The Canary Report | Tag Archive

Short film: The Story of Food

Posted on Jan 19, 2010 by Susie Collins in Blog, Food, Media/Videos, Susie Collins

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The Story Of Food from USC Canada on Vimeo.

USC Canada’s new short, animated film will get you thinking about our broken food system.

It identifies what’s gone wrong with the modern food system, and what we can do to rebuild it.

Link to more info about the film.

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Tags: Chemicals, Environment, Food, Garden, Health, Healthy Living, Organic, Products, Video

The Christmas Egg

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

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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!

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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

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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

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

Documentary film: Locavore

Posted on Nov 01, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Home & Garden, Media/Videos, Susie Collins

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A film about the return to local food or “Locavorism.”

Locavore is an inspiring new documentary about the inevitable return to the local diet. Less than a generation ago human beings worldwide traveled less than 10 miles to obtain the majority of the food they ate. Today the average conventionally grown vegetable has traveled more than 1500 by the time it has reached your pantry. Our food today is over processed, stale, and lacks nutrition. This new film, featuring some of the neo-pioneers of the Locavore movement will educate, inspire, and revitalize bringing health to our bodies AND our communities.

Link to learn more about the film.

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Tags: Environment, Food, Garden, Healthy Living, Home, Organic, Video

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

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

Find more photos like this on The Canary Report

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Tags: Food, Garden, Hawaii, Home, Organic

The White House Garden

Posted on Sep 20, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Home & Garden, Media/Videos

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This new garden was planted in the Spring of 2009 with the help of local elementary school children and yields a constant supply fresh produce for the First Family and White House events.

First Lady Michelle Obama and White House chef Sam Kass tell the story of the first garden on White House grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden during World War II.

Feel inspired!

Read more here about the garden and video at Obama Foodorama.

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Tags: Children's Health, Environment, Environmental Health, Food, Garden, Healthy Living, Organic, Organic Gardening, Policy, Support, Video

A tropical depression, MSC style

Posted on Aug 10, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, MCS, Susie Collins

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I’m not exactly sure when I realized I was in trouble.

Post by Susie Collins.

There’s nothing like a hurricane barreling in your direction to cause havoc with just about everything. No matter how many times the weather service tells you Hurricane Felicia is expected to weaken before land fall, you still have to plan for the worst. You still have to take a look in the food pantry to be sure you’ve plenty of provisions. You still have to worry about your employment if the Internet cable goes out. You still have to wonder about how sturdy the chicken pen and how delicate the spinach starts. You still have to wonder how much wind it would take to whip that tree limb into the electric line. Forty miles per hour? Sixty? How much wind would be too much? How much rain would cause a flood?

To reduce some risk, we spent all day Sunday trimming branches, clearing out ditches, securing potted plants, scrubbing water containers, planning for possible evacuation.

But disaster came anyway, for a different reason. It happened in the front garden when we were trimming back the bamboo from the Internet cable, my husband way up at the top of a wooden ladder lopping shoots, and I hauling off the bundles to the mulch pile. About an hour into the job, our neighbors decided to do their laundry. Only someone with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity understands what this means. Only someone with MCS could understand that a neighbor doing laundry can cause a disaster.

I’m not exactly sure when I realized I was in trouble. Certainly the odor was a clue, that sickening stench of laundry detergent chemicals causing my brain to lurch backwards and my eyes to burn. But exactly how long was it before I actually started to crash? Oh, I remember. It was when the same neighbors started up the BBQ. Yep, that was it, the lighter fluid, hitting my lungs and my brain and my muscles as I lugged a bundle of cut bamboo up the hill. Instantly, it was no longer a hurricane I worried about, it was my own tropical depression.

I barely made it through the rest of the chores, collapsing into bed by 7 o’clock and sleeping for a couple of hours before having enough energy for dinner. I was so sick! Horrible, horrible feeling. Brain not working, body not working, all joy of life gone.

I woke this morning groggy but better. My eyes were still a mess, but I managed to shake off the rest of the aches and pains by the time I started on today’s writing assignments. This evening, Civil Defense is saying Hurricane Felicia is now a tropical storm, quickly deteriorating into a tropical depression herself. She’s wandered north of the Big Island, and will dump some rain on a few of the other islands, but no major problems are expected. As it turned out, she made less problems in my life than my neighbor’s washing machine.

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Tags: Air, Chemicals, Environment, Fragrance, Garden, Hawaii, Home, MCS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Products, Stink, Toxic

POV: Images of surviving Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

Posted on Jul 21, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Media/Videos, Susie Collins

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This is my new theme song: I love it! Looking at this video and listening to the lyrics through the lens of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity cuts right to my core. I love the imagery: the pond, barren landscape, lush fertile gardens, arms thrown open wide to the fresh sweet wind. “Look away through the garden of love.” At it’s core, that’s my strategy to surviving MCS.

Love is all there is. xoxo

Garden of Love

Kim-Lian (Dutch)

oh my god – look at my world crumbling apart
as I chase the wind
my life – look at my life – what will I become
where will I begin

once a thousand words that could be heard one million miles
crowded in my head — confusion filled my mind
everybody searchin’ for an answer to their prayer
we cling to what we know – the truth is never there

and the lord said – look away
look away look away look away
through the garden of love
and the lord said – look away
look away look away look away
through the garden of love

my love – you are my love — thunder in my heart
may we never part
each time I look in your eyes passion tears apart
all I thought was right

once a thousand words that could be heard one million miles
crowded in my head — confusion filled my mind
everybody searchin’ for an answer to their prayer
we cling to what we know – the truth is never there

and the lord said – look away
look away look away look away
through the garden of love
and the lord said – look away
look away look away look away
through the garden of love

and the lord said – look away
look away look away look away
through the garden of love
and the lord said – look away
look away look away look away
through the garden of love (through the garden of love)

look away (through the garden of love)
so I looked away

Link

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Tags: Air, Environment, Fresh Air Photos, Garden, Healthy Living, MCS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Organic, Video, Water

Hibiscus in bloom

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

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Double hibiscus

Post by Linda.

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

hibiscusst1

hibiscusst2

hibiscusst3

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Tags: Garden, Organic, Photography

Summer Solstice report on the new veggie garden

Posted on Jun 27, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Home & Garden, Susie Collins, Susie's Secret Garden

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This week, the week of the Summer Solstice, I wanted to show you our progress on the vegetable garden.

As you may recall, we started building this garden last year on Winter Solstice, constructing the raised beds and filling with compost. Then we built the fence while the compost broke down and turned into fabulous medium for the vegetables. So here’s where we are this week!

All four beds are filled with layers of compost, soil, leaves and other organic matter, and then topped with a layer of straw to keep down the weeds and keep the soil moist in the hot sun. The straw all sprouted wheat for a couple of weeks, that was a HUGE LOL. The straw is supposed to keep the weeds down, but it started growing it’s own crop! Now we give batches of the straw to the chickens in their run and let them eat all the seeds before spreading on the beds.

I really love the fence because it keeps the chickens out. Later, we are going to cover the whole enclosure with avian netting to keep the wild birds out so we can grow sunflowers. The netting will also keep out the fluttery moths that lay their eggs on the leafy greens.

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

Therapeutic gardens and the power of scent

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

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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.”

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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

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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!

[...]

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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

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Spectacular bromiliad welcomes the spring.

bromiliad

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.

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Tags: Garden, Hawaii, Organic

Vilsack surprises critics

Posted on May 02, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Food, Home & Garden, Policy

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Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack adds a garden at the USDA and asked all USDA offices to put in gardens, too.

The Demoines Register reports Tom Vilsack’s approach as ag secretary surprises critics.

Washington, D.C. – The World War II-era poster that faces Tom Vilsack’s desk should provide a clue that he may not be the kind of agriculture secretary expected of a former governor of Iowa, the land of big, high-tech grain and hog farms.

The poster says: “Let’s All Grow Vegetables.”

In his first 100 days in office, Vilsack has surprised his early detractors, who feared he would be too close to agribusiness.

In what is supposed to be a symbol of the Obama administration’s new priorities, Vilsack started an organic vegetable garden in front of the Agriculture Department near one of the more prominent spots for tourists in Washington, the subway stop that serves the Smithsonian museums.

In another key move, Kathleen Merrigan, a university professor who helped create the national program for certifying organic food, was installed as deputy secretary at the USDA.

Vilsack also demonstrated an early willingness to take on the USDA’s traditional constituency among conventional farm interests. He called meatpackers in and told them to adhere to more strict procedures for labeling pork and beef from foreign sources, and he pitched a proposed cut in farm subsidies as vital to funding better nutrition for poor children.

“He has a much broader understanding of agriculture and food systems than I think some of his critics had expected,” said Ben Lilliston of the Institute for Agriculture and Food Policy, a group that advocates a shift to smaller-scale, diversified farms that rely less on chemical inputs and biotechnology.

Lilliston said the USDA’s organic garden is a powerful symbol showing that the department now “recognizes and values the importance of people growing their own food and connecting with food in a deeper way.”

Link to full story at The Demoines Register.