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Our 4th Annual Chuckanut Transition Food Swap a great windfall for this frugal locavore.

10/15/2014

What We Came Home With

Our 4th Annual Chuckanut Transition Food Swap was a great windfall for this frugal, locavore. For our single income family of five it is very much about the budget. Here's the run down of what was brought and what I took home. I and others freely gave as well as bartered. A real sense of wealth and prosperity circulated around. I made new alliances and expanded my neighborly network.

Went with: chocolate mint jelly, pineapple sage jelly, lemon verbena jelly, stewed plums, sauerkraut, lacto-fermented veggies, lacto-fermented pickles, poor man's capers, spicy pickled asparagus, cold and flu tea, elderflower tincture, usnea tincture, 2 different types of lichen for natural dying, tomatillo salsa, salsa and body paint. Much of this list came from my land and labor. I spent less $30 on things like organic sugar, pectin, vinegar and sea salt, and I without attachment gave away some great jars.

But...I came home with: a pot of Egyptian Walking Onions, 3 lbs dried beans, hot pickled carrots, spiced currant sauce, hand salve, tomatos, Asian pears, hubard squash, pear butter, pickled sweet onions, 2 pints blueberry jam, quart of concord grape juice, raspberry jam, roasted tomato salsa,

guacamole, table grapes, 3 hand crocheted wash clothes, willow bark, dried St. John's Wart, 3 quarts peaches, sweet peppers, sedum, lilly, and a box titled "What's For Dinner" that contains ingredients and recipe for a stew to feed 4-6 people which held garden grown Delacota Squash, onions, potatoes, carrots, beets, dried herbs/garlic, and Pedrosillano beans. ..And an IOU for quince, granola and a home cooked dinner for my family of five...oh yeah and I may have also expanded my cooperative childcare group. Community supporting community is just good medicine.

Eating out of my watershed, the market, my garden, the food my husband and I cook and preserve, the informal community economic network we have connected and amplified...it all feeds into a way of life that makes me quite happy and rich.

~Sarai Stevens, Oct. 2014

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Chuckanut Transition's 4th Annual Food Swap!

10/15/2014

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Chuckanut Transition's 4th Annual Food Swap - All Barter Welcome! We gathered at the Bow Little Harvest Market. We laughed, we traded and haggled, we connected.
Together we are building our informal food system and alternative economy. This is a fun way to meet folks interested in preserving and growing food, diversify your winter stores, and share the abundance. See you there next year?!

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2014 Bow Little Harvest Market Slideshow - Thank you Curry Family of the Belfast Feed Store for another wonderful year!

10/15/2014

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What a great year! Thanks for all who come and support this all-volunteer effort. For the fifth year in a row the market has grown in vendor numbers and sales. We have a strong, dedicated customer base. We couldn't do this without you. This market is not a tourist draw or for people who just stumble upon it. This market is for the people that live in this rural community. We may be small. We may be funky. But we got big heart.

Thanks to all for being a part of this real, rural revival! And please help thank the Curry Family of Belfast Feed Store who donate their land and time to this sweet little market.

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Bow Little Market 2014 Season Ends Vendor Dinner

10/15/2014

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Four and a half years ago, I helped start the Bow Little Market, a project of Chuckanut Transition out of love and concern for my children...now my motivations have grown and I continue the work out of love for all the wonderful, hard working and inspired people that I have met along the way. Thanks for journey.
This was yet another end of the season dinner. Thanks to Mi Casa, one of our market vendors, for catering the event.
Sarai Stevens, Market Lady

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The Rain Promises Clean Water - By Chuck Nafziger

10/15/2014

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The Rain Promises Clean Water
Chuck Nafziger
October 14, 2014
It is dismaying that in many parts of the world, human activity has added pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, hormones, antibiotics and even radiation to local water supplies. Rivers, lakes and ground water are being impacted. Even the rain can bring in acidic components, mercury, PCBs and other toxins. I have to laugh at human "exceptionalism". I am glad we live in an oasis of good water.

Here in our neighborhood, we are blessed with fairly clean rain water. Much of the crap Asia puts in the air drops out in its trip across the Pacific and there are few power plants or other major pollution generators upwind of us. We are in a favorable niche on a stressed Earth. We still get a beautiful quantity of water that makes our neighborhood a lush, green paradise. Forest fires are rare in our damp climate. Droughts are rare here and I hope it remains that way.

I count my blessings that I drink my own well water. My well gets its water from ground water and I know all the people between me and the nearby hilltop from which it flows. I minimally filter the water and have tested it for bacteria, so I know it has good mineral content and safe bacterial levels. In general, Americans are deficient in minerals. Agribusiness vegetables are grown in depleted soil with just enough specific fertilizers to produce large, plump, tasteless, non-nutritious, herbicide laden lumps of matter. They are over washed to remove some of the added toxins, so they are very deficient in the minerals humans have evolved to need and use in the complex chemical processes of growth and healing. Michael Pollan talks about this in his book "In Defense of Food". Even industrially grown "organics" are deficient in natural minerals. The vegetables I get from my garden and from the Bow Little Market are beautiful and tasty!

City water systems over filter water in a largely unsuccessful attempt to remove all the chemical toxins, hormones and other pollutants from their water sources. Even co-op water is filtered through a reverse osmosis system that, in its attempt to remove toxins, takes out many necessary minerals. The more I study and ponder the journey of the water from the rain to my water glass, the more I like my well water.

My pond is filling up again after losing a couple of feet of depth over the dry summer. It is cool now, but still swimmable. Mushrooms, many edible, are responding to the wonderful rain (hope to see you this Sunday at the Mushroom Show). The winter browse for my goats is greening up.

I am not a summer person. I do not relish the heat and biting insects. I had too many sun burns as a stupid kid and as a teenaged lifeguard to even consider basking in the sun now. Bring on the rain and I count my many blessings.

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Flu season just keeps getting tougher...Ebola and other viral threats.

10/14/2014

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The deadly Ebola epidemic has been making headlines recently. It is portrayed as being far from here, and the US health system will protect us. But the rapid spread of the disease in Africa and the intense efforts in the US to deal with just one or two cases show the possibility of problems we will have to deal with personally in the future.

The number of infected people in west Africa is doubling every 20 days. At that rate there could be a million people infected by early next year. With an incubation period of up to 3 weeks means people can travel around the world before symptoms show that they are carriers. West Africa is an area with cocoa plantations and oil productions. Workers for those activities travel to and from other areas of Africa and around the world. It seems likely that more and more cases of Ebola will be found in the US.

Work is being done to find a vaccine or viral treatment but so far there isn't any proven method of treatment. The present treatment is of the symptoms, not the the disease. The patient is kept hydrated to make up for the loss of fluids and wait for the patient's own immune system to fight off the virus. Currently hospitals are only capable of handling one or two total isolation patients at a time. It would take time to set up large scale isolation facilities.

Consequently, it is likely that many people will have to rely on home care of infected patients. Like in the hospitals, it is important to try to prevent the spread of the virus to anyone else. In the hospitals, this is done with medical isolation rooms and head to toe gowns. In the home, the best substitute would be garbage bags and rubber gloves for the caregiver. Having surplus food stores on hand is good for any emergency, but especially one that requires complete isolation. The patient would be kept hydrated with a sugary, salt water solution like Gatorade. Since the patient will be vomiting, the solution would have to be dripped into the mouth slowly so the tissues can absorb it directly. Again this is to give the patients own immune system time to combat the virus. With this system, it is hoped that the caregiver doesn't become the next patient and the death rate can be lowered from the present 50-80%.

Even if the Ebola virus is stopped now, there are other virus and antibiotic resistant bacterial infections like TB that need to be dealt with. So that means we may need to change our behavior to protect ourselves. In Africa it has been observed that people are not getting as close to strangers in public places like buses. In schools they are screening kids for fevers with non-contact thermometers and sending them home if with fever. The practice of shaking hands may need to be reduced. And like my mom always said when I walked in the door, WASH YOUR HANDS.

Here are a couple of articles regarding Ebola, our current health system, and how it may be most effective/necessary to deal with Ebola in small, community minded ways if it we were to experience full pandemic. The Alger Community Hall plans to have documents regarding what to do in case of the Ebola virus makes it to this area. They also plan to have extra supplies of rubber gloves and plastic bags on hand.
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-09-16/ebola-as-a-game-changer
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-09-30/uncharted-territory-for-a-system-in-overshoot
Also here is a link to Flu.gov and their Community Planning and Preparedness Check List.

By Chris Soler

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Small-Scale Traditional Farming Is the Only Way to Avoid Food Crisis

10/14/2014

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Small-Scale Traditional Farming Is the Only Way to Avoid Food Crisis, UN Researcher Says

New scientific research increasingly shows how “agroecology” offers environmentally sustainable methods that can meet the rapidly growing demand for food.

Modern industrial agricultural methods can no longer feed the world, due to the impacts of overlapping environmental and ecological crises linked to land, water, and resource availability.

“If we deal with small farmers we solve hunger and we also deal with food production.”

The stark warning comes from the new United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Hilal Elver, in her first public speech since being appointed by the U.N. in June.

“Food policies which do not address the root causes of world hunger would be bound to fail,” she told a packed audience in Amsterdam.

One billion people globally are hungry, she declared, before calling on governments to support a transition to “agricultural democracy” which would empower rural small farmers.

Agriculture needs a new direction... http://www.nationofchange.org/2014/10/10/small-scale-traditional-farming-way-avoid-food-crisis-un-researcher-says/

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Our 4th Annual Chuckanut Transition Food Swap a great windfall for this frugal locavore.

Chuckanut Transition's 4th Annual Food Swap!

2014 Bow Little Harvest Market Slideshow - Thank you Curry Family of the Belfast Feed Store for another wonderful year!

Bow Little Market 2014 Season Ends Vendor Dinner

The Rain Promises Clean Water - By Chuck Nafziger

Flu season just keeps getting tougher...Ebola and other viral threats.

Small-Scale Traditional Farming Is the Only Way to Avoid Food Crisis

Chuckanut Transition Community

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