Growing Your Own Food
I will grow more of my own food this growing season.
The many benefits of growing your own food include eating fresh produce, supporting local wildlife, exercise, and saving money. 12 Benefits Of Growing Your Own Food
It’s time to plan for the 2024 growing season.
Browsing through the many seed catalogues available is a great way to get inspiration. Many are available online; you don’t need to order a paper copy. Seeds can be delivered to your door by Canada Post (see lists in the links below). Seeds are also available in many local stores.
If you have never tried to grow your own food, this may be the year to give it a try, even if it’s just a few herbs in a window box. If you have access to a larger space, talk to locals about what grows well in your area and when to plant.
Don’t spring into garden clean up too soon though.
Butterflies, bees, pollinators, and other beneficial insects overwinter in the dead leaves and hollowed out stems of last year’s plants, and it is important not to disturb them until temperatures are consistently above 10°C. Insects are a vital part of a balanced ecosystem and seed heads can serve as a valuable early food source for birds.
Resources:
- Spring Clean-up: A Toronto Master Gardener Guide
- Please Resist the Urge to Clean Up Your Gardens: Embracing Nature’s Cycle
- Vegetable Gardening for Beginners – The Old Farmer’s Almanac
Where can I get seed:
- Grow Your Own – Vegetables – Climate Action Muskoka – with links to online seed venders
More from past challenges:
- Grow your own food | Buy locally grown | Eat in season – link to list of Farmers Markets in Muskoka
- The Carbon Footprint of Food – Bonus Quick N Delish
Repair Your Broken Stuff
I will, repair my broken stuff. Fact: 96% of independent repair shops surveyed turn customers away because of manufacturers’ repair restrictions. Access to parts, tools, and repair information should be fair and affordable.
Source: Repair is freedom – iFixit
“Repair Everything” first appeared in our January 7, 2021 newsletter and we have returned to the issue several times. See the links below. We should have the right to repair things we buy, whether that means taking it to a repair shop or fixing it ourselves. The Right to Repair movement is a broad international effort to secure our repair options and to prevent repair limitations.
Right to Repair laws have three main goals:
– allowing us the right to open our stuff
– increasing the availability of the parts and tools needed for repair
– keeping independent repair shops in business
Canada needs right to repair legislation. It will keep stuff out of landfills, reduce the need for new raw materials, save consumers money, and create jobs. Fixing something that’s broken gives a sense of accomplishment; refurbishing something you love feels good.
A Feel-Good Movie
Watch The Last Repair Shop, now streaming for free on YouTube. Nominated for Best Documentary Short 2024 Academy Awards. 40 minutes
Resources:
- Repair is freedom – iFixit
- CanRepair – The Canadian Repair Coalition
- What is Right to repair 1.2 min video
- A clearer right-to-repair picture emerges in Canada
And from past Community Carbon Challenges:
- Repair Everything | Repair Everything II
- A Stitch in Time … – Mend Your Clothes
- Support the Circular Economy
Let’s talk!
I will talk about climate change with family and friends.
“Talking about climate change requires honesty and connection. Every single person already has every reason they need to care about climate change.” Katharine Hayhoe
In her November 2018 TED Talk Katherine Hayhoe told us the most important thing you can do to fight climate change is talk about it.
Conversations about climate change can often become heated or just dead-end. Most people who are labelled as climate change deniers aren’t actually deniers at all — they are feeling isolated or just have questions. The key to having a real discussion is to connect over shared values, family, community, nature — and to prompt people to realize that they already care about a changing climate.
“I learned how much of people’s emotion around climate change is rooted in feeling isolated…A lot of the conversation about climate change places the power out there—but the power to make change happen is actually in our conversations, in our relationships, and in our towns. It’s in our hands, more than we believe.” – Kate Schapira, Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth
Resources
- Talking about climate change requires honesty and connection | CBC Radio
- How and why to have climate change conversations – David Suzuki Foundation
- Talking climate – Climate Outreach
- Talking Climate Change at Home Just Got Easier | EcoParent magazine
- “Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth”
A Safe and Just Space for Humanity
I will learn how to live within the means of a living planet.
A safe and just space for humanity lies between an ecological ceiling which ensures humanity does not overshoot what our planet can handle and a social foundation that ensures no one is left behind. AKA “Doughnut Economics.” About Doughnut Economics
Be a sharer, repairer, regenerator, a steward of natural habitat. Reduce waste, buy local, eat less meat, minimize travel, fly less, be climate and energy smart.
An Ecological Ceiling
“We don’t know how long we can keep breaching these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm.” Johan Rockström
We can and we must pull back from these planetary boundaries by switching to renewable energy sources, reducing pollution, recycling critical minerals, preserving biodiversity, adapting regenerative agriculture practices, shifting to a circular economy… COP28: The Transformation Remains Unstoppable
A Social Foundation
If we look only at ecological limits, we risk leaving the most vulnerable behind. A just transition requires that we establish a social foundation below which no one falls. Leaving No One Behind.
Our goal must be to meet the needs of all humanity within the means of the living planet and to insure a safe and just space for future generations.
More Resources
- A Safe and Just Space for Humanity: Can we live within the doughnut? Oxfam Report (pdf)
- Support the Circular Economy: A previous CCC from CAM
A new challenge will appear in our weekly newsletter every few weeks
Here’s a list of all previous New Challenges:
- Growing Your Own Food
- Repair Your Broken Stuff
- Let’s Talk
- A Safe and Just Space for Humanity
- Learn about Planetary Boundaries
- Individual Climate Action Matters: Use your influence
- Heat pumps are the most efficient heating technology ever invented.
- Scientists understood the physics of climate change in the 1800s
- Nature Nurtures
- Fossil Fuels, Petrochemicals and Plastic
- Say No To Peat
- Re-examine your fossil fuel-free transportation options
- Food and Farmland
- Imagine a fossil fuel free future
- Preserve Biodiversity – Nurture ‘Everyday Awe’
- Community Carbon Challenge – 2023
- Municipal Election
- Preserve Your Own Food
- Nature-based Solutions
- Grow your own food | Buy locally grown |
Eat in season. - “Silent Spring“ – 2022
- Efficiency without sufficiency is lost
- Get Outside — Spring Edition
- Talk To Your Kids About the Climate Crisis
- Yes, heat pumps work in winter in Canada!
- Think Globally – Act Locally
- Winter Recreation – Get Outside
- Repair Everything II
- New Year’s 2022 — CO2, A Direct Result of Consumption
- A Climate Christmas Carol
- I will work to further reduce my Carbon Footprint
- Get Creative to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint This Holiday Season
- A Stitch In Time – Mend Your Clothes
- Break the Idling Habit
- Don’t Upgrade Your Phone (Yet)
- Going On a Picnic…
- Support the Circular Economy
- A Call to Action at Every Level
- Choose People-Powered Recreational Vehicles
- Restore the Dark Sky
- Active Transportation in Muskoka
- Carbon Drawdown – Rewilding
- The Carbon Footprint of Your Refrigerator
- The Carbon Footprint of Your Next Vehicle
- The Carbon Footprint of Food – Bonus “Quick N Delish”
- Grow Your Own Vegetables
- Shop Local – Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
- Repair Everything
- The Carbon Footprint of Getting Dressed
- The Footprint of Food Packaging
- Energy Vampires
- The Impact of Tires on Your Carbon Footprint and Your Health
Return to the Community Carbon Challenge – here