Repost: Russia's households produce over 50% of Russia's total agricultural produce.

Dachnik:

Original Post Comes from Building a More Sustainable & Self-Reliant Community

Russian Dacha

In contemporary Russia 66% of the country’s households (35 million families) produce over 50% of Russia’s total agricultural output.  This is typically done on small allotments known as a dacha. Urban families flee to their dachas on weekends and in summer. On these small plots they use a kind of permaculture technique growing annuals and perennials, fruits and vegetables. The word dachnik is used interchangeably with gardener.

This is often referred to as the ‘dacha movement’ but the gardening tradition in Russia goes back 1000 years.
“Russia’s household agriculture — possibly the most extensive in any industrially developed nation — suggests that in developed countries highly decentralized, small-scale food production is possible on a national scale. This practice therefore warrants close attention, since the degree of self-sufficiency in a number of food staples attained by Russian house- holds points to the reemergence of a distinct, highly localized food regime, on a nation- scale level.”

As the United States moves into a transition period away from cheap oil we have a lot to learn from other countries such as Cuba and Russia. Clearly, it is possible to raise much of our food in our yards.
My Internet addiction led me this week to a Ph’d thesis by a Russian academic titled THE SOCIOECONOMIC AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FOOD GARDENING IN THE VLADIMIR REGION OF RUSSIA by Leonid Sharashkin

The cultural differences in gardening in the US vs Russia are dramatic because of the thousand year tradition of gardening there. Mr. Sharashkin points out that in the US during times of war or economic stress home gardens flourish in the US. But in normal times statistics like the following apply:

“Russia has 18.8 million acres of family gardens, which produce US$14 billion worth of products per year, equivalent to over 50% of Russia’s agricultural output, or 2.3% of the country’s GDP (Rosstat 2007b). The United States, on the other hand, have 27.6 million acres of lawn, which produce a US$30 billion per year lawn care industry (Bormann, Balmori, and Geballe 2001).

In the Vladimir region of Russia, gardeners spend, on average, 17 hrs per week (during the growing season) tending their gardens. Surveys from other regions (Clarke et al. 1999) offer similar results. By comparison, Americans, on average, spend 32 hrs per week watching television (Nielsen Media Group 2006).”

Appalling when you stop to think about it.
There’s much to digest in Mr. Sharashkin’s thesis and I will continue to wade through it.

Repost: The city’s new park will be filled with edible plants....

I am reposting this because I love the concept and I wish we could do something like this in all cities & town's accross Canada, and the rest of North America. April-Anna

It's Not a Fairytale: Seattle Build's Nation's First Urban Food Forest

By Clare Leschin-Hoar

Forget meadows.

The city’s new park will be filled with edible plants, and everything from pears to herbs will be free for the taking.

Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.

“This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer.

The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild. Not only is this forest Seattle’s first large-scale permaculture project, but it’s also believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.

“The concept means we consider the soils, companion plants, insects, bugs—everything will be mutually beneficial to each other,” says Harrison.

That the plan came together at all is remarkable on its own. What started as a group project for a permaculture design course ended up as a textbook example of community outreach gone right.

“Friends of the Food Forest undertook heroic outreach efforts to secure neighborhood support. The team mailed over 6,000 postcards in five different languages, tabled at events and fairs, and posted fliers,” writes Robert Mellinger for Crosscut.

Neighborhood input was so valued by the organizers, they even used translators to help Chinese residents have a voice in the planning.

So just who gets to harvest all that low-hanging fruit when the time comes?
“Anyone and everyone,” says Harrison. “There was major discussion about it. People worried, ‘What if someone comes and takes all the blueberries?’ That could very well happen, but maybe someone needed those blueberries. We look at it this way—if we have none at the end of blueberry season, then it means we’re successful.”

Model Wanted!

Photography by Christopher Capicollo

MODEL WANTED!

So I am looking for a petit model (5'6" or shorter, slim), male or female, available for the 16th, 17th and possibly the 18th to volunteer to come with us to the Trois Rivierre body painting competition at the PGBHG wild life fine art exhibition.

You need to be comfortable with being fully body painted; you'd have nipple covers on that I body paint over, and something like bikini bottoms, or a G-string.

Your travel, accomodations and food would be paid for. You'd get a copy of the photos from the competition.
Someone with modeling, or performance experience is preferred.

The competition is on the 17th, it's a long day; we have to be on site for set-up and registration at 10am-ishness. Competition starts at 12pm/lunch hour, and ends at 6pm. A break for dinner (not very long), then the judging starts, photos, then stage. By the time everything is said and done, it'll be approx. 9pm.

There are showers on site, but if we stay overnight on the day of the competition, then you can shower in the hotel (might be nicer).

FYI I can get really intense when I am body painting and sometimes I get really stressed, so ideally I'd like a model who won't be affected by whatever mood I am in and is also able to remind me to breath and stay calm. I try my best to make it fun and cheery and can use a little help in that process.

I will consider all candidates, but I have a back-up plan if I don't find what I am looking for.

Recent Photography

I just wanted to share some of what I have been doing lately with my photography (for anyone who doesn't know, I have been in a photography course for the past 6 weeks). Mixture of studio and outdoor shots, portrait and landscapes.

 

Going Green?

Here are some thoughts I have on the subject of going green and lowering your impact on the environment. Everything I mention are all things I do, and have been doing for years. Not sure if I am forgetting anything. Please leave your comments or questions at the bottom of this article!  

1) Reduce Garbage:
Shop consciously; avoid buying things that come in packages, or look for products that come in as little packaging as possible. Buying in bulk, using your own bags (either reusing old plastic bags or finding or making small cloth bags) is ideal whenever possible.

2) Compost:
Which of course also reduces your garbage and it's a great fertilizing for your plants the following year! There are many ways you can compost, including in city environments. Many cities have a limited amount of community composts that you can register to use (you take it down there), a few cities even have compost pick-up now available (much like your garbage or recycling pick-up); I hope the City of Montreal gets a city compost pick-up system going soon.

• Composting toilet
• Container composting
• German mound
• Sheet composting
• Trench composting
• Vermicomposting 

3) Recycle:
Most cities have recycling collection set-up. If they don't, I recommend you send a letter your city every so often requesting one. Unfortunately the biggest issue with recycling is that most cities don't process their own recycling into new materials. Such as Montreal, which collects it for sorting, then for now it gets stored. In the past most recycling produced in North America gets put up for sale, clean recycling costs more, dirty recycling is sold for less (which is actually hard to sell, but our municipality does not clean the recycling, they just sort it, so it's up to the household it originated in to wash it). China and India, as far as I know, are the two countries most likely to buy it, up until they had bought more recycling then they could process since they can't sell the final product fast enough compared to our rate of producing recycling. So as a result, Montreal has a recycling crisis because no one wants to buy the recycling anymore (they have too much of it overseas), hence it ends up just being stored, except rumour mill is that they are running out of storage space.

4) Change Your Light Bulbs:
Ok everyone says change your light bulbs. But my concern with the compact florescent lights is that they have mercury in them, if they break you have a mercury contamination, which is dangerous. They also should not be thrown into the garbage, ideally they should be recycling by a plant set up for handling mercury. LEDS are good, but also have their issues. There is no perfect answers, but living on the sun's rhythm and having lots of windows & skylights will definitely help. I think it's just important that we try our best to make the best possible decisions with the choices we have and always look for new and better ways to do things.

5) Shop & Support LOCAL:
Shop and support locally is easier then you think, though unfortunately not everything is available from a local producer, I am still often happily surprised at how much I can find locally. I also encourage you to shop organically if you can.

6) Carbon Foot Print:
Try to walk or ride a bike as much as possible, take city transportation and avoid using a car whenever possible. Try to avoid buying things that are not local for this reason.

7) REDUCE REDUCE REDUCE
We don't need to buy all the latest greatest gadgets and fashions. It's crazy and unsustainable. In my opinion, if it isn't broken don't replace it. Avoid buying plastics, especially new plastics which mostly come from the oil industry. There are alot of alternatives to using fossil fuels for producing plastic such as hemp, corn, or potato. I don't know alot about the subject of plastic sources,  but I do know that potato and corn based plastics are used to produce compostable containers for take-out food!

8) SOAPS & Household Cleaning Products:
I use only biodegradable, healthy products (healthy for you, healthy for the environment) no matter what I am doing. The simplest solution is often the most environmentally friendly, cheaper and easier way to clean things. It's important to understand that the water you send down your drains does end up back into the ecosystem, into mother nature's water systems.

Here is some more information from Concordia University Building Engineering Society, written by CUBES President - Agnieszka Koziol:

Only 39% of Canadians voted...

(The Following Message is from www.Avaaz.org) 
Only 39% of Canadians voted for this Government and they still won power. This could happen again unless we all join our national political parties and encourage cooperation. In weeks, leadership elections in our opposition parties will begin, deciding their positions for the next four years! If each of us joins the political party of our choice right now, we can change politics in Canada forever.

The government in power only represents the priorities of 39% of the country, with the rest of our votes split amongst four other parties. But most Canadians think the opposition should cooperate to make sure the majority is represented in Parliament. The Greens already support this plan and a key leader of the NDP is moving his party in that direction. Now we need a wave of support from Canadian voters to make cooperation a reality.

We can change the way the opposition behaves by joining their ranks. Parties begin to close their doors to new voting members this week. Click below to join our national parties now -- our voices as members can come together in a massive national call for cooperation and finally make democracy work in Canada:

    Click here to join the NDP
http://www.avaaz.org/en/join_the_ndp/
    Click here to join the Liberal Party
http://www.avaaz.org/en/join_the_liberals/
    Click here for the Green Party
http://www.avaaz.org/en/join_the_greens/
    Click here for the Conservative Party
http://www.avaaz.org/en/join_the_conservatives/

Most of us, including progressive conservatives, aren't represented by Harper's right-wing policies. Joining a party only costs a small fee -- 25 dollars for the NDP and 10 dollars for the Liberals, the two official parties holding leadership races. Joining the Conservatives costs 15 dollars and the Greens cost only 10. And, for the first time ever, cooperation is a key topic in the NDP leadership race. This might be a once-in-a-generation chance to make cooperation a reality and end vote-splitting and defensive voting for good.

The Green's leader Elizabeth May supports cooperation, and high-profile NDP and Liberal party members are open to the idea. If we all become members of parties now, we can vote as a bloc for party heads who will put the public interest first by uniting to represent the majority of Canadians right now in Parliament and in our next election. Those of us joining the Conservative Party can act as an important force to bring progressive conservatism back to Canada.

Let's help elect a government that represents the real majority of Canadians and ensure no one can hijack our elections with less than 40% of the vote. Click here to join the movement to make Canada's democracy work:

    Avaaz members across Canada have stood up for our democracy before, beating back attempts to create "Fox News North" and fill our media with misleading statements. Let's stand together again today and make this the turning point for our country and the future of our politics.

With hope and determination,

Emma, Stephanie, Ari, Benjamin, Ricken, Morgan, Wen-Hua and the whole Avaaz team

Sources

Half favour Liberal-NDP co-operation: poll (CTV)
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Politics/20100608/poll-coalition-100608/

NDP leadership contender Nathan Cullen calls for united front against Conservatives (Straight.com)
http://m.straight.com/s?fid=22&a=571481&pml=3&f=latest&s=60

Harper's pension policy: Voters will have veto in 2015 (Chronicle Herald)
http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/60426-harper-s-pension-policy-voters-will-have-veto-2015

NDP hopeful pitches joint nominations with Liberals, Greens (Globe and Mail)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/ndp-leadership-hopeful-pitches-joint-nominations-with-liberals-greens/article2205165/

Harper wins when voters snooze (Ottawa Citizen)
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Harper+wins+when+voters+snooze/6058825/story.html

Baby Kitties!! Long Lost VLOG!!