The Compost Diaries

I am an instructor for this SFU certificate program. My colleague Nina Winham and I developed and deliver the Applications Course – essentially a three day mobile workshop looking at real life cases and talking to experts along the way. The program is a joint offering from the Centre for Sustainable Community Development and City [...]

My Green Roofs and Living Walls tour this past Wed night turned out to be a real treat on a summer evening. Wanted to share some of the pictures.  Dr. Tara Moreau gave us a wonderful, brisk overview (I gave her 20 min!) of the SPEC roof top garden program.
We were able to peer [...]

I belong to the Kits Neighbourhood House community garden. It is not a typical community garden, if there is such a thing. Atypical because it’s in a parking lot and because we don’t have individual plots. We garden communally. It made more sense to garden as a group because the space was so limited.
We have [...]

Wrote this one back in 2004 when I was doing the regular radio bit on CBC’s North by Northwest. The Green Streets program is still going strong – with more than 300 gardens now and a beautiful coffee table book highlighting some of the best. My friend Terry Dixon has retired to a life of [...]

This tour was inspired by a chapter in my new book called A Little Left of Garden Centre. A kind of  ”alternative” gardens tour. So we won’t be doing VanDusen Botanical or Minter Gardens on this one.
Wed. July 21  – 6 to 8pm
On this walking tour we explore a number of unusually wonderful gardens. The SPEC [...]

You might expect to find a dairy farm in Lister, a sleepy hamlet in the pastoral Creston Valley. It seems fitting that Mountain Valley Dairy uses a centuries old method of cheese making that evokes “taste of place”. As with chocolate and good wine, you can almost taste the Kootenay mountain air, fresh pasture grasses [...]

In the spirit of summer finally beginning on the west coast, I dug this little kayaking piece out of my archives. Probably no surprise that I’m no longer with Adventure Boy.
The last time I’d been camping I was eight; that was 35 years ago in my best friend’s back yard. Yet last summer, when my new [...]

We got some funding through United Way to do a series of pocket markets this season. It is an interesting juggling act trying to support local farmers and still make the food affordable to seniors on fixed incomes. We had our first market a week ago and bought way too much food, but the leftovers [...]

Can urban agriculture save the world? My friend David Tracey (Guerilla Gardening, A Manualfesto, New Society, 2007) and I did a series of podcasts that attempted to answer that question. All of our guests (there have only been three to date – a roof top farmer , an urban farmer, and a uniquely local corner [...]

Wed. July 7, 6 to 8pm

Join me on this delicious walking tour of coffee and chocolate – my two favourite food groups. And thankfully, we have plenty of both on the west side of Vancouver.  We’ll visit Buen Café, a fair trade coffee shop and Capers/Whole Foods Market, to hear about the retail side [...]