Eco-Sense

Eco-Hut in the morning sun

A short entry this week, as it has been busy with the instant and welcomed sight of the sun and the cozy warm temperatures.   Observations from the hill are an addictive pass time as Ann and I share our new and entertaining stories of the landscape and observations with each other.  Gord likes to think that he  notices many of the same subtle things as Ann, but really Ann usually kicks his butt at noticing things.  This year though he is feeling pretty proud of his observation skills.  (rants at the end of our post)

Our recent workshop held in the Eco-Sense MUDRoom on Resilient Food Systems  was fully booked.   This 3 hr course lasted for 4.5 enthusiastic hours as the questions kept coming.  We will allow more time next time we offer this course.

This year, the non native European Paper Wasps (Polistes dominula) are so numerous that it is mind boggling… and somewhat frightening.  We have not yet observed a single native yellowjacket or native paper wasp.  These normally docile garden carnivores are a huge gift for the garden as they are responsible for the control of aphids, cabbage worms, and pretty much every other small life form.  Normally they only get goofy (aggressive) near the end of summer.  This year is not the case, as they cover everything… they are fighting amongst themselves, and a little testy with us.  (This is where Ann edited out Gord’s testicle joke).   Last year Ann received two stings between her fingers and consequently suffered with a swollen itchy mitt almost up to her elbow.  When Gord gets stung, it hurts, but then we can never see where… Ann thinks he’s just making some ploy to get attention. (Guys these days eh?)

One of last years nests…painted around it. Not aggressive at all.

Unfortunately, we will need to knock the populations back a bit pretty quickly but we are attempting to hold off until after the main fruit tree blossoms are completed.   How carnivorous are they?  Gord watched one almost cut a caterpillar in half, three times the size of the wasp… then try to carry it away.  We like them around, but this is just too many.  We will remove small selected nests in the evening with a small bagless shop vacuum.  The selected nest are under our chairs, by the front door, next to the cob oven, at the outside garden sink, and about half of the nests in the greenhouse.  Walking into the greenhouse is like entering a swarming hive.  Anyone else have this issue this year?

spraying everything in the nursery with compost tea

Plant Sales:  Every Saturday from 10am-2pm we will continue with the farm sales of perennial edible plants until the end of May.

Climbing Vines form an important part of our food systems.

• Just this week, we planted more thornless blackberries… one of our very favourite berries.  These are easy to control, ready before Himalayan blackberries, even better flavour (hard to imagine, but true), larger fruit, less seedy, and very abundant and did I mention that these do NOT make you bleed?  Trellis the vines, or simply cut canes at about 6-8 feet tall.  Could also tie to a sunny fence.
• Logan berries.  We love these too and plant them on the same trellis as the thornless blackberries.  Ready about 2 weeks before the thornless blackberries.
• Hops.  We have large CASCADE hop plants for $25.  These plants will produce this year.  Good for beer and for bedtime teas.
• Kiwi’s.  We have Fuzzy, Hardy, and Arctic.  Hardy’s are our favourite as they are productive, easy to grow, partly shade tolerant (half sun), and have no fuzz.  VERY yummy.  Arctic kiwi’s grow in the shade and are very beautiful, also fuzz-less, and tasty.  Most are male and female except for the hardy Assai.
• NEW this year:  Apios Americana (common names include ground nut, potatoes bean, Indian potato).  Nitrogen fixing vine that produces small potatoes like tubers with a very choice nutty flavour. These are perennials that grow like tall runner beans.  I’m going to try growing mine in a large container as the rabbits like the vines, and voles like the tubers.  Small plants take 2 years to produce a crop.  only $6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apios_americana
• Chinese Yam  or Cinnamon-vine.  Very nutritious and potato like.  Perennial beautiful vines with glossing heart shaped leaves.  Grow in large containers as the large and ugly tubers will go down very deep.  These can be invasive in some soils. $16.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yam 

Self fertile Issai Hardy Kiwi

Male and female hardy Kiwi’s

Ground nut (Apios Americana)

Hops (Cascade)

Established trellis with thornless blackberries and Logan berries

New berry trellis

We now have a free table with lots of great plants that need a home.  Why Free you ask?  Well, some of them are unnamed varieties, (tag went missing), some we have too many of, and some just need a bit of love.

And an Update on the Essential Composting Toilet book.   The copy editor has read and reviewed it, and sent her initial comments.  All Gord’s diagrams will need to be edited and have all the Canadian English replaced with the US spellings.  What does this mean?  Four more solid days sitting, and 3 days to re-upload all the images again.  Does this not seem arrogant and crazy.   Can our American neighbours not comprehend the word colour over color?   Yeesh!

And one more tiny little rant regarding Used Victoria.  We have used this service over the past few years to help advertise our plants… we even pay for some ads, but most are free.  Anyways, we may not be able to do this anymore as they are calling Eco-Sense a commercial seller.  Are we?

• We are a very small farm open only 4 hours per week about 4 months per year.
• We are not even a corporation… we operate as an un-incorporated partnership.

The Used Victoria ads (free and paid) have been a primary marketing tool for us… Now what?

No wonder small farms give up…

Ann and Gord

What are Ann and I doing today?   What else other than planting more trees!  We have been plann(t)ing this for about two years, and well, when the weather is chill and damp, and the house is chill, and the only thing that is hot (other than Ann in gumboots and a big wool sweater) are more nuts and pears in the ground.
So though it may seem cool, damp and grey, this is the BEST time to be planting your perennial food crops.  The Eco-Sense nursery is open every Saturday this spring from 10am-2pm for plant sales of of all our favourite fruit, nut, and berry bushes.

Spring Last year

We are well stocked with plants we have propagated and grafted ourselves and purchased from other suppliers.  Here’s a partial list.

Plums are in bloom

Fruit Trees:  Apples, Plums, Pears, Apricots, Cherries, Figs, and Peaches.

Special Fruit Trees:  Medlar, Mulberry (limited stock), Quince, PawPaw, Persimmon, etc.  We also have 1 pollinating pair of the hard to find Cornelian Cherry that we have grown from seed.  ($60 for the pair)

Nut Trees: small almonds, Hazelnuts, Pecans, Walnuts, small Yellowhorn, Chestnuts, and even the very beautiful Russian Almond.  Bigger yellowhorns will be here late April.

Berry bushes: Currents (red, white, black), Gooseberry, Josta Berry, Elderberry, Evergreen Huckleberry, Raspberry (Cascade Delight)

Climbers:  Cascade Hops, Kiwi (Fuzzy, hardy, and arctic), Thornless blackberry, Logan berry, Cinnamon (Chinese) Yam, and Grapes

Berry Producing Nitrogen Fixers: Autumn Olive, Goumi, Sea Berry, Silver Berry

Mountain Pepper

Teas and Herbs: Tea (Sochi and Korean), Sechuan pepper, Japanesse pepper, Mountain Pepper, Siberian Ginseng, Wooly Tea Tree, Wintergreen

Vegetable plants like Hosta and edible BAMBOO

Lots of varieties with excellent information sheets in the nursery to help choose the right fruit and the right pollinators.  Inventory list here.  Prices INCLUDE the GST.

SPECIAL  The $5 (Gord Screwed Up) table for  unnamed varieties and stuff that GORD lost the tag to… and its a shame to discard it for no name, is edible and would want to a new home that gives it better attention than GORD gave it.  We also have Desert King figs ($15) and most grapes ($10) on sale.  (BTW…Gord wrote this …not Ann.  Actually the ducks are to blame for many missing plant labels.)

Special Plant Workshop on Resilient Food Systems: Fruit Nut, and Berry Crops:  (only a few spots left).  WHEN: Sunday April 22 (Earth Day…also Gord’s birthday). TIME: 9am-noon.

DETAILS:  Explore the different food producing trees that are ideal for OUR climate and YOUR home and lifestyle. Presentation with Q&A to learn about fruit trees, nut trees, berries bushes, vines and support plants to create a sustaining eco-system to nourish the land, our bellies, and our souls.

Answer such plant questions as soil types, water requirements, sun exposure, weather toughness, crop timing, pollination, guilds (what likes to grow together), and how to process, store, and eat.

The MUD room @ Eco-Sense – Classroom for Radical Learning

Classroom session followed by a guided tour to see plants in action.

For anyone that wishes to hang around after the 3 hour class, bring your lunch and we can all sit and chat.

Plant nursery will be open following lunch.  Register Here:   $20

IN OTHER NEWS:

• We have our first Wwoofer coming in April…and keeping with our values she is  local (Washington) and did not fly here.  🙂
• We have sourced out replacement sweet chestnut stock and are accepting serious orders with deposits… the more people that order a tree or 20, the better.  Named varieties include Bisalta No. 3, Szego, Prococe Migoule, Bouche de Betizac.  If we order 200 trees, we can minimize the shipping costs, but expected pricing on trees between 36″ to 84″ is likely in the $40-$60 range.
• We are just nailing down the details of have ongoing live on-site help for 3 months this summer to help in the nursery.
• We are planning another camping trip this summer and have some dog, chicken, duck, and garden loving friends housesitting for 10 days this summer.   Woohoo.
• Still waiting on the final news for when our book on Composting Toilets will be published.  Stay tuned for upcoming news and workshops.
  

  We love camping!

On social media and blog posts we often see just the good stuff.  The fun, the happy, the success!  Of course this is not reality, and we all know this.  But so often we can’t help but compare our own lives to those we admire and are left with the feelings of not measuring up or feeling bad about our own life.  So today in this short post we thought we would share a snippet of our “other stuff”.

Book to be published fall 2018

We have just spent the better part of the last 5 months writing a book on a topic we are quite passionate about…compost toilets.  Interestingly, we had said no to the publisher the first time we were asked to write this book…but eventually our resolve weakened and we agreed to write the book when the time lines were extended another year.  The book is pretty much done now, and we are very pleased with the result.  We have dreams that it will truly be a book to take the topic of compost toilets “From Waste Stream to Mainstream” and help countless people and communities locally and globally find ways to safely deal with human “resources” in an era of rapidly declining water resources.  Our first book will be published early this fall and the sales and big bucks should start rolling in.  Ha.  In the meantime, our cash flow has plummeted.  Our combined total Eco-Sense net income for the past five months has been less than $3,000.  (Nursery sales, consulting, tours, workshops, presentations, etc).

Gord bundled up at his desk this morning…feet on pillow, sunbeams coming in, compost toilet books on coffee table, and if you zoom in on his screen you see a toilet.

Cash flow being very poor is only one piece… we have been so busy and focussed on the book, that a few other things didn’t happen that should have happened.   Don’t you hate that word “should”.  But in our case, we should have got more wood in the wood shed…it was a VERY cold winter…rationing wood.  At lease our CO2 emissions have been even lower than normal.  Thank goodness the temperatures are rising and the solar is heating the home and providing much of our heat.  The solar thermal evacuated tubes are making LOTS of hot water to pump through the floors keeping our home at a lovely 17 deg C.  Interesting experiment for sure, and we kind of like the indoor toque look.  Still rather cold for sitting on ones butt at a desk.  Ann has taken the heating pad used for the baby chicks and is splurging on electricity to pre heat the bed.  (Note that we could have found and purchased more wood, but with the bank account now empty, we decided to just make due).

Chickens have gone into egg production overdrive…and you’ve got to love fresh oca and beets from the garden (grown in raised garden beds with simple hoop covers).  Gord and Nina photo bombed my food photo.  We have SO much food.

Gord also “should” have got busy hunting for venison…or even some front yard rabbits, but was too busy and focused last fall.  Even our dog Nina has found the time in her busy nap schedule to hunt some food.  sheesh…

So, we have been scrambling to get the spring nursery season going and start our workshop series in the MUD room @ Eco-Sense.  (details of workshops here) Last year our spring nursery season got off to a fantastic start with LOTS of people and good sales.  We were actually TOO busy to properly serve all our customers.  We did everything the same this year…except hardly anyone came…and last week NO ONE came.  Sad day!  We have no idea what happened.  We have more stock, healthy plants, bigger plants and lower prices for many items given their larger sizes.  So, we’ve been brainstorming what happened and why?

Fresh lemonade from our own lemons.  Life is good!

Anyways, we’ve been finding that the nursery is A LOT of work and isn’t particularly profitable when all the costs are factored in.  We may downsize and just specialize with a few plants…like nut trees and a few others that we can propagate easily here.  This would likely mean not have the regular nursery hours.  We are finding that most of our sales happen by private appointment now anyways.  BUT, in the meantime, we are still moving forward with the spring season.  Here’s our list of plants and we will continue with the Saturday 10am-2pm open house for sales of perennial edible plants for the next little while.

Now the reality check on the reality check…

WE ARE SO LUCKY and GRATEFUL for our lives.  We are healthy and happy, have great friends and a wonderful community, kids are doing great, our parents and siblings are doing great, and we have very rewarding day to day lives living in a beautiful place with meaningful work in alignment with our values.  We have excellent and abundant food, clean water, and don’t live in fear of violence or rape.  We have so much more security and happiness than most people on this earth.  We continue with our passion to live in a way to reduce our impact to people and the planet and we do this from a place of LOVE and not GUILT.

Cob oven pizza with the kids.

Life isn’t perfect, we have our challenges, and we are grateful for our incredible life with all it’s ups and downs.

So despite our bank account being empty, life is pretty full.   Note: we still have some emergency savings and are doing just fine…despite the indoor toques.

Ann and Gord