Eco-Sense

Eco-Sense Nursery – Year 3

Posted on April 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

Three years ago the Eco-Sense nursery idea was seeded. The idea grew out of our distress with the state of the world with respect to quality of food, ecological collapse, and looming economic insecurity. We wished to pursue a resilient lifestyle that could buffer these changes while providing excellent food, free of chemical contamination. At the same time it was essential to us that we love what we do and how we spend our days.

The nursery has certainly become one piece of this puzzle and now in our third year the business is thriving and Gord and I may actually be able to go to the dentist. woohoo! We combine our nursery income, with income from tours, speaking engagements, workshops, consultations, rain water installations, various small building projects, council work, and cleaning the public bathroom (humanure of course). This will be the start of the 6th year for the composting toilet contract…wow time flies… and better yet… no flies!.

We will continue with the Saturday open houses for sale of perennial edible plants for the rest of spring. Updated Plant List here. Prices include GST.

Saturdays from 10am-2pm at 3295 Compton Road, East Highlands
- April 9, 16, 23, 30, May 7, 14, 21
- If you can’t make the Saturday dates, send us an email to set up a time to visit the nursery to buy some plants. ann@eco-sense.ca

Plant Pots: We will buy your large pots in good condition. If you have lots we could pick up or if you just have a few you could bring them to one of our Saturday Farm sales or set up another time to drop off.

$0.50 for 2-4 gallon
$1.00 for 5-9 gallon
$1.50 for 10+ gallon

Chicken Runs: We have been converting our annual planted chicken runs with perennial plants. In the last few days we have planted 1 MULBERRY, 2 DWARF CHERRIES, 2 PEARS, 3 PLUMS, 2 HARDY KIWI, 8 COMFREY, and 5 BROAD LEAF FRENCH SORREL. (additions to the existing hazelnuts, figs, plum and mulberry). Each is secured like Fort Knox as the roots are a little chicken of fowl play. These perennials will help build the soil, be less work, and provide lots of dropped food (more bugs the better) for the chickens and us (hopefully not too many bugs). We are also going to down size our chicken flock to keep it at around 10 laying hens. This will be much easier on the land, less work for us, and less eggs to wash and sell. We easily sell our amazing eggs…but it’s not cost effective for the amount of time and the impact to the land. It probably works out to less than $1 per hour for our time. For now, we will still have some eggs for sale.

Strawberries for sale – Ever Bearing – $2 each

Other Chicken News: We have a broody chicken sitting on 12 eggs…this is the earliest we have ever had a chicken go broody. Due to hatch in 2 weeks. Gord only killed one of its potential kids when he dropped an egg while moving her to the broody box, (the same box we call the drunk tank where we place stoned chickens we find who have ingested mushrooms in the fall).

Eco-Sense Video of the Week: Here is a favourite video from WAY back with all of us building the Eco-Sense house. Such good memories. Knowledge Network 8 minute video filmed in 2007 and 2008. (Gord urges you NOT to watch… please no!)

Cob woodworking shop under construction

Eco-Sense Photo Memory of the Week: Cob wood working shop under construction.

Baird Council Initiative of the Week: This initiative was from last year, but Ann was quite happy to finally have the Highlands Sustainability Appraisal form updated with changes to the flows of Capital. The original form was a product of the first sustainability group that Ann participated in with 8 others many years ago. It’s a powerful 2 page planning tool for council and staff to use when assessing the capital flows between Natural, Human, Social, Financial, and Manufactured capital with any project being undertaken in the Highlands. Finally we are accounting for impacts to future generations, GHG emissions from loss of forest and soil, GHG’s from embodied energy in materials used in construction, loss of habitat for other species, and even inequality. Lots of changes made. Now we just have to use these results to inform our decision making.

Links: Great article on Tree Eater Nursery on Denman Island. They are doing very similar work as we are at Eco-Sense.

Baird Council Failure of the week: Gord is in the process of having one of BC best speakers on the topic of climate change and municipal adaptation come and present. The initial pushback could mean imminent failure… despite the vast array of tools and knowledge that Deborah Harford, the Executive Director of SFU ACT has. Not a failure yet, but definitely some pushback.

AND A NOTICE for those waiting for GLOBE ARTICHOKES… they have arrived.

That’s it for now…thanks for reading,

Ann and Gord

We have leaves!

Posted on March 30, 2016 | 3 comments

Yes, finally, after three weeks of selling plants that are basically dormant sticks, we now have leaves…lots of glorious leaves. Every day we enjoy walking through the food forest and the nursery to look at the leaves and some flowers. This is an excellent time of year to plant your new trees and shrubs as the soil is still cool and moist.

This week, we have more new plants to add to our stock of almost 200 varieties of plants. Here’s the updated inventory list with prices (all prices include the GST).

Sweet potatoes are sitting in the window and starting to make some eyes…in a few week the little sweet potatoes starts should be ready (SWEET!). We had an abundant crop of these amazing tubers as did many others who purchased their sweet potatoes slips from us last year. And yes, those are lemons growing outside the window.

Grafting Workshop: It was a great success with teens and adults. Everyone learned about grafting and went home with two of their very own grafted apple trees. It was wonderful to see such pride on everyone’s face.

Eco-Sense potting mix. Ann has been starting some of our veggies for the garden and has made up her own special mix. It includes a bit of goat bedding manure in the very bottom of the pot, then filled almost to the top with worm castings (from our veggie sink composter), and then topped with a very fine sifted layer of 2 year old aged humanure. Go tomatoes!!!

Beautiful multi coloured eggs…fresh from the chickens and ducks.

Eco-Sense Video of the week: West shore TV did a great little video of our house a few years back…here it is (only 5 minutes): Highlands Eco-Sense Home

Holding our award for the Living Building Challenge

Eco-Sense Photo Memory of the Week: The easy part was building one of the world greenest modern houses as rated on the World’s strictest green building platform…the hard part is living a green lifestyle. Why is it hard? Culture damn it, and the programming that pushes the Bigger, Better, Faster, More. More often than not we feel very lonely, and perhaps slightly crazy.

Baird Council Initiative of the Week: This is budget time for municipal governments and we talk about taxation, revenues, expenses, municipal assets and everything to do with financial and manufactured capital. Problem is, we leave off the balance sheet anything to do with natural capital. While I (Ann) really don’t like the idea of giving a monetary value to living systems, the fact is that our society only sees value when a $$$$ is connected, our natural environment provides amazing and very expensive ecosystem services that would cost the municipality and our citizens A LOT of financial capital if we had to actually pay for these services. Here in the Highlands we are mostly on ground water and rely on this resource to be clean and abundant. If we had to pipe in water or set up rain water systems for everyone in the Highlands, this would come at a price of roughly $27 MILLION DOLLARS (900 homes x $30,000 per household). Over time we damage the land by putting in impervious surfaces, building houses, driveways, and roads, allow industrial activities, we blast, we dig, we fill, we use toxic chemicals in our homes, we cut trees, damage wetlands, etc, and all the while, we are drawing down our natural capital and reducing these ecosystem services. Ann spoke to this during the budget discussions and suggested that Natural Capital should appear as a municipal asset right next to roads and structures. She also suggested that our activities are rapidly depreciating this asset and consequently it would be prudent to recover these costs to complete other restorative ecosystem projects so that we don’t have a net negative impact on our capital. Her comments were well received, but it was noted that this probably wasn’t legal within the context of municipal laws and accounting principles. Highlands’ Mayor did mention that these same conversations are occurring at the CRD board level.

Baird JOINT Council Failure of the Week (rant): Given that it is tax time for local governments, both Ann and Gord felt that business and light industrial should move to a higher tax multiple. For reference the residential tax multiple is 1 and other tax classes like business, utilities, industrial, etc are multiples of this meaning that they generally pay more taxes on their assessed value. This is why municipalities talk about diversifying their tax base. For reference the provincial average for light industry and business are 3.40 and 2.45 respectively meaning that they pay more taxes per $ of assessed value. Here in the CRD there is a very large range of multiples with some urban communities having lower tax multiples, and more rural communities having higher tax multiples. Anyways, for many reasons (which we won’t go into), Highlands had been giving business and light industry a major tax break where their multiple were close to the residential multiple of 1. This means that residents were carrying more of the tax burden than is the standard. AACK! Last year our council agreed to address this, but were sensitive to the business and industrial land owners to phase in the increase back to accepted levels…Gord and I were less sensitive but were convinced by other councillors that this would be appropriate. This year we were feeling less sensitive as we were feeling more sensitive to regular citizens of the Highlands (the majority) AND to raise some extra revenue to cover depreciation expenses… something that had not been done by any of the past councils. We both feel strongly that more money should be put away into capital reserves to cover the costs of aging municipal infrastructure and to build up funds for the coming impacts of climate change, impacts due to extreme weather events on our infrastructure. This just seemed prudent…and since business and industry had been getting a tax break for many years we thought that their tax rates should be raised sooner rather than phased in slowly over 3 years. We were defeated 5 to 2. AACK again! There seemed to be little interest in addressing depreciation and amortization as it would upset the business class… leaving the residents on the hook for a troublesome future.

And as for those leaves we mentioned… as there are more leaves, there is more that leaves, and that actually leaves us a little sad. We develop connections with our plants… after all there is a little bit of us in many of the plants that we have given a shit about.

keep trying,

Gord and Ann

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Posted in Eco-Sense Updates

Spring Swing of Things

Posted on March 24, 2016 | 1 comment

Saturday March 26 farm gate sales for perennial edible plants. Lots of new items this week including:

Asparagus: some bare root ($10 for 5) and potted ($3/ea). Bare root will only be available this week!!!
Strawberries: some bare root ($5 for 10) and potted ($2/ea). Bare root only this week.
Thornless blackberries (Chester and Black Satin): $14/ea
Logan Berries: $13/ea
Rhubarb (Sutton Seedless): $12/ea
Perennial Leek (2 year old for $8; freshly planted for $5; bulbs ($3 each).
New last week from Geoff Johnson:
- Goumie,
- Josta Berries,
- Clove currants,
- Mulberry (Hunza),
- Goji (Spring Ridge variety),
- Dessert King Figs in 2 gal.

Same place, same time: Saturday 10am – 2pm 3295 Compton Road in the (East) Highlands. Please park at the bottom of the hill if you are just coming to look around. Drive on up if you are planning to buy plants.

Full updated plant list…PRICES INCLUDE GST.

Two great perennial edible plants sales on this Saturday…check out Hatchet & Seed in North Saanich…here’s the link: http://hatchetnseed.ca/edible-plant-sale/

Can’t make it to the Saturday plant sales? No problem, send us an email to book your PRIVATE appointment in the nursery. ann@eco-sense.ca or gord@eco-sense.ca Ask about our discount for large orders.

Eco-Sense video of the Week: Here is part 2 of a garden tour filmed by Peak Moment TV about 3 years ago when we were just starting the food forest…sure looks different now, but still a great video. http://peakmoment.tv/videos/food-and-permaculture/grow-your-food-in-a-nook-and-cranny-garden-part-2-290/

: Nodding Onion Seeds on grafted plants

: Grafted Paw Paw

Grafting: Gord has been busy grafting all week. He picked up 150 rootstocks last Friday at the BC Fruit Testers AGM. His presentation to that group seemed to be very well received.

Final harvest of Jerusalem artichokes…ready for fermenting. Yummy, crunchy pickles!

Food: We are eating abundant and delicious food from our garden…in fact we have been all winter. At every meal we feel such gratitude for the bounty we enjoy and the fact that we do not have to consume food from the industrial agricultural system. This is no easy task, growing, harvesting, and sustainably processing our bounty is hard work. Our gut micro biome has evolved to the place where we eat lots of jerusalem artichokes fresh and fermented…they are one of our favourites. These inulin filled prebiotic tubers feed our gut bacteria, and our bacteria feed us with all kinds of nutrients. The latest science on this topic indicates that a healthy gut micro biome contributes significantly to our immune function and our brain chemistry. We literally are what we eat and processed industrial food full of chemical toxins and low in fibre is making people sick. But remember, sick people are good for the economy.

Baird council Initiative of the week:

Gord sits on the CRD Water Commission and initiated a motion (from the sideline), for rain water harvesting in the region that has passed. WOOHOO. To come, will be the details as to what the CRD will incorporate into the strategy. The concept is that specific guidelines for potable water will be stated, cross connection considerations be approved, and the design criteria to allow for such be part of the strategy.
Follow up from last week. Ann’s comments on the BC Climate Leadership Plan were fully endorsed by Highlands council and will be submitted on behalf of Highlands council. Topic covered include: aviation, LNG, carbon neutral forestry and agriculture, carbon budgets, embodied carbon in construction, loss of sequestered carbon in our natural habitat, CONSERVATION, and more.

Picnic table dog

Baird Council FAILURE of the Week: Ann represents the Highlands for our regions economic development initiative and tried valiantly to get the following phrase inserted into the constitution of the new society that was being formed to shape the economics of the region; “Promoting local economic resilience through the opportunities arising from mitigating and adapting to climate change”. This new society is made up of funding partners from most local municipalities, business, educational institutions, and economic development business groups. There has also been an effort to get first Nations on board. Most people in the group were not interested in inserting anything to do with climate change into the constitution and there was quite the maneuvering to dilute the municipal vote. Ann kept Highlands council up to date with her memos to council. For anyone who shares Ann’s morbid fascination with the internal workings of the system, here’s the links to learn more:
First memo Dec 21, 2015:
Letter written to SVIEDA from Highlands:
Second memo to Highlands Council Jan 21, 2016:

Ann’s Facebook post on this subject can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/ann-baird/economic-development-and-climate-change/10154560046207564

Photo from our Eco-Sense Past.

Lower cob walls complete…ready for the bond beam.

Link for the week: Newest paper from James Hanson and 18 other climate scientists was just published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Link Basically we could see multi-meter sea level rise THIS century and 2 deg C rise in temp is not safe. This is a problem not for the future, but NOW. We have a climate emergency. This link really sums up this latest research which has been all over the alternative news…but has anyone come across it in the mainstream media????

Thanks for reading,
Ann and Gord

1 Comment

Posted in Eco-Sense Updates

SUNDAY: Farm Sales and garden walk

Posted on March 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

Hi Everyone. This week only, we will be open for plant sales in the nursery on SUNDAY. For the rest of the spring season we will only be open on Saturdays. Nursery is full of new information signs (and plants).

Where: 3295 Compton road in the east Highlands

When: 10am – 2pm

FREE to walk around – Even if you are not buying plants you can come out to look around and walk through the emerging food forest and look at our permaculture homestead. Please park at the bottom of the hill if you are not buying plants.

Food forest. Plants are all coming to life and many have signs so you know what’s what.

New Plants this week: Globe Artichoke, Burbank Plum (Asian), Damson Plum, Santa Rosa Plum (pollinator for Black Amber and Burbank), Pear – Bartlett (classic pollinator for most pears), Pear – 20th Century (Asian pear), Pear – Chojuro (Asian Pear), Pear – Shinseiki (Asian Pear), Strawberry – Quinault, Thornless Blackberry – Black Satin, Thornless Blackberry – Chester, Logan Berry, Rhubarb – Sutton Seedless, Perennial Leek, Asparagus – Millennium (bare root), Black Velvet Gooseberry, Goji Berry – 2′ tall. Plant list with prices. All prices include GST

New plant signs with key info

Reminder of BC Fruit Testers yearly meeting ($10 membership required): Saturday morning on March 19. Gord will be there and speaking on the topic of UNCONVENTIONAL AGRICULTURE at 11:30am. BC Fruit Testers AGM

Eco-Hut with 4ft galvalume garden bed.

Other things for sale:

* Galvalume Garden Beds: 4 ft diameter bed is ready to go. $180

* Garlic for eating or planting around roses/raspberries, fruit trees

* OCA tubers – $10 for 20 small tubers. Our favourite edible ground cover around perennials

* Halls Hardy Almond seedling sprouted in our OCA…they must really want to grow together. $10 takes this special combo home.

EcoSense_Greenhouse_600

Our cob patio and sitting area by the cob oven need some work this year and this time we will be installing a roof. Here is a beautiful watercolour done by Janaia in 2013 during their last visit.

Eco-Sense Video of the week: Filmed by Peak Moment TV when Janaia and Robyn visited us a couple years ago. Excellent video on our chicken coop and root cellar. Grow your Food in a Nook and Cranny Garden (part 1) Watch for the jumping chicken.

Local Permaculture in action: Check out this blog post from the UVIC permaculture tour of two local sites: The Eco-Sense Homestead and our friends Tayler and Solara at Wild Edge Farm

Grafting Workshop at Eco-Sense: On Monday March 28th from 1-4pm, Gord is teaching a grafting workshop – so far students are a mix of parents and homeschooled teenagers. Gord will teach how to graft apple trees. Each student takes home two trees they graft. Only 5 spaces left. $49. Students need to bring a sharp pocket knife… and bandages (for Gord of course).

Spring at Eco-Sense

Baird council Initiative of the week: Ann participated in an on line interactive webinar for input into the BC Climate Leadership Plan with many BC legislators and staff participating. This session was for municpal elected officials on Vancouver Island.
Ann submitted various comments and spoke to many elephants in the room. Things like aviation being completely ignored in transportation, Natural Gas extraction (and fugitive methane), embodied energy in construction and loss of sequestered carbon, carbon budgets, no new fossil fuel infrastructure, and provincial policy being out of line with the scientific consensus. At least I was heard. Highlands council will also be discussing offical feedback at our next council meeting. Here is Ann’s full submission for Highlands council to discuss. Link http://highlands.bc.ca/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/2737?fileID=2901.

Baird Council Failure of the month: Gord’s work on CRISP (Capital Region Invasive Species Partnership), lead him to volunteer to track down an educational institution that would be willing to investigate a method to kill invasives using electricity rather than glyphosate. Presently glyphosate is used for stem injection on such items as knotweed. After many attempts over three months with the UVIC Biology department not one email or message was returned. Perhaps there is an engineering student that is interested in taking on this challenge? Someone at UBC or SFU? For more information on the concept, please contact Gord. Here’s a video on just how bad glyphosate (Roundup) is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVolljHmqEs

And finally, what happens when anxiety, depression, and ADHD meet? Funny

SPRING Season

Posted on March 6, 2016 | 3 comments

Woohoo…Spring has Sprung and we are busy preparing the EDIBLE PERENNIAL PLANT NURSERY for our first open house of the spring season.

First date is SATURDAY March 12, 2016 from 10am -2pm
The next is SUNDAY March 20 from 10am – 2pm (On Saturday March 19th, Gord is speaking at the BC Fruit Testers meeting…details below)
Then every Saturday for the rest of Spring.

Gord and Dug (Nina behind Gord)

As usual, come on out to visit and say hi, walk around the gardens, look at chickens, cuddle Dug the dog/duck, cuddle Nina the dog, (cuddle Gord the bull in the china shop),checkout many examples of raised garden beds, and look at the house and outbuildings (outside only – no inside tours). If you come to just look around, please park at the bottom of the hill or on the road. If you are buying plants, please drive on up.

Plant list is here and more plants will be arriving throughout the spring. Note that our prices INCLUDE the GST, and all of our repotted plants contain really good soil, bone meal and mycorhizal innoculants. We have a limited supply of Apricots and Almonds trees for sale. Anyone like garlic? We have WAY too much. 6 for $5. Also have some OCA tubers, (20 small tubers for $10), and some OCA plants ($4 for small pot).

Tour through food forest (Photo by Jason Guille)

Our Food Forest is in it’s 3rd year and really starting to mature…Come on by and walk through the pathways. Lots of new plant signs too.

Micro climate in zone 1 right outside the front door

Raised Garden Beds: We took out the “monster” of a rose bush that was right in the front of the house…it was a love hate relationship where my Dad had faithfully pruned it 5 times per year so it wouldn’t take over the house. He bled many times on that plant. Anyways, this is prime zone 1 garden space right on the south wall of the cob house…what an incredible micro-climate. We are going to install more raised garden beds (the curvy beds) and plant more lemons and maybe even a mexican avocado. Stay tuned…we may even do a 1-day workshop of raised garden beds.

New galvalume garden beds

Annual beds: 8 years ago when we lived in the trailers, we terraced the hillside with cedar raised garden beds…and yup, they are now falling apart…after about two years of brainstorming solutions that would last our lifetime, be affordable, and make it easier to garden as we get old, we came up with the GALVALUME beds. This is a very heavy gage material that we get pressed on the mainland, AND is water potable certified (will not leach lead or cadmium.) We have now installed three of these…one 4ft round, one 5 ft round and one rectangular 10ft x 4ft bed that can have a cold frame/greenhouse cover easily installed. We will have one round 4ft bed (2 ft deep) for sale this week at $190.

Building the terraces for our annual garden

BC Fruit Testers yearly meeting ($10 membership required): Saturday morning on March 19. Link. Gord will be there and speaking on the topic of UNCONVENTIONAL AGRICULTURE . He is also picking up his pre-ordered 150 root stocks for grafting…he is going to be a busy beaver the following week. These grafted fruit trees will be for sale the following year. Gord’s talk is at 11:30am. see this link:

Water display: Composting toilets, rain water harvesting, grey water reuse.

Composting toilets and Grey Water Policy in British Columbia: Draft regulations are now published and open for comment until April 19th. Gord was part of the group writing this document for the Ministry of Health.

Eco-Sense video of the week: Here is a very short video (filmed by School of Permaculture in the US) on our garden veggie washing station that combines worm composting, compost tea, and convenience.

The Baird Council Initiative of the week: Gord has written and put forward a resolution for AVICC (Vancouver Island municipalities)…if approved it will go forward to UBCM (All BC municipalities). It is a request for the BC Government to create a safe soils bylaw – clean and free of invasive species. This policy would have broad reaching implications as it would mean that people can request safe certified soil materials AND municipalities could implement a clean soils policy requiring all materials moved to be free of invasive species.

Links:

By the way, the climate hit a milestone on Thursday March 3 where the average temperature of the northern hemisphere hit 2 degC higher than pre industrial levels for a brief moment. This on top of Jan 2016 blowing all the records out of the water for the warmest month on record…and then followed by Feb 2016 which blew by Jan 2016 records by a huge amount. Here are some short articles…anyone hear of this in the mainstream media? March 3rd record: Here Jan 2016 record: Here Feb 2016 record: Here
Dr. James Hanson speaks to melting ice and sea level rise…It could be many meters…by mid century…Let that sink in. 3 minute video here
Here’s an article by Hanson on the same: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/multi-meter-sea-level… His study (written with 16 other scientists) is here: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2015/20150704_IceMelt.pdf Study has not yet been peer reviewed.