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Paradise Garden: the Urban Gardening Experience in Hamilton

The idea of Urban Agriculture has been on my mind a great deal as of late. Certainly this is in part due to the warming weather of spring. My thoughts of Urban gardening have also been greatly influenced by our recent move. Our new home (pretty much smack dab in the center of downtown) came with 1) a dedicated room in the basement dedicated to storage of preserves and 2) a good sized yard with a great solar profile and a good mix of sun/shade throughout the day.

So these two elements of our new home have really got the sustainability nut in me thinking? How much food can I produce and preserve in this small plot of land downtown. Can I feed my family? Can I share with friends? Might the bounty be so great I can share with strangers too? (from what I can tell from last summer no one is a stranger if you have Zuccini in the garden)

Obviously we are talking long term goals here. I have no expectation that I will be filling my cellar with super local food stuffs this fall. So while I may not be able in the short run to fulfill my goal of the 100 ft diet it is definitely the time to get started.

Which brings me back to why I decided to write this post. I have been doing a bit of gardening / urban agriculture / food production research lately. As I find good resources I intend to share them here (if you have any good ones to share use the comment section below to share!).

Today’s link, Paradise Garden: Urban Gardening in Hamilton by Maggie Hughes, a Citizen Shift podcast I found while Googling last night.

“

Sometimes a garden is not just a garden. Sometimes it is the meeting point for a whole community and the things that grow in the garden can tell us a lot about the people that live there.

”

To download the podcast visit the site or have a listen with the player below.

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Let’s talk about the Wind

The following audio was recorded last spring at the

Glen Estill, the President and CEO of Sky Generation began researching the wind business in July 2000, by attending the conferences of the Canadian and American Wind Energy Associations (CanWEA and AWEA), and by traveling to Denmark to talk to wind turbine owners and manufacturers. Sky Generation erected a 1.8 MW wind turbine on the Bruce Peninsula in November of 2002 and has since added two additional turbines.

If you are interested in keeping up with happenings in Wind power generation, both locally and beyond, you should check out Glen’s Wind Blog.

From a recent entry…

This wasn’t the windiest December in Ferndale, but it was respectable. The wind farm produced 1,478,000 kWh, a 39% capacity factor. This was the second highest capacity factor in the province for the month, trailing Kingsbridge’s outstanding 47%, but ahead of third place Prince, at 34.6%, 4th place Port Burwell at 34.5%, and 5th place Amaranth at 32.2%. The new Ripley wind farm came in at 28.4%, which is very respectable, considering they were still completing some of the turbines, and it was a start up month.

Here’s the audio…

Glen Estill talks about wind energy (right click, save as to download)

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Al Gore on the Earth in Balance

I have had a number of very late nights over the past few days as I work on the next iteration of this site. During this time I have been consuming hours of audio programming produced by the Conversations Network. I have been a bit of a Conversations Network junkie for awhile now. Actually, I have been a Conversations Network Junkie since it’s very beginning. Early on the audio available was largely of a tech nature, with topics such as Linux, various programming languages, and emerging tech trends.

Over time a variety of other content began to find its way into the network such as recordings from PopTech, which weren’t always about technology, with topics such as global warming, population and human dynamics. It was around this time that I really started to see the potential of time shifted audio and the value of time shifted conversation that could go along with it. It was at this point I decided that new, now, social (pick whichever you like best!) media was the place/business for me. In past 2 years I have amassed well over a hundred hours of recordings from a variety of events, mostly in the “green” space and have been slowly publishing these works for audiences who may have missed out on the events the first time around. For example, we just finished editing an hour long lecture on Wind Power with Glen Estill of Sky Generation in Lions Head from the Kimbercote Renewable Energy Festival this past spring.

So what does Al Gore have to do with all of this? Well despite the fact that I have never met him face to face, or even been in the same room for that matter, I have had the opportunity to hear him speak a number of times and to a number of different audiences. I will likely post some more links here in future, but for the meantime have a listen to the “former Vice President Al Gore, who passionately urges a Stanford Business School audience to take action to save the environment.”

You can grab the mp3 of the talk here (right click save as to download, or just click the link to listen in your browser)

For more about Al Gore, this Talk to the Stanford Business School, and a bunch of other great Social Innovation topics be sure to check out Social Innovation Conversations.

*If you happened to be at Stanford that night, sorry for the repeat!, you can skip this post

** Also the model by which the Conversations Network produces and distributes shows is of interest (well it is to me anyway b/c I am sitting on a huge backlog of audio to be published), and if you think it’s interesting too then drop me a line.

***The real value here, as always, is the fact that this post and this audio lecture isn’t the whole story. Your thoughts and ideas and criticisms and negativity ok scratch that last one, are very much welcomed here. Please take a moment to add a comment below. I would love to generate some discussion on just what impacts this whole Global Warming deal might have on the local area. Once we get through the impacts then we can move on to the real good stuff… like what do we do to mitigate them? and how do we make that process economically and socially beneficial to the area?

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