Wild Food Walk Number 3

The Cowichan Green Community Wild Walk participants had a fabulous sunny stroll with Chef and author Bill Jones this past Wednesday, July 21st. Bill had lots to share, even if it was not the season for Bill's passion - mushroom foraging. On this most recent Wild Walk, participants learned about a range of wild edibles from Ox eye daisy (has a sweet apple flavor) to Salall berries, which Bill cooks in local maple syrup.

Wild walkers learned about the high vitamin c content of new shoots of the Grande Fir (great for tea or just eat them), the antibacterial properties of Old Man’s Beard, and were treated to a delicious patch of early season sun ripened Trailing blackberries. Bill Jones’ respect for local First Nations has led him to learn some of the traditional First Nation uses of native plant species, as both foods and medicines. Sharing knowledge such as rubbing the...

1 week 1 day ago

Picking fruit in the Sunshine

Yesterday was a great day. The sun was shining, and the air was sweet with fruit. I was picking fruit for the Cowichan Green Community's program FruitSave. In the office we got a phone call about a tree that was bursting with plums. We headed out there out there to pick the plums, bright yellowish-orangy plums. It was fun, and in the end we picked about 100 pounds of plums. We sent about 50 pounds of plums to warmland house.

How it works: 1/3rd goes to the picker, 1/3rd goes to the home/tree owner, 1/3rd to the food bank. If you want to help out, get some great fruit or just have fun picking fruit, let us know. You can view the FruitSave page for more information.

 

1 week 3 days ago

Phew...January is over!

There has been a whirl-wind of events here at Cowichan Green Community in the past few weeks!

The food charter is now complete and has been receiving a lot of praise (and signatures) from organizations and citizens of our community. The City of Duncan, Town of Lake Cowichan, CVRD Economic Development Commission, CVRD Environment Commission, Cowichan Agricultural Society, Transition Cowichan, O.U.R. Ecovillage, Malahat First Nation, and Cittaslow Cowichan Bay are a few of the organizations and groups that have signed on so far. We would like to thank everyone for their input and support through the final drafts of the charter.

CGC staff members have been busy gearing up for Percy Schmeiser's talk on Feb. 5th and the...

25 weeks 1 day ago

Status update for the CGC

 

Welcome to the CGC website. A lot has happened in the last few months and we have all been super busy here (hence the lag in the update of the blog).

 

One of the most visible changes is our website (your viewing our new website right now). The website is based on drupal and is very dynamic. It has been a lot of fun and a lot of work to create. The goal of the new website was to make easier for everyone to contribute yet powerful enough to have a dynamic front page, and a low maintenance events page. If you have any suggestions on how we could improve it, use the form at the contact us page.

 

Another exciting development is the Warmland Community Garden. Anyone who has driven on Beverily street lately will notice a structure. That...

26 weeks 1 day ago

Our Human-Powered Move

Change need not be a hairshirt excercise. It can be something that is exhilarating, has a feel of being a historic process, and is a collective call to adventure. (Rob Hopkins)

Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Town movement in Totnes, England, explains that one litre of motor oil contains the energy equivalent to one person performing hard manual labour for five weeks. Incredibly, one average thankful of gas (40L) contains the energy equivalent to one person performing hard manual labour for four years. As we pack and organize the dear old CGC office in preparation for our zero-carbon move to 181 Station Street – an incredible and positive transition to a location with more light, more space, more people and more resources – we find ourselves face to face with the fact that we do not personally possess the astonishing get-up available in that one litre of oil. What we do possess however, and what is infinitely more satisfying...

47 weeks 3 days ago

Putting an End to Junk Mail

I remember years ago in an anthropology class our professor presented us with a fictional scenario, set around the year 2500AD. In the scenario, North America exists as a zero-life wasteland, having succumbed sometime in the 21 century to slow burial by mountains of self-created junk mail – a result of the lethal combination of heavily subsidized newsprint and escalating consumer obsessions. Futuristic archaeologists painstakingly excavate the ruins of this once-great civilization from a million layers of outdated coupons and big-box store flyers, deeply intrigued by its mysterious demise.

The laughable scenario went on to detail archaeological practices and common errors, but what remained with me for some time afterwards was that searing reference to our very real cultural practice of using precious resources in the least intelligent ways, and to the detriment of all living things. Reflecting on this, we decided to withdraw our participation from the gross waste of...

51 weeks 6 days ago

Doing it in the Dark

Our first bright idea was, in fact, to turn out the lights. The reasons to do so are manifold: less energy used, less dependence on fossil fuels, less heat, less buzz. We realized that with our office lights out, our working space is sufficiently illuminated by the front window as well as a skylight in the back that we barely noticed when the strong CFLs were on. On sunny days, extra artificial light - and especially heat – pouring into our rooms is definitely unnecessary, and we quickly found that working in natural light feels healthier and more calming.

Over the course of several days, and as we adopted this practice in our homes as well as the office, our observations grew more subtle and interesting: by letting our eyes adjust to natural light levels, we became more aware of the weather, the luminous qualities of summer, the gentle wind-down of nightfall…in a small way, the simple act of using fewer indoor lights can sensitize us to the natural world, attuning us to...

1 year 4 weeks ago

Our Blog is Born

At the Cowichan Green Community, and for many people we know, July swooped in with a flurry of excitement, inspiration, and activity on the wing. As we gathered back at our little office after the Seeds for Change Environment Conference, we found ourselves full of good intentions and the desire to bring more positive changes into our lives and the CGC space.

It happened that all of us were reading Vanessa Farquharson’s fantastically hilarious new novel Sleeping Naked is Green (available at the CGC office) and so, naturally, we decided to emulate her organized, methodical, list-y approach to greening our days and nights. And like Vanessa, we decided to share our journey in an online journal in the hopes of inspiring and connecting as many people as possible. Once a month, we will be posting and exploring a green change that we have committed to, and we invite your participation. We aim to generate interest and dialogue surrounding small but meaningful acts of...

1 year 8 weeks ago