54: Community

In the last year and a bit, I’ve mostly been sticking close to home. I’ve probably gone into Vancouver (which is about 25 minutes away) less than 10 times since the pandemic started.

Without having any events to go to, and not being allowed to meet up with groups of people, there have rarely been occasions when I had any reason to travel much farther than over the border of New West into Burnaby or Coquitlam.

And you know what? It’s been pretty great. I feel like I’ve gotten to know a lot more about my community and it is wonderful.

I know I’ve mentioned our local “Share” group a time or two (that’s New West’s version of a Buy Nothing group), which never fails to fill me with joy. My favourite aspect of the group is the satisfying environmentally-friendly benefits of redistributing things that people don’t want to the people that do want/ need them, without any new items being purchased. It’s almost a zero footprint transaction. (A lot of the pick-ups involve a short drive, so not quite zero.)

Just last night I gave away a can of grey paint that I wasn’t going to use and arranged to pick up a pizza cutter from someone else because we’ve started making pizza at home and it turns out, as much as I like to avoid collecting kitchen gadgets that only have one specific purpose, it would actually be pretty handy to have a proper pizza cutter.

For the last few months I have been going on weekly walks with a friend that lives nearby. Within about a half hour radius of our homes, we can walk to a ravine, two different rivers, numerous parks and (my favourite) through neighbourhoods made up of a wide variety of old houses. Especially now that it’s spring, I also love looking at people’s gardens and yards for ideas. Just like the houses, there’s a wide variety of interesting ideas to check out.

Another occasional aspect of the walks is picking up delicious treats from local entrepreneurs. We have a professional pastry chef up the hill that sells fancy donuts on the weekends, as well as a backyard farmer and caterer that has recently started making hot pretzels. (All pre-ordered and scheduled pick-ups for COVID safety.) This kind of defeats the health benefit of walking, but you could also look at it as offsetting the calories of the treats, so that’s how we’re framing it.

On my own street, some kids applied for and received a Community Grant to make butterfly gardens around the neighbourhood. I got a cute flyer in my mailbox last week with information about how to be involved. We had already been planning to remove the grass on our boulevard and replace it with a lawn alternative mix of wildflowers, so we’re hoping that counts as part of the group project. Just waiting for our seeds to arrive!

Last weekend we installed a patio in our backyard made of reclaimed bricks that used to be our neighbour’s chimney. It’s not quite finished yet, but I’m really looking forward to being able to invite people over for backyard visits.

Side note: We started digging out the area for the patio last fall and as a place to move some of the soil, we built a couple of large planter boxes out of 100-year-old wood that we’d saved from our basement reno.

We put them in the side yard and noticed last week that they had some crazy mushrooms growing in them. Michel guessed that they were morels, which are “prized by gourmet cooks” (Wikipedia), but we didn’t know for sure.

We’ve only just started eating regular grocery store mushrooms in the last little while, so we weren’t ready to try anything weird and fancy, but it turns out one of our neighbours is a mycophile and he came over with his special mesh bags and harvested the good ones.

In exchange, he gave us a bag of coffee that he’d roasted himself and I am looking very forward to trying it this weekend. I feel like I’m just surrounded by interesting people lately – has it always been this way and I’ve just started to notice?

But back to the backyard: Aside from the patio, I think I’m going to have big plans for the rest of the space, I just don’t know what they are yet.

For the last few weeks I have been doing an intro course on Permaculture and it is so fascinating. Definitely something I want to look into further. At this point, I really only have the most basic idea of what permaculture even is, but it really appeals to me in a bunch of different ways.

If you’ve never heard of permaculture, the definition on Wikipedia says:

Permaculture is an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience.

Some of the key things that interest me about it are that it can be done on a small scale (such as in a backyard) and still work as a system, and that it relies on design principles. I love relying on design principles!  

More about this later, I’m sure.