Clay and Wattles

Thanks to Claire Singer of Ecology North, I have just received a shipment of two-and-a-half pounds of worms (about 2500 worms, supposedly). Claire was kind enough to pick them up from Earth’s General Store in Edmonton for me and bring them home to YK. They come in large bags filled with soil; each bag contains 1/2 a pound of worms. I picked them up from Claire’s house with my bike trailer (that green stuff in the photo is a clump of chives I begged from her garden).

Worm-herder extraordinaire Christa Domchek has been collecting names of Yellowknifers who want worms and is up to 50 names! YELLOWKNIFE NEEDS WORMS. I will be passing along some of these, so if you are on the list, be patient…

p.s. The title of this post is a snowclone.

When I was growing up, I often visited the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario. I have fond memories of huge draft horses, grain fields, and flowers. The farm exists to develop new varieties and systematically discover the best techniques and crops for the Canadian climate.

My “farm” is tiny, but I’m trying to take a scientific approach to it. I have researched plant varieties and growing techniques in an attempt to find the best, most sustainable way to feed my family organic food grown right in our own backyard. I am planting an enormous variety of plants (about 100 different cultivars) to see what works and what doesn’t. I have tried to choose the earliest cultivars I can find because of our short season. In many cases I have more than one variety of a particular vegetable – I want to know what grows best. Naturally, this process of experimentation will take years to bear fruit (pun intended). Fortunately, if I keep track of my results, other people can save some of the same effort.

The square foot method makes this easier because each one-by-one-foot square can be planted with a different vegetable. So, for example, I have usually planted one square of each variety under a plastic cover and another without.

So far the plastic-covered seeds are winning. My turnips, mustard greens, radishes, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, kale, basil (!), and kohl rabi have sprouted under plastic covers, but only the mustard greens have sprouted in the open air.

I am also keeping very careful records of what I have planted, planting dates, germination dates, and even soil temperature. Our average last frost date is officially May 30th (perhaps creeping earlier because of climate change), and our first fall frost date is supposed to be September 15th. With only a little effort, I think it should be possible to push those dates in either direction by two weeks to a month.

Every garden bed is a little bit different, of course – more or less sun, more or less shelter from wind, slightly higher or lower elevation. My lot is quite flat and uniform, which is unusual in Yellowknife, so the variation between beds isn’t extreme. This makes it easier to garden and more consistent for experimentation. I have also filled all my raised beds with the same soil mixture, which eliminates another variable.

Slowly, but surely, I am trying to collect Yellowknife garden lore. Gardening is a popular hobby and I am constantly surprised by the things I discover when I ask people. There isn’t anyplace to look to find out whether chives will survive YK winters, for example (they will!), but there should be.

Everyone says you can’t grow much food in Yellowknife. They are somewhat correct. There isn’t enough arable land here to grow a lot of wheat or soybeans, for instance. However, I am increasingly convinced that, on a family by family basis, we could grow a significant percentage of our food here. The payoff for this is enormous: zero petroleum used in cultivation, zero petroleum used in processing and packaging, zero petroleum used for transportation – to produce organic, fresh, healthy, wholesome food. Even if we can only supply 10-20% of our needs, we should be happy to reduce our greenhouse gas footprints accordingly.

Perhaps the most damning criticism of Kyoto is that it is a toothless tiger. And that is indisputably true, for the momentum of climate change is now so great that Kyoto’s target of reducing CO2 emissions by 5.2 per cent is little more than irrelevant.

-Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers

I have done a lot of yard and garden work over the past few weeks. I want to explain all the things I’ve done so far, but I will start back at the beginning for this post.

I already had lots of seeds, ordered from a few different companies. In 2003, I ordered seeds but ended up travelling on business for most of May and June, so I didn’t plant them. Most seeds keep for several years (corn, parsnip, and onion seeds do not), so I am using them this year. They were kept in plastic bags in our dark cool basement to preserve them. Some may turn out to be dead, but I will fill in the gaps later if I have to.

I have read (and re-read) many gardening books over the years. Unlike cookbooks, you don’t need a lot of gardening books; they mostly provide all of the same information with a few extra tips or unique ideas. I have two favourites which I use as my main sources of general information:

• The New Northern Gardener by Jennifer Bennett

  This is the best book I have found for Canadian gardening, particularly in colder parts of the country. It gives loads of practical details on growing and harvesting organic vegetables, flowers, and herbs in a frigid climate. If you want to raise food plants in the north, you need this book. If it has a flaw, it is only that I wish it were twice as long and included information about shrubs and trees.

• Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

  Many years ago, Bartholomew came up with an integrated system for vegetable gardening which allows larger harvests in less space with less work than conventional row gardens. The method is simple, thrifty, and organic. Many of the ideas are common to other gardening traditions (raised beds, wide rows, mulching, etc.), but I like the fact that Bartholomew’s book provides a step-by-step systematic approach to building your garden. I have successfully used the square foot gardening technique in the past and it suits northern growing for a variety of reasons: small intensive beds allow us to avoid improving large areas of our poor soil, small beds are easier to protect from the elements, and the square foot approach makes it easy to experiment with many different plants and varieties. If you want to use the square foot method, I recommend visiting the Square Foot Gardening website. You should particularly check out the “latest improvements” on the “what’s new” page – these refinements include several tips that are perfect for northern gardeners.

  The only minor problem with Bartholomew’s book is that square foot gardening is presented as an almost perfect, utopian system. It is a great place to start, but, naturally, readers must adapt and tweak the system to suit local circumstances.

After re-reading the books, I took a long tape measure and made a bunch of measurements of my yard and lot. Then, I drafted the diagram above using the program Dia (it is free and open source, but only runs on Linux – you could do something similar on paper or with free OpenOffice Impress presentation software). By mapping out the beds, I knew exactly how much lumber and soil mixture I would need. I also knew roughly how much food I could grow. More about that later.

This picture is me at the Yellowknife Dump recently. I had borrowed a truck and was dropping off; the people in the background were picking up. For those who don’t know Yellowknife, we have a long and healthy tradition of dump salvaging. It is one of the reasons I like our landfill facility (as much as it is possible to like a pile of garbage). There really is a lot of perfectly good stuff at the dump. Why shouldn’t people take it away and continue to use it?

The dump is a pretty good place for birdwatching, too. You can see lots of gulls and ravens, even bald eagles.

Another reason I like our dump is that you don’t just throw your waste into a nice, hygenic bin. You have to go right to the active area of the landfill and look at all the waste we create. Every time I visit, it reminds me that everything, everything, everything we buy ends up at the dump eventually (with the exception of food, which ends up at the sewage lagoon down the road). Even things that seem quite permanent: books, furniture, appliances, buildings – all eventually end up here. Some items may last hours (packaging), days (disposable items), months (a lot of clothing), years (furniture), or decades (buildings and books), but all of it someday ends up as waste in a landfill (or littered on the side of a highway). A recycled item may have a longer lifetime, but given enough time, all of its constituent molecules wind up in the dump, too. I suppose the odd item avoids this fate: diamonds, museum collections, etc., but you get the idea.

The dump is a wondrous monument to our lifestyle. Regular visits to see the broken plastic gewgaws, old barbecues, wrecked cars, soiled furniture, and broken computers are the best anti-consumer vaccine I can think of.

Inspired by City Farmer’s instructions and photo gallery, I decided that I needed to make a pet waste digester for our dog and cat waste. City Farmer has a great website, by the way, so have a look at their other features.

The digester (sort of a septic system for pet waste) is essentially a hole in the ground with a plastic garbage can as a liner. Pet waste and septic system bacteria go in. The waste liquefies and is absorbed by the subsoil. Eventually (as much as several years later) you can dig out the compost and use it on non-food plants (or just fill in the top of the hole and start over, I suppose).

Without a car (or with one for that matter) it is awkward to take pet waste out to the sewage lagoon where it is supposed to go. I have already written about our experiment with flushable cat litter. It has worked out reasonably well for two of our three cats, but one refuses to use the flushable litter. That means we still have one cat box which uses unflushable clay litter. We also have a dog who refuses to use the litter box altogether!

Read on for photos and a description of how I made the pet waste digester.

(more…)

Everything characteristic about the condition we call modern life has been a direct result of our access to abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have permitted us to fly, to go where we want to go rapidly, and move things easily from place to place. Fossil fuels rescued us from the despotic darkness of the night. They have made the pharaonic scale of building commonplace everywhere. They have allowed a fractionally tiny percentage of our swollen populations to produce massive amounts of food. They have allowed us to develop industries of surpassing ingenuity and to push the limits of what it even means to be human to the strange frontier where man imagines himself into a kind of machine immortality.

-James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency

We have finally, finally, finally sold our van. It was in the paper for two months and I reduced the price drastically, but at least it is gone. What a relief.

p.s. Note my cool “lunar modules” in the foreground. I’ll write more about them soon.

It’s true. I was shocked to learn that the Arctic Farmer nursery has a small flock of chickens. They produce a couple of dozen eggs per day which are sold from the Arctic Farmer store. You pay only $3.75 for a dozen delicious, local, organic (mostly) eggs. Get there early before they sell out.

I should also mention that they have a small herd of very cute pygmy goats, too. Arctic farmer is on Drybones Drive in Kam Lake. They sell perennials, seed potatoes, bedding plants, etc. The staff is very knowledgeable about gardening in the subarctic, so if you want to raise some of your own food, this is the place to start.

My daughter was wearing these spiffy organic socks yesterday. My wife bought them for her from Many Moons, a BC company which also sells reusable menstrual products, organic underwear and similar products.

According to the Many Moons site:

In just 40 years, the marketers of disposable menstruation products have convinced women in North America that chlorine bleached disposable pads and tampons are the only option. They are wrong! Most women outside of North America and Europe continue to use cloth menstrual pads – just as our grandmothers did. Switching to Many Moons encourages a healthier attitude about our bodies and menstruation.