Caped crusaders

Innovative outdoor clothing company, Arc’teryx takes its responsibilities to the planet seriously.  For a second winter, the homeless people of Vancouver, Canada had the opportunity to receive weather protection in the form of Gore-Tex capes created from the end rolls and discontinued fabric used in the manufacturing process.

Last year, employee volunteer cut and sewed 300 capes; this year’s tally reached 560 capes.  The staff donates their time to sew the capes;  in lieu of pay, Arc’teryx provides time off as a thank you to the volunteers.  The Salvation Army hands out the capes to the citiy’s homeless population.

This heartwarming sharing with those in unfortunate circumstances serves two important purposes:  caring for those people in need of weather protection, while reusing fabrics which would otherwise become unrecycleable landfill.

Video Friday: “Where’s Rob” in honor of the basketball season

Video Friday:  “Where’s Rob”

In honor of the basketball season, we offer this funny video:

The case for Collaborative Consumption

Reduce Reuse Recycle Repair Redistribute.

I recently listened to an interesting lecture from Rachel Botsman about her theory of Collaborative Consumption.  She espouses the view that our society needs to create a more sustainable system that will better serve the innate needs of both our community and individual identity, while caring more responsibly for our environment.  She dubs this system “The Collaborative Consumption”.

In a nutshell, the system values the collective good over wasteful individual consumption, usage trumping paraphernalia. The individual doesn’t really want to own the possessions, he wants the usage or experience that the possessions provide.  For example, you don’t want the drill, you want the hole that the drill provides.  You don’t want the DVD, you want to watch the movie the DVD provides.

Ms. Botsman points to the growing connectivity of our communities, via online social networks.  It is this networking that has given rise to the opportunities to barter and trade more efficiently and safely than ever before.  With peer-to-peer redistribution systems in play based on models like eBay, Paypal, and Freecycle, the newer barter/trade sites offer guaranteed success.

This is a fascinating social ideal.  Please check back next week for more discussion and links to barter/trade sites.

The importance of heirloom seeds

There are many food revolution movements going on at the moment, from Jamie Oliver’s important work in school cafeteria’s to the cry to eat locally produced foods.  With our thoughts turning towards spring, the gardener in us inevitably starts to dream about the coming planting season.  With this in mind, we’d like to talk about the importance of heirloom seeds.

Heirloom seeds offer many advantages to the home vegetable gardener. Heirloom vegetable seeds deliver on taste and nutrition while providing a greater variety of vegetables.  Hybrid seeds have been developed since the 1950s to suit the requirements of supermarket food monopolies. Commercial growers want high, simultaneous yields and thick-skinned produce that will store and transport well. Taste and nutritional value are not priority, profit is.  In addition, genetic alteration has begun showing up in ground animals, insects, and fish, which scientists attribute to the chemical herbicides which are sprayed over the genetically altered crops.  The crops have been engineered to resist the herbicides, however the wild life is now suffering.

Heirloom seeds, on the other hand, have evolved over centuries through open pollination of non-hybrid plants.  These plants represent an unbroken chain of evolutionary improvement.  Food growers have kept back seed from the earliest, best-yielding and most disease-resistant strains since plant domestication began more than 8000 years ago. Through this selective process,  heirloom varieties were encoded with thousands of generations of improvements.

For some of the world, food security plays a big part in the importance of non-hybrid seeded plants. Genetic diversity in food crops is vital for global food security. Combined with local expertise, genetic diversity enables communities to meet their needs over varying seasons.  The ability of the gardener to gather non-hybrid seeds at the end of the growing season ensures that the plants that perform best in a particular local climate will continue to survive and provide food for the future.

We offer you a list of 25 easy to grow heirloom plants.  Many seeds are available in your local gardening store, but if you don’t find them there, we also provide links to some online heirloom seed sites.

• Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans
• Chioggia Beets
• Lemon Cucumbers
• Listada de Gandia Eggplant
• Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
• Moon and Stars Watermelon
• French Breakfast Radish
• Paris White Cos Lettuce
• Improved Long Green Cucumber
• Hubbard Squash
• Pattypan Squash
• Bull Nose Pepper
• White Globe Onion
• Deer Tongue Lettuce
• Forellenschulss Lettuce
• Scarlet Nantes Carrot
• Golden Bantam Corn
• Early Scarlet Horn Carrot
• Homesteader (Lincoln) Peas
• Bloomsdale Longstanding Spinach
• Tomatoes – Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Striped German, Eva Purple Ball, Yellow Pear

Some links to online heirloom seed catalogues:

• Heirloom Seeds
• Seed Savers
• Victory Seeds
• Heirloom Acres Seeds
• Salt Spring Seeds (in Canada only)
• Annie’s Heirloom Seeds

Video Friday: Pomplamousse “Jungle Animal” with Allee Willis

Video Friday returns to the blog!

To kick it off (again), here’s some music for your long weekend: