Calling all lovers of local food! Don’t miss Skagit Valley’s new homegrown cookbook

Books are $20 from Eat Your Yard and selected local outlets, including  Skagit Valley Co-op in Mount Vernon, Calico Cupboard in La Conner, Ace Hardware, Watermark Books, and Pelican Bay Books in Anacortes, and Anderson’s Store on Guemes Island. All proceeds benefit Eat Your Yard to help our community achieve a more resilient food system.

To order, mail $20 plus $4.95 for shipping and handling for the first book, $1.00 s/h for any additional books, to Skagit Beat the Heat, PO Box 1122, Anacortes, WA 98221. Thank you for your support!

Questions about the book?  Find answers here Cookbook

Order form here Cookbook order form

At the council chambers at City Hall (6th & Q Ave).  We encourage you to attend and bring a friend!

The tour kicks off at 10 am at the Anacortes Senior Activity Center at 1701 22nd St.  At the kick-off tour participants can attend solar workshops and pick up tour maps and other information.  Tour sites will be open from 11 am – 3 pm.  There will be 13 tour sites on Fidalgo and Guemes Islands featuring solar PV systems for generating electricity, solar thermal or solar hot water systems, and wind technologies.  All tour sites will be staffed by system owners to answer questions.

The event is co-sponsored by Skagit Beat the Heat, Power Trip Energy of Port Townsend, and Whidbey Sun & Wind of Coupeville.

“The goal of the solar tour is to show how home and business owners on Fidalgo and Guemes Islands are investing in renewable energy and saving money on their electric bills at the same time,” says Jeff Randall of Power Trip Energy.   “The tour will be a great way to have fun and learn a great deal about renewable energy in a short period of time.”

The tour will also feature a Solar Scavenger Hunt with free prizes awarded to participants.  Scavenger hunt forms will be available at the tour kick-off event and prizes donated by local businesses will be awarded at the end of the day.

The solar tour and all educational workshops are free and open to the public.  All workshops will occur at the Anacortes Fidalgo Center and are  scheduled for 11 am – 1 pm, repeating at 3 pm – 5 pm.  Spread the word – bring a friend!!

To learn more about the Anacortes Solar Tour, please call Jeff at 360-643-3080 or visit www.solarwashington.org.

There is a saying that when you point the finger of blame at someone, 3 fingers point back at yourself.  Why was BP looking for oil 5000 feet down in the ocean in the first place?  The easy answer is: to make money.  But the rock-bottom reason is: to feed an addiction.  Our addiction.

The drilling and the killing of the earth will never stop until we the people rise up and say – and show – that we don’t need to get in our cars every day.  That we will carpool, walk, bike, or take the bus.  That we will fly only for emergency needs.  That we will  give up foods from across the country or halfway around the world. That we will stop and consider the true costs behind the things we buy. That we will do whatever we must to protect and honor the immense gift of this world.

Easily-accessed oil is a thing of the past – now we’re squeezing oil out of tar sands, ripping apart shale, and going to extreme depths to drill.  Fracturing shale can contaminate groundwater, and extracting oil from tar sands requires the destruction of  forests while producing 3-5 times the  emissions of conventional oil refining.  And now we’re seeing the price of deep water drilling.

We can sign all the petitions we want to hold people to account but until we recognize our own culpability and pay more than lip service to the need to change, politicians and corporations will not take us seriously.  Because they know we’re addicted.  They know we don’t really want to make the changes that life with less oil requires.

Are they right?  Are we too weak to give up the poison that is killing us, along with the earth that sustains us?

A new way starts with us.  Government and corporations will continue business as usual as long as we remain hooked.  We have to say, and prove by our actions, that what we need and want is clean air to breathe and water to drink.  Healthy oceans and soil.  A bountiful diversity of creatures enlivening our days.  A planet not fouled and sickened by our presence.

IT STARTS WITH US.

…and from Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute: “This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet. The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway as a result of resource depletion and economic, environmental, and military ruin: end our dependence on the stuff.”

On Tuesday, May 25, we’ll present Going Buggy!  Keep your garden healthy by supporting the insects who benefit your plants and controlling those who don’t.  Lifelong insect aficionado and WSU Extension Educator Sharon Collman will share a fun and fascinating look at the insects who visit our gardens.

On Thursday, May 27, Eat Your Yard presents a special evening on “Sustainable Food Production from Four New Farms in the Skagit Community”.  Local farmers Everett Chu (Azusa Farm and Gardens), Holly Braun (Jubilee Family Farm), James Lyon Jr. (Good Shepherd Farm), and Ben Smith (Puget Sound Pasture Farm) will discuss creating small-scale farms and showcase their approaches to sustainable food production.  The evening includes door prizes of 10 edible-landscape plants.

For more info, call 293-4048.