Struvite? What's that?

Last week I had the good fortune of joining an enthusiastic group of agronomists and farmers on a small farmyard near Libau, just off Hwy 59 north east of Winnipeg. Anyone knowing anything about farming and Manitoba, knows that Libau is not known as a farming area. So why were we there?

Our common concern was sustainable food production, in this case concerns about P – phosphorous.

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Lasagna in the Garden: A Permaculture Technique

When we decided to move to the country, we became interested in the gardening philosophy of permaculture. Permaculture is focused on creating a system were living and nonliving parts of the garden work together to create a thriving mini-ecosystem. We were focused on improving the quality of our soil and reducing the amount of weeds. If you have healthy soil that has a fungi/bacteria ratio that favors the type of plants you want to grow, your desired plants will thrive and the weeds will fail.

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Permaculture

This week I'd like to write about a concept that has had a strong influence on me since I first heard of it some ten years ago. Permaculture is a system of agricultural design developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1980's, in response to concerns they had about the unsustainable and unsatisfactory direction they saw society moving. Their approach was to imagine a framework of ethics, principles and methods that would enable the creation of agricultural systems which last forever, while sustaining a maximum amount of human and non-human life - hence the name "Permaculture" (permanent agriculture).

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Mulching and Intercropping

It wasn’t so long ago that I looked forward to the new spring growth; the greening up of the world. Then it came on strong, nurtured by timely rains and the warm sun. Now, a few weeks later I am already thinking about stopping some of that growth. I hear lawn mowers cutting grass, and sprayers out in the fields. Garden hoes are quite silent but do provide a satisfying clunk as they cut off a thick dandelion root.

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The Trans-Mountain Pipeline

The decision by the Trudeau government to purchase the Trans-Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion and the commitment to actually build the pipeline can hardly be seen as anything other than a massive subsidy to Oil Sands development.

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