Rainwater Harvesting Education Day is April 16th!
April 13, 2016
We are thrilled to be hosting two great rainwater harvesting workshops, as well as a stormwater management specialist from the City of Victoria who will be on-hand to answer questions!
But that’s not all — our wonderful friends at Van Isle Water are offering all workshop attendees a coupon that can be redeemed for 15% off all rainwater harvesting materials!
INTRO TO RAINWATER HARVESTING, 10:00am-12:00pm, $20. Register here.
This introductory workshop is perfect for people who are keen to start learning all about rainwater harvesting. The workshop will define and explain watersheds, lay out the principles of rainwater harvesting, define terms such as greywater and blackwater, and go over the laundry to landscape system of rainwater containment using techniques such as cisterns and earthworks.
RAINWATER HARVESTING INTEGRATED DESIGN, 2:00-4:00pm, $20. Register here.
This workshop will help you get started designing a rainwater harvesting system for your household. We will cover site assessment, water budgeting, design work, and evaluation of different systems. Please bring a plan/overhead view of your site if possible, as we will be doing hands-on work.
It was a successful first day of soil testing for the Healing City Soils Team! The team will be taking samples from residential yards and boulevards for the next two months around Victoria and Esquimalt and the information collected will be uploaded into an interactive soil health map. 
Bokashi is a Japanese term meaning “fermented organic matter”. Different from composting, which is aerobic, it is an anaerobic process that allows a person to deal with a wide variety of food waste on-site. Bokashi harnesses the power of effective microorganisms (EM) dehydrated onto a cereal base to carry out the fermentation process . It is best used as a partner to a compost pile, because you will need a place to compost the ‘spent’ material once it has finished going through the bokashi process. It is a great alternative to the green cone food digester as it breaks down the same types of materials but doesn’t need sunlight or to be buried down 2 feet in your garden work. You can make your own system or purchase a ready-to-use unit.
In general, tumbler composters are in the form of a barrel mounted on a stand so the unit can be turned or “tumbled” around a central axis. They can be mounted horizontally or vertically, both work well. Turning these units easily incorporates air into the material inside the tumbler, which can speed up the decomposition process. It is possible that you may get a finished product faster than with passive backyard composting due to the increased aeration that tumblers make possible. However, beware of manufacturers that say you will have finished compost in three weeks or less – anything that looks finished in this short amount of time will be unstable and need to sit for at least 6-8 weeks longer to cure.
When we built our new greenhouse wanted the plans for this project to be free and readily accessible. As such, this factsheet includes a budget and materials list for the greenhouse, a list of the lessons I learned, and some photos of the building process.
We are very excited to announce that we have partnered with Royal Roads University and Danielle Stevenson of DIY Fungi to launch a new project called Healing City Soils. Bridging urban agriculture, composting, food literacy, ecological restoration and bioremediation, this initiative brings together the municipalities of Victoria and Esquimalt, local post-secondary institutions, food security organizations and people who are interested in growing food and building the soil beneath their feet.
