Andrea's Everything Eco Exploration

We live in a two room place, and our spare room has been slowly taken over by plants. We just recently added an aquaponics system to our seedling, micro-green, and 3D printing operation I decided to also try my hand at oyster mushroom farming again!  This is spent grain and pine shavings and coffee grounds that have been pasteurized (SRSLY don't skimp on sanitation!!)   then mixed with colonized spawn from an old growing kit and put into sterilized containers with holes drilled in the sides.   5 buckets and one extra bag!  They're kept under plastic bags so the stay moist but can still breathe. I really hope they make it! Oysters are my favourite.

I went for a long soggy romp along the river yesterday.  I bundled up in fleece and a long purple rain slicker, mittens and galoshes, and sloshed through slick puddles on clay and sandy paths along a muddy river I slipped and slid and hid in the underbrush that dripped fat drops on the brim of my hat. I'd packed almonds and cider and tea, and set off between the trees To see how far I could get along the north side of her swollen banks. It felt so freeing. So grounding Surrounded by these trees waking up and unfurling curled leaves Taking hearty drinks from the steady drizzle before it drips back into the river.

Wow, what a crazy year 2020 has been so far! At the beginning of the year I was preparing for a trip to France to do Workaways , and not much else beyond that. My partner was going to start running an urban farm company, and I didn't have much planned except for trying to get into the child care & education field and sitting on the board of my favourite music festival and running their Eco-committee. When we left France the Covid-19 cases in France were double digits and mostly in Paris. There was single digit cases in Calgary. But that quickly changed. Fast forward to the present, Calgary has the most cases in Alberta! There has been over 4,000 cases, with over 3,000 recovered (that's pretty good at least). But as with most of the country and world, most of the city shut down as self quarantining was encouraged. Schools, day-cares, restaurants and bars, any thing non-essential was closed. This was not a good time to try and find work! Luckily my partner was still

Hello again! I’ve realized that I am no good at regular updates to this blog. Living in the woods with no internet has a big part to play in that. But at long last, I’m back to give an update on my west coast life. Recently Michael and I have invested in a solar array. We’ve got two monocrystaline 270 W panels, two 400 Ah, 6 volt flooded lead acid batteries in series, a charger and a inverter. The whole system cost over 2,000$. And while the price was an uncomfortable pill to swallow, we are now off the grid energy wise. It feels right, to be set up in a small clearing in an alder and salmon berry forest, less than 500m from a small organic farm, and to be hooked up to solar power. It feels like one more step towards assimilation with our natural neighbours. In a sense, we are photosynthesising energy to run our little trailer. And our bodies are fuelled by the vegetables we pick, which ate the same tasty sun, less than a km away.  On our property we also have our own littl

Sweden is burning your trash and unsold clothes And it's being touted as an environmentally applaudable behaviour. This is green-washing at its peak. Incineration/waste to energy (W2E) is second last on the waste management hierarchy. Simply it means they burn the garbage to produce heat which makes steam which runs a turbine. It's not very energetically efficient, and it requires a lot of big machinery and filter systems to ensure the pollution doesn't escape and spread its toxic vapours everywhere. And then they must safely dispose of the concentrated chemical ash. But what I find most troubling about W2E is that they lock cities and countries into contracts, assuring they provide a certain amount of feedstock / garbage each year. This sways the motivation away from reducing waste in the first place, and instead towards the perpetuation of our over-consumptive materialist culture. There's no incentive to implement zero waste practices or change behaviou

That title is not the cat walking on the keyboard after I've typed my name. No, rather it is a class of non vascular plants, which contain mosses, like those found in the order Andreaeopsida. I've just recently learned a fun little mnemonic to remember the division of evolution: "Dutch king Phillip came over for green spinach" or : Binomial nomenclature is when we name things with two Latin words. These words are the  Genus and the species. Species  being the most specialised branch of the tree of life, whereas kingdoms can be seen more as the trunk of the family tree. The three main kingdoms are Animals, Plants and Fungi.  When I mention class and order in the first paragraph, I'm talking about a branch that forks off around the middle of the time line of evolution. Mosses are an early evolutionary plant, and consist of a rudimentary life form, so it doesn't include a vascular system ie: a way to get water up from the ground and into high branch