Good food and conversation last Thursday

Our latest Grandview-Woodlands village potluck and conversation meandered through a lot of territory and nobody took minutes, so this summery will be incomplete, but also brief. We may want more directed discussion at some point, but I found it to be informative, interesting and enjoyed getting to know everyone a little bit. It was somewhere midway along the continuum between "party" and "meeting". One of the areas we did not cover was the mapping project. Perhaps, for now, that inititative needs to bounce around online discussion and messages, with an eventual get-together just for it.

In the process of telling each other what we do for income and other things we're involved in, several projects and potential projects emerged:

Composter Construction: At the co-op where I live, we are planning to build several rotating drum composters in order to upgrade our capacity to handle and use all that stuff "in house". The event that will enable this process will be a trip out to Abbotsford to buy some plastic drums. The rest of the materials can be purchased from Home Depot. I will post something about that soon, but for now you can view the composter design demonstration at http://dixiegrilling.com/ - just scroll to the bottom of the page. If anyone would like to build one of these for your own use, we might consider combining forces to make it easier... in which case you can contact me at cabot@telus.net

Bokashi: I also mentioned my recent, ongoing exploration of the use of Bokashi. Bokashi is made of wheat bran innoculated with a specific mix of microbes, making it useful for handling kitchen waste before you compost it. The innoculent essentially ferments the food waste, altering its properties. The advantages are that you can compost anything including meat scraps, it does not attract flies and rodents and when you eventually compost it, it breaks down rapidly without nasty smells. I would eventually be interested in producing large amounts of Bokashi for numerous households, but for now you can buy (and learn) whatever you need in Vancouver from http://greatday18.ca/indexgdb.htm

One really cool idea from Jodi is the pospect of creating small forest gardens in the neighbourhood. Forest gardens are food producing ecosystems with the multi-level structure of forests - trees, shrubs, woody and herbaceous perennials, ground covers, vines with all their attendant birds, bugs and microbes - that are designed to eventually look after themselves, except for harvesting. One possible site would be a corner of the park just outside my place at Adanac and Salsbury. There may be other sites, perhaps some neglected corner near you.

Other projects discussed were things mentioned elsewhere in the VV site, such as:

the neighbourhood repair project spearheaded by Andrew (see his comments on the G-W village page)

a market bazaar behind Jeff and Jodi's place right next to their aquaponics greenhouse

the open money initiative to create community currencies in Vancouver, starting with Dunbar Dollars. You can find out more by scrolling down through the Local Economy Network Discussions at http://www.villagevancouver.ca/group/localeconomynetwork/forum?

OK, I said it would be brief and it wasn't, but there's plenty of stuff I missed, so I'm convinced that we'll be doing it again in May.

-Cabot