My name is Emily, I’m the new Child and Youth Education Assistant at the CEC, and I’m very excited to be working here for the summer! While originally from the territories of the Anishinaabe Mississauga peoples out East, I have been living on these lands for the past 7 years. As a graduate from the Geography and Indigenous Studies departments at UVic, my experience and interests lie primarily in community-based research, environmental education, and climate justice.
My interest in working with the CEC came from a passion for projects that help support healthy and reciprocal relationships to the land, as well as instilling these values in the hearts and minds of our society’s youngest members.
In my free time you’ll find me gardening, climbing, practicing my Spanish, and trying to entertain my very needy cat. Besides helping with the Child and Youth Education Program, I’ll be spending my time with Zoe-Blue working on some fun communications materials. Come find me in the office and garden; I love a good chat, especially when it’s about Native plants!
Ever since moving to the coast, I’ve been fascinated by flora and have spent a lot of time learning the names of the plants around me and how to recognize them. While spending so much time in the forest admiring plants, it became hard to ignore fungi when fall rolled around. Since 2021, I’ve been equally enamored with the fungal diversity that can be found here on the south island, which led me to join the South Vancouver Island Mycological Society (SVIMS). Joining the mycological society has been very fun, and has provided me the opportunity to learn from countless experts while expanding my knowledge of the fungal kingdom.
This fall, the CEC supported me in attending SVIMS’s annual Cowichan Lake Foray as a professional development opportunity. The Foray is a Friday-Sunday event consisting of several guided mushroom walks, identification and generally a survey of the fungal biodiversity in the area. There were a plethora of amazing things out there, but my mushr.oom find of the weekend was definitely finding my first Cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis radicata), which I was able to take home and cook with my roommates. Another fun part of the weekend was getting to help out in the identification room a bit. When I first joined SVIMS, I mostly practiced “keying out” mushrooms that others already knew what they were to get familiar with the process. Keying out is the process of identifying fungi using guidebooks and other resources. This time around, I tried my hand at keying out mushrooms that hadn’t yet been successfully IDed and ended up identifying one of them as a Tricholoma species that we only found one potential previous record of having been observed in British Columbia. SVIMS ended up sending it for DNA sequencing so it’ll be exciting to see if the results are a match for the ID I made!
Compared to plants and animals, there is a lot more we don’t know about what fungi species we have here in North America. Many species here are currently named for similar European species, but as more genetic sequencing is done, we are discovering that the species are distinct from their European counterparts and/or what we previously considered to be just one species is actually several. For this reason, even the most amateur mycologist can make interesting contributions by observing, documenting, and preserving specimens they find. While learning about the ever-evolving taxonomy of fungi is interesting, it’s even more intriguing to learn about all the various roles fungi have in the ecosystem as well as the ways they interact with plants, insects, animals. and everything in the forest.
In my role running the semester long Let it Rot (LIR) program at high schools in the CRD, it has been so great to get to incorporate mycology with the knowledge I’ve gained at SVIMS over the past two years. This fall, I ran a mycology unit as part of LIR which included a guided mushroom walk, a lesson in documenting fungi using field slips, recording key information, properly collecting and taking spore prints. We also learned about fungi’s many roles in the ecosystem and wrapped it up with some fungi trivia. The students were quite excited about mushrooms and got really into trying to spot them. Even this week in early December weeks after our mycology unit students were asking if we could do another mushroom walk. I’ll be looking forward to another mycology unit in 2024 when some spring fungi are out. And stay tuned for an adult introduction to mycology workshop fall 2024!
Did you hear? We’re having a raffle for a brand new cargo e-bike!
In 2021 the Compost Education Centre began a concerted effort to expand and evolve our Child and Youth Education program, including the crucial addition of a second child and youth educator, Jeffrey Ellom. As a team, Jeffrey and Child & Youth Education Manager, Elora Adamson, have developed a host of new workshops and programs. These include one-off workshops like ‘Bees and Blossoms’, ‘Spectacular Seeds’, ‘Flawless Fungi’ and more! Fundraising from the Summer 2022 E-Bike Raffle will support not only the development of more relevant and exciting science and environmental resiliency workshops for young people, but will also contribute to new programming initiatives such as the ‘Parent-Child Workshop Series’.
Drop by in person, find us at events, or click here to grab your tickets to score this sweet ride.
Winner drawn in September. Thank you to @fairfieldbicycleshop for the generous donation.
1000 tickets, 1 for $2.00; 1500 tickets, 3 for $5.00; 3000 tickets, 10 for $15.00 | BC Gaming Event License #133883 | Winners consent to the release of their name by the licensee.
*Participants must be 19+ and a resident of BC to enter
This month we’d also like to share a read along of Charlie’s Dirt Day by Andrew Larson, with illustrations by Jacqueline Huson-Verrelli. This is one of our favourite compost-related kids’s books here at the CEC, for younger primary school aged children. It’s about a boy who discovers that compost can help him grow fruits and vegetables in containers on his balcony! This book is suitable for children ages 3-7.
If you know of any child and/or youth resources (books, zines, videos, workshops, ect.) that would pique our young audiences interests, please let Elora know via email at [email protected].
The list to the left has been living on my bulletin board for a few months and seeing it makes me smile every day. It’s from a student in a grade 3 class at St Patrick’s Elementary who was excited to help harvest his classroom worm compost bin but who wasn’t completely enthusiastic about touching the worms and finished compost. He put himself in charge of documenting all the organisms found in the worm bin and thoughtfully made me a copy of his list to take with me.
There are lots of reasons I get nerdily excited about worm composting (such as the beautiful finished product and how little time it takes for the worms to make it), but the most compelling one has to be what a great experience a classroom worm bin is for kids. It is a little ecosystem tucked away in the class, it lets kids see and participate in the entire compost cycle, and it gets them into the habit of integrating positive environmental change into their daily routine. Plus, it gives them an excuse to dig around in the dirt!
