An Edmontonian's backyard tomato crop, 2010

The term elitist has been popping up more and more in the media when describing local organic food. I think that using the term displays a lack of imagination and out-of-the-box thinking (to use a tired term).

We just hauled in this year’s tomato crop (I described starting the tomatoes from seed earlier in the year). We transplanted them in late May in 30-40 square feet of garden space. I picked a few weeds along the way (like, 50), but we hardly paid them any mind until today.

With fewer hot days in late summer than usual, it was a bad year for tomatoes in Edmonton. Late blight took all of a neighbour’s tomatoes, and we lost most of our crop at the community garden to blight as well (seems that the cool wet weather is what causes it). Also, usually by this time at least half of our tomatoes are red, but we've only picked three red ones to date. No matter - covering them with newspaper will enable them to ripen on their own, and I for one can’t tell the difference between on ripened inside and one ripened outside.

So in a bad year we grew 10 gallons of local organic tomatoes with minimal effort, for $5-10 worth of seed. And, for those without a yard there are a plethora of community gardens in this city.

What exactly is elitist about local organic food again?

It's been a long road but my system is now up and running! I expect that a lot of people will ask how much energy my installation actually collects so I ended up taking the $600 Government of Canada Eco-Energy rebate for my high-efficiency boiler and bought a BTU meter (http://www.wsetech.com/btu.php) from the guys at WSE Technologies (http://www.wsetech.com/). So far the BTU meter is up to 84kwh which means I've collected (84 kwh * 3400 BTU/kwh =) 285,600 BTUs of heat. The temperature sensor at the _bottom_ of my storage tank didn't drop below 58 degrees C all week so I'm pretty sure that my boiler hasn't run since I completed the installation.

There are a few outstanding things I have to take care of: Insulation and cladding on a portion of the exterior runs and insulation on the piping in the house. Also, I've talked to IBC boilers and they don't yet have a controller module that integrates the boiler and the solar so I'll try and rig something up so that I can use the collectors to help heat my home. At 9:40 this morning (August 28, 2010) the outside temperature was 12 degrees C and I was suprised to hear the collector pump start. Despite the fact there was light cloud cover, the temperature sensor in the collectors was reading 68 degrees C.

Here are some pictures:

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This is the second installment in a three-part series about personal finance for the conscious green Edmontonian. It will cover:

1. day to day finances
2. retirement
3. investments

Retirement

Freedom 55. You may remember the phrase as part of a brilliant ad campaign (not sure if it’s ongoing) that promised a millionaire’s life upon turning 55. Just follow our advice…invest in us…this could be you.

The meaning of the word retirement has changed dramatically in the past 75 years. Pensions were first introduced in Canada in the early twentieth century. My grandparents became eligible for Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement in the 1960s, sources of income that kept them and other pioneers and homesteaders from the Slave Lake region going through the 1970s and 1980s.

But these hardworking people did not “retire”, as we have come to know it. Most of them worked in some capacity until they were no longer able, and work was a source of pride and joy rather than a grinding burden.

These days, we have put idleness on a pedestal. Retirement seems to mean the time in your life when you lounge about all day. That may seem tempting when viewed through the screen of our Blackberry as we answer our fourth work-related email of the day at 7:20 in rush hour traffic.

But I don’t think that doing nothing every day (or golfing every day or sitting on the beach every day) is all it is cracked up to be. In fact, I think that having no work to do, ever, would spoil most leisure activities. People need the satisfaction of contributing to those around them.

The worst part is that we have become retirement slaves. Our financial planners tell us that we need $1,000,000+ dollars in order to do nothing all the time when we retire. So we invest in the stock market, continue our 50-hour/week jobs and demand that the economy keep growing until we cash out. We can’t afford to not invest in coal and mining companies because, after all, we need to hook up with that beach time when we’re older!  read more... »

This is the first installment in a three-part series about personal finance for the conscious green Edmontonian. It will cover:

1. day to day finances
2. retirement
3. investments

Your Money or Your Life: One of the most important books that I’ve every read.

Day to Day Finances

My family (myself, my wife, and our two kids) got very lucky when the universe handed out its socio-economic status cards. We were raised in one of the world’s richest countries, we received subsidized, world-class educations, and we are entitled to free health care. The vast majority of humanity has never known the riches that we do.

Still, it is possible to waste any amount of money, and in my opinion much of the wealth in Canada and Alberta is wasted. It is spent on things that don’t provide much benefit to the spender, and in some ways it negatively affects the spender’s mental and physical health.

The answer for my family has been Your Money or Your Life. My wife and I read this book a dozen years ago, and it helped to set us firmly on the path of voluntary simplicity. For us, voluntary simplicity means living a materially simpler life in order for it to be more fulfilling. It means less paid work, but more time with friends and family. Less stuff, more fun. And less shopping, but more playing.

Your Money or Your Life provides nine steps to improving your relationship with money. It helps you realize that when you’re working for money, you are trading your life force, your precious hours on this earth, for dollars. Wasting money, spending it without getting full value out of it, is therefore wasting your life.

I highly recommend this book (reserve it at the Edmonton Public Library). It has helped us to live a low-impact (for the western world, anyway) lifestyle that includes the following things:  read more... »

It has been my pleasure to get acquainted with Duncan Kinney this year. He is new to Edmonton (he’s from that other city to the south; the one with the ugly hockey jerseys), but he has really embraced Edmonton and its political and social scenes. Duncan has a blog that, as well as reporting on his sustainability-based activities, acts as a well-filtered clearinghouse for links to green articles.

I’ve developed the habit of reading Duncan’s blog every day.

Homemade raspberry rhubarb juice.

The days of harvest have arrived in Edmonton. We’ve been enjoying one of our region’s most resilient and trouble-free foods.

I was especially impressed by the fighting spirit of the strawberry rhubarb plant that was growing on the property on which we built the Mill Creek NetZero Home. We dug a hole on the property in 2008, forming a mountain of clay over the rhubarb that stayed there for months. The clay was then unceremoniously scraped off by a bobcat, and the rhubarb’s growing area was used as a driveway to transport materials on and off the property for a year and a half.

So imagine my delight when I spotted this little guy a few weeks back.

This rhubarb plant refused to die no matter how it was mistreated

My wife Rechel made a few juices using rhubarb (straight rhubarb juice, as well as apple rhubarb and raspberry rhubarb). It’s ridiculously easy:

1. Dice up the rhubarb and other fruit
2. Fill half of a pot with fruit, and top it up with water
3. Simmer for 30-60 minutes
4. Strain
5. Add sweetener to taste
6. Chill

The juice can be frozen for future use or kept chilled in the fridge. Trust me, you can’t buy juice this good in the store.

To grow rhubarb in your own yard, just transplant a small part of the root of a friend’s plant.  Make sure to give it some room though – rhubarb tends to get big!

Although rhubarb leaves are somewhat toxic (I’ve been talking about the edible stems this whole time), they can be composted once they are stripped off of the stems.

Rhubarb can be added to many things. Jam, crisp, pie. Whatever. It will taste like Alberta no matter how you cook it.

Editor’s Note:I recently discovered a wonderful blog called Avenue Homesteader. Carissa Halton writes about her experiences with green local living in Edmonton’s Alberta Avenue area. I love her focus on food production and community efforts in the area. Carissa has generously offered up a guest post for Green Edmonton readers:

Cross-posted from http://avenuehomesteader.blogspot.com/:

For members of my household who love pumpkin pie and butternut stew, 2009 was a disappointing year. Total number of winter squash: 2. I gleaned one Buttercup and another Spaghetti squash from six large plants. It was a lot of green square footage producing a whole lot of nothing.

After some sleuthing and input from my squash-crazy sister-in-law, we’ve deducted a pollination problem. In 2009, I had plenty of flowers and the fruit would look like it was growing then instead yellow and die.

This year, I have taken matters into my own hands and started playing ‘Birds and Bees’. The first thing to surprise me was the sheer number of available male flowers and the woeful number of willing female compatriots. The ladies are more inclined to draw their virginal petals up demurely around their centre and remain like this most of the day. In my patch, fruit-making action happens exclusively in the mornings.

So if you share my problem, or skipped the Bio class where they taught this stuff, here’s how you can increase the conception rates in your squash patch:

1. First, figure out who’s female and male. The female flowers blooms from what appears to be a miniature squash. They look like they’re growing from a new fruit while the male flower buds burst from a long, narrow stem.  read more... »

I'm a born and raised Albertan. I love this province and I'm proud of it's natural features. Having said that, I was shocked to see a recent article in the Edmonton Journal about how Alberta has started importing natural gas from the United States: Scarcity drives deal for imports

To be honest, I thought this should have been front page news.

Travel is the toughest nut to crack. As a family, we’ve reduced our footprint in most areas of our lives by 80%-90%. However, there is no getting around the fact that travelling from Edmonton to Vancouver in a few days will burn a whole lot of fossil fuel.

We just got back from a three week tenting trip to Vancouver Island. We visited some of BC and Alberta’s wonderful provincial and national parks, and we also managed to see a piece of the lovely Northern Cascades National Park in northern Washington. It was a fantastic trip. After all, what could be better than camping with your spouse and kids?

Our MEC tent – home for 19 days.

Our trip wasn’t greener than a cycle tour, but it was greener than it might have been. Some random thoughts about the trip, and greener holidaying in general:  read more... »