Month: August 2017

Visited the beautiful Loutet Farm in North Vancouver run by the Edible Garden Project. These urban farm visits provide an opportunity for youth to check out different forms of urban agriculture, but more importantly, to get a real life farm experience, few of us really ever get. The youth really connect with farm work, in part, the physical work but also knowing that they are contributing to something meaningful. Cool to hear some of the kids actually say they would like to be farmers.

I have said it before that Strathcona and Cottonwood gardens offer such a wonderful variety of learning experiences to keep the youth interested. It is the beauty of semi wild, diverse spaces. This week we cleared some more invasive plants and bushes in preparation to plant more native species and to create a food forest structure in the Environmental Youth Alliance garden area. The youth also installed some birdhouses they made, we picked apples and other fruits, learned more about pollinators and pollinator attracting flowers, and did some seed saving.

Nature has an remarkable way of growing back in force, in particular, the invasive plants, such as Himalayan Blackberry. In our Wild Minds program with Environmental Youth Alliance and Evergreen BC, we are also helping to rewild urban spaces, and today spent time clearing away invasive plants in an area of the youth garden to help support a new food forest and planting of native plants. Later picked Oregon grapes, Mulberrys, apples and plums and made fruit leather, as a suggested activity by one of the youth.

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The Grandview Woodland Food Connection and Britannia Community Centre are pleased to participate in this year’s Wild Salmon Caravan with a kick off Vancouver Parade on Oct 7th. As our contribution to this parade, we will be organizing a series of arts builds at Britannia (See our poster below) focusing on creating bike salmon art and bike floats and encouraging the bike community to participate in the parade and help promote a carbon free future, recognizing that climate change is a serious threat to the survival of wild salmon.

So, we hope to see you at our arts Builds and at the Vancouver Wild Salmon Parade. For more information, check out the Wild Salmon Caravan facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/wildsalmoncaravan/

We are in the mid summer doldrums and heatwaves. The plants need a lot of watering and the youth are keen to take on this task. Took some more time to clear some scrub bush to replace with new native plants as part of Environmental Youth Alliance work to clear invasive and rewild areas of the garden and further afield. Later collected calendula seeds as part of our seed saving effort. With the heat, we stayed indoors out of the sun after lunch and built some swallow, flicker, chickadee, and mason bee homes to put up in the gardens.

Wild Minds Week 4 – Visited the The Sharing Farm in Richmond, which is mostly volunteer run and grows food to support the local foodbank. Was such a beautiful reprise from the busyness of the city and to get out into nature. Had to take the skytrain into Richmond and bus to No 1 Road and Westminster Highway, then 10 minute walk to the farm. Saw an amazingly productive greenhouse and helped weed the carrots. Was so much fun, the kids actually wished they could stay longer. Thing is, the experience of working on a real farm is something the kids have never done before (let along most of us city dwellers) and they really enjoyed the meditative nature of weeding.