Wouldn’t it be great to extend the growing season from 3 months to 10 or 11 months? What if there were a way to garden year-round OUTSIDE without building an expensive greenhouse?
The geodesic dome is an amazing design because it is very strong and yet light. It needs no permanent foundation and thus could be easily moved to another site, if required.
“While winter winds & snow sweep the length and breadth of the ranch at Hummingbird Living School,inside the dome it’s a cozy 65º and rising as the morning sun shines into the translucent geodesic greenhouse.
Our 42-foot dome was erected in four days, but that was only the beginning. It’s an ongoing community effort to set up the water tank, build the loft and haul many wheelbarrows of rich soil into the structure for the beds. And we love it all! The peripheral ring of beds is complete and already home to tender sprouting plants.”
“Harvey Ussery delivers all the practical information you need to grow your own eggs and meat birds, in a style and format that will keep you interested and amused. Plus, he raises the larger question: what kind of world do we want to live in? One that treats animals as units of production, or one that honors all life, especially that farmstead marvel, the domesticated chicken?”
— Sally Fallon Morell, President, The Weston A. Price Foundation
“Here’s the ultimate book for those who want to know everything there is to know about raising poultry. And every detail is backed up by the author’s own (and often entertaining) experiences. I could not find ”in this encyclopedic array of chicken knowhow” one detail that I would quibble with.”
— Gene Logsdon, author of Holy Shit and The Contrary Farmer
“The Small-Scale Poultry Flock is about establishing a free-range poultry flock fully integrated into a healthy homestead ecosystem. Based upon the author’s decades of hands-on experience with many breeds and species, it covers all the basics about raising poultry, and fills some important gaps not usually covered well enough elsewhere, including chicken behavior, poultry breeding, raising chicks with broody hens, managing free-ranging, dealing with predators, using electric net fencing, feeding poultry with home-grown feeds, and integrating the poultry with soil mineral balance, gardens, lawns and pastures, orchards, worm bins, and soldier fly (larvae) production. If you want to raise chickens and can afford just one book, I recommend this one.”
— Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener
Our family farmer program, started in 1995, provides food to an estimated more than 30,000 people each year. It helps Quebecers adopt a sustainable diet, and encourages local farmers.
Ingredients for a healthy workplace
We can help you set up a drop-off point in your workplace. Many hospitals, businesses and academic institutions already have a family farmer, including, in 2010, RONA, Standard Life, CHUL, Demix and Ubisoft.
Simply follow the steps outlined in our set-up guide to establish a relationship with a family farmer.
For more information, contact our community supported agriculture (CSA) team at 514 522-2000, ext. 295 (toll free, 1 877 272-6656) or by email at infoasc@equiterre.org
Sustainability is another word for “immunity from government tyranny.” We cannot possibly be “free” of something we despise, if we are still entirely dependent on it.
Believe it or not, growing your own food or visiting your local farmers market is more revolutionary and constructive than burning down your own city and killing security forces…
They need us, we don’t need them. That’s the big secret. We get our freedom back as soon as we take back our responsibilities for food, water, security, the monetary system, power, and manufacturing; that is independence. Independence is freedom, freedom is independence. We’ll never be free as long as we depend on the Fortune 500 for our survival.
Fixing these problems unfolding overseas starts with fixing the problems in our own backyards. Boycott the globalists, cut off their support, undermine their system, and they lose their ability to commit these atrocities. That will be a real revolution and it can start today. Not burning cities and masked rebels waving flags, but communities no longer dependent and fueling a corrupt system we all know must come to an end.
Where are farmer markets in Montreal? Jean-Talon is the city’s largest farmer’s market, but there are others.
There are chickens laying eggs at community centres, volunteer gardeners sharing the work and the harvest in 45 collective gardens across the city, and vegetables growing on top of the Palais des congrès convention centre.
But the blossoming urban agriculture movement is running into municipal roadblocks, say proponents pushing city hall to consult the public about the future of farming in Montreal.
Existing city bylaws make it difficult for people who want to practise urban agriculture to get started. They forbid livestock within Montreal city limits, except for in very limited cases in Rosemont-La Petite Patrie where community groups can get permission to have chickens for educational purposes. People aren’t allowed to dig up their driveways to plant vegetables. Farmers delivering produce for community-supported agriculture projects try to stay on the good side of residents living around their drop-off points to avoid traffic complaints being made to the city. Even people who want to compost in their backyards have gotten into trouble with neighbours complaining to city officials that their compost piles are too smelly…
Montreal has no policy on urban agriculture, although it is included in the city’s sustainable-development plan as a way to help green the city and reduce heat-island effect between now and 2015, said city spokesperson Martine Painchaud.
Many obstacles are slowing the development of urban agriculture in Montreal, including:
Pressure on land occupancy and use due to real estate development projects;
The presence of contaminants in certain soils;
The sub-optimal financing of initiatives and the absence of strategies in favor of urban agriculture;
The lack of availability of plots in community gardens in central neighborhoods.
In order to contribute to creating a green city, the Work Group on Urban Agriculture proposes a collective mobilization to demand a public consultation on the state of urban agriculture in Montreal.
The Work Group on Urban Agriculture invites all citizens to sign a petition which will support a public consultation on Urban Agriculture in Montreal. The petition must be signed by November 8, 2011. There are many locations around the island of Montreal to sign the petition. Find the location nearest you (n.b. The petition may be signed in NDG at Coop la Maison Verte – 5785, Sherbrooke street West).
If 15,000 Montrealers support this action within less than three months, the City of Montreal will be required to hold such a consultation.
It is unlawful to keep chickens or raise them in a coop in the city of Montreal although it is legal in Westmount.
A new pilot project this summer in the Montreal borough of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie will test community interest and acceptance towards letting everyone on the island have the ability to raise chickens in their backyards.
The city of Montreal outlawed chickens in 1966, part of the era’s trend against livestock within municipal boundaries.
While the law is still on the books, advocates are hoping a pilot project launched this summer in one borough could be the beginning of its undoing within the municipality.
“We had a lot of demand from residents, especially because it’s now allowed in other cities,” says Francois Croteau, mayor of the Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie borough.
The project announced last month means the borough will operate a hen house open to the public.
The original proposal was to permit residents to keep a few hens in their backyard if they had a large enough plot, but not everyone was in favour of the plan.
There were concerns backyard chickens would make too much noise and attract pests, such as rats.
“After one year (of considering) the regulations we found the first step would be a project that would focus on education and environment,” Croteau said of the project.
Wouldn’t it be great to extend the growing season from 3 months to 10 or 11 months? What if there were a way to garden year-round OUTSIDE without building an expensive greenhouse?
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