound this already alarming development, the bees often haven’t even simply just dropped dead–they’ve completely vanished from the hives altogether. Scientists and beekeepers are still trying to identify the root cause of the skyrocketing bee mortality/vanishing rate, so for lack of a definitive answer, it has been tentatively attributed to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) .

CCD is an umbrella term for a number of possible factors, including environmental change-related stresses (such as travel or climate change), malnutrition, disease, pests (such as the verroa mite), exposure to certain pesticides (such as neonicotinoids or imidacloprid) or genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics (like transgenic corn). Mobile phone radiation appears to have been ruled out, but at this point it is just not known which factor, or combination of factors, is responsible for the die-off–about 30% of hives have been lost in both Canada and the US, with Saskatchewan suffering losses of 24% .

When I first heard about this disturbing phenomenon last year, I did not realise that the vast majority of the affected bees were not native bees, but rather honeybees raised by commercial beekeepers. These bees produce honey, obviously, but they are also responsible for helping to pollinate a large number of fruit and vegetable crops in Ontario and British Columbia. These types of bees are also extremely important to the US agricultural industry, as they are shipped in from long distances every year to pollinate an estimated one-third of American fruit and vegetable crops, mainly in California. A decade ago, the value of bees to crop pollination was pegged at $782 million yearly in Canada (and about $14 billion in the US in 2000) .

Honeybees therefore have a huge role to play in the North American food chain. In response to the die-off, beekeepers have been replacing their bees at great expense with unaffected queen bees from New Zealand. But how long can that continue? It is simply not financially viable for beekeepers to replace a third of their stock every year–and what happens if CCD starts to affect New Zealand bees as well?

The die-off has helped raise awareness of how dependent we are on insect pollinators, and about how they can be all too vulnerable to unexpected collapse. So, what can we do about the problem? Interestingly, bees turned loose to pollinate organically-grown crops have not experienced near the same attrition levels as bees that pollinate crops exposed to pesticides. This could well indicate yet another good reason to buy organically-raised produce. You should also try to buy locally-produced honey, as it supports local beekeepers and helps to boost local honeybee populations. It’s easy to find (try the Farmers’ Market, Steep Hill Co-op, or the SaskMade Market). Or at the very least, stick to Canadian-produced honey, which has much higher quality controls than some other parts of the world–as with all food products, it’s just not worth it to buy dirt-cheap honey.

It’s also a good idea to help encourage bees by providing bee-friendly habitat in general. Did you know that there are 800 different species of bees in Canada? Our world would be a strange, less lovely, and much hungrier place without them. You can find plenty of tips to help them here:

Hinterland Who’s Who: The Bumblebee (Bee Courteous, Bee Safe)

10 things to do to help honeybees

A guide to urban bee-friendly gardens

(right: photo from Solar Freedom International)

Solar Freedom International is holding a solar oven building workshop.

Come and assemble your very own family-sized solar oven and learn about other solar applications through slides and discussion! With clear skies, your solar oven can reach temperatures of around 400F. You can cook roasts, casseroles, cookies and more all year round without using energy and heating up your kitchen.

This oven is portable and ideal for camping. Its low-impact, high-performance design makes it the perfect choice for anyone looking to lower their environmental footprint while enjoying quite possibly the best tasting meals ever.

WHEN: Saturday 31 May, 9am -4pm

WHERE: Sunset Estates Community Hall. Located 10 minutes east of Saskatoon on Highway 5. Front of town, East of store.

COST: $325 (cheque or Visa), includes user’s manual

Pre-registration is required by 22 May to ensure a spot (contact Craig on 652-1442 or Grant on 280-0689)

BRING: a bagged lunch and basic small hand tools (i.e. utility knife, multi-screwdriver and pliers)

A solar lunch will be cooked for sampling, clear skies pending!

Solar Freedom International began in 1994 as an organization dedicated to the research, design and dissemination of solar ovens and solar cooking world wide. It has placed thousands of family-sized solar cookers in over 38 countries, including Cuba, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Fiji, Northern India, Haiti, the USA and Canada. To learn more, see the Solar Freedom site.