Modern day homesteading

As some friends and I are considering banding together to buy land and create a kind of Eden on Haida Gwaii, thoughts of alternative green energy technologies, home design and intentional communities are dancing through my head like sugar plums.

I was listening to Spark on cbc the other day and stumbled across an unusually interesting interview with another like minded soul from Whole systems design, a research farm where they are doing many of the things that I am dreaming of. Have a listen.

Salt

I am starting to learn about salt. I have an audiobook entitled "salt a world history" that I got from the library and just got this link to a great website that clarifies the different harvesting techniques for various kinds of salt. Seems like there is a good potential for people here on Haida Gwaii to produce their own sea salt, and this is one product idea we have been toying with at the HGCC. I am bouyed by the fact that they are alredy producing salt on Vancouver Island at Vancouver Island Salt co.

LOHAS

Just found out about an interesting marketing demographic courtesy of a group of German marketing students who did some research for the Haida Gwaii Culinary Co-operative this week. LOHAS or Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability make up about 2/3 of the German market! I wonder how many Canadians would be considered LOHAS? How about that? Better than just calling them hippies right? I was just discussing the other day with someone how we needed to develop more words so that we aren't just constantly referring to the 70's. Thank you Germans!

Haida Gwaii Culinary Cooperative interview on CBC

Recently Kiku from the HGCC was interviewed on All Points West. click here to listen, or download the podcast.

Haida Gwaii Culinary Cooperative

I have started working with the Haida Gwaii Culinary Co-operative here in Haida Gwaii. I am helping out with communications and for the past few days have been working on making some signs (like the one above). It is really exciting. The main focus of this co-op is to provide mushroom pickers and other wild harvesters with a fair price for the products they harvest. Central among these is the "rainforest chanterelle", a beautiful little fungus that is native to the islands. I have been picking some myself and they are scrumptious (above are a few tiny examples, though those are not my hands, they belong to my picking partner). The big brianwave of the co-op is to have developed a very high tech dehydration system which allows them to buy mushrooms at a fair price from the pickers (who ideally are members) and then if they can't sell all the fresh mushrooms, they can dry them and sell them all year round. More on this process later.