The Canary Report

Short film: The People’s Grocery

Posted on Jan 29, 2010 by Susie Collins in Blog, Food, Media/Videos, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins

Food justice: The People’s Grocery in West Oakland is an inspiration to communities everywhere about the importance of a healthy diet and about knowing where your food comes from. Director of the project Brahm Ahmadi is a hero!

In West Oakland, California, where liquor stores have replaced markets, People’s Grocery is creating a healthy alternative, offering access to organic produce. Through urban gardens and local farms, People’s Grocery supports a culture based on connection to the land, sustainable agricultural practices, and regenerating community.

Brahm Ahmadi is the co-founder and executive director of People’s Grocery. He has a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California and is an MBA candidate at the Presidio School of Management. Brahm combines social enterprise, cooperative economics, urban agriculture, public education and youth development to build healthy and stable inner city communities. He is also Executive Director of the North Oakland Land Trust, which preserves properties in North Oakland for the exclusive purpose of community gardening.

Link (A great site with oodles of online films to watch!)

Continue Reading

Tags: Children's Health, Environmental Health, Food, Healthy Living, Organic, Video, Work

The Christmas Egg

Posted on Dec 26, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins, Susie's Secret Garden

This is Betty, our new hen, a Rhode Island Red I was given by my neighbor. This is her first egg she laid after coming to live with us (not actually on Christmas Day, it was a couple weeks ago, but I just couldn’t resist the play on words). We were all so excited! After a bit of a rocky start when she first arrived– she picked on my littlest bantie, chased all the wild birds out of the gardens, pooped all over everything (and so named Betty Poop), and would not go to bed at night in the coops– she’s now all settled in, getting along perfectly with everyone else, ignores all the wild birds, snuggles in at night right alongside the others on the roost, and now gives us an egg a day. She still poops gigantic poops all over everything, but we love Betty!

Continue Reading

Tags: Garden, Hawaii, Healthy Living, Organic, Photography

My Solstice

Posted on Dec 21, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins, Susie's Secret Garden

Happy Solstice!

I spent Solstice evening in the garden, puttering around, taking photos and planting a bed of vegetables and flowers (you can see the seed packets on one of the slides). After the series of storms that blew through here over the weekend, the evening was calm and peaceful, barely a whisper of a breeze. The melodious laughing thrushes sang and sang from the bamboo. It was one of those perfect evenings in the gardens.

Find more photos like this on The Canary Report

Continue Reading

Tags: Fresh Air Photos, Garden, Hawaii, Healthy Living, Leisure, Organic, Photography

Susie’s Secret Garden: Ponds, chickens and vegetables

Posted on Oct 10, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins, Susie's Secret Garden

Some photos from my garden. I love harvesting fresh greens each night right before dinner!


Find more photos like this on The Canary Report

Continue Reading

Tags: Food, Garden, Hawaii, Home, Organic

Hibiscus in bloom

Posted on Jun 29, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Linda Sepp, Media/Videos, Organic Gardening

Double hibiscus

Post by Linda.

I found a flower on my indoor hibiscus yesterday, totally missed that it had a bud!

Continue Reading

Tags: Garden, Organic, Photography

Therapeutic gardens and the power of scent

Posted on Jun 01, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins

Scent, fragrance and memory can all be found in the garden.

Naomi Sachs, who writes at Therapeutic Landscapes Database Blog: News and Other Good Information about Landscapes for Health, wrote two very good posts on “Garden fragrance as an emotional memory trigger” (5/14) and “More on scent, fragrance and memory: Guest blog post” (5/31). In the two essays, she explores the scent of flowers as powerful triggers of memory in elderly people whose memories are slipping away.

A commentor to Naomi’s first post, Wendy Meyer, left the link to her own thesis on “Persistence of Memory: Scent Gardens for Therapeutic Life Review in Communities for the Elderly.”

[...]

Continue Reading

Tags: Air, Chemicals, Environment, Environmental Health, Garden, Healthy Living, MCS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Support

More adventures in veggie gardening

Posted on May 31, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins, Susie's Secret Garden

Time to plant!

It’s been awhile since I updated you on the new veggie garden. For those of you who missed it, we started building a serious organic veggie garden with raised beds on Winter Solstice last year. In February, we filled up the beds, right on top of the lawn, with compost layered with straw and banana leaves. Then we let the beds “cook” during the rainy season; the moisture and warmth broke it all down, creating a perfect, nutrient rich soil.

So here’s where we are now:

We fenced in the whole garden. The gate is still to be built. The main purpose of the fence is to keep the chickens out. The salad buffet is closed!

[...]

Continue Reading

Tags: Food, Garden, Healthy Living, Nontoxic, Organic

What’s blooming today?

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins, Susie's Secret Garden

Spectacular bromiliad welcomes the spring.

My gardens are exploding with blooms as the weather warms up and the sun comes out. It was a long, wet and chilly winter, and all living things are happy for spring!

Look at this spectacular bromiliad! We got this plant about 15 years ago as a sucker, about 4 inches high. This is its first bloom, and to give you some perspective on how big it is, that fence in the background is four feet high. I had to get up on a ladder to get the photo. So this bromiliad is gigantic, and blooming in a gigantically AMAZING way!

It started the flowering process about a month ago by sending up that pillar out of the center top, which then began unfurling the individual blooms last week. At left is what it looked like before it started blooming.

It’s not unusual for bromiliads of this size to bloom only once in 10, 12, 15 or even 25 years, so it’s very exciting! I can see it from my office windows, nestled there in the red heleconia, which is doing some amazing things itself.

Continue Reading

Tags: Garden, Hawaii, Organic

Natural pest control

Posted on Apr 30, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Media/Videos, Organic Gardening

Ah, the simplicity of it.

Link.

Continue Reading

Tags: Environment, Garden, Healthy Living, Nontoxic, Organic, Video

Indoor vegetable garden

Posted on Apr 28, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Media/Videos, Organic Gardening

A very fun video on an indoor veggie garden. Be inspired!

Link.

Continue Reading

Tags: Garden, Healthy Living, Organic, Video

Where day and night meet

Posted on Apr 17, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Media/Videos, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins, Susie's Secret Garden

Susie’s Secret Garden

Yesterday morning at about 9:00 a.m., as the night water lily at left was closing, the day water lily at right had just fully opened. Each bloom opens and closes with the cycle of day and night for about three days. There’s a nontoxic black dye in the water for algae control, it really sets off the colors of the blooms and leaves. The variegated leaves belong to the day lily, and the solid reddish to the night. I mixed up the varieties in the same pots this year so they’d come up close together like this. I call it pond art.

Tending my ponds is one of my survival techniques for dealing with my Mulitple Chemical Sensitivity. Even when recovering from an exposure, when I get outside and putter with the ponds– prune plants, feed the fish, change the water– I feel so much better about life and my place in it. I hope you, too, have an activity in your life that helps you stay connected to nature and at peace with yourself and the world. xoxo

Continue Reading

Tags: Garden, Hawaii, Leisure, MCS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Organic, Organic Gardening, Photography, Water

The history of school gardens

Posted on Apr 08, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Food, Media/Videos, Organic Gardening

Constance Carter, head of the Science Reference Section at the Library of Congress, describes the history of the school garden in America and offers reasons why school gardens are making a comeback.

Thanks, Jason!

Continue Reading

Tags: Children's Health, Environment, Food, Garden, Healthy Living, Home, Organic, Video

What’s in bloom today?

Posted on Mar 15, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins, Susie's Secret Garden

My garden is full of red and white blooms:

Passion Flower

[...]

Continue Reading

Tags: Garden, Hawaii, Leisure, Organic

Square Foot Gardening tips for February

Posted on Feb 28, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins

I learned how to grow vegetables many, many years ago by regularly watching Mel Bartholomew on his Square Foot Gardening show on PBS. I’m delighted to see him on YouTube, along with Patti Moreno, The Garden Girl. For February, they talk about frost dates and how to save seeds.

Continue Reading

Tags: Garden, Health, Healthy Living, Nontoxic, Organic

How to turn your lawn into food

Posted on Feb 08, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Media/Videos, Organic Gardening, Susie Collins

Scott Meyer, editor at Organic Gardening Magazine, gives step-by-step instructions for creating a new garden bed where grass is currently growing.

This video explains how to create a veggie garden bed right on top or your lawn. This is how we’re building up the soil in the raised beds in our new fenced-in organic veggie garden– the slow way, by layering organic material on the top of the lawn. We’ve boxed in each 4X8-foot bed with large eucalyptus planks to create a raised bed. We’re using wide banana leaves for the bottom layer to keep it truly organic (the gardener in the video uses newspaper). I’ll update you on our progress soon, with some photos!

Link

Link to Organic Gardening Magazine

Continue Reading

Tags: Garden, Healthy Living, Organic, Video