Click here for a 3:34 slideshow about Eileen Ailert’s campaign to kick-start urban agriculture.

Also: click here to order a used copy of Heather Flores’ book “Food Not Lawns”, a practical guide to home food growing. And click here to check out VPO resources on how to start growing your own food.

It’s a way to get back in touch with this Nature we keep hearing so much about, a way to start eating healthy organic food for practically nothing, and a political act - all rolled into one. Join in!

Innovative development will house 45 families, a farm, businesses
Brian Lewis, The Province
Published: Sunday, August 17, 2008
Original article

One of the Fraser Valley’s better kept secrets is the picturesque village of Yarrow, where even today it feels more appropriate to drive down its main street in nothing newer than a ‘56 Chevy.

However, just across from “Hank the Barber” on Yarrow Central Road, you’ll find a unique development project that’s capturing attention from as far away as Kansas and California.

Yarrow EcoVillage is still in its early days. But if everything turns out as planned, the 10-hectare site will house about 45 families, home-based businesses and a working organic farm.

It’ll be a “village within a village” where residents live, work and play, while leaving as small an ecological footprint as possible.

The development will utilize the latest technologies, but its fundamental concepts are definitely rooted in a time when earliest immigrants in the Fraser Valley — including the Mennonites who founded Yarrow in the 1920s — lived much more in harmony with the land.

Michael Hale, a spokesman for the Yarrow EcoVillage Society (www.yarrowecovillage.ca) who showed me around the property last week, explains that this is much, much more than just an environmentally friendly housing development.

There’s a strong sense of communal living. But for the co-operative that owns the former dairy farm, this is also a working laboratory of sorts devoted to taking current environmental trends in construction and lifestyle to an entirely new level.

The houses will be constructed using environmentally sustainable materials and techniques.

The walls, for example, are 40-centimetres thick and formed by cordwood laid crossways between large wooden beams on a bed of masonry mix that includes straw, wood fibre, clay, sand and a little cement for bonding.

It’s similar to an ancient wall construction technique known as “cob” building that needs no insulation.

“When finished, it looks very much like stonework because the butt-ends of the wood are the inside and outside surfaces of the walls,” Hale says.

Construction of the first two duplexes began recently. The building techniques are so unique that the City of Chilliwack, whose jurisdiction includes Yarrow, had to devise and pass a zoning bylaw exclusively for the development.

A large heritage barn on the property, which now has a new roof made of recycled automobile tires, will become the community and recreation centre and will also house a learning centre and cottage industries, such as pottery and other arts and crafts.

The existing farmhouse will also become part of the new development, and plans are to use parts of it as a bed and breakfast. The residential area also includes a village square covered by porous material so rainwater returns to the aquifer.

Solar, geothermal and wind energy are being considered for the development site. Waste water will be reclaimed using a high-technology “solar aquatics system,” where essentially water plants in greenhouses perform the purifying.

“Outside interest has been phenomenal and we’ve had visitors from places like Kansas and California,” Hale says.

He says the entire project should take about five years to build and that total costs are estimated at about $12 million. Homeownership will be on a long-term, leasehold basis.

The first organizer of the Vancouver Peak Oil Citizens Group, Max - a highly like-able young permaculturist and eco-activist - renounced the post allegedly, because he foresaw our powering-down and transitional efforts going to s***. I remember hearing this information from my predecessor, Steve. I was told that he was off, ‘walking the land,’ trying to find out ‘where it is at.’ As I began to Contemplate Max’s life-path, I also began to question more of my own plans for the future. Put it this way, if I am to use the folks at LATOC as a yardstick, I am woefully unprepared, ripe for the die-off. A secure home with crate-loads of ammo is the de rigeur minimum - or so the message boards would have us believe.

I have about a month’s worth of food and some basic emergency supplies. The usual suspects: the fresh, bottled water, the excess propane, the Katadyn water filters and purification tablets. Oh, and next years’ seeds are in cold storage.

And when I plan it comes down to this: I plan to plant more beans next year. I will double the potato plot to make room for some early and mid-season varieties. Other than that I plan to to take a last trip to the Old Country - preferably before my Grandmother dies and before the civilian air-fleet is permanently grounded.

I find it so hard to make contingency plans for my existence when I am so bloody caught up in living that self-same existence. And, despite being the son of a farmer, I am also a former quasi-urbane metro-sexual. I am the product of the eighties and the British Education combined - probably not what you would call true survivor material. To this end, I hope it is not all Mad Max hair-do’s and pointy sticks anytime too soon!

Ultimately, wheresoever I am now, is exactly where I am connecting with my landbase. Presently that is Burnaby. Often I project into ‘A Long Emergency’ scenario. Often, during walking meditation along the perimeter of my immediate landbase, a voice will percolate upwardly through my being:

“The H.Y. Louie Distribution Warehouse is the best place for food reconnaissance raids (as it is hidden.) The war zone will be on the other side of Lougheed, about the Costco loading bay. Yes, that is where the gun-fire will be…”

Knowing your immediate landbase ensures your best ability to survive.

While a significant number of my fellow activists are eye-balling Nelson as a agrarian utopia, I pose the question: Can the Kootenay landbase accommodate a post-postmodern diaspora of this kind? I fear it may not be able. Moreover, how will the indigenous population feel about any prospective exodus?

If it all goes to hell-in-a handbasket, I will evanesce into the woods like the best of you. Until that time I am going to more intimately connect with my locale. I am going to find the mythical spot where the best blackberries grow on the borders of Lake City; where the most reliable natural water-source is in late August.

I will prove to you that chantrelles grow here. Once I find them.

I find myself trying to take account of a lot of different scenarios, ranging from a “soft landing” — where oil depletes gradually and price rises are the biggest problem we have to deal with — to a crash with both sturm and drang.  In the soft landing scenario, I’d hope to stay in North Vancouver and help relocalize it into a fairly self-sufficient neighborhood, bearing in mind that that still requires preserving farmload to grow food for the whole metro area and so on.  That’s why I’m eager to get the Peak Oil task force going, get the city council and the provincial government on board, and make Vancouver the first city in Canada to officially prepare for what’s coming.  But I’m also thinking about what to do in a more severe scenario — I’d still need a village around me — but maybe somewhere farther from the city, like Nelson, or the Sunshine Coast?  That kind of scenario brings with it a million questions:  How do I make a living?  What about family, here and elsewhere?  Where are my best friends?  How do I convince lots of people with Really Useful Skills to come live next to me and teach me everything I don’t know?  No real answers yet, but I’m hoping 2008 will bring much more clarity.  I’ll update this post when I know more.

Plans A, B & C are all in various stages of research and development:

Plan A - Stay in Vancouver - Plan A

• Continue to develop guerrilla and community gardens
• Create a non-profit to facilitate the creation of city sponsored community gardens
• Start an urban permaculture school to train low-income, disadvantaged, at risk populations alongside anyone interested in the subject
• Work with the city to create urban farms employing people who have graduated from the urban permaculture school

Plan B - Ecovillage in BC

• Looking at property in Lillooet with plenty of sun, long growing season and access to fresh water
• Work with city of Lillooet to create a methane digester facility for composting municipal food stuffs while generating electricity and fertilizer
• Purchase diesel vehicle and get a Plant Drive kit so I can run on used veggie oil, dino diesel and biodiesel
• Start building a huge garden & orchard - enough to be self-sufficient with a surplus to sell/trade
• Begin keeping livestock for meat and dairy
• Continue developing soap making skills
• Start a permaculture school within the next five years
• Continue to create micro-enterprise focused on relocalizing our economy

Plan C - Head for the Hills

• Retreat to Manitoulin Island - work with friends and family to build self-sufficient infrastructure there