April 16, 2010 - Glebe Report

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28 Glebe Report April 16, 2010 ENVIRONMENT Ottawa Eco-Stewardship Fair inspiring and practical By Jill Sturdy Saturday, April 24, there is no better place to celebrate the earth and Earth Week than at the 7th annual Ottawa Eco-Stewardship Fair at the RA Centre. Sample some wonderful local food and taste some of the best in local wine and beer. See some unique and creative pieces by area eco-artists and check out dozens of practical innovations for green living that will save you money and help the planet. There is something for everyone. There are exhibits in health, beauty and fashion, energy, home and garden, nature, moms and babies, eco- Tourism and recreation. New this year is a Bike Festival. Ride your bike to the EcoFair and reduce your ecological footprint! After you lock up, you can stop by the tents set up outside the north entrance and check out the variety of bikes on display and stay for a bike repair and safety demonstrations. The 2010 Ottawa Eco-Stewardship Fair is the region’s longest running environmental event. Each year, it has grown in popularity. Last year’s event was a major success with over 100 exhibitors and activities that attracted close to 5,000 visitors. Yet, it has a laid back and friendly atmosphere. Before and After Care in a Home Environment When it comes to the environment and the health of our families, we can’t do everything, but each of us can do something. Finding out how has become an annual tradition at the Ottawa EcoFair. This grassroots community event continues to build on those traditions. It will feature food demonstrations by local chef Jacqueline Jolliffe of the Red Apron, a popular fresh meal service that offers sophisticated comfort food. A Taste of Ottawa’s Countryside will offer sweet and savoury treats from the Valley. Back by popular demand is the 100 mile lunch, created by talented RA Centre Chef, Darcy Ryman. This free event is made possible by community volunteers and the generous sponsorship support of the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, the Ottawa Citizen, Enbridge Gas Distribution Inc., the City of Ottawa and Rogers TV. Mark it in your calendar now. The Ottawa EcoFair will take place on Saturday, April 24 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the RA Centre, 2451 Riverside Drive. Free admission and parking. For more information, visit www.ottawaecofair.ca. Jill Sturdy is co-ordinator of the Eco-Stewardship Fair. Fun activities, nutritious snacks, homework help. Experienced caregiver in the Glebe for over 10 years. Available for school breaks (PD days, March Break, and throughout the summer). Call Misse at 613-569-9521. Save the beaver A beaver finds a home in the Experimental Farm by Gerard Kenney Last fall, the Experimental Farm had the good fortune of becoming host to a permanent and very welcome, visitor – a beaver. Canada’s national animal set up home in a small pond, formed by an equally small stream that runs right next to Fletcher’s Wildflower Garden. My lady, Claire, and I were among the many people who feared the beaver might not make it safely through the winter because of the small size of the pond that it now calls home. Survive it did, and quite well indeed, if we judge from the superb condition of its dam this spring. Now beavers can be a bit pushy when it comes to humans invading their living spaces – after all, they were here before us. However, if we humans strive to match their ingenuity, there are ways for beavers and people to live happily in peace. Imagine the benefits for city kids, to say nothing of their parents, to experience closeness to Canadian beavers in the wild, right here in the city. In the past, we humans have had a tendency to solve beaver-people problems in a very brutal way – getting rid of them. I would presume that we are past using such simplistic methods and that we can find more humanistic solutions to not only live in peace with beavers, but at the same time to reach a beneficial rapprochement between the beavers and ourselves. Yes, such solutions probably come with a price, but here, a made-to-measure opportunity has been served up to us on a silver platter for getting our children and grandchildren closer to nature. And that is priceless. Hopefully, we will be up to the challenge. Gerard Kenney is a retired professional engineer with experience in hydraulics who has not yet given up hope about the possibility of accommodating a resident beaver. He is studying the situation and would like to hear from anyone interested in having something to say about this challenge. Please contact him at gikenney@hotmail.com. Photo: Gerard Kenney HELEN BUDAY Sales Representative (613) 226-8790 BUSINESS (613) 226-4392 FAX (800) 472-6512 TOLL FREE COBURN REALTY 1415 Woodroffe Ave. Nepean, Ontario K2C 1V9 Each Office is Independently Owned and Operated Helen-Buday@coldwellbanker.ca Now available at Silver Scissors Hair 613.236.6408 857 Bank St. at Fifth Ave. silverscissors@rogers.com www.silverscissors.ca est 1979
ENVIRONMENT Keeping the Glebe green and clean by Virginia Carver and Carol MacLeod Do you like your neighbourhood green and clean? The Glebe Community Association Environment and Anti-Litter Committee is working hard on your behalf and we are looking for volunteers to expand our efforts and our results. Cleaning Spring cleaning on Bank Street Saturday, April 17: in the spring and fall of each year, volunteers clean Bank Street as a part of the City of Ottawa Cleaning the Capital campaign. We meet outside Fifth Avenue Court at 9:30 am for the clean-up. The City of Ottawa supplies gloves and bags. Graffiti project Do you live near a Canada Post mail box or a utility box that is regularly vandalized with graffiti? The city provides materials with which to clean Canada Post boxes or you can report graffiti on the grey or red Canada Post boxes to Canada Post, toll free: 1-800-267-1177. For safety reasons, Bell, Enbridge, Rogers and Ottawa Hydro prefer to clean their own boxes. You can report graffiti on utility boxes to the City of Ottawa at 311 or email 311@ottawa.ca. We track our experience with having utilities remove graffiti on their property, and work on intercepting vandals in collaboration with local schools and the Ottawa police. If you would like to ‘adopt’ an offending box, call Virginia at 613-233-2875. She will provide cleaning supplies. Eliminating litter The Environment Committee lobbies the City of Ottawa about litter concerns in the Glebe. Some members have adopted local parks under the city’s Adopt-a-Park environmental program. This means they regularly pick up litter and report graffiti which they remove, where possible. Starbucks is the adoptive parent of Third Avenue from the Canal to Bronson, and we encourage local businesses to join the program. Street care We collaborate with the Glebe Business Improvement Area (BIA) to consider street furnishings for Bank Street. At our request, the city maintains the same number of garbage containers along Bank Street summer and winter and we work with a coalition of core community associations to develop strategies for more efficient garbage collection on our main streets. In collaboration with the BIA, we are also lobbying for garbage containers to be placed adjacent to benches along Bank Street and for recycling boxes to be located at regular intervals. We want to reduce the number of newspaper boxes along Bank Street by replacing them with multi-unit boxes. Finally, through a donation from the Glebe Report Association, the committee financed a pilot project to install cigarette butt boxes at Second and Third avenues. We are encouraging smokers to make use of them just as we urge Bank Street businesses to provide butt containers for their customers. Greening Our Garden Angels maintain those flower boxes you see at entrances to the Glebe and along Bank Street. Our lead Angel masterfully finds us plant donations, but the boxes need to be planted, weeded and watered throughout the season. Consequently, we are always looking for aspiring Green Thumbs to adopt planter boxes. Re-TREE our Glebe is an ongoing project to update the city’s inventory of trees on its right-of-ways in the Glebe. We completed one quadrant of the community manually last year, but technological glitches mean that we need to enter those data on the city’s GPS system. At the same time, we are educating homeowners about the emerald ash borer, which will sooner or later destroy the ash trees across the city. We encourage people who have ash trees around their homes to contact the city to proactively obtain free replacement trees through the city’s Trees for Tomorrow program. Our enthusiastic Tree Team will advance the project over the upcoming season, as city equipment becomes available. We keep an eye on the health of trees in the community, particularly emerald ash borer. We are involved in Mutchmor School’s project to replant the playing field it shares with Corpus Christi and the Glebe Community Centre. About half the trees in that field are green ash, so the parent council has embarked on this ambitious project to replace the trees before they die and refresh the field’s landscaping. We are working with the Glebe BIA to green Pretoria and its intersection with the Driveway. “Black knot of plums” is a disease that is becoming a problem requiring attention in our community. It affects several varieties of plums and has been known to affect hawthorns and crabs. A first response is to trim off and dispose of affected branches in your regular garbage. Ontario Ministry of Agriculture has information on control of the disease: Black Knot of Plums, http://www. omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/05-017.htm. EnviroFair Every couple of years, in conjunction with local businesses, we mount a fair focussed on environmental issues of importance to the Glebe. Our first fair promoted non-chemical, pesticide-free gardening. Last fall, our second fair promoted sustainable technologies for older homes such as those in the Glebe. A third EnviroFair is tentatively scheduled for 2011. Virginia Carver and Carol MacLeod are members of the GCA Environment and Anti-Litter Committee which meets at 7 p.m. the first Monday of every month at the Glebe Community Centre. We welcome ideas for projects that will make the Glebe a greener and healthier community in which to live AND the helping hands to implement those projects. Glebe Report April 16, 2010 29 Imagine spring April 25 at St. Matthew’s Church Master gardener and St. Matthew’s parishioner, Mary Shearman Reid, is presenting a slide show and gardening talk at St. Matthew’s Anglican Church in the Glebe on Sunday, April 25 at 2 p.m. She is often a guest speaker for garden clubs, horticultural societies and businesses. Mary made an unusual transition from banking to horticulture in 1996 when she took over the Green Thumb Garden Centre, a community-oriented business that specializes in the service and sales of outdoor plant matter. Green Thumb’s services include consultations, diagnostic visits, landscaping and garden maintenance. She grew up in a family of gardeners, worked as a gardener during her summers at university and continues to garden at home. As a certified landscape professional and a master gardener, she teaches for various school boards and at Algonquin College where she studied horticulture. “We never know how spring will look at the end of April, so I will tailor the talk to suit the weather,” says Mary. She intends to include snippets on perennials, shrubs, containers, trees and fertilizing. The talk will include tea and delicious refreshments and an opportunity to ask Mary about your garden. Join us on Sunday, April 25 at 2 p.m. in the Parish Hall, First Ave. entrance. Tickets are $20, available at Master Gardener Mary Reid at Green Thumbs Garden Centre St. Matthew’s office, 117 Glebe Ave., near Bank St. For more information, call 613-234-4024. The only good car is a shared car La seule bonne auto c'est celle qu'on partage Need Renovations? 50 stations 613-798-1900 Custom Designed Additions and Major Renovations that respect the Craftsmanship and Architectural style of your older home. 594-8888 www.gordonmcgovern.com Photo provided by Mary Reid
Page 1 and 2: April 16, 2010 Vol. 38 rvn No. 4 Se
Page 3 and 4: EVENTS 25 th anniversary for the Gr
Page 5 and 6: LETTERS Glebe Report April 16, 2010
Page 7 and 8: NEWS Glebe fires: déjà vu by Juli
Page 9 and 10: FOOTBRIDGE UPDATE Midtown footbridg
Page 11 and 12: CITIZENS INITIATIVES Hands off our
Page 13 and 14: BIA Glebe BIA protecting our villag
Page 15 and 16: GLEBE HISTORY Heritage spaces, not
Page 17 and 18: BUSINESS BUZZ Alana leads one of he
Page 19 and 20: NEWS The Glebe: A healthy neighbour
Page 21 and 22: HEALTH Keeping drugs out of our dri
Page 23 and 24: Community parks of the Glebe by Car
Page 25 and 26: MUSIC St. Matthew’s spring concer
Page 27: FOOD By Karen Wallace-Graner Apple,
Page 31 and 32: SCHOOLS Some updates from the board
Page 33 and 34: SCHOOLS Sustainability initiatives
Page 35 and 36: TRAVEL Glebe artist explores South-
Page 37 and 38: COMMUNITY Winners of Awesome Author
Page 39 and 40: BOOKS Egg on Mao, the story of a no
Page 41 and 42: RELIGION Tiptoe through the tulips
Page 43 and 44: Glebe Report April 16, 2010 43 BEST

April 16, 2010 - Glebe Report

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