Welcome to the April 2022 newsletter from the Template EDA. We wish you all the best as spring and warm weather approaches as we all look forward to socializing more outdoors.
This issue features exciting upcoming events, spring gardening info, book club news and more.
The Green Party of Canada has based their core principles on the Global Greens Charter. These are fundamental truths which bind Greens from around the world together:
- Participatory Democracy
- Nonviolence
- Social justice
- Sustainability
- Respect for Diversity
- Ecological Wisdom
Why We Vote Green
In last month’s newsletter we invited you to submit a few sentences to say why you vote Green. All names were placed in a draw and the lucky winner is….
Template Greens Events
Template Book Club
In March we read, What Does Green Mean? The History, People, and Ideas of the Green Party in Canada and Abroad by the author James Marshall.
Our book for May is How To Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa. The gifted young writer was the Giller prize winner for this her first book of fiction. Born in a Lao refugee camp, Thammavongsa was raised in Toronto. Although it is a work of fiction, it is obvious that she is writing from knowledge. The beautiful minimalistic prose uses short stories to capture men, women and children torn between languages, cultures, values and family loyalties.
With great sensitivity and compassion the author gives us a glimpse into the lives of new Canadians struggling to build a life in Canada while occupying low paying jobs. They are stories of hurt, rejection, loss, discrimination and racism, but also love and hope. It is an informative and very moving book.
The reader may at times feel anger and embarrassment, but the author has the gift to open our hearts and even sometimes make us laugh.
April in the Garden
The sunshine has really got our gardening juices flowing, but wow, is it ever cold in the morning. As a result, the growth this year in the greenhouse has been slower than normal, or at least slower than last year. Lucky all of you who have room in your house to start plants indoors because you will be way further ahead. Nevertheless, our soil temperature outside in our beds was 10°C in the middle of March when we had only one or two days with high temperatures of 10°C. That is the value of using a cloche over your garden beds. Plus the soil was damp, but not too wet. As a result, we were able to get our brassicas into the ground a couple of weeks ago and they are doing great. Our peas too have been growing under the cloche and are about 45 cm high already.
Gardening is a series of lessons learned from experience. We often plant a green manure crop into the garden beds in the fall and then rototill them under in the spring. However, now that we are not tilling our garden anymore, we found out that green manuring does not work very well. It is hard to kill that fall rye that just wants to keep growing now that spring is here. So we now have to lightly hoe the rye to uproot it and then spread our compost over top. Hoeing all our beds is a big job that we will gladly not have to do next year because we will spread the compost in the fall and forgo planting fall rye.
We love the thousands of starts that are under lights in the greenhouse and hardening off in our “hoop house” because they are our garden in miniature. Germinating the seeds, nursing the seedlings, repotting them into ever larger pots before getting them into the garden is like raising children, except that it all happens in less than a year and you get to take the winter off. Now that’s the kind of parenting Gary can relate to. As usual, we are raising far more foster children than we can accommodate so we will be giving away lots of tomato and tomatillo plants and a few others. And that is another joy of gardening — sharing the surplus.
Here is wishing all of you with veggie gardens great success this year. And for those who do not have veggies at your doorstep, please support the farmers’ markets because we need our agricultural land to be producing real food rather than houses and hay. Supporting farmers is the best way to get those idle agricultural lands back into food production so we can all eat locally.
Social Media
As mainstream media becomes less responsive, thereby less valuable, to smaller political parties and issues, social media becomes the important information and news communicator for many of us. Here in the Template EDA, we have a request for our members to assist us with this endeavor.
Our group has a Facebook account plus a Twitter account. We would love to have you join us in our efforts to bring the news and views of this valuable Green organization forward. If you or a friend would like to assist our EDA in providing tasty bits of info and fun to our social media, please contact….
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We hope that reading this has left you feeling inspired, encouraged, fortified! We are hard at work getting ready for a possible spring, fall, or whenever snap election. If you can, please consider helping the next federal campaign to elect our candidate! There are many ways to help, even during the pandemic, and our campaign plans have evolved to consider the different situations that might be present whenever an election is called. Would you like a lawn sign, to be delivered when the writ is dropped and picked up afterward? Would you like to discuss volunteer opportunities? We have a growing group of amazing volunteers, and we have fun. And of course, donations to support the campaign are always welcome.
Please email us for further information about volunteer opportunities and to reserve a lawn sign. Our fantastic phone volunteers have been hard at work calling people who displayed a lawn sign in 2019 to support Elizabeth, but they have not been able to reach everyone often due to changes in phone numbers. A big thank you in advance for considering how you might support the Template Greens this year.
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