Upcoming Events and our New Approach

TWO EVENTS – Adaptation, Re-skilling, and Re-programming:

1.  Next Open House here at Eco-Sense for sales of Perennial Edible Plants or just coming out to walk around and chat is on Sat Oct. 3rd from 10am-2pm.   3295 Compton road, East Highlands, Victoria, BC.
2. FOOD WORKSHOP – ONLY 1 spot left:  $100 + GST (Includes lunch)

When:  Wednesday Sept 30th from 9am-3pm

Where:  3295 Compton Road in the East Highlands

What:  No Farting Around Food Preservation – Learn how we do it here using less energy and mostly local ingredients.

• Fermentation demos – pickles and beans maybe some cabbage
• Cheese demos (hard, soft and feta – including waxing and pressing)
• Ginger beer: counter top method; Quick, simple and 10-15% alc.
• Food drying – ideas and methods
• Milk Kefir
• Grain fermenting – oats for breakfast cereal.
• Garden tour (includes root cellar, eco-hut, chickens etc)
• Includes LUNCH:  Local food including Gord’s sourdough, Eco-Sense quinoa wraps made with fermented grape leaves.  Dried wild salmon  jerky, (Gord caught) and of course a sampling of cheeses, and fermented foods.  Enjoy a glass of ginger beer or home made beer (with our own hops).  Herbal tea (nettle, mint and stevia).  Dried fruit samples for dessert.
• A few simple kits available for purchase to get you started fermenting or brewing.
• Lets explore food, health, adaptation, and resilience.
• email ann@eco-sense to reserve your spot.
• Please, no fragrances.

Ginger Beer at about 15% alcohol

Our New Approach:  Over the years we have been learning about holistic management with regards to permaculture and to life planning while at the same time co-creating and implementing the Highlands Integrated Community Sustainability Plan.  These two planning tools are remarkably similar in their approach to making decisions and achieving goals.

Time to start having some fun again and stop taking everything so seriously.  Yup, we are going to die, our families are going to die, our much loved dog Boo already died, MudPuddle our duck died, we just killed and ate our rooster, and oh yeah, the oceans are also dying.  It’s all dying, but we are alive and healthy now, and we have a LOT of work to do and fun times to have.  Life is a roller coaster of sorrow and joy…that’s just the way it is.

In our 10 years of Eco-Sense adventures, and in our personal lives, we have had wonderful success basically flying by the seat of our pants.  However, some of this has caught up to us and we have been letting some very important areas of our life slide.  This, combined with our busyness, cultural programming (autopilot),  and communication deficiencies has made it abundantly clear to us that we need to slow down and come up with a new strategy to move forward with the next stage of our lives.

So here are the steps we are taking:

• Holistic plan for our life (including Eco-Sense).
• shared vision statement – high level
• Identify categories (focus areas) with our combined descriptions of success (desired outcomes).  Where would we like to be in 5 years or 10 years? (For us, these goals are mostly NOT material goals)
• Action items (Strategic Plan).  Some examples are learning and practicing NVC (non-violent communication), grief sharing (connecting through empathy), preparing for a massive change in civiliation (due to ecological and economic decline/collapse) with emotional preparations, skills, infrastructure investments, resilience, and building community, etc)
• Measurement tools (Are we making progress?)
• Create decision making tools so that we don’t make decisions on autopilot according to our cultural programming.  Is each decision moving us towards our descriptions of success or away?
• And lots more.
• 

Anyways, that’s where we are at.

Ann and Gord